New Orleans: The Good and the Soul-Feedin'

As I mentioned in my last post, I kicked out a chapter before heading down to New Orleans. This was glorious; after almost a year of being stuck, writing slowly, hitting walls, dealing with shifting geography and employment, it was elating, giddy-making, to get that out the door. And then New Orleans came along, right on cue, to feed my heart and steep me in the richness of life, fully-lived. After the jump: a long weekend in one of the great Real Cities in America!

Fun New Orleans fact: the swamp is extremely good. Please go visit the swamp. There is also a city but there is also a swamp. Which I recommend visiting. Due to its goodness. OK goodnight.

Two days before I left, I got an automated message from Amtrak letting me know that there was a "service disruption" to my overnight train. I'd booked a sleeper car, maybe my favorite way to travel; now, thanks to crumbling infrastructure, we'd be making about half the journey via coach bus. I took the offer of a refund, booking a last-minute flight down to the city, and with it bought myself one more night and an early-morning wander. That set the template for the whole week, and stood in well for New Orleans as a whole.

If you think New Orleans is a city that you should visit in a rushed or overly organized manner, perhaps you should "hold your horses!" Hello! I am resigning from blogging, writing in general, and society as a whole, goodbye forever.

As my outstanding host and spectacular human Caroline pointed out, New Orleans has a sort of loose "whatever you can get away with" energy to it, which can be invigorating or frustrating depending on the energy you bring to the table. I found it dreamy and wonderful. Much like southern Italy, things that would drive you nuts in a more systematic town are charming here, and something about the city's architecture psychologically prepares you to go with the flow and take the days as they come. Spanish moss drooping from the trees, beads from the previous Mardi Gras dangling from branches, balconies hanging off of paint-stripped buildings: the whole city invites you to relax, to bend, to sway. And as soon as you do, great things unfold.

Swampity swamp swamp boardwalk loveliness. NATURE FEEDS THE SOUL

Caroline's immediate piece of advice was spot-on: spend your first day in the French Quarter, and as soon as you get sick of it, get out to other pockets of the city. My first day, I started to wander the Quarter, quickly realized there was no reason to explore it "before the crowds," and cut over to Cafe du Monde for beignets before taking a riverside stroll on the Crescent Park trail, indulging in an obscenely delicious breakfast at Elizabeth's before returning to the Quarter.

Duck down side streets and kick around the joint, it's extremely lovely and whatnot and so forth!

Here's the thing: yep, Bourbon Street is gross and crawling with a lot of terrible tourists clutching plastic grenade-shaped cups full of slushy sugar spiked with cheap booze. But there is also busking of the screamingly best caliber, running the gamut of styles and ensemble size. There are atmospheric bars dating back to the 18th century. There are pockets of great food amidst the garbage. And there's the ebb and flow of a city whose local population hasn't turned away from its touristy center, so if you're lucky (we were!) you'll encounter a second line for whatever occasion has called for one.

Armstrong Park sculpture party!

But a day was more than enough French Quarter, so with Caroline's generous leadership we hustled all over the dang place: bouncing in and out of the music clubs on Frenchmen Street (once "where the locals go," and still a step up from Bourbon Street if not the real underground scene), thrifting along Magazine Street, scooting up along the bayou for po' boys after a few false starts, wandering the glorious sculpture garden at the Museum of Art, and hiking out into the swamp of Lafitte Park. It was all magical - stupendous food, expert cocktails, perfect weather, and hours upon hours of catching up on life and mulling over all the complications of being a human. We wrapped up at the Tree of Life, an ancient and sprawling tree as old as the city itself, and a place where Caroline has gone again and again for centering and guidance. My heart a splode.

Tree of Life! Caroline is hidden a the base of the tree on the right. These are... these are all big trees.

One last thing to note - the main reason this trip was so glorious was that Caroline opened the door into her own life, which is a lovely and special thing. Visiting her church on an Easter Sunday, stopping at a friend's house to see his grandchildren put on a play about bunnies, and all the million little encounters that spring up when you explore the city at the side of someone who knows it well. But I don't think you'll miss out on that experience altogether if you visit without a friend who lives there.

But for real if you do have a friend there you might get to see some wildly delightful backyard theatre, highly recommended.

My last night in town, Caroline had a choir practice in the Bywater, and I spent that hour wandering the neighborhood, walking down to the river and eventually perching on the stoop of a corner house or shop of some sort. The owner stuck her head out after a while, looking for a package, and after ascertaining why I was sitting on her stoop, asked, "Would you like to see a cool space?"

I stepped in, and she showed me her photography studio, her place of work and exhibition since the late 90s, when she moved into what had previously been a pharmacy. The early-twentieth-century glass counters were still in place; rotary fans lazily spun overhead; the tile floor spelled out the pharmacy's name in mosaic. It was just a couple of minutes, but it was, as Caroline later told me, "a real New Orleans encounter."

Not the studio, but the view from its stoop! Bywater's cool, guys.

I'm not really getting into the details or recommendations (though reach out if you're going, for I have many of both). In part that's because I've only had this one long weekend and barely scratched any kind of surface, but moreso it's because of what Caroline told me my first night in town: New Orleans gives you the trip you need, not always the trip you want or plan. This is a city that, if you are open, if you are receptive, will take you in and teach you things you weren't looking for or thinking about. And I cannot wait to return.

Jackson Square! Or, One More Statue I Wouldn't Mind Seeing Taken Down Ah Well

Water is very relaxing, did you know this, did you even dream of such a thing

Let's all take one last slackjawed look at the Tree of Life! A+++ tree would climb on and stare at and wonder at its age and reflect on life and all its thorny complexities again.

Columns

A chapter out the door meant permission to duck out of town, and New Orleans was as glorious as advertised. More so, and in different ways than anticipated, even. Much more on that soon, but first, this. After the jump:  m o n u m e n t s.


My first morning in New Orleans I rode a streetcar into the French Quarter, not realizing that I'd glide right past Lee Circle, one of the sites of a removed Confederate statue. It was the first time I'd been to one of these sites in person, and while it seems like it shouldn't have had a huge impact, it very did.

When the debate over monuments to the Confederacy was in its loudest phase, I remember reading statements from southern Republican politicians opposed to "erasing history" by removing the monuments. In particular, in one telling exchange one of these politicians was asked: what if we remove the monuments from their place of public pride and display them in a museum contextualizing the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement? A heaping pile of bluster and refusal ensued, and that sort of sealed it for me. If the only commemoration you will accept is in the public square, there's something nasty afoot, particularly given the origin of a lot of these monuments. As The Atlantic noted:

"A timeline of the genesis of the Confederate sites shows two notable spikes. One comes around the turn of the 20th century, just after Plessy v. Ferguson, and just as many Southern states were establishing repressive race laws. The second runs from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s—the peak of the civil-rights movement. In other words, the erection of Confederate monuments has been a way to perform cultural resistance to black equality."

Keeping these statues in public squares, in front of courthouses and in front of major civic buildings, has felt like a defiant tribute to white supremacy rather than any kind of remembrance of history or an honest reckoning of treason in defense of slavery.

But rolling past the column where Robert E. Lee's statue once stood, the physical reality of the space exposed a whole new layer of the bad-faith argument against removing these statues. Because where the statue was, now there was tangible absence. A column still stood at the center of a traffic circle, ringed with fences and bare at its apex. And that's when it struck me that removing the statue didn't erase history, it added a layer of history.

Riding past Lee Circle, now defined by an empty column, two stories are told: first, that once there was a statue here erected in memory of a man who went to war in defense of chattel slavery, and second, that we have decided to stop honoring someone who would do that. Not erasure, but addition and expansion.

Anyhow. It was an interesting start to a phenomenally complex city (we could talk about Jackson Square and that problem, or Jean Lafitte and those problems, or.... well everything, really) but I was glad to start the trip with a rush of uplift at the decision Landrieu made to remove the city's civil war statues. Let's keep it going. Tear 'em all down, and let the scars in the landscape tell the story of who we were, and how we hope to be better.