To say Highway 61 between St. Francisville and New Orleans isn’t scenic would be a spectacular understatement, and it was particularly dreadful as we made our way through Baton Rouge. The seemingly endless stretch of horrifyingly ugly streetscape was littered with every conceivable blight of our consumer culture: mile after mile of fast-food restaurants, chain stores, tire and auto parts stores, all plunked down with absolutely no regard for aesthetics. We’ve all seen these stretches of highway; they’re a common feature of the American landscape that has grown like kudzu to accommodate the consumer needs of a country whose population has nearly doubled since Steinbeck’s travels with Charley.
As we drove this nightmarish stretch of highway, hitting stoplights every quarter mile or so, I became preoccupied with the fate of a man named Gordon McKernan. Nearly every mile or two for many dozens of miles there was a huge billboard with a picture of a nice-looking middle-aged man and his name, Gordon McKernan, in big letters. The billboards were very simple. One said: “Gordon McKernan. Injured?” At the bottom was a phone number. Nothing else. Just the name, the phone number, and a question. “Gordon McKernan. Car Wreck?” “Gordon McKernan. Big Truck Accident?”
Apparently, something terrible had happened to Gordon McKernan, but no one seemed to know what. By the time we pulled into the parking lot of the Household of Faith in Gonzales, fifty miles north of New Orleans, so I could make some notes, there’d been dozens of billboards pleading for information about the fate of poor Gordon McKernan. How long had he been missing? Why didn’t anyone know what had happened to him? His family must have been beside themselves. At least every motorist in this part of Louisiana, bombarded with these billboards, knew who to look for.
As we approached the New Orleans airport there was another billboard with a large picture of another fellow with a huge smile named Mike Branden. “Have a wreck? Need a check?” Mike was holding a facsimile of huge check about three times the size of his head that said “check” on it, just so it was clear he wasn’t waving around a meaningless piece of paper. Mike was identified as “attorney at law.” Wow, I thought, if Gordon McKernan ever surfaces he needs to connect with Mike!
As all of this was tumbling around in my head I realized that after more than a week of driving, a little break from the road was sorely needed. I was constructing elaborate fantasies based on billboards to keep myself occupied. A few days in New Orleans would be just what the doctor, or a personal injury lawyer, would have ordered.
Laissez le bon temps rouler! Let the good times roll! No city in America celebrates life, and living in the moment, more lavishly, more spontaneously, and more regularly, than New Orleans. Why? One reason is that the specter of death is never far away.
Half the city is below sea level. There are places in New Orleans where you can watch large freighters on the other side of the levee making their way along the lower Mississippi and the ship’s hull is above you. Surrounded on three sides by the Mississippi and one by Lake Pontchartrain, which is actually an ocean bay, New Orleans lives life ever on the edge of catastrophe. Those chickens came home to roost in 2005 when the levees broke, and the water came pouring in.§ That sense of vulnerability makes life worth celebrating every day because any day could be your last.
The fragile line between life and death is also the ethos of the second line parade, the parades Doreen Ketchens watched as a child. Musicians and dancers, and anyone else who feels like joining in, follow the hearse and the mourners in a jazz funeral. There but for the grace of God, that could be me riding in the hearse to my heavenly reward, so why not dance in the streets today? And because the water table is so high, people aren’t buried in the ground in New Orleans, but in crypts above it. This makes the cemeteries more visible, a constant reminder of life’s impermanence.
There’s a certain sense of . . . well, not quite chaos . . . but joyous disorderliness about New Orleans, and I’m not talking about the public drunkenness on display every day on Bourbon Street. Streets are routinely closed without notice for a couple of hours when a local community parade breaks out. Police officers can sometimes be seen partying while on duty during one of the countless festivals that dot the New Orleans calendar, Mardi Gras, of course, being the most famous. It’s been said that you shouldn’t think of New Orleans as the worst organized city in the United States, but as the best organized city in the Caribbean.
Few cities are as atmospheric as New Orleans, or as exotic, the result of a mixture of French, Spanish, and Caribbean influences. The iconic streetcars that ply St. Charles Avenue under live oaks draped in Spanish moss, the ever-present sound of music, mostly jazz, riding gently on the breeze, the smell of jasmine and honeysuckle wafting in the air—New Orleans has a soundtrack and a fragrance all its own, and it’s all very intoxicating.
We arrived early in the afternoon and went directly to Audubon Park, across St. Charles Avenue from Tulane University, to take a good, long walk on the oval path that winds through the park and under the oaks. As soon as we got out of the car, Albie broke his self-imposed silence of the past several days by giving a little pug what for. In fairness, the pug barked at him first. A few minutes later he barked at some ducks in a pond, but in fairness they quacked at him first, too. This was the Albie I knew at home.
Danny met us after we’d checked into our hotel on St. Charles Avenue. We took Albie to get a po’boy at the Bayou Beer Garden and later to the pottery studio where Danny takes classes. Albie charmed everyone there; he was on his best behavior once more and endeared himself to all the potters by offering up his paw and not breaking any of their work.
Judy and I had last been in New Orleans just a few months earlier, around Christmas, but now the spring had brought forth the honeysuckle and the magnolias and I learned all over again why I yearn for New Orleans. As we drove down St. Charles Avenue Danny looked around as a streetcar passed, its bell clanging. “It never gets old,” he said. No, it most definitely does not.
New Orleans was the last place Steinbeck wrote about in any depth in Travels with Charley,¶ and he left the city deeply troubled by what he’d seen there. He watched in horror as a small group of white women, known as “the Cheerleaders,” arrived at a local school at the beginning and end of each school day to harass and heap verbal abuse on “tiny Negro children” attending a predominantly white school. It was, he wrote, “cruel and obscene.” The Cheerleaders attracted the attention of local television news, which was in its infancy back then. Thus amplified, the entire spectacle attracted a mob that egged the Cheerleaders on to new heights, or lows. The frenzy fed on itself.
Growing up in Salinas, Steinbeck wrote, he had known only one black family, the Coopers, who were widely respected in the community. By the time he was an adult he was “perhaps too far grown to reform the inflexible habits of childhood. . . . Thus it remains that I am basically unfitted to take sides in the racial conflict.”
“Beyond my failings as a racist,” he wrote of witnessing the Cheerleaders, “I knew I was not wanted in the South. When people are engaged in something they are not proud of, they do not welcome witnesses.”#
“But there was something far worse here than dirt,” he continued, “a kind of frightening witches’ Sabbath. Here was no spontaneous cry of anger, of insane rage. Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. . . . Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heartbreaking. . . . It would be difficult to explain to a dog the good and moral purpose of a thousand humans gathered to curse one tiny human.”
“[I] knew something was wrong and distorted and out of drawing,” he wrote. “I knew New Orleans, I have over the years had many friends there, thoughtful, gentle people, with a tradition of kindness and courtesy.”
Steinbeck lamented that the Cheerleaders were now misrepresenting New Orleans to the world. His disgust at what he witnessed, plus a racist earful he got from a hitchhiker near Jackson, Mississippi (and whom he evicted from R
ocinante shortly thereafter), about “niggers,” “nigger lovers,” and “commies,” seemed to drain his spirit and spell the end of his journey. He made a beeline for home, barely able to recall anything about the trip from that point on.
When I sat down with 79-year-old JoAnn Clevenger in the dining room of her famed restaurant, Upperline, on our second day in New Orleans, she remembered the Cheerleaders clearly. She was about 20 then and had only been in New Orleans for a few years.
“That period in New Orleans was short-lived,” she told me. “Television amplified what they were doing, and it became drama for the sake of drama. TV kept it going and blew it into a bigger thing.”
JoAnn, like Albie, hails originally from Alexandria, Louisiana, and came to New Orleans when she was seventeen. Her demeanor ranges from bemused to perpetually delighted—by people, by New Orleans, by life, and by her work. She called to mind Ruth Gordon’s title character in the 1971 film Harold and Maude.
She was attired in her trademark black-and-red dress (she has many); her hair, as always, was swept up in a stylish bun. She looks at the world through round, horn-rimmed glasses and her Bohemian spirit is evident in her conversation and the eclectic art collection that adorns the walls, mostly paintings that capture the diversity and exuberant spirit of her adopted city. JoAnn epitomizes the city itself—indomitable, spirited, resilient, full of life, and utterly original.
When she was a teenager her mother fell ill. Physicians at Tulane Medical School, which has long had one of the nation’s preeminent tropical medicine departments, diagnosed her with a rare tropical illness that required long-term hospitalization. JoAnn moved into her mother’s hospital room to care for her at night and took the streetcar to high school during the day. At a downtown cafeteria she had her first epiphany about food.
“That’s where I first saw shrimp remoulade served over iceberg lettuce,” JoAnn told me as if remembering for the first time. “I never knew you could eat shrimp that weren’t fried!”
Despite living in a hospital room and caring for her mother, JoAnn was a National Merit finalist and won a scholarship to Tulane, where she began studying electrical engineering before switching to the business school. But her mother died her freshman year and she dropped out to take a job as an assistant medical librarian. Before long she succumbed to what she calls “Big Easy Syndrome.”
“Big Easy Syndrome allowed me to flourish with no money and no education,” she told me. “It lets people’s creativity bubble up. Everyone has creative potential but for so many, survival takes precedence. But in New Orleans, with its ease of spirit, people have time for creativity whether its music, art, or food.”
“What is the source of creativity in New Orleans?” she asked rhetorically. Then she reinforced what I and many others have observed about the city’s zest for life. “It’s death. Cemeteries are everywhere here, and they are visible because they are aboveground. You can’t avoid mortality here, so live today! Life isn’t a dress rehearsal, so reinvent yourself a little bit at a time every day.”
JoAnn has reinvented herself many times over in the years since high school. She sold cut flowers and successfully organized flower sellers who the licensed florists were trying to drive out of business. As a young mother she worked as a cocktail waitress on the overnight shift at King’s Room on Iberville Street in the French Quarter. She’d come home, get her children off to school, and return to King’s to do the payroll and the banking and order supplies, experience that would serve her well years later when she opened Upperline. She had a costume shop and designed and made costumes for the musical One Mo’ Time which was performed around the world. In the late 1960s, she opened a music club on Bourbon Street named Andy’s. Many famous performers came just to hang out and occasionally do a number or two, including Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, Richie Havens, and The Band. She opened a bar called The Abbey, still around, though she sold it decades ago.
“The most wonderful part of life in New Orleans is that people who are very different from one another all rub shoulders here,” she said. “It makes us more complex and more joyful. We have all these divisions of wealth, race, religion, gay, straight, but still we all rub shoulders.” Though New Orleans has had its share of racial strife (witness the Cheerleaders that so appalled Steinbeck) and Jim Crow laws, it has generally been more harmonious and less racially explosive than many other cities, perhaps because of its pervasive, easygoing, laissez-faire ethos.
“The businessmen, the maids, and the gardeners all rode the same streetcar together,” JoAnn told me, “and black and white neighborhoods are typically just a few blocks from each other.” She believes familiarity, far from breeding contempt, breeds tolerance and acceptance. To illustrate she told me a story.
Several years ago, she had a party of proper “country club types” in Upperline—the husband was wearing a plaid sports jacket, she recalled—and she sat a couple at the table next to them—“punk types.” The man was sporting a Mohawk haircut. When the plaid-jacketed gentleman discreetly complained, JoAnn said, “Just wait. See what happens.” (JoAnn is ever present in the dining room; she is your hostess and attends to everyone and makes introductions when she senses it’s appropriate.)
“The punk couple were perfect guests,” she told me. “As the gentleman was leaving he said to me, ‘I learned something this evening about not judging people by the way they look,’ and he thanked me!” She pulled herself upright in her chair and an impish, delighted smile flashed across her face.
She opened Upperline in 1983, without enough money to meet the first week’s payroll. At the time, her Uptown neighbors wanted her to have a formal dress code, thinking it would ensure a better class of clientele. JoAnn refused. She wanted everyone to know they were welcome at Upperline. To send that message, JoAnn also broke with what had, intentionally or not, become an unwritten rule at New Orleans restaurants—that waitstaff was either all black or all white. She always wanted to have black and white employees working at the “front of house,” as they say in the business. “It sets a tone of acceptance,” she told me. “So, Upperline has in its own way been a social experiment. Our waitstaff is black and white, gay and straight. I wish we had more women, though.”
JoAnn also believes in cultivating and bettering the lives of her employees and takes joy in the fact that Upperline has been part of their life journeys, wherever they lead. The bartender, Gerard Crosby, is African American and started working at Upperline twenty-four years ago as a dishwasher when he had just turned seventeen and was still in high school. Now she trusts him to run the place when she’s not there. One of the head chefs, Kenny, became a Catholic priest. In its nearly forty years, there have only been five head chefs at Upperline, astonishingly low turnover in a business known for it. JoAnn keeps at least one item developed by each of them on the menu at all times, her way of honoring their contributions to her success. She has twice been a James Beard Award finalist, and Upperline was named New Orleans’s best restaurant in 2017 by the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Toward the end of our conversation JoAnn showed me a framed menu from October 19, 2005, the day Upperline reopened about two months after Hurricane Katrina. Every such reopening marked another tiny step back toward normalcy for the devastated city.
“We had only four people working that day,” she told me. “My son came in from St. Louis and my husband, who was in London, came back to help. We had to scrape the goo off the floors. But having the restaurant open with white table linens gave people a sense of hope that the past could be re-created and maybe even be made better. One customer remarked that this must have been what it was like in London after the Blitz, when a little civility gave people hope and courage. It’s like spring following winter. Renewal.
“There have been a lot of positive changes that came after Katrina,” she went on. “Maybe not enough to make up for the negative, but many young professionals came to be a part of New Orleans’s rebirth. So many people feel they can’t change the
world, but after Katrina there was the promise that you could make a difference. Just the idea that you might be able to change things is uplifting.”
JoAnn pointed out that the word “restaurant” comes from the French verb restaurer, which means “to restore or refresh.” For JoAnn that means both creating an atmosphere that will refresh her customers at the end of a long day and doing what she can to restore and refresh the world.
“Restaurants were originally more than just a place to find a meal,” she has written, “they existed to soothe and bolster the weary soul with comfort and indulgence. My goal with the Upperline is to be just that, a haven for our guests: to help restore their serenity with great Louisiana food and wine, and of course hospitality.”
“New Orleans has that joie de vivre,” she said as our conversation started to wind own. She practically bounced out of her chair. “It’s the clang of the streetcar, the foghorns of the tugboats on the river, and the sound of the trains rumbling down Tchoupitoulos Street; the smell of olive trees in winter, jasmine in spring, and the coffee roasters all year!” She seemed not so much to be describing these things but experiencing them as she spoke.
Before we wrapped up I told JoAnn the story, in brief, of my great-grandaunt Annie, the ’round the world cyclist of the 1890s. They seemed to be kindred spirits—enterprising, larger-than-life women, women ahead of their times, who reinvented themselves and lived lives undaunted by the obstacles that prevent so many from realizing their dreams. JoAnn was utterly captivated by the idea of a woman in the 1890s gallivanting around the world on a bicycle, so I promised to have Danny deliver a copy of my book about Annie to her. The fitness center Danny manages and co-owns in Uptown New Orleans is immediately around the corner from Upperline, and he and JoAnn had been working together with the city to resolve some parking issues. That’s why Danny was able to arrange our meeting. JoAnn had become quite fond of him and appreciative of his efforts. They see each other all the time now.
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 10