Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 - (Page 72)

F O R U M guest commentary charged before. They should have walked farther. It is the person in between — me, the visitor who keeps coming back — who can give you some perspective. New Orleans is not what it once was, neither the fetid swamp nor the great city nor the readily affordable bohemia. Miami is now a more international town, Vegas more of a flesh-and-gambling mecca, and Memphis, thanks to FedEx, more of a hub. But New Orleans is still like no other place in America, and yet (or therefore) it’s the cradle of American culture. It’s where Walt Whitman (he said) first tasted sin, where Abraham Lincoln got his first full sense of the scope and the primary shame of the nation, where Mark Twain began and ended his riverboat career and started imagining the books he would write, where Buddy Bolden and Bunk Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton became the first legends of jazz and Louis Armstrong put the “A” in American music, where W.C. Handy dreaded seeing that evening sun go down, where William Faulkner turned from poetry to fiction (and shot BBs at nuns from his garret window), where Huey Long went to law school, and where Tennessee Williams acquired his “Tennessee” and lost (he said) his virginity. It’s also where John James Audubon drew the whooping crane (working from a dead one brought by a hunter who shot it as it speared baby alligators with its beak) and put in several sessions painting a mysterious high-born lady naked, after she approached him in the street, wearing a veil, and asked him to meet her at a certain address. Where Zora Neale Hurston got into voodoo, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise, O. Henry took his pen name and refuge from the law, and Langston Hughes bought some Wishing Powder and “the next day, quite unexpectedly, I found myself on the way to Havana.” Where Kate Chopin smoked her first cigarette, Little Richard recorded “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” the Boswell Sisters got their act together, Chuck Berry was inspired to write “Johnny B. Goode,” Anita Loos wrote Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, Ingrid Bergman (playing a trollop) ate jambalaya off the head of a dwarf, and a couple of guys tried to mug Richard Ford right out in front of his Garden District house but he didn’t have any money on him so they got back in their car and drove away. Walker Percy and Robert Stone set their first novels here, in the ‘60s, Percy’s lyricstoic, Stone’s politico-phantasmagoric. New Orleans is where Louis Prima, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Lamour, Mahalia Jackson, George Herriman (creator of Krazy Kat), Doctor John, Madame X (portrayed scandalously off-the-shoulder in Paris by John Singer Sargent), Richard Simmons, Lloyd Price, Truman Capote, Elmore Leonard, and Lee Harvey Oswald were born, and where Randy Newman spent what he referred to in song as “my baby years.” Where Walker Evans fell in love. Where John Steinbeck and Hank Williams married their second wives. Where Jefferson Davis, in town for a visit, died. Where Gram Parsons and both Marie Laveaus are buried, and where Anne Rice, in a red wedding dress, popped up out of a closed coffin delivered by a horse-drawn hearse for a book-signing session. In New Orleans, craps, café au lait, and the cocktail were invented, and the following were introduced to America: cocaine, tomato sauce, the free lunch, Marquis of Queensbury boxing, the term arriviste, and the Mafia. A New Orleanian’s invention made sugar a common household item. The largest slave market in North America was here, and the first synagogue outside the original 13 colonies. New Orleans was the first American city to build an opera house and the last to install a sewer system. It has been the most nearly European American city and the most nearly African. The northernmost Caribbean city and the westernmost Mediterranean. I know of two places where the “Marseillaise” was sung in defiance of an occupying power: Casablanca, in the movie, and New Orleans, under Union control. I am not a New Orleans expert. If I’d lived here long enough to be that, I’d be dead, because New Orleans never closes. But then New Orleans has not generally been a place where creatives, Fats Domino excepted, put down roots. It has been a place for reorientational interludes. William Burroughs long enough, among “lamsters of every description,” to get busted for possession and flee the country. Benito Juarez long enough to plot a revolution in Mexico, and Aaron Burr long enough to conspire to create a new empire with New Orleans as its capital. Edgar Degas long enough to be bowled over, visually, by all the black people around. Charles Bukowski to acknowledge that “being lost, being crazy maybe is not so bad if you can be that way undisturbed. New Orleans gave me that.” ————————————— ————————————— Excerpted from Roy Blount Jr.’s book Feet on the Street (Crown Journeys), published mere months prior to Hurricane Katrina. Feet on the street by Roy Blount Jr. New Orleans is nobody’s oyster. It is situated, however, like a served-up oyster — the half-shell being the levees that keep Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River from engulfing the city. New Orleans lies several feet below river and lake level, and it sinks a little farther every year. When the big hurricane hits — and it will, New Orleanians assure you, with what suffices locally for civic pride — the waters will finally rise over the shell and inundate the town, killing tens of thousands. There will be rooftop parties. Neither pestilence nor fire nor corruption nor rioting nor thuggery nor a series of governing powers — French then Spanish then French again then American then Confederate then American again — has managed to dampen New Orleanian spirits for long, so why should the Deluge? New Orleans is my favorite place in the world to ramble. Even on those deep-summer days that make a person feel swathed in slowly melting hamfat, New Orleans has always put a spring in my step. I can hear residents already: “He thinks he can write about N’woilins and never had a Nectar Cream with Cream [a sort of snow-cone] over by Hansen’s or the cannibal salad — raw beef in it — at the Magnolia Grill? He thinks he can write about Noowawlins and can’t even figure out how to spell how it’s pronunciated right?” (The pronunciation Noo Orleens is just for song lyrics, rhyming as it does with beans, means, queens, and scenes.) Residents know what it means to miss the point of New Orleans. But here’s something that New Orleanians tend to have in common: none of them believes that most of the others of them get New Orleans either. New Orleanian solidarity is a matter of e pluribus falsibus unum: from the erroneous many, one. Tourists may not catch this — those tourists who walk the tawdriest blocks of Bourbon Street, who see other tourists weaving along holding drinks known as hurricanes or flashing their breasts for trinkets, who eat in the wrong famous restaurants, and who go back home saying big deal like we never saw drunks or breasts or got over- 72 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2005

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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