Feet on the Street Read Free Page A

African-Louisianan blood. Or a culture so blended that there’s no separating one ethnic strain from another. Categories melt in New Orleans.
    A LLIGATOR SAUSAGE
    â€œWhat does alligator taste like?” people would occasionally be heard to ask at the Tally Ho. “Like alligator,” would be the answer, after a beat.
    B EIGNET
    A square doughnut with no hole. Which may seem contradictory, but then New Orleans is a laissez-faire city developed for French Catholics by a Scot named John Law whose architecture mostly reflects the Spanish occupation imposed by troops under Don Alexander O’Reilly.
    S MALL COFFEE
    Don’t order the large, because the cup, tall but not so big around, is hard to dunk into.
    C HUCK BERRY
    In his autobiography he writes that New Orleans was “a place I’d longed to visit ever since hearing Muddy Waters’s lyrics, ‘Going down to Louisana, way down behind the sun.’ ” His first trip there was to perform, in 1955. After the thrill of “seeing my black name posted all over town in one of the cities they brought the slaves through,” he found that his black skin made him inadmissible to strip joints. Whenever he tried to peer into one, in fact, the doorman “would draw the door closed as I strolled past, reopening it beyond my sight.” So, after putting on a show that went over big (“Maybe someday your name will be in lights, saying ‘Johnny B. Goode Tonight’ ”), he went back to Rampart Street, where the strip clubs were back then, and “employed a little strategy of my own. With the exception of when the door would close because a black male happened to pass in front . . . I enjoyed a half dozen full shows wearing a cowboy hat and gloves, standing in doorways and using my field glasses from across the street.”
    M ARK T WAIN
    He came here in February of 1857, at twenty-one, hoping to catch a ship to South America, where he would make his fortune from the importing of coca leaves. Fortunately for modern American literature, which might otherwise have kicked off with
Fear and Llamas at Lake Titicaca,
the coca thing didn’t pan out, so young Sam Clemens signed on as a cub pilot on a riverboat instead. Back and forth up and down the Mississippi, in and out of New Orleans. To have some spending money for the nightlife there, he would guard piles of freight on the levee. “It was a desolate experience, watching there in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir. But it was not a profitless one: I used to have inspirations as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. . . . I can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another.” When the Civil War broke out, Clemens got off the boat in New Orleans and said good-bye to piloting. After a couple of weeks as a Confederate irregular, he headed out west. In 1881 he returned to the river to expand his recollections for
Life on the Mississippi,
several of whose chapters are about New Orleans.
    W.C. H ANDY
    Struggling to make it as a musician, he was penniless in New Orleans. No place to lay his head at night but the levee. It was hard bedding, he recalled years later, and that is why his “St. Louis Blues” begins, “I hate to see that evening sun go down.”
    I NGRID B ERGMAN
    The movie is
Saratoga Trunk,
from the novel by Edna Ferber. It was filmed on Hollywood sets (as were Elvis in
King Creole,
Mario Lanza in
The Toast of New Orleans,
which Pauline Kael called “sheer excruciation,” and
Naughty Marietta,
in which Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy find in New Orleans, at last, the “ah, sweet mystery of life”), but most of the story takes place in New Orleans during Reconstruction.
    Bergman is the fabulous, amoral,
brunette
adventuress Clio Dulaine, who returns from Paris to claim her Creole birthright. With her are