We went there. Our mouths watered at all the cute kids we saw running around. We found the spiritual head of this institution reposing in a trailer home on the grounds. We were prepared to plead with him for pictures.
He was old, pale, and shapeless, a blob floating in the carapace of a Barcalounger. He breathed with a faint wheeze. He had had several bypass operations, he said, and was living only for his charges. Nestling nervously in the middle of him was an aged Chihuahua. We explained our mission, at length, as founder and dog eyed us narrowly.
Then we waited.
“On one condition,” said the founder at last. A shudder went through the Chihuahua.
We waited.
He asked for a pen. I gave him one. He asked for paper. I tore him a scrap from my notebook. He wrote out a few words, slowly, deliberately, and handed the paper over. I believe he kept the pen.
His handwriting was spidery. His condition was “That it glorify Christ.”
I looked at the message, Slick looked at it, and the man looked at us.
The Chihuahua sneezed, as if in disgust. A Chihuahua can tell who’s from Satan.
In fact we behaved as Christians in that crucial moment. There was no one else around. We could with impunity have taken that dog and smothered the founder with it, and his consequent heart failure would not have surprised or stricken a living soul.
We did not do that. We let him live. He waved us away. No pictures. And no pictures, no story.
Slick and I went to Felix’s. We kept up with the shucker through a couple of dozen, but after a while Slick wasn’t eating so much as staring at the little pink bodies lying there exposed to the light. He started telling me about something that had happened when, as a teenager in Monroe, Louisiana, he was working as a lifeguard at an overcrowded pool. On his watch, a kid drowned. Nobody saw him go under. By the time anybody called for help, he was dead. Slick was full of remorse, especially when he heard that the child’s parents wanted to have a talk with him. When they arrived, they just sat there looking at him. He expressed his deep regret, explained the situation as best he could, and got no response.
“I was about to cry, I felt so bad,” he said.
Hard to imagine Slick in tears. He went on.
“The parents just stared. They looked nervous. I said, ‘Is there anything you want to ask me?’ Finally, the mother spoke up. She said, ‘Can we have his frog feet?’ ”
Not a story Parade’s readers would want for Christmas. We had already run up quite an expense account. “What are we going to tell Parade?” I wondered aloud.
Slick stared at the oysters lying in their shells. It was early evening, magic time in terms of light, which was coming in through the big window there, lending a rosy glow. Slick picked up the battered Leica that stuck with him through thick and thin.
“How about: ‘Orphans? We thought you said oysters.”
MANY YEARS LATER, I’m in New Orleans alone, at Felix’s, having a dozen and working the New York Times crossword. And the shucker is condescending to talk to me. He can evidently shuck and jive at the same time. He is telling me that the other night a man ate forty-eight dozen oysters at a sitting. Not here, but at a seafood place out by the lake. “I don’t know if he even leaves the shells,” he says. “Lives in Hammond, Loozanna. I wish I owned a grocery in Hammond.”
“Fat?” I inquire.
“Yes. But not extree-ordinarily fat. About my heighth, with your stomach.”
And in comes Becca. And her husband. I know who they are because he says, “Aw, Becca,” and she looks at me, jerks her thumb over at him, and says, “My husband Kyle.”
It’s late fall, crispy for New Orleans, and she’s wearing a sweater. Striped, horizontally, which on a flat surface would be straight across but on her the effect is topographical. And there’s a twinkle in her eye—well, more of a glint, probably, but you can see seeing it as a twinkle in just the right light. “Shuck us a dozen,” she tells the shucker, and with a look over at hubby, “Let’s hope one of ’em works.”
If I had not seen Double Indemnity enough times to be all too familiar with how these things turn out . . . Because she is over close to me now saying, “I work that puzzle every damn day of this world.”
One look at Becca and I’m into a noir-narration frame of mind, thinking to myself, You know, a man has always got to be promoting getting some; and a woman always got to be promoting getting something out of giving some up; but a woman who is giving you some to get back at her husband can just enjoy it and let you just enjoy it because her ulterior motive is covered. Problem would be when she gets her message through to the husband, gets tired of that, and starts figuring out how you, too, are letting her down. I’d say Becca’s daddy had money till she got halfway through high school and he lost it all: A daddy’s girl whose daddy folded.
And now this husband, Kyle. A weedy sort. He nods distantly, looking like he hopes it won’t come across as miserably. “And two Ketels on the rocks,” she says, and he says, “Aw, Becca,” again. They’re both fairly sloshed, but he’s fading and she is on the rise.
“ ‘A little hard to find’? How many letters?” she says. She’s up against my shoulder looking at the puzzle. Kyle’s leaning against the counter, putting horseradish on the first oyster the shucker has presented them with. Without moving away from me or looking away from the puzzle, she reaches over, takes the oyster from in front of Kyle, puts it to her lips, gives me a little half-look, and slurps it down.
I say, “Eight.”
She says, “A good man.”
“But where’s the ‘little’ in that?”
A woman just in it for the giggles would have made a coy face and said “I’m not touching that one.” Becca gives me another half-look and grabs my pen and starts writing “A GOOD MAN” in.
That doesn’t appeal to me at all, on one level. On another, it brings her up against me even closer.
She smells like her corsage—they’re in town for the weekend, she says, for a football game—and her lipstick, maybe, which is certainly red enough to be aromatic, especially now that it’s set off by a fleck of horseradish.
“No,” I say, “ ‘A GOOD MAN’ can’t be right—see, fourteen down, ‘Greek love,’ would be AGAPE, and—”
She looks at me with both eyes, and rolls them. “Ooh, I don’t think so, hon,” she says. “Let’s just jam it in there. We’ll make it fit.” She writes AGAPE in so that the E is on top of the N.
That fleck of horseradish is still there on her lip. I could flick it off for her. Or I could point to the same spot on my own lip so she could get it off herself. I refrain from doing either.
Now she has one of my oysters. “Slurps” is too blatant. She takes it in juicily. Now she’s filling things in one after another, free association and spontaneity being the key more than strict interpretation or even in some cases the right number of letters. I am more tolerant of this than I would be in other circumstances.
“You know we could do this all evening,” she says, and in spite of my reserve I’m beginning to have the same thought. At this time I am unattached, and I am not thinking with as much edge as I was back there in that noir-narration frame of mind. But there’s Kyle. She turns to him and says, “Me and this man could keep on doing this till another puzzle comes out.” She takes the last of their dozen. “Kyle doesn’t do the puzzle,” she says. “Kyle could eat ever’ got-damn oyster in New Orleans and he still couldn’t do the puzzle. Let’s go, Kyle, put some money down.” He does, and my weight sags just a bit farther than I’d prefer in the direction of her abruptly withdrawn shoulder.
Becca and Kyle turn to go, her arm in his; but she looks back long enough to lick the fleck of horseradish off, finally, and to say, by way of farewell: “They like it when you dog ’em out.”
I look at my puzzle, which is a mess.
“Say, ‘They’?” says the shucker.
SLICK PULLED THE orphan story out of the fire. He had a wide circle of friends i
n, for instance, the ballooning and motocross and country-music communities, and one of them put him onto some photographable orphans. The cover picture, under the billing, “When Love Is the Best Gift of All—MERRY CHRISTMAS, AMERICA,” was of a little blond girl who had been an orphan before adoption. But when Slick told the story of the orphan story he tended to leave people believing that we had shifted topics on Parade and pulled it off: Oysters. He pronounced it oischers, to rhyme with moistures, as do many people who savor those mollusks’ juices. They say a mayor of New Orleans named DeMaestri hosted President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at dinner once and didn’t say a word until the end of the evening, when he said, “How’d you like them ersters?” This is one of several indigenous pronunciations.
Some twenty years later Slick died, directly from drink. He was the second New Orleans rambling companion of mine who knew that drinking would kill him, who narrowly escaped dying once already from it, but went back to it anyway. One of the things Slick often said was, “I wouldn’t want to live like that,” in a not entirely facetious though mock-pious tone, pronouncing “live” sort of like “leeyuv.” Say we passed a man in the street who was carrying a cat in a cage labeled “Tom Doodle” in fancy script, and the cat was emitting a cranky-sounding moan and the man was talking back to it in a whiny, put-upon voice. Slick would say, “I wouldn’t want to leeyuv like that.” When liquor began to get the better of him, he was in and out of rehab programs. “I’m drinking myself to death,” he told me once, in tears. Slick, in tears! I told him drinking wasn’t as much fun as it used to be, which was true. He agreed. A pleasure-principle grounds for abstention. But in the long run he couldn’t live like that.
Lagniappe with Oysters
SLICK’S LOVE OF NEW ORLEANS
One of his friends in town was the scion of an old family who fell in love with a stripper. The family was appalled, but the scion assured them that she was quite bright and cultured. Meet her and you’ll see, he said.
So some of them came to the club where she worked, and sat talking to her, and sure enough she was quite the lady and well educated. They liked her. You couldn’t not like her. Then she stood up and said, “Excuse me for a minute, y’all, I’ve got to go show ’em my monkey.”
CHIHUAHUAS
On Decatur Street, across from the French Market, there’s a wee nook called Chi-wa-wa Ga-ga, “A small store for dinky dogs.” In the window in Christmas shopping season are many gift ideas, including a red-and-green sweater that says “I Don’t Fa la la for Nobody,” a pullover suit that would make a miniature dog look bulging with muscles, and nightlights for dogs.
Outside, a very large woman is holding in one arm a dog so diminutive and quivery that you can hardly make him out. She is saying to a heavy, beat-down-looking man, “Look, Rob, little crowns! It’s a little dog store!” Halfway through the door, she sees Rob trying to continue down Decatur. She reaches back and grabs him.
I follow them inside, where many people are squeezing and milling about. At least seven of them have brought their tiny dogs, not all of whom are Chihuahuas. “Some kind of shelty and shih tzu, we don’t know. Do we, Precious?” says one owner. One little dog, shivering on the glass counter, is modeling a tiara.
“She don’t preshate it,” says the man of the couple.
“Yes she does, she preshates it, don’t you Weejee?” says the woman.
“She’s already got one tiara. You going to get her another tiara she’s not going to wear?”
Another little dog is brought to the counter, to try on a sweater. “It’s too big for him, look, he’s trying to get out of it. You have a changing room? He don’t like to get naked.”
Among the small dog toys for sale is a chewy-looking monkey labeled “Shake Me!” A shopper tells me, “Ohhh, my dogs back home have one of those, they love it so much.” She shakes the monkey and nothing happens. “I can’t get it to do,” she says. “My dogs get it to do all the time. You try.” I shake it for her, it emits a vaguely simian squeal, and she says, “There. That’s what I hear all day long.”
The resident Chihuahua sits next to the counter in a tiny stuffed armchair, yapping at everybody who tries to pet him.
“That your chair?” asks a woman trying to win him over.
“You’re mighty god damn right it’s my chair,” says the Chihuahua.
BALLOONING
So far as I know, the full history of ballooning in New Orleans has never been told, but in 1858 two local enthusiasts, named Morat and Smith, raced from Congo Square to the corner of Camp and Felicity riding not in the standard gondolas, but on the backs of two live, eleven-foot alligators. And in a local paper in 1905 a man named Buddy Bottley (or Bartley), “the colored aeronaut,” advertised “astonishing, perplexing, fascinating” balloon ascents. If Buddy brought along his brother Dude on these rides, to provide cultural commentary, they must have been fascinating indeed, judging by “old Mr. Dude Bottley’s” recollections of early musical days in New Orleans, which appear in Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville, by Danny Barker. Bottley recalls hearing Bolden, in venues where the funk was like “burnt onions and train smoke,” perform “such nice love songs,” like “Your Mammy Don’t Wear No Drawers, She Wears Six-Bit Overalls,” “Don’t Send Me No Roses ’Cause Shoes Is What I Need,” and “Stick It Where You Stuck It Last Night.” Bottley also speaks of a Lorenzo Staulz, who would sing Civil War songs “about how General Grant made Jeff Davis kiss and kiss his behind and how General Sherman burnt up Georgia riding on Robert E. Lee’s back.” Staulz “had a cleaning and pressing business. If you took your clothes to his place to have them cleaned, if he looked nice in your suit and it fitted him, he wore it. So, people naturally thought he had a hundred suits.”
RAMBLE FOUR: COLOR
The various grades of the coloured people are designated by the French as follows . . . : Sacatra, [a cross between] griffe and negress; Griffe, negro and mulatto; Marabon, mulatto and griffe; Mulatto, white and negro; Quarteron, white and mulatto; Metif, white and quarteron; Meamelouc, white and metif; Quarteron, white and meamelouc; Sang-mele, white and quarteron. And all these, with the sub-varieties of them, French, Spanish, English, and Indian, and the sub-sub-varieties, such as Anglo-Indian-mulatto, I believe experts pretend to be able to distinguish. Whether distinguishable or not, it is certain they all exist in New Orleans.
—FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED, 1861
ON ESPECIALLY MISTY DAYS IN NEW ORLEANS, background colors emerge as if bleeding into the atmosphere: you catch sight of a beige-faced woman in a blue slicker carrying a manila envelope past a mint-green housefront, and it’s as though you’re seeing the color manila for the first time. In the Quarter and the Marigny and the Bywater, you see houses painted blue and green and white, orange and white and green, pink and beige, lavender and white and purple, ocher and powder blue, pink with red-and-white trim, aqua with cream trim and deep purple shutters.
New Orleans has historically been unconventional and recombinant also in regard to color of skin. The city from its founding in 1718 was a melange of voluntary European colonists, African and Indian slaves, and European deportees and indentured servants; there was much commonly accepted mixing of blood. Slaves escaped into the surrounding swamps and established “maroon” communities that traded with citizens of the town. And within a few decades there was a growing number of “free persons of color.” Many of these were immigrants or refugees from Haiti (then Saint-Domingue), others former slaves who bought their freedom, or had it bought for them by relatives, in the late eighteenth century.
However, for most black Americans before Emancipation—for instance, for Jim in Huckleberry Finn—New Orleans was a threat: if they didn’t toe the line, they could be sold “down the river” to the New Orleans market, which meant back-breaking labor and separation from loved ones in the deep South.
On a wall on the corner of Chartres and St. Louis, there’s a plaque with a bas-relief of three gents (one taller and more rawboned) looking
at some papers around a table. The plaque commemorates “Original Pierre Maspero’s Slave Exchange, est. 1788. Within this historic structure slaves were sold and Andrew Jackson met with the Lafitte Brothers and planned the defense for the historic and epic battle in which the British surrendered to American troops commanded by General Jackson. American independence was finalized and General Jackson went on to become the seventh President of the United States of America.” The plaque doesn’t linger even long enough for a comma after “slaves were sold.” What the plaque might say is “slaves were sold to the highest bidder after being made to run, dance, leap, tumble, and twist to show they had no stiff joints, and after being fattened up over by the river in holding pens and washed in greasy water to make their skin shine.” Until long after the finalization of American independence.
Slaves were sold at several locations in New Orleans. At the corner of Royal and St. Louis is the splendid, expensive Omni Royal Orleans hotel, on whose site once stood the even more opulent St. Louis Hotel, in whose rotunda slaves were auctioned off. An 1842 engraving of one such sale shows white men in big hats and white women in big dresses milling around as an auctioneer waves his gavel and points to a black woman naked above the waist. Also in the picture are two small black children not wearing anything and a black man with a wrap around his loins. In the foreground are casks and bales also up for auction. Louisiana law prohibited the sale of small children separate from the mother, but if they came from other states there were no restrictions. When the novelist John Galsworthy visited New Orleans in 1912, the St. Louis Hotel was in ruins. As he poked through them, he was startled nearly out of his skin by the sudden appearance of an abandoned, injured horse stumbling through the marble rubble.
As a young man, in 1828 and 1831, Abraham Lincoln twice worked his way on flatboats down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. These exposures to what was then the nation’s most cosmopolitan metropolis are assumed by biographers to have given Lincoln his first sense of the great world, and also his first sense of the magnitude and inhumanity of slavery. He’d seen some slaves in Illinois, but never anything like those auctions. According to a friend who accompanied Lincoln on his second trip, the sight of a girl being sold made him vow to do something about slavery when he got a chance.
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