Feet on the Street Read Free

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 (see
lagniappe,
below), Fats Domino excepted, put down roots. It has been a place for reorientational interludes. Thomas Wolfe was here just long enough to muster the independence (or to intensify the paranoia) it took to sever his umbilical editorial connection to Maxwell Perkins. 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. Gertrude Stein long enough to find “New Orleans hot and delicious.” 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.”
    I spent one summer here, in 1963, working as a reporter at the
Times-Picayune
and living in a converted slave quarters, on St. Philip Street, around the corner from Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. I was twenty-one and shy. I have returned, to the best of my recollection, thirty-eight times, for anywhere from two days to three weeks. I’ll bet I have been up in N.O. at every hour in every season. It is not a town, in my experience, where a person takes meticulous notes, over the years, or keeps assiduous track of every note he does take. If this were school, I’d say the dog ate some of my research. But I can bring the dog to class and show you how fat he is and how apologetic he looks. (In 1922 Sherwood Anderson wrote, “When the fact is made secondary to the desire to live, to love, and to understand life, it may be that we will have in more American cities a charm of place such as one finds in the older parts of New Orleans now.”) And I can take you to the river and on various alluvial tangents.
    Some Lagniappe with That
    L AGNIAPPE
    From the Quechua
yapay
by way of the Spanish and with a French twist added in New Orleans, it means “a little extra.” It’s an old local custom. If you bought some red beans and some rice, the grocer might toss in a lagniappe onion. One morning I woke up in a New Orleans hotel room, stretched, went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and saw to my astonishment that I had a big, thick gout of dried blood in the middle of my forehead. I said to myself, I had better change my way of living. I could remember doing several things the night before, but not, for the life of me, being shot. It was Winston Churchill, I believe, who said that the most exhilarating experience in life is to be shot at and missed. But to be shot at and hit, and have no recollection? Especially if you’re a writer. But then I turned on the light and looked closer, and of course I had not been shot. I had just slept on my complimentary mint.
    C REOLE
    This term originally meant “born here,” in reference to a fresh start in the New World. As the generations rolled on, people who claimed descent from the early French families used it to mean “from way back.” Then, because New Orleans culture is such a mélange, people began to assume it meant “mixed race,” which caused light-skinned Creoles to deny that there was any such thing as a Creole of color. All along there were descendents of early black, brown, and beige natives of the city who duly considered themselves to be Creoles (says
Times-Picayune
columnist Lolis Elie, “A white guy told me he never heard of any black people called Creoles. I told him I never heard of any white people called Creoles”), and indeed in recent years anti-Eurocentric studies have controlled the discourse to the point that in both scholarly and popular circles Creole is most likely to connote old