What I leaned in Louisiana is that they don’t call it “The Dirty South” for nothing.
New Orleans was all the dirty “D” words.
Dilapidated.
Dangerous.
Decrepit.
Damp.
There were cockroaches in every place. Red and brown and beady.
Empty houses were filled with only broken beams and decaying floorboards and piles of earth rubbish.
But even still, with its old walls glazed with grime and its narrow streets caked thick with Mississippi River mud. With its incessant tourists. Its city smell of mildewing water mixed with smoky incense and deep fried and spicy. With its worrying crime rates and its controversial history.
Even still.
I don’t need to pretend that New Orleans is something that it’s not to know that I loved it even more than I’ve loved most men.
Tim and I went in mid-June.
For three days we ambled from the Bywater to Freret in muggy hotness that radiated in visible waves.
Heat vibrated off broken sidewalks that crumbled under massive, knotted roots of haunted oaks and flowering magnolias. It bounced off old brick and ricocheted off of rotting front porches. Humidity slapped our faces with sting and sweat pooled in the smalls of our backs and dripped down our necks.
Then, steamy hot rain that fell in wide sheets from pregnant clouds and soaked us right through.
Thunder clapped and lighting cracked.
Our energies were left parched like our skin and lips.
And mind you, it was only June. I understand very well that it gets much hotter, heavier, stickier in the deep summer months.
To me, the sweltering heat was relentless but it was also romantic and exotic.
I donned short, blue jean skirts with strappy sandals and billowy, low-cut blouses.
In the lazy afternoons, I dozed on the second-story balcony in just a thin T and a cheeky thong.
I kissed Tim on the lips in packed live music joints along Frenchmen Street where the rich sounds of deep horn blows and bass strums stuck in the thick air and lingered like cigar smoke.
I loved Tim a lot in Louisiana (I love him in every place).
And I know it was more than just the warm weather that made me feel so romanticized.
We stayed in a charming little house in the technicolor Bywater.
It was big and probably white underneath all the dirt and twists of ivy that wrapped around its tall columns.
Inside, the floors were slanted at varying degrees and in the bathroom, a clawfoot tub.
We slept late into the morning, braided up in lightweight, white sheets and when it was time to wake up, Tim brewed chicory coffee. The thick grounds leftover at the bottom of the mug reminded me of Mississippi muck. For breakfast, I ate mangos from the corner store and drank lots and lots of ice water.
As we like it, Tim and I walked and walked and walked all over New Orleans.
We drifted to a soundtrack of bouncy, bluesy jazz sounds that leaked into the crowded streets from horn players in dive bars and crooners in coffee shops.
New Orleans, even in it’s hot, low season, was full of foreigners.
In the French Quarter.
On Bourbon Street.
They oozed out of the Quarter and into the Garden District.
Into the Bywater.
Uptown.
Midtown.
Trinket shops on Magazine Street beckoned us with with fleur de lis keychains and voodoo dolls and feather boas.
In the French Quarter, we were the tourists.
We cruised through Jackson Square packed tight with fortune tellers and horse-drawn carriages. We poked into photography galleries on Royal Street and I considered whether or not I should buy an alligator head to add to my taxidermy collection. I bought a Robert Southey print from a secret Vampire shop instead and Tim bought a vintage postcard picturing an old river boat on the Mississippi from a little shop on Decatur Street.
I was impressed with the sounds of New Orleans. Jazz sounds and swing sounds and blues sounds.
I liked that the musicians in the street were mostly young, black men that played with sincere passion. There, in New Orleans, was a youth population that was excited about a genre of music that was important to their heritage and it connected them to their histories. It reflected an enthusiasm and pride in their culture and their ancestry.
It’s why New Orleans still felt authentic and genuine, even in the thickest part of its tourist center.
I really felt like I needed to experience the kitschy bustle of the French Quarter because “When in New Orleans…”, but, admittedly, after a few hours, I lost interest. Because more than I liked the the liveliness of the city center, I liked walking on the empty, residential streets in the suburb neighborhoods instead, where fossils of Mardi Gras beads were petrified in coils around porch posts and overheated tenets snored on their stoops.
With Tim, I liked to admire each and every house.
In the Marginy. Throughout Midcity and Irish Channel. In the Garden District and the Bywater.
The buildings and old homes have such personality. So much character and story. Yellow and purple. Blue. A mint house with pink shutters and a pink door and tropical foliage. Slinky street cats with glowing eyes yawned in the shade of ferns and palms. I liked that the deep front porches of the weathered mansions were furnished with ancient wrought iron patio furniture and wide swinging benches.
At night, gas burning lanterns that burned real fire flames made the city feel antique.
And haunted, too.
In New Orleans, there are ghosts.
Lots and lots of ghosts.
There are translucent apparitions that float up and down old staircases and drift through walls. Lonely, leftover spirits that moan howls in your ear and brush your back with false fingertips. They extinguish lights and break dishes in demanding attention.
And then…they dissolve.
Are your eyes playing tricks on you? Or was that Madame Marie Laveau gliding among the above-ground tombs in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, whispering fortunes and voodoo charms at the living?
But you don’t believe in ghosts?
Fine.
Maybe me neither.
But in New Orleans, it was hard to ignore this manifest, spiritual energy that hovered in the streets and in its dark, secret alley ways and tropical garden courtyards. A heaviness that pressed upon us in dimly lit taverns. It sailed through the spooky cemeteries, the graves of which reminded me of Père Lachaise in Paris, where, in 2009, I used to spend hours picnicking and practicing the conjugation of French verbs in a spiral notebook.
And despite all the darkness in New Orleans, a city birthed from an oppressive heritage of tragedy and horror, I found that it was also so bright.
And not just because of the coats of paint.
The people we met were fantastically polite and wonderfully helpful.
I loved the accent in the South.
It was smooth and slow and sweet like condensed milk or real maple syrup.
“Ya’ll take care.”
“Mornin’, Miss.”
“God bless your day, Sir.”
“Sure thing, son.”
The food was probably wonderful. (I, beyond unfortunately, got terribly sick in New Orleans and I was unable to keep any food down. I managed a few bites of a beignet and also a Louisiana hot sausage. As I’m sure you can imagine, I was livid.)
Tim ate all the New Orleans things.
On Freret, he ate an entire fried catfish poboy, stacked tall with romaine lettuce and beefsteak tomatoes. He ate fried Gulf oysters in Midcity and black drum ceviche marinated in citrus and grape tomatoes at Bacchanal in the Bywater.
I loved Bacchanal so very much.
In the backyard of an old house on Poland Avenue, we sat in the balmy, hot night under the glow of flaming tiki torches and strands of vintage Christmas lights. Jazz musicians, of course, played for diners on a makeshift stage at the back of the yard. Insects hummed and buzzed. I cautiously chewed on buttered bread and radish slices and Tim sipped on bubbly, cold pilsner beers in between bites of house-made burrata served with Calabrian chilis.
I drank lots and lots of fresh-squeezed lemonade.
At little cafes on Magazine street. At St. Roch Public Market and at Mimi’s in the Marginy.
At Café Beignet on Royal Street, Tim and I situated ourselves at a shaded garden table next to a kitty cat that nibbled on leftover ham bits fed to him by a kind cook from the kitchen.
I called him Lars and petted his head.
After only a few bites, our front sides were dusted with powdered sugar that wouldn’t unstuck in the humidity.
We wore our sugared bibs on the Streetcar to City Park. There, we looped around a lagoon that was swimming with snappy turtles and enormous swans. The oaks in the park were majestically large and dripping with tangles of lacy Spanish Moss.
To escape the heat, we ducked into the New Orleans Museum of Art. We admired
paintings by Warhol and Sam Francis. We saw a Braques and several Miró’s. There was a Cassat painting and also a Magritte. In the sculpture garden, a Renoir.
Perhaps what I liked most about New Orleans was our pace.
We were unhurried.
Gradual like the Mississippi, which, before this trip, I had never seen.
As always, I wish we had more time and also, that I had more of an appetite.
Had we another day, I would have liked to spend the day on a speedboat in the Bayou, tempting gators to bite skewered hot dogs in the shade of swampy shrub trees.
I would liked to have eaten at a John Besh restaurant. Restaurant August or maybe Lüke.
I’d like to have ordered a cheese plate from St. James Cheese Co. and also wish I could have drunk a lot more beer.
It’s true that in New Orleans, I experienced first-hand the dirty of the South.
But, of course, it was also so much more than that.
It was distinct.
It was dramatic and it was delicious.
And I’ll be back.
Cheers Nola.
You were all right.
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