Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  The space in question is not the ordinary living space of individuals and families but rather the interstices thereof. In New York millions of souls carve out living space on a grid like so many circles on graph paper. These lairs are more or less habitable. But the space between is a horrid thing, a howling vacuum. If you fall ill on the streets of New York, people grumble about having to step over you or around you. In New Orleans there is still a chance, diminishing perhaps, that somebody will drag you into the neighborhood bar and pay the innkeeper for a shot of Early Times.

  Mobile, Alabama, unlike New York, has no interstices. It is older than New Orleans. It has wrought iron, better azaleas, an older Mardi Gras. It appears easygoing and has had no riots. Yet it suffers from the spiritual damps, Alabama anoxia. Twenty-four hours in Mobile and you have the feeling a plastic bag is tied around your head and you’re breathing your own air. Mobile’s public space is continuous with the private space of its front parlors. So where New York is a vacuum, Mobile is a pressure cooker.

  Philadelphia is suffocating but in a different way. I speak from experience. Once I spent an hour in Philadelphia. I had got lost driving and instead of zipping by on the turnpikes, I found myself in the middle of town. I parked and got out and stood on a street corner near Independence Hall, holding my map and looking for a street sign and also sniffing the air to smell out what manner of place this was. Some young Negroes were moping around, no doubt sons of sons of the South. They looked at me sideways. I asked a fellow for directions but he hurried away. I hummed a tune and swung my arms to keep warm. Meanwhile, all around us, ringing us 360 degrees around like a besieging army, were three or four million good white people sitting in their good homes reading The Bulletin. I got to thinking: I don’t know a single soul in Philadelphia, black or white. What is more, I never heard of anyone coming from Philadelphia except Benjamin Franklin and Connie Mack, or of anything ever happening in Philadelphia except the signing of the Declaration of Independence. What have all these people been doing here all these years? What are they doing now? They must be waiting. Waiting for what? For something to happen. Let me out of here!

  Somebody said that the only interesting thing about New Orleans was that it smelled different. There are whiffs of ground coffee and a congeries of smells which one imagines to be the “naval stores” that geography books were always speaking of. Yet the peculiar flavor of New Orleans is more than a smell. It has something to do with the South and with a cutting off from the South, with the River and with history. New Orleans is both intimately related to the South and yet in a real sense cut adrift not only from the South but from the rest of Louisiana, somewhat like Mont-St.-Michel awash at high tide. One comes upon it, moreover, in the unlikeliest of places, by penetrating the depths of the Bible Belt, running the gauntlet of Klan territory, the pine barrens of south Mississippi, Bogalusa, and the Florida parishes of Louisiana. Out and over a watery waste and there it is, a proper enough American city, and yet within the next few hours the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before. And when he opens the sports pages to follow the Packers, he comes across such enigmatic headlines as HOLY ANGELS SLAUGHTER SACRED HEART. It is as if Marseilles had been plucked up off the Midi, monkeyed with by Robert Moses and Hugh Hefner, and set down off John O’Groats in Scotland.

  The River confers a peculiar dispensation upon the space of New Orleans. Arriving from Memphis or Cincinnati, one feels the way Huck Finn did shoving off from Illinois, going from an encompassed place to an in-between zone, a sector of contending or lapsing jurisdictions. On New Orleans’s ordinary streets one savors a sense both of easement and of unspecified possibilities, in fine a latitude of which notoriety and raffishness—particularly its well-known sexual license—are only the more patent abuses.

  Steeped in official quaintness and self-labeled the “most interesting city in America,” New Orleans conceives of itself in the language of the old Fitzpatrick Travel talks as a city of contrasts: thriving metropolis, quaint French Quarter, gracious old Garden District. Actually, the city is a most peculiar concoction of exotic and American ingredients, a gumbo of stray chunks of the South, of Latin and Negro oddments, German and Irish morsels, all swimming in a fairly standard American soup. What is interesting is that none of the ingredients has overpowered the gumbo, yet each has flavored the others and been flavored. The Negro hit upon jazz not in Africa but on Perdido Street, a lost nowhere place, an interstice between the Creoles and the Americans where he could hear not only the airs of the French Opera House but also the hoedowns of the Kaintucks, and the salon music uptown. Neither Creole nor Scotch-Irish quite prevailed in New Orleans and here perhaps was the luck of it.

  If the French had kept the city, it would be today a Martinique, a Latin confection. If the Americans had got there first, we’d have Houston or Jackson sitting athwart the great American watershed. As it happened, there may have occurred just enough of a cultural standoff to give one room to turn around in, a public space which is delicately balanced between the Northern vacuum and the Southern pressure cooker.

  What makes New Orleans interesting is not its celebrated quaint folk, who are all gone anyway—Johnny Crapaud, the Kaintucks, the Louis Armstrongs—but the unquaint folk who followed them. The Creoles now are indistinguishable from the Americans except by name. There is very little difference between Congressman Hébert and Senator Claghorn of the old Fred Allen program. Every time McNamara closed down a base, say, an army-mule installation in Hébert’s district, the act would go on: “This strikes, I say, this strikes a body blow to the morale of the Armed Forces!”

  The grandsons and -daughters of Louis Armstrong’s generation have gone the usual Negro route, either down and out to the ghetto or up into the bourgeoisie. The boy has likely dropped out of school and is in Vietnam; the girl maybe goes to college and talks like an actress on soap opera. Neither would touch a banjo or trumpet with a ten-foot pole.

  Yet, being unquaint in New Orleans is still different from being unquaint in Dallas. Indeed, the most recent chunk added to the gumbo are the unquaint emigrés from the heartland who, ever since Sherwood Anderson left Ohio, have come down in droves. What happens to these pilgrims? Do they get caught upon the wheel of the quaint, use up New Orleans, and move on to Cuernavaca? Do they inform the quaint or are they informed? Those who stay often follow a recognizable dialectic, a reaction against the seedy and a reversion to the old civic virtues of Ohio which culminates in a valuable proprietorship of the quaint, a curator’s zeal to preserve the best of the old and also to promote new “cultural facilities.” It is often the ex-heartlanders who save jazz, save the old buildings, save the symphony. Sometimes an outlander, a member of the business-professional establishment, who has succeeded in the Protestant ethic of hard work and corporate wheeling-and-dealing, even gets to be king of Mardi Gras these days, replacing the old Creoles for whom Fat Tuesday bore the traditional relation to Ash Wednesday. There has occurred a kind of innocent repaganization of Mardi Gras in virtue of which the successful man not only reaps the earthly reward of money but also achieves his kingdom here and now. The life of the American businessman in New Orleans is ameliorated by the quasi-liturgical rhythm of Mardi Gras, two months of carnival and ten months of Lent.

  Here, in the marriage of George Babbitt and Marianne, has always resided the best hope and worst risk of New Orleans. The hope, often fulfilled, is that the union will bring together the virtues of each, the best of the two life-styles, industry and grace, political morality and racial toleration. Of course, as in the projected marriage of George Bernard Shaw and his lady admirer, the wrong genes can just as easily combine. Unfortunately and all too often, the Latins learned Anglo-Saxon racial morality and the Americans learned Latin political morality. The fruit of such a mismatch is something to behold: Baptist governors and state legislators who loot the state with Catholic gaiety and Protestant industry. Transplant the worst of Mississippi to the Delta and what do you get? Plaqu
emines Parish, which is something like Neshoba County run by Trujillo. Reincarnate Senator Eastland in the Latin tradition and you end up with Leander Perez, segregationist boss of the lowlands between New Orleans and the Gulf.

  Yet things get better. There were times when Louisiana was like a banana republic governed by a redneck junta. Now New Orleans has people like Congressman Hale Boggs, who is actually a statesman; that is to say, a successful, able, moderate, responsible politician. And the Baptist North produces Governor John McKeithen, who may well turn out to be a populist genius.

  Moreover, despite the bad past, the slavery, the Latin sexual exploitation, the cheerless American segregation, the New Orleans Negro managed to stake out a bit of tolerable living space. Unlike the Choctaws, who melted away like bayou mist before the onslaught of the terrible white man, the Negro was not only tough but creative. He survived and it is not a piece of Southern foolery to say that there are many pleasant things about his life. Even now it wouldn’t take much to make New Orleans quite habitable for him. Here is the tantalizing thing: that New Orleans is by providence or good luck fairly close to making it, to being a habitable place for everybody, and yet is doing little or nothing to close the gap—while in cities like Detroit the efforts are strenuous but the gap is so wide that it has not been closed.

  Thus, the relative serenity of New Orleans—and the South, for that matter—is subject to dangerous misinterpretation from both sides. The black militant says that the New Orleans Negro has not tried to burn the city down because he is afraid to. The mayor and most whites would reply that the local Negro is better off and knows it, that there is still a deep long-standing affection and understanding between the races, etc., etc. Both are right and wrong. The New Orleans Negro is afraid but he still doesn’t want to burn anything down—yet. Despite all, he has something his uprooted and demoralized brother in Watts does not have, no thanks to the whites, and which he himself is hard put to define. Said one Negro phoning into a recent radio talk program while the panelists were congratulating themselves on the excellent race relations in tolerant old New Orleans: “Man, who are you kidding? I’ve lived in New Orleans all my life and I know better and you know better. I know and you know that every Japanese and Greek sailor getting off a ship and walking down Canal Street is better off than I am and can do things and go places I can’t go right here in my hometown. But where I’m going? Harlem? Man, look out!”

  New Orleans can perhaps take comfort in the fact that this man still wants to live here, still has the sense of being at home, still has not turned nasty. He is still talking and is, in fact, not ill-humored. Treat him like a Greek or Japanese today and you have the feeling New Orleans could make it. But tomorrow? That is something else.

  The only trouble is that as long as the Negro does not lose his temper nobody is apt to do anything about him and when he does it is too late. It is a piece of bad luck that the Negro, for whatever reason—and of course there are reasons—is like a piece of litmus paper which turns suddenly from blue to red. He takes it, looks as if he is going to keep taking it, then all of a sudden does not take it. There does not intervene in his case the political solidarity of the Irish and Italians. So, with the Negro, the blue litmus is always open to a misreading.

  For any number of reasons, New Orleans should be less habitable than Albany or Atlanta. Many of its streets look like the alleys of Warsaw. In one subdivision, feces empty into open ditches. Its garbage collection is whimsical and sporadic. Its tax-assessment system is absurd. It spends more money on professional football and less on its public library than any other major city. It has some of the cruelest slums in America and blood-sucking landlords right out of Dickens, and its lazy complacent city judges won’t put them in jail. It plans the largest air-conditioned domed sports stadium in the world and has no urban renewal to speak of. Its Jefferson Parish is the newest sanctuary for Mafia hoods. Its Bourbon Street is as lewd and joyless a place as Dante’s Second Circle of Hell, lewd with that special sad voyeur lewdness which marks the less felicitous encounters between Latin permissiveness and Anglo-Saxon sex morality.

  Its business establishment and hotelmen-restaurateurs are content that lewdness be peddled with one hand and Old World charm with the other—Bourbon Street for the conventioner, Royal Street for his wife—while everyone looks ahead with clear-eyed all-American optimism for new industry and the progress of the port. Yet there are even now signs that cynical commercialization will kill the goose. The Chamber of Commerce type reasons so: If all these tourists like the Vieux Carré, the patio-cum-slave-quarter bit, let’s do it up brown with super slave quarters, huge but quaint hives of hundreds of cells laced with miles of wrought iron and lit by forests of gas lamps. An elevated expressway is planned along the riverbank in front of Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral, with a suitable decor, perhaps a wrought-iron façade and more gas lamps. Twenty years from now and the Vieux Carré may well be a Disneyland Française of high-rise slave quarters full of Yankee tourists looking out at other Yankee tourists, the whole nestled in the neutral ground between expressways. The only catch is that the Yankee is not that dumb. When he wants synthetic charm he can buy it in Anaheim and he can find the real thing in Mexico. If New Orleans has the good sense of St. Louis and Pittsburgh, which had much less to work with, it will at whatever cost save the Quarter and open it up to the River, thus creating the most charming European enclave, indeed the only one, in the country.

  These are some of the troubles, and there are many others. But the luck of New Orleans is that its troubles usually have their saving graces. New Orleans was the original slave market, a name to frighten Tidewater Negroes, the place where people were sold like hogs, families dismembered, and males commercially exploited, the females sexually exploited. And yet it was New Orleans which hit upon jazz, a truly happy and truly American sound which bears little relation to the chamber music of Brubeck and Mulligan.

  There is nearly always an and yet. Take the mass media. One might have supposed that New Orleans, with its history of colorful journalistic dissent, its high-toned Creole literary journals, its pistol-toting American editors, would be entitled to the liveliest journalism in the South. What has happened here instead is that the national trend toward newspaper monopoly has taken a particularly depressing form. The Times-Picayune is a fat, dull, mediocre newspaper which might as well be the house organ of its advertisers. Even the local Catholic archdiocesan weekly, hardly an exciting genre, offers a more provocative sampling of opinion on its editorial page. It runs Buckley next to Ralph McGill. The great debate in the Picayune is generally carried on between David Lawrence and Russell Kirk. It is not as bad as the Jackson Clarion-Ledger or the Dallas Morning News but it is not as good a newsgatherer as Hodding Carter’s small-town daily up the River. The best that can be said of the Picayune is that, being money-oriented, it does have money virtues. It is against stealing. In Louisiana this is not a virtue to be sneezed at. And even though the Picayune supported Governor Jimmy Davis, composer of “You Are My Sunshine,” and the most lugubrious disaster ever to overtake any state, it has served over the years as the sole deterrent to the merry thieves both in Baton Rouge and in New Orleans who otherwise would have stolen everything.

  And yet. And yet there is WDSU-TV, owned by the Stern family, a sparkling oasis in the wasteland. It actually performs the duties of a medium. Its news staff is one of the best in the country. It cries when foul is committed and holds its nose when something stinks.

  One might have supposed, too, that the old Jesuit-owned CBS outlet, WWL, would shed some of John XXIII’s sweetness and light among rancorous Louisiana Christians, to say nothing of the Ku Klux Klansmen to the north. But although WWL radio is a powerful clear-channel station which covers the entire Southeast, its most enduring contribution to the national morale has been its broadcast of H. L. Hunt’s Lifelines, twice a day, year after year. Millions of farmers get the word about the wicked United States government while they milk their cow
s in the morning and thousands of taxi drivers hear it on their way home at night. If the South once again secedes from the Union and throws in with Rhodesia and South Africa, the Jesuits are entitled to a share of the credit.

  And yet there is Jesuit Father Louis Twomey, who has done more than any one man hereabouts to translate Catholic social principles into meaningful action. His Institute of Human Relations has performed valuable services in labor-management conciliation, in its campaign for social justice for the Negro, and in the education of the unskilled.

  And there is Loyola University, which under new leadership is doing some admirable things in science and the humanities. As one professor expressed it: “We may be broke and we may not make it, but if we go down, we’re going down in style.”

  Loyola sits cheek and jowl with Tulane University, which is in a fair way of becoming the first first-class university in the Deep South, although it has money problems, too, and it will probably never be able to compete for scholars and professors with Princeton and Stanford. What Tulane and Loyola should do is capitalize on the unique Creole-American flavor of their city and merge to form Greater Tulane University on the Oxford model, of which Loyola would be the Catholic college. It would be like Beauregard’s Zouaves joining the Army of Northern Virginia. Clerical and anticlerical elements would be embroiled in a fruitful melee without which either party tends to become slack and ingrown. Such an institution would be as unique as New Orleans itself, or as the Napoleonic Code of Louisiana and the civil “parish.” It could well be more catholic than a Catholic school and less dogmatic than a secular school.

  New Orleans has the ideological flavor of a Latin enclave in a Southern Scotch-Irish mainland. There is a certain inner rigidity softened at the edges by Southern social amiability. Catholics tend often to be more Catholic than the Pope. There are always jokes going around about how Pope John XXIII had to die in his sleep to get to heaven (i.e., awake, he’d be selling out to the Communists). Protestants are more conscious of being not Catholic, are indeed like Protestants of old. Unitarians are more anti-Trinitarian, anti-clericals more anti-clerical; Freudians more Freudian; anti-fluoridationists more passionate.