Roy Blount - Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans

Feet on the Street

RAMBLES AROUND NEW ORLEANS

Roy Blount Jr.

CROWN JOURNEYS

CROWN PUBLISHERS . NEW YORK

CONTENTS

For Joan, in New Orleans and all over

INTRODUCTION

... the low city... the labyrinthine mass of oleander and jasmine, lantana and mimosa...

WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!

They say anything will grow here, and everything eats it.

A LONG-TIME RESIDENT

T HIS DOESNT LOOK LIKE AN AMERICAN STREET. Its lined with architecture, some of it rotting, some of it in the dusty process of preservation; a variety of styles but largely late-eighteenth-century-to-mid-nineteenth-century Spanish-influence, because nearly all the original wooden French buildings burned in 1788 and 1794, while the city was under Spanish rule, and were replaced with stuccoed tiled-roof brick structures with lacy ironwork andoh look, theres somebody out on one of the balconies now, smashing windows with a champagne bottle. Thats all right, explains a passing stranger who notes our concern, its her place. Shes having some little problems with her family life. Chameleons skitter across turquoise stucco to disappear among elephant-ear leaves and bougainvillea blossoms, which Tennessee Williams likened to bloodshot eyes.

A sign says the street is a Calle, which is Spanish. Back home what were walking on would be the sidewalk, but here its the banquette, an old Creole word, pronounced bang-kit, from the French for a raised walk around a parapet. The history is so thick around here you could pop it open with an oyster-knife, and oh, the aromarama: fresh-ground coffee, spilt beer, hot pastry, sloshed Tabasco, yesterdays fish, patchouli oil, and hints of some fortuitous compound... mule plop and olive salad?

We will not be starting off this day with alligator sausage, because the Tally Ho Caf, on Chartres (pronounced Charters), has closed, having been run into by a car. So we have had a light, open-air breakfast of sugar-dusted beignets and a small chickory-flavored coffee at the Caf du Monde on Decatur, while enjoying the days rich harvest of obituaries in the daily Times-Picayune: only one due-to-gunshot-wound, which is unusual, but many great-named persons are mentioned, including the late Theoclecia Bijou Bourgeois, the late Glideville Creech, two different men named Dermis, a Honey Bunny, a Charmyra, a JJohn, and three different women given-named Marie Antoinette, one of whom married a Champagne. Providing musical accompaniment to breakfast was Jack the boombox man, standing in the street in red shorts and tube socks, playing the Beach Boys. Some days he plays gospel, some days jazz, whatever he has a mind to play. Once he was playing Sinatra reeealll sloowww, and my friend Rosemary James handed him some new batteries, which he took under advisement. Jack isnt selling anything, this is just how he chooses to spend his afternoon. He is a character.

Yes, afternoon. We are off to what might somewhere else be considered a late start, because last night after smoked softshell crab and grilled baby drum at Clancys, on Annunciation, we did some dancing to the ReBirth Brass Band at the Maple Leaf club uptown, where the crowd sweated and swole and spilled out onto the street, and from there we went to the Saturn Bar over on St. Claude, whose beyond-grungy dcor incorporates a Greek frieze, lots of red and white and yellow neon chandeliers, a psychedelic painting of a dragon, several pairs of panties, and a bumper sticker that says ID RATHER BE AT THE OPERA. That must have been where we listened to a man with a crucifix hand-painted on his hat tell us about his father, who accumulated lots of cars in his yard and every Saturday would take his one battery around to each car and crank it. Because it was later, while we were having that nightcap at the Napoleon House, which is over two hundred years old, that the young couple in evening wear came in, looking pale, and swore that they had just seen the ghost of a beautiful naked quadroon lady humming a melody that they could not for the life of them recall.

And now, cutting through the clip-clop of the mules drawing carriages over the cobblestones, we hear:

Betcha I can tell ya

Where ya

Got them shoooes.

African-American lad about nine years old. Doing a lickety-clackety shuffle on flattened halves of Fresca cans affixed to his sneaker soles.

Dont want to take advantage of you, young man. How could you possibly know

Betchadollar,

Betchadollar,

Where ya

Got them shoooes.

Well, all right... We show our dollar, and the lad, clickle-lickity clack, delivers:

Got your shoes on your feet,

Got your feet on the street,

And the streets in Noo

Awlins, Loo-

Eez-ee-anna.

Where I, for my part, first ate a live oyster, and first saw a naked woman with the lights on. I was startled by both, they both by mepresumably in the first case, regrettably in the second. Where I first heard the blues, first met an eminent author, or any other kind of author, and first realized that a person of my own gender could have designs (when I was much younger) on my, uh, body. Every time I go to New Orleans I am startled by something.

NEW ORLEANS IS nobodys oyster. It is situated, however, like a served-up oysterthe half-shell being the levees that keep Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River from engulfing the city. New Orleans lies several feet below river and lake level, and it sinks a little farther every year. When the big hurricane hitsand it will, New Orleanians assure you, with what suffices locally for civic pridethe waters will finally rise over the shell and inundate the town, killing tens of thousands.

Here is one thing you hear, locally, about the flood: It hasnt happened yet. That proves that were blessed.

Here is another: I hope it wont, but if it does Id hate to miss it.

And another: The other morning, I woke up thinking it happened last night.

Many New Orleanians, in what suffices locally for prudence, have taken the precaution, officially urged by what suffices locally for civil authority, of keeping an ax in the attic. So they can chop a hole up through the roof, when the time comes, and rise above the flood.

There will be rooftop parties. Neither pestilence nor fire nor corruption nor rioting nor thuggery nor a series of governing powersFrench then Spanish then French again then American then Confederate then American againhas managed to dampen New Orleanian spirits for long, so why should the Deluge?

One day its coming, I heard that expert say on the news, and when it does, its very probable that the French Quarter becomes one massive tomb.

But then New Orleanians dont get down in the mouth about death. Marching to a jazz funeral, a New Orleans band plays something slow and dirgey, but marching away its upbeat: Oh, Didnt He Ramble, a celebration of all that the deceased managed to get away with in his or her time.