State by State

by Matt Weiland

  There he married the blonde Josephine Vacarro. They had a son and daughter. It’s said he produced a much-admired brandy vintage without ever tasting a single drop, so strong was his loathing for spirituous liquors, so instinctive his understanding of chemical behavior. The sharpest detail from the Sicilian years is hidden in the journals of William Swainson, a towering English naturalist of the early nineteenth century who worked for a few years on Italian fishes and met with Rafinesque. Swainson conceded the brilliance but complained like everyone about the lack of meticulousness, in preserving specimens, for instance. He says Rafinesque used to walk down to the fish markets near his house, where the fishermen knew to put aside anything weird for him. He found many new species this way, one while Swainson was with him. Yet although Swainson begged him to dry and keep the fish properly after he’d finished drawing and naming it, Rafinesque insisted on eating it. He lived well. He got involved in some sort of medical business and made loads of money. He paid litter-bearers to carry him through the hills, laughing that in Sicily only a beggar walks. The men slept in the meadows while he herborized. A decade passed.

  When Rafinesque returned to North America—of course he did; destiny can’t be eluded, only perverted—he went to find John James Audubon. He asked for the great man in Louisville, but they told him Audubon had gone deeper, into the forest, to Hendersonville, where he’d opened a general store. Rafinesque longed to see his new paintings of western birds, not yet published but already famous among the learned. He knew Audubon liked to incorporate local flora into his pictures and was sure he’d find new species of plants there, hidden, as it were, even from Audubon himself. As great naturalists who worked for money in an age of gentlemen herborizers there would have been immediate sympathy. In childhood, both had been driven by revolutionary violence to flee relatively happy Francophone homes, Rafinesque’s in Marseilles and Audubon’s in Haiti.

  Audubon was out walking when he noticed the boatmen staring at something by the landing. It’s through his eyes, which so little escaped, that we see Rafinesque again, almost, in “a long loose coat of yellow nankeen, much the worse of the many rubs it had got in its time and stained all over with the juice of plants, hung loosely about him like a sack. A waistcoat of the same, with enormous pockets, and buttoned up to the chin, reached below over a pair of tight pantaloons. … His beard was as long as I have known my own to be during … peregrinations, and his lank black hair hung loosely over his shoulder.”

  Their first meeting was a potentially grotesque slow-motion pileup of awkwardnesses from which they emerged smiling together in perfect good humor. Rafinesque stooped like a peddler under a gigantic bundle of dried plants strapped to his back. He walked up to Audubon “with a rapid step” and asked where one could find Audubon. Audubon said, “I am the man.” Rafinesque did a little dance and rubbed his hands. Then he gave Audubon a letter of introduction from some heavyweight back East. Audubon read it and asked, “May I see the fish?” What fish? “This says I’m being sent an odd fish.” It seems I am the fish! Audubon stammered, but Rafinesque laughed.

  Audubon offered to send servants for the luggage, but the traveler carried only his “pack of weeds” or as Audubon calls them elsewhere, “his grasses.” Rafinesque’s other things rose in the unexplained gigantic pockets and included mainly the notebook bound in oiled leather, linen for pressing plants, and a broad umbrella. He walked on the ground now. In fact he refused to ride any of the many horses he was offered, saying all botanists ought to walk, to stay close to the earth.

  There are those who’d make Rafinesque’s entire eight-year Kentucky period coincident with the onset of mental degeneration. And it was: and his genius grew. His genius grew as his errors and embarrassments multiplied. This is what maddened about him and always will. He won’t reconcile.

  Consider: It’s at this time that Rafinesque begins planning his masterpiece, Ichthylogia Ohiensis, the posthumous rediscovery of which will spark the rehabilitation of his standing in the late nineteenth century. Yet it’s on this same trip to Kentucky that the seeds of his academic shame are gathered, for along the river he’s confronted with the Mounds, those rain-smoothed earthen monuments raised on the landscape by hundreds of generations of Native American builders. “They struck me with astonishment and induced me to study,” Rafinesque says. He calls them “earthy remains” and notes how swiftly they’re falling to the plough, “and will be obliterated ere long.” There are a few places left in Kentucky, mostly on family farms, where you can see them as Rafinesque did, geometric land sculptures covered with grass, half in the field and half in the forest. Rafinesque declares it “high time that these monuments should all be accurately surveyed” and undertakes the work himself. But the book he produces, The American Nations, is worthless, an interminable pseudo-scholarly unfolding of his theories on the origin of New World societies, which he contends sprang from a voyage of Mediterranean ür-colonizers, the Atalantes. On and on, lineages of chiefs, names, dates, for thousands of years, information that would change everything, had Rafinesque actually possessed it, had he not somehow himself been able to sit there and endure the sheer tedium of inventing it. And then, not content with fraud, he descends to forgery, cooking up an entire migration saga for the Lenape Indian tribe, one that corroborates to a striking extent his ideas about prehistory. He writes of having received, in Kentucky, a set of “curiously carved” wooden sticks, the markings on which consumed him for years, until finally he completed his great decipherment. The sticks themselves disappeared, a tragedy, but at least the translation survived. This was the famous Walam Olum, which obsessed the pharmaceutical tycoon Eli Lilly his whole adult life and is still taken for real in corners of the scholarly world, though it was definitively revealed to be a hoax by the Lenape scholar David M. Oestreicher in 1994.

  Ethnographically speaking the Walam Olum is probably worthless, too. There was only one true writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, the Mayan. As it happens, Rafinesque is today considered the “prime mover” in the eventual decipherment of the Mayan glyphs, making him the only thinker in history ever to have both successfully unlocked the secrets of one ancient language and at least half-deviously attempted to counterfeit the existence of another. But it’s the lovely and disorientingly modern poetry the Walam Olum’s verses become when unburdened of scholarly expectation I wish to honor. The Walam Olum is in fact a great nineteenth-century American poem. Written in the 1820s or early ‘30s and purporting to date from the dawn of time, it’s not a translation but a divination, performed in a state of at least partial madness by someone for whom English was a fourth or fifth language.

  It freezes was there, it snows was

  there, it is cold was there.

  To possess mild coldness and much

  game, they go to the northerly plain, to

  hunt cattle they go.

  To be strong and to be rich the comers

  Divided into tillers and hunters.

  The most strong, the most good, the

  most holy, the hunters they are.

  And the hunters spread themselves,

  becoming northerlings, easterlings,

  southerlings, westerlings.

  Rafinesque’s virtues are often misplaced in this way. You can’t ever trust him or even listen to him about his own work. He doesn’t understand it. He never had time to understand it. Is his forged enthnographic artifact a great original poem? Well, his “great poem,” The World: Or, Instability, is sadly inept and simpy, but its long train of self-explanatory endnotes, predating The Waste Land by a hundred years, ranks among his finest writings. It’s there he fantasizes about hot-air balloons with sails and steam power and shaped like “a boat or spindle, a fish or a bird.” It’s there he calls for an end to enclosures, a return to the commons. “I hate the sight of fences like the Indians!” he says. It’s Rafinesque the stylist, among all the souls he contained, whom we should get to know. Like Conrad or Isak Dinesen, he made the subtle o
ffness of his foreign inflection work for him in English, finding effects concealed from native speakers. Warning would-be field workers he wrote, “You may travel over an unhealthy region or in a sickly season, you may fall sick on the road and become helpless, unless you be very careful.”

  Rafinesque and Audubon spent three weeks together. All Americans ought to read, in Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, his chapter on their idyll in Hendersonville; it’s our Gauguin and Van Gogh, with kinder madness. Audubon says, “I observed some degree of impatience in his request to be allowed at once to see what I had.” At the house, “I opened my portfolios and laid them before him.” Rafinesque gives criticisms, “which were of the greatest advantage to me,” says Audubon, “for, being well acquainted with books as well as with nature, he was well fitted to give me advice.” Audubon even got Rafinesque to drink brandy, though he did it only by scaring him into arrhythmia, leading him on a snipe hunt in a miles-thick canebrake where it got dark and stormed and a young bear brushed them, and the canes popped in the suffocating humidity like guns, and “the withered particles of leaves and bark attached to the cane stuck to our clothes.” Like scales. Now they were the fishes! Audubon had hunted with Boone and chuckled at such adventures. Rafinesque had shot a bird once and never got over the “cruelty.”

  Safely home they sat up over cold meat. “I listened to him with as much delight as TELEMACHUS could have listened to MENTOR,” Audubon says. It was hot, and they put the window open. The candle drew bugs. We have then Messers. RAFINESQUE and AUDUBON at the table by the open window in the middle of the night in 1818, in Kentucky, a state whose name the natives have for some reason always wanted to mean “dark and bloody ground” but that probably means “meadow land,” and they are joking in English and French about bugs, on a night of summer weather all central Kentuckians know, of thunderstorms that have suddenly given onto a mysteriously invigorating late humidity. Gazing down on the forest that surrounds these two like a starless ocean, you’d assume they were the loneliest people on earth, but in fact they’re at rare ease, and inside the cone of their little flame, it’s Paris. Audubon grabs a big beetle and bets it can carry a candlestick on its back. Says Rafinesque, “I should like to see the experiment made.”

  It was made, and the insect moved about, dragging its burden so as to make the candlestick change its position as if by magic, until coming upon the edge of the table, it dropped on the floor, took to wing, and made its escape.

  Before dawn Audubon woke to uproar. Hurtling through Rafinesque’s door he found the smaller man leaping naked in the dark, holding the neck of Audubon’s Stradivarius, which he’d bashed to splinters trying to stun small bats. These had come to eat bugs by his still-burning candle. Rafinesque was “convinced they belonged to ‘a new species,’” but they turned out to be common pips.

  Some days later, out of possible embarrassment over this incident, Rafinesque vanished at evening without a word. He rejoined the ark. “We were perfectly reconciled to his oddities,” Audubon says, “and hoped that his sojourn might be of long duration.” Rafinesque barely mentions the visit in his own memoir and says it lasted three days.

  As Rafinesque wrote in The World: “Fare-thee-well truly glorious earthly genius.”

  LOUISIANA

  CAPITAL Baton Rouge

  ENTERED UNION 1812 (18th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME In honor of Louis XIV of France

  NICKNAME Pelican State

  MOTTO “Union, justice, and confidence”

  RESIDENTS Louisianan or Louisianian

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 7

  STATE FLOWER magnolia

  STATE BIRD eastern brown pelican

  STATE TREE bald cypress

  STATE SONGS “Give Me Louisiana” and “You Are My Sunshine”

  LAND AREA 43,562sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Avoyelles Parish, 3 mi. SE of Marksville

  POPULATION 4,523,628

  WHITE 63.9%

  BLACK 32.5%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.6%

  ASIAN 1.2%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 2.4%

  UNDER 18 27.3%

  65 AND OVER 11.6%

  MEDIAN AGE 34.0

  LOUISIANA

  Joshua Clark

  “At the age of four, I saw the little girl in our house. She was always turning all the faucets on. My parents would be having sex and she’d turn the light on. She just thought it was funny.”

  A smile inflates Cari Roy’s cheeks almost to caricature, vanquishing the wrinkles from around her eyes, her glare exuding an easy energy. A crystal ball lies on her dining room table between us. She keeps it just for fun, says she doesn’t need such instruments.

  “You’d be hard-pressed to go into any building in New Orleans and not find spirits. This town is soaked with them. Fifteen thousand people died in one summer from yellow fever. Where do you think all those bodies went? We didn’t have enough cemeteries. We’re living on bodies.”

  Roy first ventured from psychic to ghost-hunter when the novelist Anne Rice brought her in to investigate her properties, and since then Roy has become a sort of spiritual guru in New Orleans.

  “Katrina woke the dead. It woke up people who had died in the last flood. Those impressions overlapped like crazy with the new spirits. It was a psychic cluster fuck, like throwing gasoline on a paranormal fire. It was the closest thing I’ve experienced to the paranormal in sci-fi films. I mean, the amount of dead. All walking around in a daze. They too were evacuating from the storm, panic stricken, running in terror.”

  Roy had front-row seats. She lives here on the boundary between the Upper Ninth Ward, which stayed dry through the storm’s aftermath, and the Lower Ninth Ward, which went underwater. The lavender shutters on her double shotgun house seem to melt into the air as the day dies outside.

  “Some spirits just can’t come to terms with the fact that they no longer have a grasp on life, that they no longer control it. Like a junkie, they still want their fix. When I came back after the storm, there was a dead woman wandering around my block searching for her family. Using my little psychic short radio waves, I eventually found her family just outside of town. I sent her there. She was really, really pissed. She always hated the suburbs.”

  Like many, Roy claims water is geologically conducive to spirits. And the Big Easy is built on swamp around the deepest part of the most powerful river in the world. Partly due to this unique ecosystem, through three centuries New Orleans has seen more than its fair share of suffering. And yet it could be argued the town has always put a smile on the face of death. Like those old Mardi Gras masks, the city balances the tear in its eye with a grin on its lips. New Orleanians love their dead as much as they do the living. Death here is dragged into the light, just as it is into blinding limestone tombs beside the interstate during rush hour.

  “They especially hold onto dead people in the Ninth Ward,” says Roy. “Spirits love this. Would you go somewhere people don’t pay any attention to you?”

  Through her open door she gazes across the street at the Industrial Canal levee, its darkness partially eclipsing the twilit horizon. This side was lucky. It was the other that finally gave way to a twenty-foot wall of water. “Hell, since the storm, we’re all still walking around here half dead.”

  I do a different type of ghost tour,” says Randy Ping, one of New Orleans’s most respected ghost tour guides. “I don’t do the usual ‘Here’s the house where the spirits are so unhappy!’ I don’t believe in any of that shit at all.”

  I’ve brought Ping to a coffee shop courtyard to meet Jeff Dwyer, a clinical specialist in cardiology and ghost-hunter from California. I first met Dwyer three years ago while he was in New Orleans researching his third ghost-hunting book. “Ghost aren’t like fallen leaves,” Dwyer told me that morning in the Lower Ninth Ward. “They can’t be blown away by wind or washed away by floods. These catastrophes often infuse them with new energy, making them more active and easier to discover. And renovation is the best tim
e to find ghosts. There’s often activity when their home’s being disturbed.”

  Ping shifts his black boots alongside Dwyer’s white Reeboks. He is easily half Dwyer’s age, his dyed black hair tucked into a long pony tail, a cigarette hovering between long-nailed fingers and silver rings. “I think that people who have a strong belief in the supernatural should go have an MRI done,” Ping says. “It was in Scientific American a few years ago, they have a neurological disorder.”

  “Really?” Dwyer says, smiling. “Well, I guess I should have the lab give me an MRI when I get back.”

  Ping stubs his cigarette out. He is not joking, nor is he specifically criticizing Dwyer. “There’s plenty of old buildings down here in New Orleans with their fair share of creaky boards and old timbers and bad air conditioning and plumbing,” Ping says, “and some jackass turns on a faucet and it doesn’t come on right away and he forgets about it and an hour later it turns on automatically when the water pressure’s back up and he exclaims, ‘The place is haunted!’ You know—real freaking morons.”

  Dwyer maintains a clinical, detached expression. “I think there is a direct correlation between the level of education here and the number of ghost stories,” Ping says, smoke and words pouring through his teeth, where he bites a fresh cigarette. “It’s hard in America to find a less literate society than New Orleans. People need to find a way to remember certain historical events. Add a ghost to a story and it makes it good enough for the kids to remember.”

  “And you conduct ghost tours?” Dwyer asks.

  “I moved here from Oklahoma to find ghosts. I have gone to every single one of these places—ones that are supposed to be so incredibly haunted. Not once have I ever seen anything that gives me any belief at all that there is anything supernatural going on.”