Our window seat on the Delta
flight last August 2013 descending into Satchmo Airport provided a rich view of Big Monk Lake
Pontchartrain, where so much of New Orleans
dumps so that New Orleans
lives.
We cabbed east along
highway 61 towards the city. The ride
was nondescript and one glimpsed the feel of the familiar U.S. common
denominator of auto dealers, “Cash is Free” billboards and chain shopping
outlets, a make believe of character.
Exit ramps lead to mysterious sidestreets that disappear into the outer
wards.
We passed the Superdome, a
fat Art Brut nexoid cigarette machine of sports competition and disaster
relief.
We landed in the French
Quarter. The driver was a wide-bellied
man with a pocked bullet-shaped head and crew cut. He spoke clipped Spanish over the dispatch
radio. There was something European
about his dialect, his easeful tones. A
five-fingered amulet jangled from his rear view mirror.
We wanted to pay with a
credit card but naturally the machine was broken. With an ingratiating smile, the driver
indicated that he preferred cash, which we paid him.
Getting our luggage out of
the trunk, firstly stretch-legged in the middle of the bright steambath of Royal Street, the
gush of new surroundings abound the inner portals of both gut and mind.
It was too early yet to check-in
our inn, on St. Peter and Burgundy
(“Ber-GUN-dee”), so we ambled toward the Cabildo at Jackson Square. The blocks yawned in the hot wet plaintive
Monday sun.
Named for General Andrew
Jackson, who drove the Queen’s Army from the city in the War of 1812, the area
was a touristological setting.
The Cabildo, completed by
the Spanish in 1799, was once city hall, the Supreme Court House, and a prison. Apparently it was the site of the Louisiana Purchase real estate transfer in 1803.
The Cathedral-Basilica of
St. Louis King of France is claimed
to be the “oldest Catholic cathedral in continual use in the United States.”
One might be forgiven to
mistake the saint as Louis Armstrong, whose trumpet made miracles.
St. Louis Cathedral served
visitors interested in historic sites and local worshippers against the godless
war heroism of Jackson
across his square.
Jackson Square is a tourist attraction that obscures the city in
war, government and faith. Here is the
Roman Catholic Diocese of a city regarded for the multivalence of voodoo. Here is the Jackson
statue, his horse with two forelegs in the air, inscribed by the victory of
preservation of the Union, while New
Orleans was one of the most ardent Confederate
states.
On the other end, another
church, the Café Du Monde, where the eucharist of beignets is washed down with
coffee anointed with chicory.
One can catch the Gray
Line tour bus, or head up the steps to the river walk and take in the bend of
the Mississippi.
The colonial and
post-Jackson houses and apartments in the Vieux Carre seem empty of inhabitants,
with the closed shutters and perverse charmed appearance of not having front
doors. The places turn away from the
street, knowing they are exquisite specimens of archival real estate.
Later on we learned a bit more
about the insides of these buildings, from Lee Miller, the archivist at Tulane
University, a white mustachioed and pale gimlet-eyed man with a quiet, determined,
sardonic and highly-listenable Louisiana accent. Lee told us that friends of his had saved up
to purchase a place in the Quarter for retirement, only to sell it soon after, disconsolate
that the experience did not live up to expected fantasies. Lee suggested it was the kind of thing that often
happened, and told stories of other occupants who buy a place for $6 mil and
stay three weeks a year but let visiting friends use the place, to impress.
One night around town,
after a multiplasm of beers and interaction ritual with archivists at an
archivist conference “tweet-up” at a bar in the Garden District…
... I encountered Nick, who
said he was a butcher in the kitchen of Bourbon House, a noted meatery located
in the daggered heart of the French Quarter.
Nick offered a Pabst tall boy from his six pack while we stood in the mild
heat of the midnight hour of Royal
Street, where it was quiet. Brynn made friends with Nick’s girlfriend,
the vocal Jess, a firecrackerette who bartends at Molly’s on Decatur St. Nick said he shared an apartment off Bourbon
Street with three roommates and that he paid… something… it was expensive … I forget now, it was 2AM and we were waiting
for sandwiches outside Verti Marte, a tucked away 24-hour deli that served the
best meal of the trip.
When you return from New Orleans, people like
to ask, “What was the best thing you ate?”
My answer, is the gigantic catfish po’boy from Verti Mart. Washed down with a budweiser on the gallery of
our inn, where there was little streetlight, and beyond a low jigjag of
recasted roofing the uninspired skyline of downtown was unmisktakable.
New Orleans is not a skyscraper city, but it does fuss about
perspectives from heights. In New Orleans, there is the
“gallery, ” which is a second floor deck supported by columns at the curb, and
roofed.
And there is the “balcony,”
a small platform belt without supporting beams or the shelter of architectural
outsidery.
Here is a picture of a
balcony taken from a gallery.
Here the balcony is in the
foreground, the gallery in back.
We learned about the
social intimations of city premises the next day, at a 9AM presentation at the
Notarial Archives, a city records collection of land deed transactions. The archivist was Ms. Sally Reeves. Sally pronounced it “New Or-le-ans.”
The Notarial Archives are
a city collection of real estate transaction documents, going way back to the
old days. Sally was the exemplum of
personality, character and intellect, and spoke dense and delicate for about an
hour. We broke for refreshments,
including praline-flavored pecans, and what I wanted, coffee. Sally showed us some maps, pointing out the cartographic traces of meaning. From where I stood at the table, the map was upside down, and when Sally realized this she paused, "Aan-dy, I am sorry I am discriminay-ting against you..." She turned the map around so I could better inspect.
As I indicated in the
postcard I mailed Sally after the trip, I could have listened to the lady speak
all day. Sally tracked social narratives
from the records, and to tell it was to apprehend it, and the strength for
Sally was language. She was exact in
explaining the definitions of terms of architecture; she translated French; was
a histrionic glossary of the juju of city documents, made sense of the word
“noncuperative.” A frenetic composure,
short-cropped weathered mahogany hair, in a simple classy light blouse and
skirt. Here is an excerpt from Sally’s
book, The Rise of the Walled French
Quarter Courtyard, which prose should be studied in creative writing
classes but isn’t:
… In the earlier Colonial period, the old French lots were
wide and spacious. Houses sat in mid lot, with flat and spreading par terre
gardens around them. The sunny potager or kitchen garden was a necessity. But
after the two great fires, houses rose with new and closer alignments on deep
but narrower properties. Adjacent buildings rested on common side walls
(carefully computed as to costs, of course), and along the street the fronts
were continuous. This pushed open spaces rearward, giving rise to walled spaces
with vertical accents…
I was a supreme
first-timer in New Orleans,
having never been to the “City That Care Forgot,” nor to the annual conference
of the Society of American Archivists (SAA).
The schedule was split up into “sessions,” a bunch in the morning and a
bunch after lunch.
“What session did you go to?”
“I went to the session on ‘Native
Americans and Route 66: Hidden Stories of the Mother Road,’ where they opened with a
video by The Clash doing ‘Route 66.’”
“Sounds cool.”
“What session you go to?”
“Value-added Processing
the Satellite Facility Interface for Other-Subject Collections Management in
the Age of MPLP.”
“Yeah.”
I went to a session on the
Georgia State U. papers of Stetson Kennedy, a “folklorist and
crusader” Bible Belt double-agent who infiltrated the KKK like Donnie
Brasco the New York
mafia.
I heard speak the section
chief of Records Management for CENTCOM, who led a team in Iraq to secure
and transport back 46 terabytes of 50-60 million documents and one terabyte of
photos generated by Operation Iraqi Freedom.
I sat for two sessions on archival advocacy, where Texas-tanned and
white-haired Brother David stood up from the audience to stump for the savvy
shirtsleeve-and-skillet radical of U.S. information science, and asked,
“Can I get an Amen!” He got it.
We ate at a Creole-Italian
joint that was good. The secret
ingredient in Creole-Italian food is madame paprika.
I imagined that the A.J.
stood for Aunt Jennie.
We saw The Treme Brass
Band.
It was the spectator’s
sublimation when the band banged out a ripping “Life is a Cabaret.” A white guy showed up on backing horns,
wearing a teeshirt with an image of the gabroni NJ actor Joe Pesci. But I was losing steam cause I had to get
going y’at dawn for a volunteer gig I signed up for in the Lower 9th
Ward, so we left after the second set.
An archivist at the University of New Hampshire, Bill Ross, had a long
relationship with the group, and brought students down over the years to lay
tile and install plumbing and clear weeds and use buzzsaws without
goggles. Bill Ross may have lived in New
England, but spoke and walked his North
Carolina birthrights, a white handlebar mustache and
big hands and shoulders and a barrel gut voice who loved new places but never
left home.
Besides me, three
archivists signed up. Joan was a lauded
archivist at Northeastern U., a 1970s sandals-and-root vegetable activist who
won the Diversity Award at the SAA conference for a career collecting and
advocating the archives of social justice and Boston minority communities. Joan didn’t watch The Wire, too much graphic violence. Leah was the archivist for the city of Colorado Springs and asked
what my dream job would be after graduating library school. I answered that I’d already had and lost my
dream job, which was Gray Line doubledecker bus tour guide. Lisa was the archivist for the Black
Metropolis Research Consortium, coordinating the processing of African-American
collections in Chicago.
We helped build a house on
Tricou Street
for Ms. Audrey. Our foreman from
LowerNine was Darren, who was born and raised in the neighborhood and claimed
he never once in his life crossed the St. Claude Bridge over the Industrial Canal
into “New Orleans.”
Darren spoke with a velvet
bark, inflected somehow both strident and lax, and when he told you what to do
you wanted to do it. Bill Ross said that
some of his college students had problems interpreting what seemed like
Darren’s anger as the sardonic affability that it truly is. Darren insinuated nicknames for the lady
workers he took to, like Fannie, a young French exchange student living and
working with LowerNine for the summer.
“Fannie Wannie,” cried Darren, “I need dat drill now!” Fannie had Darren’s card and we all cracked
up when Darren accidentally left the water hose on in the yard, flooding the
lawn while we ate lunch. Darren stared
at the muck with a slight culpable smirk.
“Darren you are stoopid, stoopid!” lashed Fannie. At lunch Darren ate a shrimp po’boy.
Darren was a hardened and
steadfast worker, but dreaded the sanction of Ms. Audrey. When a kitchen tile was a smidge misaligned,
and I outlouded, “It’s OK, Miss Audrey won’t know,” Darren looked at the off
geometry and countered, “O she know…”
On our way back to the FQ we
stopped at the House of Dance
& Feathers, operated by Big Chief Ron Lewis, who in the heyday led second
line for the Social Aid & Pleasure Club and Skull & Bone Gangs.
We went to Meyer’s Hat
Store, a harvest of hats off Poydras.
The clerk was a skinny teenager who surely had learned most truths about
life working at Meyer’s Hat Store, which he demonstrated in his suggestions to
me of hats. He had bushy hair and wore a
baseball cap. His voice was a seasoned
drawl that rolled from his steady-lidded eyes.
I said, “I have a big head.” He
sized up my head right off and passed me some choice hatworks that looked good
on my big head. I sampled a hat from the
rack. “That’s more of if you’re going
for a Western look.” He was right. The clerk dealt with another customer while I
went through a crises to buy a hat, which I did not, and did not want the clerk
to see me leave without honoring his pitch with a purchase.
New Orleans is a city in the balance of dizzy good word. I didn’t see any cops, about which I had read
so much.
There was a statue of
Winston Churchill outside the Hilton Hotel.
Like New York, the city once battled an invasion
of British troops, so there is strangely a subsequent nod to John Bull.
The statue of Winston stands
in the least likely area to be seen, and there is no shade and the hotels block
any breeze from the Mississippi River.
It might have been
deliberate to put the statue where it is the least comfortably looked at, so
maybe it is never really seen. Like in
1699 when Bienville tricked a rabid British scout ship sailing up the Mississippi to turn
around, rather than find the burgeoning shamble ontogeny the French were crafting
of the early city.
We heard the steamboat
calliope; visited the state-of-the-art archives room at the New Orleans
Historic Collection; spied the buff dude wearing a blonde lady’s wig and black
tights in short sport shorts leaving the deli and crossing the street with a
beer in his sweaty man hand.
Bourbon Street was neon punctuated…
A quarantine of the
personologically debauched…
The folks made it dirty….
But next morning the City
made it clean, like a hungry gator devouring a flock of drunk pelicans…
During a merciless routine
rainstorm, we took the famous streetcar along the arabesque-trunked oak tree
millinery of St. Charles Avenue. We mounted the steps and I futzed with how to
pay the fare. “This is your first time
in New Orleans,”
said the driver with an urbo-Cajun deliverance of the stranger’s warmth. “Step into my office.”
Introducing himself as
Kevin, for the rest of the ride we stood beside and hung out with him while he
drove, Kevin glancing at us more than the wet tracks ahead. Kevin was the best friend we made
the whole trip. Swarthy, blue-eyes under
small glasses, in his 40s and bald from nape to dome. When
it started raining, Kevin closed the windows, saying, “I don’t want to get my
hair wet.”
We live in Brooklyn? Kevin
was once in the Navy and spent time at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. From Kentucky? For a stint, Kevin drove shipments of Ragu
Tomato Sauce from the main plant in Owensboro,
KY. Kevin had a story and joke for every state in
the U.S.,
plus most foreign lands on the map. None
of it was fake. He had the true spirit
of the tour guide, who may seem a good talker but is a better listener. “I have the best job in the world,” Kevin
said. “I get to drive a giant electric train
all day and talk to tourists.”
Many an American outlaw
story involves a trip to New Orleans. A hotbed of JFK assassination conspiracy and
the birth of jazz. New Orleans was settled by prisoners,
destitute females, pirates, dandies, and slaves.
The chief industries are
tourism, seafood, oil.
I read headline news
stories over eggs and grits at Commerce diner in the Times-Picayune about the murder indictments of The
Taliban, a gang from Riverbend, and the Cross-the-Canal Gang, the Melph
Mafia, and the Cut-Throat-City-Snake gang.
We didn’t encounter any of
these mugs, but crossing St. Claude avenue at Congo Square, a flatbed truck
revved a turn wherefrom the shotgun seat a menacing glare encountered us… a galoot
hitman with the simp look like he just ate five muffulettas for lunch... a shit-for-brains
fist-swinger with the ape Irishman’s jaw…
genealogy likely traced to former district attorneys and dock buzzards... there was no time to take a picture.
We look forward to
returning.
