The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story

by Julia Reed

  Two days later, riding my bike on Magazine, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. In the short time since my walk, the merchants had banded together and staged a massive cleanup aided by the remaining National Guard troops, who were by now getting bored, and the firemen from the Magazine Street station. At one point even the mayor, shamed into turning up, briefly managed to lift a shovel. Now, with the debris gone I could see things, important things like the banner hanging across the Belladonna day spa exhorting me to “Be a NEW New Orleanian,” and the open takeout window at the pie and praline stand of Tee Eva, a former dancer for Ernie K-Doe, the late New Orleans soul singer whose biggest hit had been “Mother-in-Law” (hence his widow’s Mother-in-Law Lounge, which boasts a painted life-sized statue of Ernie dressed in one of his embroidered suits). Aidan Gill, John’s Irish barber was back up and running, which meant he was also dispensing shots of my favorite Red Breast Irish whiskey, and, at Casamento’s, the narrow, tile-walled oyster bar that opened in 1919, a hand-lettered sign announced a reopening date of November 15. Joseph Casamento, the son of the founder, had been born in the second-floor apartment above the restaurant where he lived his entire life until, at eighty, he evacuated for Katrina and died of a heart attack on the same day she hit. A bachelor, he had never worked anywhere but Casamento’s or lived in another spot—his nephew’s wife told Brett Anderson she thought the upheaval had been too much.

  On October 19 at six in the morning, Café Du Monde began dispensing its famous chicory coffee again, along with its addictive beignets. A month earlier, the mayor had predicted that “once the beignets are in the oven, [New Orleanians] will come back.” Despite that fact that beignets are fried in a deep fryer and not baked in an oven, people did flock to the reopening, though at least half of them appeared to be FEMA workers and the media, including the folks from CNN who featured it on the morning show, complete with an anchor biting into a golden brown, powdered-sugar-dusted, fried beignet.

  That night Upperline opened its doors with Alan behind the bar, Ken in the kitchen, and Jason, now a philosophy professor in St. Louis, backing him up as sous chef. The slightly shortened menu featured the restaurant’s signature fried green tomatoes with shrimp rémoulade, the idea for which JoAnn thinks came to her in a dream and which by now has been copied across the country, and Ken’s Cane River Country Shrimp, a delectable combination of shrimp, bacon, and mushrooms over crispy grits cakes which my mother and I helped name. John and I went with McGee and Elizabeth and ordered pretty much everything we’d been missing: the duck étouffée on corn cakes with pepper jelly, the crispy oysters with celery root rémoulade, the Cane River shrimp, the baby drum meunière, the slow-roasted duck with sweet potato fries.

  JoAnn’s funky mix of art and her gorgeous cut roses (of course) still enlivened the dining rooms, as did, on this night, the grateful diners. It was another raucous cocktail party, with people hollering and hugging and asking the ubiquitous questions: “How’d you do?” and “Are you back for good?” More than one person who answered yes to the latter told me that in those early, still half-dark days (by now everyone on unflooded ground had electricity but the streetlights wouldn’t be back on for months), that the constant trickle of reopening restaurants—and, therefore, civilization—was what had convinced them to stay. We closed the place, as usual, joined at our table by Alan and Ken and JoAnn, who kept plying us with the wine she wanted to make sure was okay. We happily obliged, but by this time it was frankly hard to tell, and when we finally left, we had to wake up McGee, who’d been napping on the banquette.

  If food led the way, culture wasn’t far behind. I was proud that the Ogden became the first museum to reopen—despite the fact that all but one staff member, including the director, had lost their houses. By the second “Ogden After Hours,” a weekly event at which drinks are served and local musicians perform, word had gotten out, and more than a thousand people gathered to hear Walter “Wolfman” Washington play his mix of soul, funk, and blues. The pre-Katrina crowd rarely topped 300 to 400, and now there weren’t even a hundred thousand people in the city, but folks were desperate for normalcy, and more than anywhere else, “normal” in New Orleans means music. To that end, Irvin Mayfield, who by now had found out that his father wasn’t just missing but drowned, had written an epic jazz piece, “For All the Saints,” which he performed with his New Orleans Jazz Orchestra at Christ’s Church Cathedral on St. Charles. The church had originally planned to commission a piece by Mayfield to commemorate the Episcopal bicentennial in Louisiana, but given the circumstances the mission, and the music, changed. Before the concert, the lieutenant governor urged the crowd to “get a sense of where you are in time and place.” Right, I thought, summoning Warren again, “Tell me a story in this century and moment of mania”—and then Irvin did tell it, a story of a life lived beyond his twenty-seven years, a story of grieving and loss and hope and celebration. When he was done, the standing-room only crowd was silent for a full minute before applauding for much, much longer.

  By this time, Eddie had sufficiently recovered from his depression to show up with some guy I’d never seen before to reinstall all the bolts and pulls and doorknobs on the two walls of French doors and windows in the sunroom that Abel had installed incorrectly. He also told me that the company that was supposed to have delivered the remaining stone, including the five sets of limestone steps, had gone out of business. (I found out later that for a whole year before the storm they hadn’t paid any of the money they owed to the Pennsylvania quarry that had been their—and our—chief supplier, money which included the hefty check I’d written to them for the stuff we’d received so far.) But since we had no one to install the stuff, it didn’t much matter—Eddie had the heard from the subcontractor whose equipment still littered our yard only once, when he’d called from St. Louis asking for money, a sad fact that meant that our gate would likely be inoperable for some time.

  He also assured me that he had repaired the leaks in the flat roof “for good” this time, and since I very stupidly believed him, I got Mr. Dupré’s men, now managed by his son Blair while Billy tried to put his flooded house back together, to come and paint the sunroom ceiling for the third go-round. By the time it had rained—and leaked—again, Eddie had taken off for Oaxaca, one of the very few people at the time who was leaving New Orleans for Mexico rather than the other way around. When I told Joe Wallis, who was back on the job painting the outside of the house, that Eddie had gone down for a long-scheduled trip to get married and to celebrate the Day of the Dead, for which he made an annual visit, I thought he was going to explode. “Day of the Dead? Day of the Dead? Goddamn, hasn’t he had enough of that around here?” Joe is a little guy but he has a deep Irish voice whose primary register is outraged disbelief. When he got through yelling and shaking his wet paintbrush, we both started laughing so hard we were crying. (Later on, when I found out that an early-twentieth-century print of a woman known as “La Catrina” was a symbol of the festivities I couldn’t wait to call him on the phone.)

  Freddy, on the other hand, was not laughing. I’d seen him on that day, a couple of weeks after the storm, when he’d come to check on his truck. He’d been thrilled to find it exactly where he’d left it, undamaged and still full of about a thousand dollars of equipment. But when he came back to retrieve it not long afterward, it was gone. A woman down the block, who was involved in a renovation far more extensive than ours, told Joe she had called a service to tow it away. We all agreed that there was something a tad bizarre about this—it had been parked on a public street in front of a house not her own and she could not remember the name of the towing company she had called. When she told Joe she thought it had been “abandoned” it gave him an opportunity to vent some more outrage. “ABANDONED? We had a HURRICANE,” he told her. Later he said to me, “You know what you call that? Two words: GRAND THEFT.”

  Other than the truck lady and Allison, a young widow with two children (and owner of the feral cat who ha
d miraculously survived his captivity), we had very few neighbors and most of the ones we did have were men. Only a couple of private schools and no public schools were open, so anybody who wanted to educate their kids had to put them in boarding school like Elizabeth had or stay gone, at least until Christmas. This was disappointing because I had been looking forward to Halloween ever since we’d bought the house—donning a witch’s hat and dispensing goodies to the neighborhood children were a big part of the commitment-to-real-life package of my imagination. In Manhattan I never had a single trick-or-treater and on my block on Bourbon, the only people in costume were grown men dressed in drag. I hadn’t had the need to carve a pumpkin since I was maybe twelve, and now this year, alas, it was going to be no different, but I carved two anyway and bought multiple bags of candy. In the end we had two sets of visitors, a grateful father who’d been desperately driving around the darkened city with a two-year-old “Cinderella,” and Allison’s son and daughter who came dressed as looters, with wads of “loot” stuffed beneath their stretchy T-shirts and Saks Fifth Avenue bags for their candy. Their lone friend wore a T-shirt that said POLICE, which was stuffed with similar wads.

  It was heartening to find out in the paper the next day that the Bourbon Street Halloween had been typically lively. I had been thinking a lot about Bourbon because Prince Charles and Camilla, on their first official visit together to America, were coming to New Orleans, and one of the stops on their brief itinerary was the Cathedral School, behind Betty’s, which had been the first school to open in the city. I was reminded of the singing nun on the loudspeaker who had woken me up every morning, but more than that, I remembered watching Diana’s funeral in my big iron bed. It was four o’clock in the morning, and I was on the phone during the whole event with Andre Leon Talley, Vogue’s editor-at-large and my very dear friend, who kept up a running—shrieking—commentary that lightened up the proceedings considerably: “What IS THAT on Fergie’s head? Would you LOOK at how many earrings Elton is wearing.” Toward the end, a very frantic Vicki Woods cut in. She was our friend in London who had a coveted seat in St. Paul’s, where her view had been entirely obliterated by one of Sir Christopher Wren’s vast pillars. She had a half hour to write exactly the sort of stuff we’d been saying to each other for a special edition of The Telegraph, so we basically dictated the whole story, and I recalled the episode often as an oddly happy morning.

  Now unlike, say, my mother, I was happy that Charles had finally been united with his one true love, and I was even more delighted that the two of them had deigned to come to see us, receiving gifts of Mardi Gras beads from the uniformed schoolchildren and generally being more helpful and pleasant than Ted Stevens, the senator from Alaska who dropped in the same week and wondered aloud, in front of the devastated homeowners of Lakeview, why on earth anyone would want to rebuild there. In Alaska, he explained, they would simply relocate the whole town.

  In Alaska, they also build bridges to nowhere, thanks to the obscene amount of pork Stevens regularly shovels into the place, so when, several months later, it was revealed that he was under investigation for all manner of dubious financial transactions and that the FBI had raided his house, I could not have been more thrilled. I had long since lost patience with irresponsible, inept, and just plain crooked politicians from both without and within Louisiana (our own congressman Bill Jefferson had also been paid a recent visit by the FBI who found, among other things, $90,000 in cash in his freezer). Every day our local elected officials made it maddeningly clearer that people do indeed get the government they deserve. It would take a little time to create a real leadership pool to replace the cesspool every one of us, voters included, had been swimming in way too long. But it was time to do something, anything, to get involved, to help speed our recovery along.

  So it was that over dinner at Upperline with my friend Walter Isaacson, the writer and Aspen Institute chief who also served on the governor’s Louisiana Recovery Authority, a small plan was hatched. Walter, who had grown up in New Orleans, had brought along an old buddy who ran the Preservation Resource Center’s “Operation Comeback,” which for years had been buying up the many thousands of blighted houses owned by the city at rock bottom prices, renovating them and making it possible for mostly low-income, first-time homeowners to move in. We all agreed that housing was the biggest single problem facing the city—we had also been imbibing a great deal of whiskey and wine. The next thing I knew Walter and I had agreed to co-host a fundraiser for Operation Comeback, and, since Wynton Marsalis and Walter were both due in New Orleans for a meeting in January, we decided to have it then and to share the proceeds with Wynton’s Higher Ground musician’s fund as well as the Ogden. (I was also already figuring out how to snag one of the houses for Rose and Thomas, who had left Natchez and gone even farther away, to Dyersburg with the others.) Once we’d shaken on it, Walter cautioned, “I’ll help you sell tickets but I won’t do anything else.” I told him I already knew that and immediately started planning the event in my head. In addition to raising some much-needed money, we needed to show people from out of town that we could still throw a good party.

  Everybody, including my father, told me I was crazy, that under the circumstances—with few hotels fully staffed, beleaguered locals low on money, and out-of-towners wary of coming to visit so soon—it would be virtually impossible to raise the money and showcase the town. “I’ve done them with huge staffs and it’s still hard as hell,” Daddy said. But I was not afraid, and anyway, I had an assistant coming, Vasser Howorth, the niece of good friends from Oxford, Mississippi, whom I’d met when she was working in one of my favorite New Orleans bookstores. The store had still not reopened, she was back in Oxford, and her boyfriend was in New Orleans, so I implored her to work for me and she agreed. She was arriving just after Thanksgiving and I knew the two of us could pull it off. We would call it Rebirth New Orleans.

  12

  THOUGH MY LATEST endeavor was exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped to do once I’d committed to John and the house and a life in New Orleans, when I first arrived in the city in 1991, civic activities could not have been farther from my mind. Unfortunately, at the time the same could be said of the state’s leaders, a great many of whom placed embezzling, evading, and general enjoyment of their various offices much higher on the list.

  I had arrived that year, two months after Jazz Fest, to see A. again and with Edwin Edwards serving as my larger-than-life excuse. He was making an unexpected comeback after conceding four years earlier to the reform-minded Buddy Roemer, who, while seemingly honest, was also abysmally lacking in leadership skills. Into the void stepped figures far more familiar to Louisiana voters, Edwin and David Duke, the ex-Klansman who had already served two terms in the state legislature. Their ultimate match-up gave rise to the most popular bumper sticker of the campaign, “Vote for the Crook, It’s Important,” which was not only a grim reflection of the state’s leadership pool, it was true on all fronts—though Edwin ultimately went to jail for the criminal activities he engaged in while in office, it had indeed been important that he be elected given the far more devastating alternative.

  In the not-so-noble pantheon of Louisiana politicians, Edwin was the last of the great entertainers. Though he was a scoundrel of the first order, he was not a megalomaniacal dictator like Huey Long, and certainly not an obsessive racist like the backwater tyrant Leander Perez, the man A. J. Liebling called the “Pasha of Placquemines Parish”—and who, according to Robert Sherrill, author of the brilliant Gothic Politics in the Deep South, was so flat-out “evil” that “one is constantly expecting him to resume the shape of a toad.” (On the contrary, Edwin was thoroughly progressive on matters of race, hiring, for example, the first black state troopers and assiduously courting the black vote, which he always got—though, like Perez, he did turn out to be a thief.) While Edwin was as funny as “Uncle Earl” Long, and certainly as crazy about women, he was not nearly as violent or profane. (Earl once bit a colleague
on the cheek and, in front of the entire legislature, he referred to one of its members as a “cocksucker.”) He was also slightly more dedicated to his job than the singer and yodeler Jimmie Davis, who wrote “You Are My Sunshine,” and who compiled the most days spent out of state than any governor before or since (much of them spent trying to sell Hollywood on a movie of his life). The fact that it was unlikely that Edwin would do the citizens of Louisiana a lot of good did not much matter to me—he was great material.

  Besides, in the New Orleans I lived in then, I couldn’t think of a single thing that needed improving. From the moment of my arrival, I was firmly ensconced in the city of Tennessee Williams, where, on rainy afternoons (which is pretty much all of them, in the summers at least), “an hour isn’t just an hour but a piece of eternity dropped into your hands.” Faulkner, who wrote Soldiers’ Pay while living in New Orleans on Pirate’s Alley, called it “a place created by and for voluptuousness.” I knew what he meant—my existence might have been a tad narrow to some folks, but pleasure almost completely defined my days.

  When I wasn’t on the road with Edwin, the great majority of my movements were happily confined to Galatoire’s, Elizabeth’s comfortable kitchen, and a handful of French Quarter bars, including the Napoleon House, a place known for its superior Pimm’s Cups, its operatic soundtrack, and the fact that its original owner offered it as a safe haven for the exiled emperor. (One of the many ironies of Katrina is that until the storm, New Orleans had always been better known for taking in refugees—escapees from boredom, sexual oppression, you name it—rather than shipping them out.) On my first night in town I met A. there at midnight and realized it would be impossible to separate romance from the city’s endless romantic settings.