Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 - (Page 25)

An Army vehicle passes a makeshift city sign on St. Charles Avenue. right: A smeared wedding album washed onto a sidewalk, among the debris in Arabi, Louisiana. photographs by David Rae Morris ment, then gets in his car and drives away. He, that boy — he’d be 19 — I hope he’s safe somewhere. It is — New Orleans is — a city foremost for special projections, for the things you can’t do, see, think, consume, feel, forget up in Jackson or Little Rock or home in Topeka. “We’re at the jumping-off place,” Eudora Welty wrote. This was about Plaquemines, just across the river. It is — New Orleans — the place where the firm ground ceases and the unsound footing begins. A certain kind of person likes such a place. A certain kind of person wants to go there and never leave. And there are the streetcars (or there were). And there are the oak trees and the lovely French boulevards and the stately rich men’s houses. And Buddy Bolden was born there and Satchmo grew up in Storyville. Huey Long lived in the Roosevelt Hotel, where he really had a “de-duct box.” His brother, Uncle Earl, was crazy as a betsy-bug. If you knew a waiter you could get a table anywhere. You couldn’t get divorced or married or sell your house on Fat Tuesday. And while they didn’t let Jews and blacks in the Boston Club, the races still mingled and often people danced in the streets. They subscribed to the Napoleonic Code. But so much for memory now. It charms, but it confuses and possibly holds us back. It’s hard enough to take things in. When I think of my friends in the city this morning, I think of them as high and dry, as being where they belong, being themselves in their normal life that was. I turn off the TV, as I did four years ago next week, just to think my own sorrowing and prospective thoughts of them. From the ruins it’s not easy to know what's best to think. Even the president may have felt this way in his low pass over that wide sheet of onyx water, the bobbing roofs peeking above the surfaces, the vast collapse, the wind-riddled buildings, that little figure (could he see who she was?) staring skyward. Something will be there when It is — New Orleans — the place where the firm ground ceases and the unsound footing begins. A certain kind of person likes such a place. A certain kind of person wants to go there and never leave. a friend’s house down treeshrouded Coliseum Street. It is 2003, and 11 o’clock on a warm January night. We are only steps from our door, just in a cone of street light, when a boy hops out of a car and says he will definitely kill us if we don’t hand it over right away. He has a little silver pistol to persuade us. Let’s say he’s 16. And he is serious. But he laughs when we tell him we don't have a penny. And it’s true. I pull my pockets out like a bum. “You people,” he says, almost happily, his gun become an afterthought. “You shouldn’t be out here this way.” He shakes his head, looks at the pave- The author of five novels and two collections of stories, Richard Ford was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Independence Day, the first book to win both prizes. In 2001 he received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction. the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops — many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans — though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground. I write in the place of others, today, for the ones who can’t be found. And there is a blunt ending now, one we always feared, never wished for, and do not deserve. Don't get me wrong. We would all turn the days back if we could, have those old problems, those old eccentricities again. But today is a beginning. There’s no better way to think of it now. Those others surely will be writing soon. LCV Reprinted with permission from The New York Times Op-Ed page, September 4, 2005. Fall 2005/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 25

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 Contents Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Louisiana State Museum After Katrina and Rita Tabasco: Edmund McIlhenny and the Birth of a Louisiana Pepper Sauce Historic New Orleans Collection Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans’ Coffee Connection No Man’s Land Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism Bookstand (Book Review by Thomas Uskali) Sound Advice (Music Review by Ben Sandmel) Forum (Commentary by Roy Blount, Jr. )

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

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