We left Atlanta the next day and headed for New Orleans by way of Alabama and the arcing shoreline of the Mississippi coast. It would be our third trip to the city together. Rain clouds stalked our drive, and torrents of water on I-65 reduced the world to the reflective lights on the road ahead of us. After a while, the rains broke and a strange, warm fog hung over the forests and under the bridges and causeways of the Gulf Coast.
“Did we drive through here with Pete?” Chris asked.
“No, that was Louisiana.”
“It looks so familiar.”
* * *
The last time we were in New Orleans was December 2017, just after our arduous sprint across the Southwest in Pete Mylen’s truck. On our first evening in town, we had stopped into a bar on Frenchman Street to unwind.
“I was at the post office today,” a band leader in sunglasses and a pink blazer had said from the stage that night. “And this woman got mad at me.”
His five-man band listed against an exposed brick wall.
“Mad at you?” the horn player said.
“Yeah, man,” the lead singer responded. “All I did was tell her I didn’t get my kids Christmas presents from Santa, and she called me a Scrooge.”
“What?”
“Yeah, a Scrooge—and that I was raising Scrooges. My kids ain’t Scrooges—come on.”
The room echoed.
“Well, this song isn’t about Christmas at all,” he said. “It’s called ‘Hit That Jive, Jack.’”
Pete was many miles away by then, yet the rumbling of his diesel engine still echoed in our ears like the sway of a ship many days after disembarking. The Pall Mall smoke hung in Chris’s hair, the fabric of our bags, and under our fingernails. But we were back in New Orleans, and that always gave us new energy. Something about the city—simmering with heat and humidity even in December—had settled over our subconscious and drawn us back to the French Quarter’s narrow cobblestone streets lit with flickering oil lamps.
Later that day in 2017, Chris was lying on a twin bed flipping through South and West—Joan Didion’s latest book about a drive she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took from New Orleans to Oxford, Mississippi in 1970.
“‘I had only some dim and unformed sense,’” Chris read aloud, “‘that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.’”
Jordan lounged on the other bed in our hotel room just off Bourbon Street and looked up from his phone with weary eyes.
“She wrote that?” Jordan asked.
“Yeah.”
“Read some more.”
Chris flipped forward.
“‘In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology.’”
Chris looked up. Seeing Jordan rapt, he continued reading.
“‘The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas. In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead.’”
“Wow,” Jordan said.
Chris closed the book and listened to the sound of a trombone on the streets below.
* * *
A year and a half later, we made it from Atlanta back to New Orleans. After checking into a hotel, Chris took a shower and let the music from his phone play loud. The hard guitar of “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones rose above the sound of the water, and Chris sang along. Jordan left to find a po’boy sandwich and headed toward the French Quarter, crossing Canal Street and weaving in and out of revelrous townies and stumbling tourists there for Jazz Fest. The beat of music emanated out of the alleys and street corners of the Quarter and hastened Jordan’s pace.
We had returned to the Crescent City to run down a feeling we’d had for some time. In Mexico, Ivan, the customs agent, lightened up only at the mention of Nirvana and when Creedence played over the speakers in the desayunador. Poetry was Gabriel’s way of making sense of his life inside and outside Parnall Prison, and Charlene just wanted to sing when she returned to Detroit after decades behind bars. And, of course, whatever was playing on the backcountry radio after our political brawls kept the two of us sane. It all seemed to crystallize for us in Denver. There, at the Leon Bridges concert in the ethereal confines of Red Rocks Amphitheatre, people of all types twisted and sang beneath red-lit trees and the glowing spits of ruby sandstone.
And like Joan Didion almost 50 years earlier, we hoped New Orleans might help us better understand all this. Here was a city that once sat at the heart of the Confederacy, where innumerable slaves were sold at auction, but that also became home to a large free black population, birthed jazz, and came through Hurricane Katrina. For us, it was a city where anything seemed possible and assuredly whatever came next would be expressed in song.
And as luck would have it, Leon Bridges was set to play at Jazz Fest. Since Denver, Leon had played in the background of our long drives across America. So we drove back to hear him play and spend time with the musicians who played the clubs and dance halls and street corners and funerals and everything in between. To us, they held the keys to Didion’s dim and unformed sense of the choreography that kept the city’s rhythm.
Jordan returned to the room and could hear Chris warbling from the bathroom.
“‘And the women never really faint, and the villains always blink their eyes,’” Chris sang. “‘But anyone who has a heart wouldn’t want to turn around and break it.’”
Chris kept humming the Lou Reed melody as he came out into the room.
“You ready?” Jordan asked.
“Let’s do it,” Chris said.
“This weekend will be a time,” Jordan responded, and we set off into the balmy evening.
* * *
We traipsed across the streetcar tracks on Canal Street and into the French Quarter. On Royal, a man with dreads and wearing a tie sang loudly as three little girls ate Lunchables on a blanket at his feet. A brass band led by a woman spinning an umbrella marched just off Bourbon. We had been in New Orleans only a few hours, and already our senses were overwhelmed by its color and melody.
That morning we had stopped by the Pensacola Museum of Art, where we found an exhibit on Aubrey Beardsley on the walls of the converted prison.
“He illustrated Through the Looking Glass at one point,” Chris said, reading about the exhibit. “And he died at 25.”
“And he did all of this?” Jordan said. We stood among hundreds of black-and-white prints ranging from ghoulish to erotic. We took in scenes of strange, pear-shaped figures adorned with jewels, depictions of operagoers—dour and mute—women with hair made of fruited grapevines and gnarled, sharpened fingers—all in black ink.
“‘Of course I have one aim—the grotesque,’” Chris read. “‘If I am not grotesque, I am nothing.’”
He stared at it for a moment.
“Why, of course.”
A more living kind of art marked the French Quarter that night. It was an art that sprang from the pavement in full color. Shotgun houses on quiet streets echoed with scratchy recordings. On Bourbon Street itself the notes of brass instruments caromed off the iron balconies and competed with the rock pumping from the beer-washed dance halls just down the way.
We stepped into 801 Royal, a French Quarter bar, where pop music played over the speakers and raucous drinkers filtered in and out on their way to and from Jazz Fest. We were looking for Storie Gonsoulin, a bartender and musician, who John-Michael had said would be working that night. On a flight many years before, Chris had struck up a conversation with John-Michael Early, a New Orleans rock musician, and the two of them had stayed in touch. Chris reached out ahead of our trip, and John-Michael delivered musician after musician—friends and collaborators—all willing to talk.
Behind the bar, a man of about 40 with long hair in a bun made eye contact.
“Chris?”
“Storie?”
“Take a seat,” he said.
In an instant, Storie Gonsoulin was off to greet another group that had just come in from the street. So we climbed up on two stools next to three brothers from Philadelphia.
“You here for Jazz Fest?” one of them asked Jordan.
“We came here for Storie, actually.”
“What do you guys want with Storie?”
“He’s a musician,” Chris said.
“Retired,” Storie interrupted, reappearing.
“What?”
“I retired two years ago from playing full-time,” he said.
“How come?” Jordan asked.
“I make four times more here at the bar than in a year of performing.”
Storie had been raised in southwestern Louisiana—“a Cajun Creole from the swamp,” as he affectionately put it. His childhood memories were stitched together by the notes of zydeco (a unique sound featuring fiddles and washboards), which had emerged from the bayous and swamps—much like Storie himself. Early on, Storie learned the guitar from Paul “Lil Buck” Sinegal, who became like a father to Storie, and soon a passion became a profession. Storie took to the road for gigs with bands and other acts. He played guitar and drums and later a washboard, traveling and performing full-time. At one point he played upward of 200 shows a year.
Until it all became too much.
“January 15,” Storie said, looking at the ceiling to jog his memory while he washed glasses. “That was two years of retirement.”
The artist’s life is difficult. By one count, the average musician in New Orleans makes around half of what the average American household does. Club-level bands have to play more than 40 shows to make just around $16,000. Storie wore himself thin touring and cutting albums—and politicking.
“I’m pretty much done with playing in a band,” was how he put it. “I can’t deal with four other egos.”
Instead, Storie kept bar and cut experimental hip-hop albums made up of the melodies of Louisiana-raised artists.
“All American music has come from jazz and blues, which was played down here,” Storie said. “The only music that can trace its roots back anywhere but Louisiana is hip-hop, which was invented in the Bronx. But what people fail to realize is that they were sampling the Meters, who are from New Orleans, to make those hip-hop beats.”
Storie expressed great pride in the city. He wasn’t a full-time musician any longer, but the Creole culture that had created zydeco kept him in the city he called home.
“I got a couple sitting down here from New York last week and they said, ‘Do you like New York?’” Storie told us. “And I said, ‘Yeah, New York is cool, but it’s not New Orleans.’”
The first syllable of Orleans came from somewhere deep in his gullet.
“She said, ‘What makes it cool down here?’ And I said, ‘Well, in New York, you got diversity. Here we’ve got diversity too. But in New York, you got Irish neighborhoods, Venezuelan, Puerto Rican, and you’ve got Jewish neighborhoods and stuff. But it doesn’t ever blend and mix and become a culture. Coming here, there’s a mix of African, French, Spanish, Caribbean, all this shit. It’s melted, and it invented a whole culture of food, language, music, everything—unlike anywhere else in the United States.’”
This was certainly part of our infatuation with the city. It was a community knitted together by too many cultures and heritages and ethnicities to count. New Orleans was welcoming in its spirit, and in its music. Its magnetism for men and women like Storie was in its openness. All could be loud there, especially if one kept a beat.
We watched as Storie ministered to all who stopped by with wide gestures and loud welcomes. He was boisterous and charming. Eventually he stopped by our end of the bar and leaned in so only we could hear him.
“Hey, y’all,” he said. “I gotta run out for a bit.”
And in a moment Storie disappeared out onto Royal and into the night.
* * *
Around midnight that same evening, three musicians trotted up to the stage at Buffa’s Bar & Restaurant on Esplanade, just a quarter-mile off Frenchman Street. The two of us sat at a table two rows from the front. A family band was still packing up their violins from the last set.
“Hurry up,” a large man in a black T-shirt barked from behind the bar. “You’re running late.”
A plump woman stared back at him from the stage.
“Don’t you have some silverware to roll?” she sneered.
“Naw, I’m doing paperwork,” he said. “Don’t we have some drinking to do?”
Soon after, Keith Burnstein, 39, plopped himself down at the piano and started playing scales. He wore a baseball cap and a gold varsity jacket over his wiry frame. Chris, a tall man with rolled short sleeves and a pomade-slicked side-part, arranged a drum set. Charles, a young man with a halo of hair and a twisty beard, ferried over plastic cups of water with limes for Keith and Chris and a beer for himself before tuning his bass. By the time Charles started plucking the first notes of a song Keith wrote, only a handful of people remained. A majority of the tables were empty, yet the three musicians warmed up as if Carnegie Hall lay just beyond the curtain behind the stage.
An hour earlier we had met Keith on a bench beneath a streetlamp outside the bar, where a handful of drunks and slouches loitered, asking for cigarettes, a buck or two, or a light. Storie had nodded along when we quizzed him about music, but his utterings ended up sounding as cryptic as he was. If we hoped to learn more, perhaps Keith could explain it to us.
Born in Philadelphia and raised in New Jersey, Keith had discovered New Orleans while on tour with his old band, the Mumbles, and moved down soon afterward. It was a good city for a piano player: Keith had recently bought a home with what he made from gigs, albums, and touring.
“If you can play, people don’t care what you think personally,” Keith told us. “If you can do the job, then most people are cool to you.”
Music was a great equalizer, Keith said, and you could feel its reach across the city.
“I work with this cat sometimes as my side hustle,” Keith said. “We deliver organs, like church organs. He’s an older guy, and this dude’s got like a shelf full of Glenn Beck books. We meet a lot of people, and he occasionally will say some things that are a little bit insensitive, and I’ll be like, ‘Dude, think about what you just said.’
“But I’ll tell you, we were in a church the other day, and everybody looks super suspicious of him for some reason. It’s this old rundown shotgun-like church in a rough part of town. And so we bring the organ in, and they’re all stressed because they’re setting up their congregation somewhere else for whatever reason. So there’s just some weird vibes, and then finally he turns the organ on to show them that it works, and he starts playing ‘Amazing Grace’ like really beautifully, you know what I mean?
“Everybody just stopped. There was like six or seven people beside me, and they all just stopped, and they all came around the organ. And they were just like, ‘That sounds great.’ And when we got back in the car, I was like, ‘Yo, man, that was a smooth move.’ And he’s like, ‘You gotta do that sometimes to make sure people know you’re all right. Music breaks every color barrier, every socioeconomic barrier, whatever it is. It makes people trust you, for whatever reason.’ He’s like, ‘If you do this more, play the organ when you deliver it, it’ll be all good, like 95 percent of the time.’”
Chris’s mother had sung “Amazing Grace” to him as a child, and he knew its soothing melody well. Perhaps it was how raw and vulnerable a song can be that gives it such force. We’re drawn to unalloyed expressions of joy or sadness—loss, bereavement, coping, and at times elation. There’s no pretense or artifice to the notes of “Amazing Grace” echoing through the transepts and naves of an unoccupied church. A melody is welcoming in a way no gesture or slogan ever could be.
As Keith wrapped up his story, Charles showed up with a bass slung over his shoulder.
“Don’t you guys warm up?” Chris asked.
“I’m warm,” Charles said.
“Charles wakes up warm,” Keith said, grinning.
We all went inside for the show. A few young people walked in and out, ordering Coors Lights and other three-dollar beers. The preparations ready, Keith introduced the band and they started playing. Keith sang and the others watched him for cues. In many ways it was a warm-up gig for Jazz Fest—Keith and Charles were playing backup for various artists on enormous stages the next day, and they wanted to stretch their fingers and feel and hear the familiar chords. They seemed undaunted by the silent room. Live music is like a conversation, Keith had said outside, and now the three of them were having it among themselves. They played their set until after 2 a.m. for scattered applause, often singing over the occasional peal of laughter from outside the open front door, and none of it mattered. What they were creating mattered to them, even if few saw it and even fewer would remember it.
“Charles, whatcha want?” Keith said, standing up to look over the piano. Charles looked over and wordlessly leaned back, baring his teeth and riffing away on the stand-up bass.
* * *
The walls of the St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 were made of bricks strangled with moss and failing mortar. Crypts with chipped plaster facades were failing up like blotches of crumbling dried paint on a canvas. It had become a tradition for us to walk the burial grounds of New Orleans.
We entered through the gates in the stone wall and parted ways to walk around the crypts. Jordan hugged the walls while Chris went down the middle. Jordan paused to observe the memorials carved into the high brick walls. The sun beat down, and the bouquets and carnations curdled and browned in the heat. The stone was sandpaper to the touch as Chris grazed his hand over it. GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN was written above the tomb of a John Franklin. His name bled a black rust over the green-white tablet. Jordan crouched down to look at a family tomb where generations going all the way back to the founding were buried.
We met again in a pool of shade by the mouth of the graveyard.
“This place goes back more than 200 years,” Jordan said. “Someone born in 1804 is buried here, and a descendant dies in 2009 and goes in right next to them.”
Jordan pointed at the dates in front of him.
“All that history.”
“The only cemetery I ever really spent time in is this one near Hot Springs, Virginia, where my grandparents are buried,” Chris said. “It’s the only cemetery I ever felt connected to. But I only know a few of the tombstones. The rest are just names.”
The same black-headed gulls of Mobile and Pensacola flew above our heads on forked wings.
“Are you thinking about your grandfather?” Chris asked.
Two weeks earlier, Jordan’s grandfather, Dr. Arthur Aufses Jr., had passed away, and Jordan’s family had laid him to rest in New Montefiore Cemetery in West Babylon, New York. Nearly a century earlier, Jordan’s great-great-grandfather, Samuel Whitman, had purchased a plot there.
“I was thinking about the burial plot my great-great-grandfather started,” Jordan said, “and how amazing it was to see three generations represented there. I felt rooted somehow.”
“Is that where you want to be buried?”
“I don’t know,” Jordan said, looking down as he considered it. “Part of me is drawn to the idea of creating a new plot.”
Arthur had been a guiding influence in Jordan’s life. He represented the kind of person Jordan hoped to become: a respected professional, a compassionate but firm man, and a loving husband and father for seven decades. Yet Jordan had made a conscious choice not to follow in his footsteps. Jordan often joked that he broke his mother’s heart the day he chose to join the Marines and forgo medical school. He often found himself conflicted in this way. Tradition kept him afloat. It gave him his faith and his moral compass. It offered him an idea of the good life, even while he remained his own man who desired to make his own way.
But Arthur never saw tradition and self-realization as incompatible. He never showed a hint of disappointment in Jordan’s choices, no matter what path he chose. After all, it was Arthur who had bequeathed Jordan the Boat four years earlier, and who often waxed poetic about his own youthful road trips across Germany, where he’d been stationed as a surgeon during the Korean War.
Chris watched his friend’s pained expression. It had been three years since Jordan’s Oregon-highway tale about his sister’s vendetta against his middle-school tormentors. The two of us had shared so much since then. The road had become our own ritual, our own rambling sacred space. So too was New Orleans. Over the past three years, we had developed a rhythm, coming back to the city every six months or so, even when 3,000 miles separated the two of us for most of the year. It was here that our most tender moments seemed to take place. The city’s hidden recesses exposed our most vulnerable selves.
“Do you want to talk about him?”
Jordan shook his head with eyes downcast, emotion strangling the words in his throat, and Chris knew Jordan’s troubles were his own again.
“I remember when we were here last, we went to that cemetery in the Garden District,” Chris said, “and we stopped in front of one of these mausoleums for a man who was born in the 1800s and lived through both world wars. I remember thinking how he had seen the rise of fascism, Nazism, the Great Depression. He had seen all this—seen America at these times of great upheaval and triumph too—and I just wondered how his perspective on this country changed.”
Jordan looked over.
“And I wonder if future generations will look back on us and think, They had 9/11, they had the Iraq War, they had the War on Terror, they had the global financial crisis, they had Donald Trump. How did they deal with it all?” Chris said. “Will the last 20 years be seen as this dramatic upheaval that shocked every sense of who we were in a way similar to back then?”
As we spoke, a man in a white T-shirt and jeans entered the cemetery grounds.
“Lockin’ up,” he yelled, looking down the pathways. “We’re lockin’ up.”
“Or are their troubles in the future going to make these look like placid times?” Chris said.
“I think it depends on how we choose to interpret that history,” Jordan said.
“How so?”
“History is written in hindsight, and how it’s written affects the way we see the present.”
Chris half-nodded.
“Take the American founding. If you think America’s history is fundamentally rooted in slavery, genocide, and racism, then your conception of who we are today is shaped by that perspective. But if you believe instead that American history is defined by an uneven but continuous fight to expand civil rights, then you have a very different sense of American identity. History becomes the vocabulary by which we describe ourselves, and the story we tell. The same will be true for our generation.”
How does one ever reconcile those two histories? Placing good beside evil had always confounded Chris. He struggled to capture how that alloy seemed so human, yet so ominous all the same.
But in that plot of above-ground crypts, with death surrounding us—in a city where the “distinction between the quick and the dead” merged, as Didion put it—a harmony seemed to exist. Statues of the virgin mother draped in robes, carved words pregnant with poetry, and stark crosses all captured what death could be. This city was heavy with the afterlife, Didion wrote, though it offered a remembrance of life, too. Contradictory ideas lived as one here. And perhaps that was a lesson to both of us as we reckoned with who we were and would soon be. Perhaps this unknowable, inarticulable knowledge was the nameless menace that seemed to haunt our time on the road, and maybe we could be at peace with it only when we confronted things unsaid; things that were instead carved, strummed, painted, or hummed.
We both had come to believe that art, culture, and music were the best way to convey the complexity of who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we may be headed. Perhaps that was why we were turning away from politics. In 2019, it was bereft of what really mattered—honesty, dialogue, nuance.
“So we’re either born of original sin,” Jordan concluded, “or something else. Maybe we’re something new.”
“Or both,” Chris said.
And with that, we slipped out behind the groundskeeper.
* * *
The neighborhoods around the city’s fairgrounds throbbed with music. Another Saturday of Jazz Fest was upon the city, and practically everyone in the Sixth Ward seemed to have a Solo cup in hand and a party to attend. John-Michael Early sat beside us on the green-cushioned couches on the porch of his family home. Festivalgoers streamed by, and a piano played somewhere not far off.
Over the course of our time in New Orleans, we had been told a lot about John-Michael. He had set us up with Storie and Keith and others, and everyone had a story or two about the man. He was a musician of some local acclaim, playing with his band, Flow Tribe, and traveling the country for shows. Some thought he was destined for politics, and he did seem to know everyone who walked by as we settled into the shade.
“Where you at, cuz?” he shouted.
A man down the street waved back.
“That’s my cousin,” he said, turning back to us.
The entire block seemed more intimate and familiar.
“I think music activates a different part of people,” John-Michael said. “Kind of brings you back to childhood wonder.
“And there’s nothing really dualistic about music or art. There’s a million ways to arrive at the same place with a song or a piece of art. What’s happening in the country now is that people are being forced to pick a side. It kind of comes down to a binary kind of thinking: It’s right or it’s wrong. But really there’s so much gray area.”
Music is expansive, John-Michael seemed to suggest. It is an infinite medium in which all comers can lend something—a tradition, a riff, a new worldview. In music, such offerings are rarely uninspiring. Novel, encompassing sounds give new life. And that philosophy—that lifestyle—gave John-Michael great sums of hope.
“You ever read Freakonomics?” John-Michael tried. “Remember the bagel story in New York?”
Both of us shook our heads.
“This dude ran a bagel company, would go to different offices in New York City and would just put fresh-made bagels down, and a sign like, BAGELS $1.00, CREAM CHEESE $0.50 or whatever. And every day he would leave out a can—total honor system. Did it for like 10 or 12 years and kept scrupulous records. And across the board it was like, 89 percent of people would pay.
“Those are good numbers,” he said. “We’ve got a damn solid majority of people who will pay for a bagel when no one’s watching. That’s our country.”
John-Michael made a living performing for strangers in bars and concert halls across the South and the Eastern Seaboard and as far away as Wisconsin. He had played for thousands of different people who cared only if he could give them a good time.
“When you really just talk person-to-person,” he told us, “and you strip away whatever flag or label that you’re flying for whatever reason, you can sit down with somebody.”
The two of us had always said we were at our worst when we were speaking for a flag or group. Instead, we were at our most understanding when we spoke from our other passions, from the most fundamental parts of our identities.
Jordan’s service had spawned his optimism about the country. He had watched Americans from all different backgrounds act selflessly under terrible circumstances. Some of his friends had given their lives for it. Anything that could inspire that kind of sacrifice had to be good. Underneath the tarnish of it all, we had to be good. Good meant they hadn’t died in vain.
Chris was a journalist—an unconventional one, but a journalist all the same. That was the origin of his skepticism and his devotion to seeing things for himself. His temperament was ultimately that of the unaffiliated, the seeker, the teller of what was said and done in distant places.
These were the kinds of authentic selves both of us could not only relate to and understand, but communicate with. And that meant there was room to be wrong, to be challenged, and sometimes even to be changed.
The notes of a piano and the vocals of an older man wafted across the porch.
“Is that a recording?” Chris asked.
“That’s next door,” John-Michael said, gesturing up at a screen window on the second floor of his neighbor’s home. He explained it was the lead singer of the Radiators. He was losing his hearing, but he played up there all the time with the window thrown open. As we listened, he played “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and sang in a deep, resonant voice.
“The Radiators always used to close Jazz Fest,” John-Michael said. And since the Rolling Stones had canceled their set closing the festival, perhaps he was practicing to close once more.
“Know which way the wind blows,” the man sang from his perch behind the screen window as he embarked on his latest tune.
Later that afternoon, we arrived at Jazz Fest just as Leon Bridges and his band took the stage. We edged around the crowd until we found an open space. A hundred yards away was Leon, doing his wild, locking, stumbling, stepping dance—elbows up and knees out—in a bucket hat, a white shirt, and linen pants.
“I feel like playing some blues tonight,” Leon called out. “Can I play some blues?”
And the songs of our trip echoed out from the Gentilly Stage in front of us.
We looked out over the crowd and found young and old, hair past waists, all shades of skin, and tufts of chest hair emerging out of untucked button-downs. It was warm, and people wore little. Every few minutes a baby stroller went by. Teens roamed about with backpacks. Others had straw hats and pens trailing vapor. Cell phones came out for “Coming Home” and passersby mouthed the lyrics.
We took a stroll and passed stages featuring Steve Earle, Logic, and Katy Perry. We walked by art vendors, food trucks, and small folk bands. We walked and walked, as we had in Yuma and Phoenix outside the convention center among the maddening numbers of protesters and politicos, and Lorain where a Confederate flag hung on the siding of a booth, and downtown Detroit where lofty monuments and high-rises whistled with wind off the river, and cemeteries just down the road elsewhere in Louisiana, and countless other boulevards and trails and fairgrounds where people gathered and celebrated and spirited themselves away to another place. Eventually we made our way back to Leon’s stage. He had a guitar around his neck and the crowd was quiet. Voices went up in harmony for the stripped-down guitar chords and Bridges’s reverb voice.
“I wanna go,” Leon sang. “Lord, please let me know.”
The music faded.
“I wanna know,” he sang, and applause followed the final line and filled his silent wake.
* * *
Two years earlier, still recovering from our voyage with Pete Mylen, Jordan had asked Chris if he could borrow South and West as we returned to our hotel off Bourbon Street after dinner one night. He sat down near the balcony, where a full brass band could be heard beyond.
“Listen to this,” Jordan said, flipping through it. “‘Joan Didion went to the South to understand something about California and she ended up understanding something about America.’”
He was reading from the book’s foreword, by Nathaniel Rich.
“‘The future always looks good in the golden land,’ Didion wrote in ‘Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,’ ‘because no one remembers the past.’”
Jordan paused before reading Rich’s last line.
“‘In the South no one can forget it.’”
Didion had sensed a “peculiar childlike cruelty and innocence” in New Orleans, but that seemed off the mark to the two of us: innocence was the wrong word. What we witnessed was an awareness of the city’s faults and sorrows, its beauty and richness, and how time and expression brought it all together. Storie had waxed rhapsodic about a line of Frenchmen, and soon-to-be Cajuns, who had left Nova Scotia for Louisiana and the pride he took in being descended from one of their leaders, a man named Joseph Bruskee.
When Jordan heard that, he thought of Captain Willis Spear back in Portland, Maine. People cared about tracing their lineage and commemorating their ancestors who put down roots. No matter where people came from, or what corners they were flung from, their descendants often revered those women and men for having settled and made a home. But what we saw in New Orleans was a culture that could allow pride to live alongside complexity—where traditions interplayed with other traditions and even formed new ones to express this unique fusion.
Years before, we had deduced that politics was not the solution to any of our problems, personal or national. Any hope of harmony, of belonging and community, would have to spring from something else. What bound the two of us together had always been shared passions and a curiosity about what kept the other one animated—literature, philosophy, ideas. And as we packed up to leave New Orleans in 2019, years after Didion had piqued our curiosity, that insight seemed to have greater relevance to us than ever before. The kind of American future the two of us dreamed of would emerge from a tradition like that of New Orleans, which was made up of a medley—a chorus—of different people, voices, customs, art, and ways of being and learning and knowing. In that diversity, a new way could take shape. New Orleans beguiled us, and always would.
We left again, headed for Tulsa, Oklahoma. As we took I-10 out of town, two massive cemeteries flanked the highway on either side.
“That’s the Metairie Cemetery,” Jordan said. “One of the biggest in the city.”
We stared out over rows and rows of crosses and memorials, mausoleums and crypts, carnations and grassy pathways, stone pyramids and bare crosses that rose above the fence line like vines seeking sunlight. It was another above-ground burial plot on the Louisiana floodlands, where groundwater tended to raise even the most weighted-down coffin out of its soil after a rain.
And there, on grounds that were once a racetrack, were Spanish-style tombs. Tombs etched with the names of Cajuns and Creoles sat next to the stand-alone graves of pirates, governors, and musicians. Nameless vaults were stacked six high in the same tomb. All were encircled by the same iron fence. All were built on land both primordial and ever-changing. All belonged there, together.