New Orleans Now
Notes From The Crescent City
2009-02-24
By Eric Easter
The people on the first line of New Orleans tourism industry – the cabdrivers, the bellmen, the waiters- know where their bread is buttered. They understand well what draws people to the city and they have a keen sense of when to turn up the volume on the boosterism. So the cabbie who took me from New Orleans International to my hotel on a trip last week couldn’t hold in his sly laugh when I told him he could feel free to turn off the tourist-centric Zydeco on the radio and switch back to the R&B station he was enjoying when I got into the car. It was a knowing exhale from someone who clearly had been working much harder for the money in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Winding up in New Orleans during Mardi Gras parade season was an accident. I needed a break and a town with an easier lifestyle fit the bill. It could just have well been Tampa or Miami, but a last minute fare drop sealed the deal. It turned out to be a great decision.
It’s important to visit New Orleans several times. Your first trip always comes with New Year’s Eve –like expectations, and the city (like most cities) almost always disappoints on that score. The food is wonderful, but more subtle and nuanced than you may imagine. The French Quarter is not all boobs and beer (if that is your interest), and when it’s not, some people try too hard make it so, which takes away whatever excitement may have come from such spontaneity. But a second, or third or fourth trip opens up the more interesting New Orleans, the one for which the now-displaced pine away.
That was the New Orleans I wanted to experience this time, so I tried to actively avoid Mardi Gras activities, which turned out not to be possible since streets around my hotel were closed off for parades that were to come later that day. What else to do then, but eat?
I can think of no other American city where what to eat and where to eat so completely drives decision-making. Rather than figure out where to eat after an activity, you look for activities to fill your time between meals. And New Orleans-style cooking can be difficult to escape. So prevalent and effective is the selling of the lore and culture of New Orleans that eating outside of the Creole/Cajun box can feel a little like betrayal. Then again, why would you go to New Orleans to eat Thai food?
Not feeling a burning need to go against the flow, I headed immediately to Acme Oyster House in the French Quarter for fresh raw oysters and gumbo. Traveling alone helped me easily navigate the long line down the block to get in and I was able to talk myself into the lone seat at the bar without a wait. A raw oyster is a raw oyster is a raw oyster, the difference is the atmosphere in which you eat it. Enjoying an oyster requires cold beer, good music, attentive service and lively company. Acme provides all that in spades.
While I ate and made small talk with the bartender, a high school band made its way up the street to join one of the weekend’s parades on the Canal Street route. Drawn by the sound of a bass drum, I walked over a block to see my first ever Mardi Gras parade while I planned out my next food outing.
I must admit there was an initial joy associated with catching a float rider’s eye and being on the receiving end of assorted cups and beads, but by the fourth parade that evening with more of the same, I quickly went from “Throw me something, Mister!” to “ Hey, if you hit me with another bead, I’m coming on that float to get you.” It served to remind me that some expressions of culture have to be born in you to get the full appreciation. Still, I could imagine the thrill of a child getting his first beads and aspiring to be on the float tossing goodies and eliciting smiles.
But even though it was my first Mardi Gras experience, I could feel something missing - some spirit, some energy, some life force. Was that all there was to the Mardi Gras that gets everybody so worked up?
After a cheap eats and walking tour that included the galleries on Royal Street plus more oysters, beignets and a shrimp po’boy, I ended the day enjoying the hip comfort of Frenchmen Street, where drummer turned vibraphonist Jason Marsalis was headlining a date at the jazz club, Snug Harbor. Walking the mile or so back to my hotel, across Esplanade and up one of the emptier streets of the Quarter, I felt more intimidated than protected by the heavy presence of patrol cars that provided a visual deterrent to those who might prey on Bourbon Street drunks who strayed from the beaten path.
On Sunday morning, I got up early to enjoy New Orleans the way it should be enjoyed. Oddly enough, it’s when New Orleans is completely quiet that it makes the loudest impression, when the balconies, the houses, the sidewalks, the doorways begin to speak to you of their long, complicated histories, That’s when the literature and the faded photographs from textbooks come to life.
And there’s the more recent and more tragic history. Looking out onto the river, I found myself struck by the curve of the I-90 overpass and how difficult it must have been for whole families to try to get across to safety, only to be turned away. It was tough image to shake.
After hooking up with an old friend for coffee, I felt like dressing up for a classic formal brunch at Galatoire’s, about as classic and traditional as you can get in the city. The hosts at the 100 year-old Galatoire’s have an ingenious way of separating the regulars from the tourists by asking if one has a favorite waiter. No favorite and you get a table in Siberia. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. As a lone diner I didn’t exactly want to draw attention to myself, just relax, read my paper and have a leisurely meal.
And a great meal it was – shrimp remoulade, a classicly prepared (shaken not folded) lump crab omelette, banana bread pudding and the best Sazerac I’ve ever had to top it off. Ask for Sean, by the way, if you go.
Because of the restaurant’s formality, it made me a bit more aware of something I had been noticing since my arrival – that I was almost always the lone Black diner in places where the only other Blacks were doing the serving or the cooking. In this case, that meant I got the “brother treatment." Not the bad “We don’t want you here,” kind, but the good “We don’t see many brothers ‘round here too much, so have some extra whiskey in your drink” treatment.
It made me realize I had been getting the brother treatment all weekend – lots more Jack than Coke in my Jack and Coke, eight oysters instead of the six I requested. Being the only Black person everywhere I went was, in fact a common occurrence. That’s not something I usually have a problem with, but in a city where the Black contribution to its culture is so essential, a sense of absence became palpable and yes, slightly discomforting.
That sense of absence became more evident late one evening along Bourbon Street when, in the midst of the drunken, flash-for beads revelry, an African American wedding party with a police escort and a lively, bouncing second line made it way down the street, onlookers treated it more as an annoyance -- drinkus interruptus – than the one element of authentic New Orleans culture they would probably get to see all weekend. Of course, neither the French Quarter nor the behavior of tourists has any relationship to the real Mardi Gras.
For perspective I went to see the exhibit “From Tramps to Kings: 100 Years of Zulu” at the Presbytere in Jackson Square. It turned out to be the highlight of my trip. Celebrating the centennial of the legendary Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the exhibit features photos, oversized float sculptures, costumes, ball invitations and multimedia that provides comprehensive insight into the origins of the famous parade and its sometimes controversial place in the city’s fascinating dynamics of race, class and society.
Seizing an opportunity for national attention, the exhibit’s entrance displays the costume worn by Desiree Glapion Rogers, the newly installed White House Social Secretary who ruled the parade as Zulu Queen in 2002 and 2008, and is the daughter of Roy Glapion, Jr. the late president of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, widely recognized as the force behind the resurgence of interest and membership in the club. A video interview featuring Glapion elegantly explains the allure being a part of carnival.
Exciting as the exhibit was, it seemed less a historic explanation of contemporary culture than a tribute to a tradition in peril due to the drain not only of people but of institutional memory that was lost to Katrina.
I struck up a conversation with a local salesman who sounded equally wistful, “Mardi Gras is still fun, but it used to be very different. The whole season used to be a festive time. I might have a brunch at my house and my wife’s sister might have a brunch at her house, and you went from house to house and celebrated all day. People really opened up their homes for everyone who stopped by. Now it’s too much about the parades and the balls.”
Wondering if my sense of something missing was just my own limited perception, I posted a note to my Facebook page asking friends if my ambivalence about Mardi Gras revelry made me less authentically Black. An answer from a friend from Lousiana who was among the displaced summed up the situation, “It’s New Orleans that’s less Black, not you.”
In and Around New Orleans
Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Company, Inc. He writes about politics, culture and technology for EbonyJet.com.
