New Orleans: Preserved in word

Matthew Hunter Guest Writer

Just to utter the name offers a quiet pleasure: New Orleans. I will always declare myself, proudly and emphatically, a native of this place. My current address, my family’s location, and the state of perdition in which the city lies—these are all irrelevant to my status as a New Orleanian. I was born there; I was raised there; I have lived nowhere else.

When architects designed this precocious locale, they ultimately created was a city to be remembered—designed to thrive and to be familiar and to thus evoke, even in something so quotidian as a car ride, a distant meal, a visit to the zoo, and a traffic light shining through overhanging branches. Such memories now inundate every native mind, and to even mention that place conjures up a deluge of locations now permanently lost. Whatever places still stand, they do so as skeletons, emptied out of all those residents who exuded a vibrant, seemingly perennial sense of life.

The city that floats through most outsiders’ minds is, I find, something like a burlesque of a Fellini film: loud accented crowds cheering as the parade goes by for beers and booze and boobs, minstrels sashaying and jazz bands pumping, the blocks lined with brothels and bars, a homeless man strumming a banjo on every street corner. The real thing was a far different place—humid, distinct, and hermetic, a world lined with oak trees and seafood restaurants, levees and street cars, whose avenues were named after local birds or Biblical events, and whose torrid nights were always awash in riverlight.

An anomaly and amalgam of cultures, it was a place both apart from and exemplary of that strange distant culture called “southern.” Like Alabama and Mississippi, racial tensions abounded,and religion was prevalent, but unlike so much of the South, New Orleans was liberal, urban, an overlap of French, Spanish, and Italian influences. The communities were so tightly interwoven that it is nearly impossible to go out without seeing some friend or acquaintance, whose parents were high school friends with your parents,and whose grandparents live a block from your house.

With the exception of this past week’s events, the seasons were mild. Winter was a brief chill and a light clatter of oak leaves, and autumn, for all intents and purposes, did not exist. Summer, meanwhile, was slow and sultry, quick to set in and unwilling to leave; air conditioning and high ceilings were requisites for comfortable living, while seersucker and linen were necessary attire.

Perhaps it was the ubiquity of local businesses that forged such intense notions of home. Local restaurants and coffeeshops in particular tended to thrive, and a drive down Magazine St. lead you from the riverbend and Audubon park, down blocks of pizzerias, bistros, and cafés, ramshackle neighborhoods and local art galleries.

It was through that park that any uptown New Orleans runner would weave a flat, tree-shrouded, three mile loop across the levee and past the river, where barges would churn past and high school girls would sit with their margaritas and cigarettes. And it was in such dilapidated, rickety neighborhoods that the city’s poor sat silently on their porches watching the evenings extinguish. Like some cultural counterpoint, robust, mansions would stand just a short distance away, half-shaded by the oaks of St. Charles Avenue.

These are vague, fragmentary images, mere portions of a wilting portrait, some eighty per cent of which now ripples beneath malignant waters. Last week, the possibility of catastrophe became actuality; the fate of our traditions is as insecure as the city itself, and the weight of this cataclysm has annhiliated not only homes, lives and any feeling of stability—of durability—but also the vocabulary to even express the magnitude such a loss represents.

To attempt in words an elegy, a verbal preservation, of what has ruptured is not only ameliorative, but, some may argue, morally necessary. When that island we call home—that place that nurtures us, assaults us, shapes us from clay—has been utterly ravaged, such written memorials may save what for the native mind was plainly a paradise. But these—the image of a boulevard’s potholes, of a pelican in flight, of a crane lighting the harbors like a durable church—these are the city’s final, furious utterances. To the native now exiled from that locus of memory, these are words that must be voiced.