‘What are you going to do now?’ a friend of mine in the Deep South who had suffered a great tragedy was asked.
‘Go to New Orleans,’ she said.
It sounded like a famous Southern line: ‘Why I’ll go home to Tara tomorrow.’
I’ve journeyed to New Orleans by Greyhound bus, by train, by car. The first time, December 1987, by bus; last autumn, living in the Deep South, I frequently made my way there by train and by car.
Going into New Orleans the first time, at early morning, by bus, manic conundrum of flyovers above dream-time esplanades of Gothic houses and still, in December, pristine gardens, I incongruously thought of lines by the ragtime poet and turbulent nomad Hart Crane: ‘Remember the lavender lilies of that dawn, their ribbon miles beside the railroad ties as one nears New Orleans.’ That time I stayed at a cheap, high-rise hotel at Lee Circle. ‘You know why General Lee is facing north?’ a loaded bag lady had cackled to me as I entered the building, referring to the bronze statue of the Confederate leader on a pedestal in the middle of the Circle. ‘Because he didn’t dare turn his back on a Yankee.’ I suppose she thought I was a Yankee.
Later that morning I strolled from Lee Circle to the French Quarter, a boy in a sleeveless vest with an outlandish gargoyle tattooed on his arm frantically darting out of a plumbago-flanked pub and, eyes protected by dark glasses, dashing across the street to another pub; a chorus of toy white cats in low-cut, claret, strapless dresses in the window of a cat shop on Royal Street; the voice of Elton John ricocheting from one shop sound system to another, through what Hart Crane described as ‘the unspeakable mellowness’ of the French Quarter, past vistas of shot gun – one-room-looking – houses, lamenting doomed American love with ‘Candle in the Wind’. On Dauphine Street was a bumper sticker saying: ‘You have conquered, O Galileean.’
I was tentative with the city then. Last autumn, living in the Deep South made me braver. New Orleans was a place to go on Friday evenings. By car, a journey on roads lined, in autumn and early winter, by snow-in-summer blossom, the landscapes runny, horse-drawn dog-wagons trekking through them, bearing pointers and setters for the hunt, men selling milk from carts, ancestral steamboat-Gothic mansions, often a kind of febrile crab-colour, squeezed into the distance.
By train it was usually a journey with revellers for company. A man who’d just got out of Atlanta State Penitentiary, going to New Orleans to continue what he’d been doing for eight years in gaol, writing poetry and reading the Bible. Once, as we crossed Lake Pontchartain by train, winter darkness crowding in, a man leaned over and told me: ‘I’ll marry the first woman who says, when I invite her to dinner, “Let’s eat at McDonald’s”. She’ll be a money saver.’
Many people in New Orleans are ashamed of the French Quarter and will try to lead you uptown in the evenings, to Pascal Manales on Napoleon Street where you have to wait among a sentimental fresco of photographs of Perry Como, Jack Dempsey, Renato Scotto before eating, to music clubs like Tyler’s on Magazine Street where desultory college students mill, to Cajun restaurants beside suburban cemeteries, statues of Confederate soldiers, Civil War nurses, brothel madames who became respectable, looking in at you as you eat.
But it’s the quarter I was first drawn to and love, the courtyards strung with coral vine and bougainvillaea; the ponds of cerulean water outside back windows; the raised Louisiana cottages with asparagus fern hanging from their porch roofs; an entire avenue of weeping figs; the house colours – wistaria blue, sunset peach, Pompeiian red.
At night the place is rabid with tourists but tourists reinforce the individuality of the performers – the old lady with the chignon hair-style at La Fitte’s on Bourbon Street who plays the piano and sings: ‘I hate to see that evening sun go down’; the strippers, male and female, in a club on Bourbon Street who never discard their G-strings – ‘We all have kids. That’s why we do it,’ a girl in a top hat and tails told me; a woman in a tomato-coloured coat-dress, beefy earrings on her, dancing with a woman in a leopardskin coat in the Bombay Club on Dumaine Street under pictures of Winston Churchill, faded British horsemen in the shade of peepul trees, and statuesque old Indian men in voluminous dhotis; the old black man with almost indigo-blue skin, his bass viol held aside, not so much singing as whispering ‘Please Release Me’, making it something antiphonal for the ladies from Boston or Charlotte, North Carolina, crouched on the floor in Preservation Hall on Peter Street. The old lady at La Fitte’s frequently sings ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ too which reminds me of the story of the first battalion of French girls sent here in 1721, from a house of correction. A midwife called Madame San Regrets was sent after them.
On an overcast Saturday afternoon at what seemed like the end of autumn last year, the very end of November (there was to be, uniquely, a fall of snow in December, a month when, in Tennessee Williams stories, the fugitive kind are still getting the sun on Canal Street), I began a very conscious journey through New Orleans, to redefine what I knew about the city and the area. I didn’t want my memory of the city to be blurred.
I started at the Voodoo Museum on Dumaines Street which is also a place where voodoo rituals are enacted, an altar there, an empty bottle of Mateus Rosé on it, a bulb of garlic, some cent coins, a ribaldry laughing buddha; above it photographs of people who had taken part in the rituals and who looked happily rewarded by them – marines, very ordinary-looking middle-aged couples.
Before I left I saw fresh-looking chicken feathers on the floor.
From the museum I went to the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe on North Rampart Street, a church which is crowded with statues of saints, St Barbara, St Expeditus, St Teresa, St Clara, Blessed Martin, St Jude Thaddeus, much of their clothing carob-coloured, penitential-coloured.
These are also voodoo saints, people coming to kneel in trances before them, praying Catholic or voodoo prayers. St Expeditus is a Roman soldier. He came to New Orleans in a crate long ago – no one knew his name. On the box was the word ‘Expedite’. So they called him St Expeditus. There is a picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help over an altar. You see pictures of Our Lady all over New Orleans; Our Lady of Guadalupe above the jumbo shrimps at the French market.
Near the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe is St Louis Number 1 Cemetery where Marie Laveau, the Pope of Voodoo, is buried. She was a hairdresser before she became a voodoo priestess. From her rituals jazz started – so they told me at the Voodoo Museum – African drums used with European wind instruments on Congo Square on Sunday afternoons. There were crosses scratched all over her tomb. Her name, Marie Glapion Laveau, on it. The Spanish handed over New Orleans to the French in her childhood and then the French sold it to America. She saw molasses running in the gutters of New Orleans when the city fell to the Union and she lived to see grandeur fade and hear the first sounds of jazz in the air.
The Projects overlook the cemetery – a block of cheap housing. You are warned before going into the cemetery that you may be mugged for your Air Jordans – high-soled boots, ‘the limousines of boots’ – but everyone around the Projects was benign to me. Charity Hospital, which was on my way uptown, has had its beds reduced from 3,000 to 500. Hundreds of people crowd in there each day for attention and wait for hours under wall paintings of rainbow-illustrated flower stalls. But among the set grimness of poverty in New Orleans are street cars decorated with garlands of pine from early November on; a sketch of a woman with spidery hair on lavender paper by a grave in St Louis Number I; yellow powder spilt from a gris-gris bag – voodoo bag – on the steps of a multi-galleried, violet-coloured house on North Rampart Street.
And not far from the Projects are Fairlands Racing Grounds where, on Saturday afternoons, people sit in inner halls as though they’re waiting for a Greyhound bus, watching, on video screens, egrets take flight on the racing track as the horses take off, the place a thriftstore fashion display of flared trousers, wide, damascened ties, the odd, ingenuous pair of spectator pumps from another age, a more exotic thriftstore.
I went up Joseph Street, parallel to St Charles Avenue, on my way out of the city. Hebrew Number 3 Cemetery is here. I have a friend who is a black musician in New Orleans and last year he took part in a jazz funeral for a Jewish musician. There was a bit of a tiff with the rabbi because the songs were – by their nature – non-Jewish. But a cultural compromise was quickly arrived at and the funeral went on, the rabbi leading the little parade, the musicians joyfully delivering ‘In the sweet by and by we will meet on the beautiful shore’ and a Hebrew love-song someone remembered from the Korean War: ‘Beimir Beistdu Schön’.
A street with little famished-looking bars – Tchoupitoulas – then on a street corner Tipitinas which was Professor Longhair’s favourite venue for years and where there are jazz concerts given by children each Sunday afternoon – slide trombones, clarinets, and slither versions of ‘Autumn Leaves’ by six-year-old girls. Later on Sundays a Cajun dance is held here – scores and scores of people jitterbugging and waltzing to rampant accordions and wailing fiddles. The Cajuns were French settlers who lived in Acacia in Nova Scotia. They were expelled by decree of the English king in 1755 and made their way to the bayous around New Orleans, a landscape of swamps, trickled by cedar knees protruding from the water. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem ‘Evangeline’ about his exodus, about this ‘shipwrecked nation’.
I’d spent Thanksgiving with a Cajun family near Plaquemines, in a house surrounded by hackberry trees and pecan trees, the late-afternoon light picking up labyrinths of water in the meadows around the house. There was a photograph on the wall of a bride dancing, dollar bills pinned to her fleur-de-lys-patterned gown and a statue of Our Lady of the Assumption, patroness of Cajuns, in the background. The son of the family had turned Calvinist and he said grace. In the distance discreet little flames were coming out of the Heaven-soaring tower of a chemical factory.
On Saturday mornings in Fred’s Lounge in Mamou, near Baton Rouge, there is a massive Cajun dance, gangly men in gym gear, red kerchiefs round their heads, taking wild steps to music which seems to recreate exodus, entry by boat and raft into this land of ‘Spanish moss and mystic mistletoe’.
On the outskirts of New Orleans, on my Saturday afternoon drive through the city, I watched the chital deer in Aubudon Park – clove-coloured deer splashed by white spots – but on my way to City Park I came across a school fête, Ellis Marsalis, the father of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, playing a piano under a small floodlight as it was already dark. After him there was a samba band and the parents, children and musicians joined in a samba, snaking out of the yard and disappearing down a street where dogs were barking, some of the last people to disappear being two women in Creole dress, luxuriant sage-coloured feathers on their heads; a man with a lambchop beard, in a waistcoat, who told me he’d been playing a plantation owner from Tipperary who’d helped Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. The school yard was empty for the moment, save for a few women in military anoraks who were selling gris-gris bags to aid this Montessori school.
I gave up the idea of proceeding to City Park, returned to my hotel, the de la Poste on Chartres Street. It was a hotel recommended by a friend from Alabama. There’d been a time she’d stayed in grander hotels in New Orleans, with an ancient and dignified aunt. Once, in the early 1960s, this aunt ventured to the hotel cabaret. Red Fox was the artiste. She’d never heard such language before – ‘I have twenty-three whores in New York City’ – and she went to the ladies’ room where she passed out. It was the last of the grand hotels in New Orleans for my friend.
‘America’s two biggest problems at the moment are drugs and bad syntax,’ a Jewish lady with multicoloured bugle-beads sewn into her sweater told me at Café du Monde that evening. I didn’t stay in the Quarter that particular evening but went uptown, past sidewalks where youths advertised the fact they were selling cocaine – white lady – or crack by standing on litter wagons. I was going to a black music club, the Winnah’s Circle, on St Bernard Street. My companion and I were the only two white people there. A boy I got talking to about the horror, the desecration of drugs, told me, ‘I go out for a few drinks and fun but I always go and have a few words with the Lord first.’ The band, which included a violinist, had just played Concierto de Aranjuez. I knew I was in an area where Air Jordans slung over electric wires passed on some message about drug dealing but I was not scared.
Nothing about this city ultimately frightened me. Because, for all its supposed dangers, it is also a city of talismans – bottles of holy oil sold at the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe; benevolent crosses piled up on the tomb of Marie Laveau; a bumper sticker saying: ‘Even the loneliest river runs somewhere safe to sea.’
Harry Crosby, Hart Crane’s flamboyant American-in-Paris publisher and equally impulsive traveller, said: ‘In America one never becomes part of a church. At Chartres one becomes part of the Cathedral.’ St Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, ironically at the end of Chartres Street, with the bonny blue Confederate flag inside, its slate-colour, hexagonal spires, two of them topped by pelicans, must be an exception.
On the Sunday morning after my late night at the Winnah’s Circle, as mass was going on inside, a little black boy, in a crocheted, lemon and navy spangled jersey, did some hambone dancing outside. All the time, as he clattered with his steel-capped shoes, chanting a refrain which would have been approved by Crane and all the other voyagers who experience New Orleands’s rainbow mesh:
Hambone, Hambone, where you been?
Round the world and am going again.