CREOLE
This term originally meant “born here,” in reference to a fresh start in the New World. As the generations rolled on, people who claimed descent from the early French families used it to mean “from way back.” Then, because New Orleans culture is such a mélange, people began to assume it meant “mixed race,” which caused light-skinned Creoles to deny that there was any such thing as a Creole of color. All along there were descendents of early black, brown, and beige natives of the city who duly considered themselves to be Creoles (says Times-Picayune columnist Lolis Elie, “A white guy told me he never heard of any black people called Creoles. I told him I never heard of any white people called Creoles”), and indeed in recent years anti-Eurocentric studies have controlled the discourse to the point that in both scholarly and popular circles Creole is most likely to connote old African-Louisianan blood. Or a culture so blended that there’s no separating one ethnic strain from another. Categories melt in New Orleans.
ALLIGATOR SAUSAGE
“What does alligator taste like?” people would occasionally be heard to ask at the Tally Ho. “Like alligator,” would be the answer, after a beat.
BEIGNET
A square doughnut with no hole. Which may seem contradictory, but then New Orleans is a laissez-faire city developed for French Catholics by a Scot named John Law whose architecture mostly reflects the Spanish occupation imposed by troops under Don Alexander O’Reilly.
SMALL COFFEE
Don’t order the large, because the cup, tall but not so big around, is hard to dunk into.
CHUCK BERRY
In his autobiography he writes that New Orleans was “a place I’d longed to visit ever since hearing Muddy Waters’s lyrics, ‘Going down to Louisana, way down behind the sun.’ ” His first trip there was to perform, in 1955. After the thrill of “seeing my black name posted all over town in one of the cities they brought the slaves through,” he found that his black skin made him inadmissible to strip joints. Whenever he tried to peer into one, in fact, the doorman “would draw the door closed as I strolled past, reopening it beyond my sight.” So, after putting on a show that went over big (“Maybe someday your name will be in lights, saying ‘Johnny B. Goode Tonight’ ”), he went back to Rampart Street, where the strip clubs were back then, and “employed a little strategy of my own. With the exception of when the door would close because a black male happened to pass in front . . . I enjoyed a half dozen full shows wearing a cowboy hat and gloves, standing in doorways and using my field glasses from across the street.”
MARK TWAIN
He came here in February of 1857, at twenty-one, hoping to catch a ship to South America, where he would make his fortune from the importing of coca leaves. Fortunately for modern American literature, which might otherwise have kicked off with Fear and Llamas at Lake Titicaca, the coca thing didn’t pan out, so young Sam Clemens signed on as a cub pilot on a riverboat instead. Back and forth up and down the Mississippi, in and out of New Orleans. To have some spending money for the nightlife there, he would guard piles of freight on the levee. “It was a desolate experience, watching there in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir. But it was not a profitless one: I used to have inspirations as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. . . . I can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another.” When the Civil War broke out, Clemens got off the boat in New Orleans and said good-bye to piloting. After a couple of weeks as a Confederate irregular, he headed out west. In 1881 he returned to the river to expand his recollections for Life on the Mississippi, several of whose chapters are about New Orleans.
W.C. HANDY
Struggling to make it as a musician, he was penniless in New Orleans. No place to lay his head at night but the levee. It was hard bedding, he recalled years later, and that is why his “St. Louis Blues” begins, “I hate to see that evening sun go down.”
INGRID BERGMAN
The movie is Saratoga Trunk, from the novel by Edna Ferber. It was filmed on Hollywood sets (as were Elvis in King Creole, Mario Lanza in The Toast of New Orleans, which Pauline Kael called “sheer excruciation,” and Naughty Marietta, in which Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy find in New Orleans, at last, the “ah, sweet mystery of life”), but most of the story takes place in New Orleans during Reconstruction.
Bergman is the fabulous, amoral, brunette adventuress Clio Dulaine, who returns from Paris to claim her Creole birthright. With her are her dwarf manservant Cupidon and her ominous maidservant played by Flora Robson—“the least likely mulatto,” as Kael noted, “in the history of cinema,” with kohl-surrounded gimlet eyes. Gary Cooper plays Clint Maroon, a gambler from Texas. (Cooper was drawn to the project by the fully sufficient circumstance that he and Bergman had started an affair on their previous picture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which she played a palpable but virtually mute blond Spanish revolutionary love-bunny. The noted harmonica player Larry Adler saw Saratoga Trunk and told Bergman she was miscast—she was a wholesome Swedish girl. Though this hurt her feelings, she had an affair with him.)
To be precise, it is off a plate atop the hat on Cupidon’s head that Clio enjoys jambalaya, she and he both standing, in the French Market. Bergman eats! Later it’s fresh peaches submerged in champagne, in the daytime, after which she sleeps for two days.
A lawyer sent by her relatives tries to bribe her into leaving town, but he can’t concentrate. Halfway through the business proposition in question, he blurts: “You’re beautiful!”
“Yes,” she says, “isn’t it lucky?”
Clint, impulsively, to Clio: “I love hearing your voice. It goes over me like oil over a blister. Folks back home are fine but they got kinda squeaky voices.”
Clio, manipulatively, to Clint: “I love you like the pig loves the mud.” Clint, or maybe Gary, looks a bit taken aback by this. But not so aback as Clio is taken when she learns that Clint isn’t rich. After making the most of her presence in New Orleans she moves on to Saratoga, New York, where just as her engagement to a boring man of wealth is about to be announced, Clint bursts into the party. In the course of a business matter he has been beaten half to death with a shovel, and he is carrying the dwarf—who may be dead—under his arm. Clint has made his fortune, two-fistedly, and of course he was the man for her anyway, and the dwarf comes to. It is a great bad movie, whose richness springs from New Orleans.
CREATIVES
Once, during some literary conference or another, the writer Molly Ivins, the artist Polly King, and I accompanied the former wife of David Bowie, who had a spicy memoir out, to a French Quarter apartment where “the widder Bowie,” as Molly would call her afterward, was staying with a friend who painted startlingly lurid figure studies. All I remember of the conversation is that the widder Bowie’s end of it was conducted at very nearly the top of her lungs, as if she were trying to be heard, or to hear herself, over a David Bowie concert; and that we all happened to agree at one point that we liked spring. I think it was spring. We all turned out to be pretty much on the same page there, causing our hostess to observe, “Well, we’re all creatives.” (Other creatives who had flings with New Orleans include Katherine Anne Porter, Malcolm Lowry, Sinclair Lewis, Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell, Thornton Wilder, Pete Maravich, and Jorge Luis Borges, who subsequently wrote a story about a squeamish famished man who in trying to swallow his first oyster . . . no, I’m just making that up.)
FATS DOMINO
The man who found a generation’s thrill on Blueberry Hill is long retired but still residing in his big pink-and-yellow-trimmed fifties ranch house in the Ninth Ward. He gives no interviews. Some years ago a famous local TV news guy, Phil Johnson, who was famous for his pretentious nightly editorial and the way he intoned “Good evening,” resolved to get Fats for his show. He knocked on Fats’s door. Fats opened it. “Hey, it’s Phil Johnson!” said Fats. Phil Johnson beamed. Said he was there to
interview Fats. “Hey, say ‘Good evening’ for me,” said Fats. Phil Johnson didn’t want to, but Fats said oh, come on. So Phil Johnson said it. “Come next door and say it to my neighbor,” Fats said. Phil Johnson didn’t want to, but he did. “Now my other neighbor,” said Fats. Phil Johnson didn’t want to, but he did. “Now one more neighbor, over here, they’d love it, it would mean so much to them,” Fats said. So Phil Johnson did. Fats had him all up and down the street saying “Good evening” to everybody. Finally, Phil Johnson asked was Fats ready to do the interview now. “I don’t do interviews,” Fats said.
In OffBeat in 1997, the director of WWOZ (a wonderful roots-music radio station that is always on the verge of folding) spoke of being privileged to eat Fats Domino’s cooking: “It was the first and only time I’ll ever eat barbecued pickled pig lips. If Fats is cooking in his backyard, you got to eat it. They weren’t as tough as you’d think. At least the grill burned off the hairs. Fats has a funny diet.”
JEFFERSON DAVIS
In the Confederate Museum on Camp Street, with portico and tower in the style of Louisiana native H. H. Richardson, the first truly American architect, is displayed a crown of thorns that Pope Pius IX made and sent to Davis when he was in prison after the war. A card next to it says: “Davis was deeply touched and he had a special need of cheer at this time, ‘when,’ as he said, ‘the invention of malignants was taxed to the utmost to fabricate defamations to degrade me in the estimation of mankind.’ ”
BOTH MARIE LAVEAUS
Mother and daughter, they are remembered as one: the Voodoo Queen, who led rites that may have involved naked dancing (and sometimes, it is said, respectable citizens), and who are said to have exerted political power over a considerable stretch of the nineteenth century. People still chalk X-marks on their tombs in St. Louis Cemeteries No. 1 and No. 2. Some fifteen percent of the city’s population still practices voodoo, it is said, but the reason you are advised not to visit these graves alone is the percentage of the population that unquestionably practices mugging.
GERTRUDE STEIN
She came in 1934 to lecture and to visit Sherwood Anderson. She wrote that she and Alice B. Toklas were shown “the social register of the bawdy houses and a charming little blue book with the simple advertisements of the ladies by themselves and we have eaten oysters a la Rockefeller and innumerable shrimps made in every way and all delicious and we are taken to visit the last of the Creoles in her original house unchanged for 100 years . . . all very lovely and lively.”
RAMBLE ONE: ORIENTATION
Mitch: I thought you were straight.
Blanche: What’s straight? A road or a line can be straight. But the human heart?
—A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
SINCE THE MISSISSIPPI FLOWS GENERALLY SOUTH FROM ITS origin in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, you expect a town on the river to be on the east bank or the west. But at New Orleans the river flows eastwardly, sort of, so New Orleans is on the north bank, sort of. On the other side of the river is an area known, to be sure, as West Bank, but most of it lies either south or east of the river. On a map you can see: if the river were straight, New Orleans would be almost horizontal, right to left, east to west, between the river to the south and Lake Pontchartrain (as big as Rhode Island) to the north. But the river is crooked. The best known parts of New Orleans form a sort of tipped-forward S along bends in the river, from Uptown and the Garden District through Downtown, the French Quarter, and on around eastward into Fauxborg Marigny and the Bywater. Within this S, Uptown is south (upriver) and Downtown north (downriver), because the river takes a northerly hitch. However, the part of the Quarter that is farthest downtown is referred to as the upper Quarter, though I have heard it called the lower.
So when I tell you that I am pretty damn sure that in 1998, during Hurricane Georges, I saw the river, at least the topmost layer of it, flowing backward (because the wind was blowing so hard southerly along that northerly hitch), you can see why I might not be absolutely sure.
It was late and I was by myself at the time, nobody else was around. And I was feeling let down, because although the wind was blowing hard, and half the population had been evacuated, and thousands who’d stayed had been herded into the Superdome for their safety, and my friend Greg Jaynes and I had taken refuge in the shuttered-up Burgundy Street home of my friend Curtis Wilkie, it was clear that this was not going to be the Big One: the full force of Georges was going to miss us.
We knew this from Nash Roberts. Nash Roberts is a veteran New Orleans TV weatherman who is low-tech, at least by way of presentation, and always right. Nash was broadcasting from his own house, it looked like, tracing the hurricane with a grease pencil on a sheet of Plexiglas or a pad of paper, I forget which, while the other channels’ meteorologists were using all manner of laser pointers and rear-projected electronic schematic representations of the area. You couldn’t tell what in the world Nash was scribbling with the grease pencil, but as usual he was the first to make the call, this one’s going to miss us, and he was on the money.
So I felt I could venture outside and take a look at the river, and when I did, it was going backward. I’m pretty damn sure.
Ordinarily, at any rate, when you face the river from the French Quarter you’ll see the river flowing from your right to your left. As recently as the late sixties, early seventies, when Kermit Ruffins was a kid in New Orleans—he’s a fixture in the city now as a jazz musician—he’d catch crabs from the river, to eat. “Get some string, tie a chicken leg on it, and when that string get real tight, pull in real slow—scoop ’em up and put ’em in the bucket. End of the day we might have a hundred, hundred-fifty crabs.” You wouldn’t want to eat anything out of the river here now; it’s filthy with silt and petrochemicals. But it’s a robust presence. John Barry, author of Rising Tide, a terrific book about the horrific flood of 1927 (which the New Orleans elite managed to divert onto poorer folks’ lands) says the river is “perfect,” as opposed to the imperfect people who try to make it behave. It’s a little like the horse that the New Orleans “swamp blues” musician Coco Robichaux told me about, which kept walking into a post, over and over. “What are you doing trying to sell a blind horse?” somebody said. “He ain’t blind,” said the man who was trying to sell him. “He’s just tough. He don’t care.”
The river is perfect because it doesn’t care. It would just as soon drown New Orleans, or any other place, as not. But people, being imperfect, want to believe that it cares. People call it “Old Man River,” “The Father of Waters.” Big dirty thruster barreling into town.
And New Orleans, née La Nouvelle Orleans, is ready to take him on. Not “ready” in the sense that she has pulled herself together for their ultimate date yet (efforts are under way to figure out how to build a wall or something), but she wouldn’t be herself if she were all squared away. Stephanie Dupuy, a native New Orleanian, once quoted Billy Wilder on Marilyn Monroe to relevant effect here. Stephanie and I were in Jennifer Flowers’s club listening to her sing “Happy Birthday” in a breathy voice, and let it be said that she, who had a long affair with Bill Clinton, did not belabor the allusion by singing it explicitly to “Mr. President.” Stephanie works out of the mayor’s office, coordinating with people making movies in the city. She says that when movie people come to New Orleans, they say the same thing Meyer Lansky said when he discovered Batista’s Cuba: “At last, a government I can work with.” Stephanie knows Hollywood lore. She says that when people on the set of Some Like It Hot were complaining that Marilyn was always late, Wilder, the director, said this: “I have an aunt in Austria who is always on time. You want her to play the part?”
Orientation. You’re in the French Quarter looking at the river. Now turn around and repeat this mnemonic: Dixie Cups, Rock ’n’ Bowl, Ducks By Ruthie. The Dixie Cups were a sweet and snappy New Orleans trio, two sisters and a cousin, who knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts with “Chapel of Love” and had another big hit with “Iko, Iko,”
the old Mardis Gras chant. (New Orleans has a long history of musical families, the Boswells, the Nevilles, the Marsalises, Harry Connick Jr. and Sr.—senior having retired as the city’s district attorney to appear as “the singing DA.”) Rock ’n’ Bowl is an uptown bowling alley (Mid-City Lanes) that is also where you can dance till all hours to, say, the zydeco stylings of Boozoo Chavis. And Ruthie is perhaps the most famous French Quarter character, who used to rollerskate around the Quarter followed by a string of ducks. D is for Decatur, C for Chartres, R for Royal, B for Bourbon, D for Dauphine, B for Burgundy (pronounced with the accent on gun), R for Rampart, the long streets of the Quarter in order.
The order of the short streets that cross the long ones may be borne in mind as follows: “C’mon, I’ll Be Cool, Sugar, Take Something Off—Something Dainty, Some Underwear—Go, Baby, Everything!” Canal, Iberville, Bienville, Conti, St. Louis, Toulouse, St. Peter, Orleans, St. Ann, Dumaine, St. Philip, Ursulines, Governor Nichols, Barracks, Esplanade. To keep the sequence of the saint streets straight, remember, Louis, Peter, Ann, Philip: “Let’s Party And Party.” These are my own mnemonics, which may not suit everyone, but you are welcome to share them.
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