by Peter Millar
Graffiti on one wall reads, ‘Fix the Ninth Ward, not Iraq.’ More than one of my fellow tourists – all Americans – snaps a photograph of it. It is the first overtly negative comment on the war I have seen. The Iraq War is unpopular primarily because of the cost in American soldiers’ lives and the waste of billions of dollars. It is hard to imagine what the response would be if, as in Britain, the war was not so much seen as a response to terror at home but a direct cause of it
Still there is no doubt in New Orleans how George W. Bush’s legacy will be perceived. From down here, in a quarter built well below sea level, you have to look up at the levees. They have been patched with concrete and reinforced by the US Army Corps of Engineers, but I still wouldn’t be happy to move in to a property here. Nor would most of the residents. According to the guide, more than 12,000 were evacuated, most of them permanently. We pass the dowdy offices of a law firm with a sign in the window touting for class action business: ‘Hold the corps to account’.
Even in the more affluent suburb of Gentilly it’s a depressingly similar story. Many of these homes were little touched by the hurricane, but they look as if they’re in a war zone. When the well-do-do fled in their cars, the looters moved in. But it wasn’t the immediate few days of chaos that did the damage but the long and badly managed process of getting the city back to normal. Many of the affluent white population haven’t come back and in the meantime their houses have been gutted by the poor left behind. Doors have been smashed in with axes, not to rescue people but to ‘liberate’ their belongings. It puts a grim reality behind the black humour on one of the T-shirts down Bourbon street: ‘I stayed in New Orleans for Katrina and all I got was this lousy T-shirt, a Cadillac and a plasma TV.’ Worse still is the damage to the physical infrastructure: the rising price of metals on the global commodity market has made it worthwhile for thieves to rip out the copper wiring from the walls. Given that here too most of the property is wooden rather than European-style stone or brick, the result is houses that look as if they’ve been literally ripped apart.
Even the Central Business District is far from back to normal. The Superdome may have had a major renovation but it still looks like it could be welcoming refugees as much as rival teams. Along Baronne Street the five-star Le Pavillon, a member of the Leading Hotels of the World group, has a plaque on the wall next to the door proclaiming ‘only spirits could have foreseen that this unprepossessing locality would become the centre of the great city of New Orleans’. The only word that still seems apt is ‘unprepossessing locality’. This is definitely a part of town to get a cab around late at night.
The rain is still pouring down as I get off the bus back at the riverfront. The Mississippi looks swollen and vaguely threatening, a great lazy force of nature against which the elegant little houses of the Vieux Carré seem insubstantial, though they are the ones that have best weathered the storms. To get out of the rain, I head for the contrasting huge mall archly labelled Shoppes at Canal Place. It is full of smart stores, big brands, and no customers. Saks Fifth Avenue occupies three floors which is two more than the number of potential buyers inside. Shiny new cars sit parked on the polished marble of the hallways: a Range Rover and a little Mazda convertible. Buy both and be prepared for what the weather throws at you.
Further on, Riverwalk Shopping is all but empty save for a few bums, the food court virtually abandoned. One of the bums, a bloke of indeterminate age with frazzled hair and a lumberjack checked shirt hassles me for some change ‘for something to eat’. I give him literally what change I have in my pocket, a less than princely 81 cents. He thanks me politely and to my astonishment actually uses it to buy food, of a sort: a 35-cent pastry and two bags of crisps. Not exactly a muffuletta.
On a wet day in Britain a mall like this would be heaving with compulsive consumers partaking in the national sport: shopping – but here the staff outnumber the customers. I find myself wondering how the economics of it all work out and then I see an ad at a fast-food stall, the sort of ad I have seen all over town but the first with a price on it, bilingual of course: ‘Help Wanted/Se Necessita Ayuda $7 per hour’. Do the sums (as the Americans don’t quite say): that’s about £4 an hour, barely two-thirds the British minimum wage.
I know that this is the home of capitalism, the sink or swim society, but I can’t help thinking that Marx or Lenin would have said that if ever a country was ripe for revolution it was this one. All the images they used to show children in the Soviet Union about why America was evil are actually more real than even I had imagined: winos, bums, beggars, people sleeping on streets and tens of thousands of those lucky enough to be in work struggling to get by on wages that are little better than slavery. What they didn’t show children in the Soviet Union of course was the big cars, the movie stars, the rows upon rows of homes with swimming pools, the malls stuffed with every luxury, the Wal-Marts with every necessity at rock bottom prices, the endless fast-food stores offering more than you could (or should) eat, for next to nothing. And those were enough for the Russians to get rid of Marxism-Leninism for good.
The difference between western Europe and America is that here the feeder chain is longer and if the sky’s the limit for the successful then it also goes very low indeed. Pond life here has to struggle to subsist, particularly in the service industries. If you work well you’ll get good tips, the logic says, and if you get good tips, it also says the company can afford to pay you less than a living wage and if it had to pay you more then it wouldn’t employ you at all and the only tips you’d get would be cigarette ends on the pavement. It works, after a fashion. It’s almost certainly why the quality of service is higher than in Europe, but there are times when it feels cruel.
I’m in this slightly melancholic, rather depressed mood as I enter the Crescent City Brewhouse, for a much-needed pint of good cheer. And almost immediately I’m cheered up by the man behind the counter: a huge black man shucking oysters and whistling quietly to himself. I order up a brew – a classic Pilsner in the Czech style but perhaps just a little too gassy – and ask him what he makes of New Orleans these days. He gives a smile that would be rueful if it weren’t beaming, and says, ‘N’Awlins has had it rough but we’ll come through. Those of us that’s still here and ain’t goin’ nowhere.’
Having seen the areas left uninhabited, I ask if the city’s population has seriously fallen, and he gives me a look like I’ve walked in from Mars. ‘You kiddin? Way back, way way back, in the sixties, N’Awlins had three quarters of a million people. Today it ain’t much more than one third o’that. People’s comin’ back but they’re still not much more than half what there was before Katrina. And this city’s had a lot of trouble for a long time.’
I tell him I saw almost as much destruction in the more wealthy parts of town, and he confirms what the guide told us: ‘It’s mostly the richer folks who’ve gone and won’t be back. Up in the areas like Gentilly and so near the lake, where the levee broke, you see houses up there half a million dollars and more, easy, but those folk all worked for companies who pulled them out, transferred them to new jobs in Denver or Houston or somewhere, and they ain’t comin’ back. They’ve got their kids into new schools and they won’t do the upheaval again.
‘Those houses are all owned by the insurance companies or the government or whoever but they’re all boarded up, just sitting there for the looters, not that there’s much left. All the obvious stuff went long ago, but they’re still at it, rippin’ out the air-con units, pulling the wiring out of the walls for the copper.’
Does he see a future for New Orleans? ‘Oh, sure. Things get bad, then they get better. Life’s like that. Drink up your beer, there’s children sober in Africa.’ And he goes back to whistling, and shucking oysters. ‘There’s always hustles goin’ on in this town, y’know. You seen them guys on Bourbon go up to some fat boy and look down and say, “Man, I bet you 20 bucks I can tell you where you got them shoes”, an’ he say, “No way, he can know where I got
my shoes”, so he say, “Okay, shoot,” and this wise guy says, “Man, you got ’em on yo’ feet”.’ And he rolls with laughter. ‘Y’know I’ve even seen someone give ’em the money. I guess that’s just N’Awlins, for ya.’
I guess. But outside, the storm atmosphere is building, flags are flapping wildly rattling their poles, the clouds dark and brooding, as if at any moment they might unleash another tropical wave, or worse.
It’s starting to feel like time to move on.
Like Paul Simon says, you can wear your summer clothes in New Orleans. Just check the weather first.
NEW ORLEANS TO MEMPHIS
TRAIN: City of New Orleans
FREQUENCY: 1 a day
DEPARTS NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA: 1:45 p.m. (Central Time)
via
Richmond, LA
McComb, Mississipi
Brookhaven, MS
Hazlehurst, MS
Jackson, MS
Yazoo City, MS
Greenwood, MS
ARRIVES MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE: 10:00 p.m. (Central Time)
DURATION: Approx 8 hours, 15 minutes
DISTANCE: 406 miles
20
Walking in Memphis
THE KING would have crooned it had he still been alive. The Boss did just as good a job. Bruce Springsteen, Cher, almost anybody who’s anybody has done a cover of Marc Cohn’s ‘Walking in Memphis’ tribute to one of modern music’s most sacred sites.
It’s running through my head now but I very much doubt if any of them felt the way I feel, arriving in Memphis at what seemed the relatively reasonable hour of 10 o’clock on a cool, rainy night and stepping out of Central Station – a deserted echoing monument to the better days of railways – into a darkened urban landscape. A street sign proclaimed Main Street but it sure as hell didn’t look it.
There are not many cities more sung about, from Chuck Berry’s ‘Long distance information, get me Memphis, Tennessee,’ to Bob Dylan’s quixotic ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,’ and a thousand others before and after. The Mississippi city has three prime claims to fame: as the ‘home of the blues’, as the chosen home of Elvis Presley, and as a shrine to black Americans’ civil rights movement: the place where Martin Luther King was assassinated. There are not many places more important in the history of the fission and fusion between white and black culture in modern America. Right now, however, Memphis looks as if both had cut a deal and deserted it.
The motel I had booked online was billed as the ‘Downtown/Graceland Super 8’, which I had a sinking feeling was going to turn out to be a misnomer. Especially as if this is Main Street, downtown is distinctly downbeat. There’s a line of shops all closed and unlit, a dimly glowing yellow sign that said ‘Taxis’ but with none in sight, in fact not a vehicle of any kind in any direction, or a human being. If there’s anybody walking in Memphis tonight, which I doubt, they aren’t doing it on Main Street.
And then, surreally, like the Knight Bus in a Harry Potter film materialising on a London street, there’s the ching of a bell and out of the dark, clanking and clattering along tarmac-embedded rails I hadn’t even noticed, emerges a magnificent ancient tram, at least a century old, all polished wood and glowing brass, with its driver, a solemn-looking black man with a peaked cap and greying beard standing rigidly erect at a brass wheel set horizontally atop a metre-high column. The tram comes to a screeching halt and he turns to look at me as if I and not he was the unnatural apparition.
Needless to say, he hadn’t a clue where the Super 8 Downtown/Graceland was to be found. I have a feeling I’m going to need one of Harry Potter’s wizards for that. But he does have a suggestion: Beale Street, the real heart of downtown Memphis. There’s sure to be a cab driver there. ‘Hop on board,’ he says. And so feeling like I’ve just entered an alternative universe I climb on board his pristine, brightly lit and spotlessly empty vintage tram for a free ride clanking along ancient rails through the empty streets of Memphis.
Beale Street isn’t empty. It’s awash with neon. The tram driver, as if he actually were one of the Hogwarts wizards, points with an impish smile, opens the doors and says, ‘Mind how you go.’ And then he’s gone again, an illuminated figure in an incongruous antique conveyance disappearing passengerless into the night. I stare after him for a second, not quite sure what has just happened.
But there I am, my feet not 10 feet off of Beale as in Cohn’s song but right on it. I stop to take it in. Beale Street is what most people mean when they say ‘Memphis’, when they don’t mean Graceland, that is. Behind me in a park in the dark stands a cast-iron statue of Elvis; ahead of me, stretching gently downhill in a glare of patriotic red, white and blue neon, a strip of bars, restaurants and music venues, and to the right, a row of low-flung Fords, decorated in a black-and-white checker pattern that at first makes me think they might be police squad cars, until I thankfully realise they were that elusive American urban commodity: taxis.
Reassured that there will be a means of conveyance to get me to wherever the vagaries of online reservations had booked me a room to lay my head, I decide I may as well feed it first – albeit not quite as Grace Slick’s dormouse said – with a few beers and a burst of the blues.
The most striking thing about the establishments down Beale is their similarity to one another. The restaurants all offer ‘bar-be-cue ribs’, the bars all offer music and beer. I settle on the Rum Boogie Café simply because having walked to the end of the busiest section of the strip it seems as good as any other and had an intriguing selection of guitars hung on the wall. These appear to be signed by, if not actually donated by, just about every guitar hero you can think of starting with Memphis’s own original rockabilly star Carl Perkins. It’s easy enough to imagine ol’ Carl hanging his axe here back in the late fifties. Maybe even Elvis too, but Billy Joel? Isn’t he the Piano Man? And did Sid Vicious really give them an acoustic? If ever there was a kid with a slim grasp of the word ‘acoustic’ in any form, it has to be Sid. I ask the barman for an answer to that question at the same time as I ask for a pint of Blue Moon wheat beer. I get the latter but I’m not really sure about the former. ‘Sure thing,’ he says, with a smile and shrug. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. Maybe both.
My beer comes in a ‘Big Ass’ plastic glass but it’s good and so is the band: an old-fashioned rock-blues quartet, two of whom, on guitars and drums, look like superannuated beatniks, complete with berets, beards and shades, while the upfront harmonica player has a Blues Brothers trilby hat. The vocalist is a fat guy twirling a double bass and hauling out heartfelt lyrics in a far-flung rangy voice to the obvious appreciation of the ‘house musician’, a black trumpeter with a sparkly boater and a mean line in pumped-up riffs.
And then just before they launch into their next number he comes to the mike and announces: ‘Folks, we got a couple of real special guys here tonight.’ I’m looking round me to see which incognito stars of the music world I’ve failed to recognise – not Jimmy Page and Robert Plant surely, or Paul and Ringo going to take a little turn on bass and drums – but he’s pointing to a couple of blokes with cropped hair and T-shirts knocking back beers by the bottle at a table in the corner. I don’t recognise either of them. ‘Two of our brave boys,’ the bloke with the trumpet continues, and all of a sudden I have an inkling of what is to come, ‘just back from Iraq.’ The crowd breaks into spontaneous applause. All except for me. Because I’m standing up, of course, and holding a plastic glass of beer. And wondering. Just wondering.
It wouldn’t happen in Britain. Not never. Just not now, not for this war. Here are no such doubts. My country right or wrong? Or just respect for ‘our boys’ fighting foreign wars. Everywhere I have been, from the quiet worried looks of the mothers in Montana, to the garish rolling martial legends on the slot machines in Reno to the heroes’ welcome here in the bars on Beale Street, the war that was supposed to be finished more than three years ago is as omnipresent as the Stars and Stripes. No questions a
sked. Certainly not of the serving troops.
As the band take to the stage again and resume their blues-based rock’n’roll an older man with a lean aquiline face and white hair swept back and flowing down below his shoulders for all the world like an ageing hippy, a surviving grandfather from the flower power summer of love, stands up and invites the young soldiers to his table, snaps his fingers at a waitress and orders a round of beers. I catch just a snatch of conversation, one syllable that explains all, ‘’Nam’, uttered with a grave face by the older man. The young ones shake his hand and call him, ‘sir.’ And he laughs and high-fives them, and they pick up their beers and clink them in mutual celebration. Of survival. So far.
It’s moving in a macabre sort of way, and at the same time uncomfortably sobering. Time to go. Time for bed. Outside, I clamber into the back of the nearest available Ford and almost faint in a warm fug that would have done credit to a bear’s hibernation den. The bear is still in it, wrapped in half a dozen overcoats and a woolly hat despite the equivalent of six hair dryers on maximum heat blasting from the dashboard; he turns a broad face rimmed with a knotted fringe of grizzled hair towards me, blinks as if surfacing from a long dormancy and says, ‘Where you headin’, man?’ Miraculously, he does know where the Super 8 is: back past Central Station.
‘Man, you could almost’a walked it, if there was anywhere to walk,’ he growls amiably as we pull under the freeway overpass and past the inevitable swathe of deserted parking lots, ‘but then you never know the hell where these places is.’