Do you know what it means
To miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day?
The voice of Louis Armstrong is possibly the most recognisable voice in the history of audio recording, and it symbolises better than anything else what we will all miss if New Orleans does not revive.
Armstrong grew up in a part of New Orleans that is now under seven meters of putrid water. He was a part of the generation that came of age just after World War I, when jazz music was emerging from the slums around Congo Square. Jazz carried the seed of African culture to the American and European mainstream. It is no accident that this seed was born in New Orleans, because the city had been known for its easygoing multicultural tolerance for two centuries.
New Orleans was born a party town in 1718. Although conceived as a French garrison to control the entrance to the Mississippi River, it quickly became the focus of the famous Louisiana Bubble, John Law’s project to establish a French plantation colony. The project was a spectacular failure, but not before hundreds of history’s first yuppies moved to the new colonial capital with dreams of quick riches and wild parties. The riches didn’t materialise, but the parties did, and a local pattern was established of “letting the good times roll” in spite of economic adversity.
There has been no shortage of economic adversity in the city’s history, nor of poor people to take the brunt of it and celebrate anyway. Cajuns, Spaniards, Sicilians, Haitians, Irish, German Jews, and impoverished Mississippi cotton farmers have blended into what became America’s prototype melting pot. Above all there were the slaves, or former slaves; New Orleans, alone among the towns of the Old South, tolerated free blacks in large numbers.
Prior to the American Civil War, fully a quarter of the city’s black population was free; after the war, thousands more ex-slaves streamed into the new neighbourhoods created by the draining of the swamps north of the French Quarter. There was no other place on Earth like it. Only here could the nascent African-American culture take form, and only here could a hayseed Alabama fiddle player or a Boston brahmin be exposed to it. New Orleans was the perfect antidote to racism, and the therapy it used was a gentle hedonism, whose finest expression was Mardi Gras.
Mardi Gras and its parades date from the Louisiana Bubble period, and were officially religious celebrations of pre-Lenten carnival. Unofficially, of course, they were just more wild parties. It was in 1857 that the first “krewes” or secret societies began operating secular Mardi Gras parades. The competition among them was the engine of the festival’s immediate and permanent popularity. Twentieth-century tourism and the convention business expanded the carnival ethic from the pre-Lenten period to the rest of the year – JazzFest, the Cajun Music Festival, the New Orleans Jazz and Blues Festival, Southern Decadence Week, the Christmas Festival and more – so that there were more weekends with festivals than without.
Not even psychopathic criminals have been immune to the city’s spirit. During the 1830s a local widow named Madame La Laurie, before she was discovered to have tortured and murdered dozens of slaves, was famous for her lavish soirées. In 1919, a serial murderer known only as the Axeman promised, in a letter to the newspapers, not to kill anybody where a jazz band was playing. He was promptly invited to the best parties in town.
To be sure, New Orleans has also had its quota of pig-headed politicians and preachers who have tried to tame the city’s exuberance, and Ku Klux Klan prima-donnas who have fanned the embers of resentment that will plague any multicultural society. It is still a place where a homeowner can legally shoot a trespasser, even if the offender is just a drunken reveler peeing in your yard.
But more representative of the city was the official who legalised prostitution in 1897. His name was Sidney Story, for whom the red-light district was instantly if informally renamed Storyville. His dictum, “You can make it illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular,” could now stand as a kind of epitaph for Storyville, the Ninth Ward, Congo Square and all the other ruined neighbourhoods whose ferment once powered the vibrancy of New Orleans.
It is not a ferment that people like George W. Bush were ever comfortable with. The people of New Orleans – largely poor, largely black, largely Democratic – do not form a part of his constituency, and this explains, in large part, the near-criminal attitude of “live and let die” exhibited by his administration in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.
New Orleans will be pumped dry and rebuilt, but to a different plan; a $100 billion fund administered from Washington will see to that. (“God has wiped the slate clean for us,” said the enthusiastic mayor of nearby Gulfport, Mississippi.) How much, if anything, of the city’s spirit will survive remains to be seen. In other words, the city will be rebuilt, but it may never be reborn.
The easygoing tolerance, the permanent party atmosphere, the cultural cross-fertilisation among a wide variety of ethnic and racial groups and social classes – Sidney Story and Louis Armstrong – these are the hallmarks of a now-dying city whose legacy to the world can be heard on every radio station on the planet. This is what it means to miss New Orleans.
Waiheke Island, September 2005
[ Return to Travelogues & Commentary index ]
Copyright © 2005 T. Mark James
This article first
appeared in the Gulf
News,
Waiheke Island, New Zealand, on 22 September 2005.