New Orleans Revisited
She sings sentences in French, in English, in a soft dialect between. It’s a solo so potent that you feel a burn in the back of your throat not unlike whiskey, not unlike the moment before a tear-drop. Sometimes, she dissipates like mist over swamp waters and shows up a century later, her clothes oil-stained and tattered. She makes meals of bayou roots and reptiles, this nourishment she brings forth from vicious and sharp-toothed landscapes. Indented cigarette burns in her kitchen table resemble empty bowls. She shouts their names out the window of a shotgun house and waits for missing guests that never make it back because they have no road home. Just the same, she invites you in, though she can tell you won’t stay for long.
You don’t walk in New Orleans. You saunter. You find it impossible to ignore the heat of bluegrass banjo, simmering metallic zydeco melodies, the brass, high hats and saxophones of jazz bands. There’s a bar on every corner. Each bar has a band, and these bands blend together. This French Quarter hymn hums and swirls in the humidity. It becomes thick in the air’s heat, emerges in drips on your face. Before this, you didn’t know your fingertips could sweat.
You saunter past 18th century houses, their precipices ornamented with painted stars and sun. Some stay antebellum white, others the color of tropical flowers, built to impress, built by oppressed. Ghosts whisper in the spirits in the opposite of a baptism. You try to imagine a flood so powerful, rushing water that sent souls asunder. Somewhere in the city, marching band drops a beat, shifts the syncopated state, but their shoes scuff on up the cobblestones. You think you hear her in the trombone’s low notes. In the vibrations she bids you to keep moving.
There’s a crawfish boil in Audobon Park. The mighty Mississippi’s brown waters froth with centuries of stories, some from sailors, some from Haitian and Caribbean enslaved peoples, some from the French Aristocracy. Frat boys from Tulane time their keg stands in the same spot where a family left behind a picnic blanket. When the sun retreats, the river loses its earthen color, masks itself in ripples of dusky southern sky. Her echo persists in the green barge lights on the other side; she says go, go, go.
In the darkness, old oaks that line the courtyard in front of the New Orleans Museum of Art stretch mossy limbs over, under, and around power lines they predate by centuries. Just across the way, there’s Congo Square. After church on Sunday mornings black men, both enslaved and freed, palmed rhythms on African hand drums, these beats the lullaby of a homeland some of them never saw. That music slips into a gin joint brothel called Storyville, this time it mixes with blues, with gospel. This mixture births jazz, a symphonic jambalaya of saxophone, societal deviance, and cigarette smoke. Louis Armstrong catches echoes of Congo Square, his lips lets them emanate through the horn of his trumpet. The upright bass follows as the tom-toms struggle to keep up. This city’s history makes your bones hurt, but it’s time to move along now, her voice gravelly, pitched deeper than before, tired.
Twilight’s dark shadows hide a prevailing poverty. The years of racial segregation and the government failure big enough to erase entire populations in some of the parishes. There’s proof of this the Lower Ninth ward’s quiet streets. You see all the houses that are no longer homes, and houses that are homes but shouldn’t be. Instead of people on the porches, an X divides numbers; bright orange spray paint announces how many living found, how many whose breath was swept away when the waters came on that August day in 2005. Your eyes linger on the weeds growing unchecked in the trellises, the vines that crawl up a corner store’s faded sign: WE WILL RECOVER. Five years after the floods receded and there is such little recovery.
Under a flickering streetlight, mosquitoes, moths and other insects battle for territory. Mini vans and school busses full of volun-tourists snap photographs of the damage to show family and friends back home. This place, a tragic attraction that brings in more revenue than before, but still no money to bring back so many of the families that were forced to leave. Most of them are still stuck in the city where the rescue bus stopped. They cashed in their one-way tickets because there was not much else to do. The silence rises, entombs, so you step away. In the flickering streetlight where moths, mosquitoes, and other insects battle for territory, she calls to you again, but you find no way to answer back.
Watch the men under the overpass, the ones who carry mattress pads on the side of their backpacks. Some of their faces are soiled and sooty from decades’ worth of dirt. They unroll their mobile beds and close their eyes; the murmur of cars passing above becomes a bizarre lullaby. Sometimes, a police officer walks by and nudges one awake. Come on, get up, you know you can’t sleep here. Wonder where it is they can sleep in this city of contradictions, the place that FEMA forgot. You remember watching the aftermath, how media outlets called American citizens refugees as they made their escape on peopled freeways but were sent back by gun-toting white neighbors on the other side of the bridge. Some stayed through the storm, had nowhere else to go. They climbed on top of houses, sat on roofs and waited to be saved. They waved white shirts and baseball caps, anything to help them be seen by the helicopters that flew over. The people in the choppers only wanted the profitable footage; the five o’clock news story.
Her voice is muffled and choked up. She wishes you well, but has scars she needs to see to, and you’ve run out of time; just another tourist.
New Orleans visits you in the somber pang of a blues scale, through the satisfying burn in seasonings called Cajun or Creole. Her song emerges again and plays painful taps on your tongue. You get a flash of the view from a scratched-up plastic window on a crowded shaky St. Charles Street trolley, hear the hushed voices of the women that cast bones and who tell fortunes in front of St. Louis Cathedral. The city that care forgot, the city that can’t forget sinks further into the sea each year. Her presence is an ephemeral haunting, a heartbreak never quite healed, another empty chair at the table
