Welcome to Malone

The crooked canals of Venice and the narrow walkways chasing after them, closed in like a picture frame. Camps’ Bay Beach in Capetown, when the immense magenta dusk opens its mouth to swallow the cobalt colored stones of Table Mountain. The emerald waters of the Bosphorus dissecting Istanbul at dawn, as the lights of the Blue Mosque fade with the morning call to prayer. The fog and wind sweeping over the Bay in San Francisco at noon on an impossibly sunny day in the middle of winter. Or even New York, where I work and live, where nature has been exiled and replaced with jagged skyscrapers rising from the ground like gigantic tombstones - this desert of concrete and iron is also a series of islands dependent on her rivers and harbor.

And then there is New Orleans. My home. New Orleans is nothing without water. New Orleans is water – a city in a swamp where sea is not distinct from land, where more than any other city water defines a way of life. Everywhere you turn there is water. In New Orleans we breathe water. We drink the air.

Anyone who has been to New Orleans in the summer knows well this lesson. On this side of the street, the blinding sun; on the other, a violent brief thundershower hits the cement producing steam that rises to burn the nostrils. When this happens we say in New Orleans that the devil is beating his wife…Everywhere, humidity wraps itself around you like a hot wet towel. But winters are no different: one January while home I watched the rains fall ceaselessly for three days from the inexhaustible sky until the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, soaked like sponges, finally begged for mercy. When the rain stopped, the city was cloaked for another three days in a tragic fog.

The geography of a city shapes the psychology of her people. Lake Pontchartrain lies impassively to the North of New Orleans. On its march to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River slices due east as it approaches the city, juts to the north, then to the south at her western suburbs, forms a perfect crescent around downtown, makes one more bend north before winding its way southeast through the fertile land and waters of Plaquemines Parish and spilling into the Gulf. New Orleans is called the Crescent City because of her relation to the riverbend. More accurately, she is the Cradled City as she rests comfortably in the muscular arm and murky waters of the Mississippi River.

The Lake - a massive muddy puddle 24 miles wide, no deeper at any point that than 15 feet. While connected to Lake Maurepas to the west and Lake Borgne to the east by small tributaries, Lake Pontchartrain is unvarying. Or better, stagnant. Little enters; less exits. Only on the windiest of days do tiny waves lap against the thick black silt that passes for a shore. All other times it is tranquil, motionless and lifeless, its coastline ill-defined.

The River by contrast is ever-changing and dynamic. How could it not be? The Mississippi Valley covers two thirds of the North American continent, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, from New York to Idaho. A valley bigger than Africa’s Nile and India’s Ganges, China’s Yellow and Europe’s Rhine. A River longer than the Congo and the Amazon. At New Orleans, one would think the river would become exhausted after its long journey. On the contrary: within its sharp flawless curves the river’s current is alive, roiling and restless, swirling, chaotic, the undertow sucking everything beneath the surface.

On one side, the natives of the city in sleepy neighborhoods where families live for generations without moving, where children are born and grow up to buy the shotgun house next to their parents, where the dead are buried in the same above ground tomb in which the entire family going back generations rests - where little changes and nothing seems to happen. This Ne

w Orleans is punctuated by perennial questions: Where y’at?” Or “How’s ya momma and dem?” Or “Where’d ya go to high school?” Someone always knows someone who knows someone who went to high school with someone…On the other side, the “visitors” to the city – tourists, convention goers, students, artists, musicians, writers, vagabonds, squatters – all who bring with them their stories, their music, their culture or lack of it, their art, their dereliction…delicate pieces of their lives they bring and deposit during their stay. Departure when it comes means that they take a piece of New Orleans with them. Like the waters of the Mississippi, this river of alluvial human sediment feeds New Orleans just as New Orleans offers back her secrets and her treasures.

And yet, for this reason perhaps, New Orleans is a ball of contradictions. It is a place where Rationality is non-existent, or at least overrated. Things which don’t seem to fit form a perfect union here. Until very recently the local grocery stores called Schwegmann’s (properly pronounced Shwag-u-muns) had bars in them so that the men had something to do while the women were “making groceries.” Until very recently the drinking age in Louisiana was still 18 despite the fact that every other state had raised it to 21, despite threats from the federal government to withhold federal funding for highways. For a while the state – and New Orleans particularly – resisted because of how much “business” would be lost in the Big Easy due to the change. What moneys lost from the federal government, went the argument, could be recouped from maintaining the drinking age at 18. Not that the law mattered anyway: the drinking age in New Orleans was always merely a suggestion.

How else does one describe a city where the “West Bank” of the River is actually further east than the “East Bank”? Where “Downtown” is actually further up river than “Uptown”? How else does one describe a place where drinking and driving are against the law but which has drive-thru daiquiri shops all over the place? At the drive-up window I was told by the server (bartender?) that you can’t get pulled over by the police and ordered to take a breathalyzer test if the straw is not actually in the daiquiri while you drive. Thank the Lord for sensibility in lawmaking.

In the 1980s and 1990s, casino gambling came to New Orleans, but a law stated that no casino could be placed on land. So before the law was changed (and before the latest Louisiana Hayride which eventually led to the Teflon governor Edwin Edwards finally going to jail) the casinos were all placed on riverboats. Riverboat casinos were even placed in the lake. One small problem: the lake was too shallow to allow the riverboats to sail. They might get stuck or hit a gas pipeline lodged on the mucky bottom. The solution? The riverboat had to pretend to sail and patrons had to pretend to be sailing along with it. There were departure and return times posted; in between them one could gamble provided they boarded before the boat “departed.” During this time, however, you could not board the boat though it was sitting right in front of you. I remember once walking up while the boat was “sailing.” The entrance was cordoned off. I asked the attendant if I could board to play some slots. He replied that the boat was out at sea and would return in an hour. When I insisted that the boat was right in front of us and not at “sea,” he looked at me as if I was the one who was crazy.

These and the many other contradictions live side by side in New Orleans. Or rather, they meld together like land and sea, like air and water, like the stagnancy of the lake and the dynamism of the river, like the living and the dead. If everywhere you look there is water, there are also cemeteries, miniature cities all about, cities of the dead, with twisted pathways like the streets of Jerusalem. Fascination with death abounds. New Orleanians know that the necessity of death makes for the possibility of life. We feel this in our bones and express it in all that we do: a dirge becomes a rowdy second line at a funeral - the distinction between mourning death and celebrating life blurred. Brass bands take names like Rebirth and New Birth. Like our neighbors in Latin and South America, New Orleanians celebrate All Saints Day (The Day of the Dead) on November 1^st by visiting loved ones who have passed, bringing fresh flowers and lunching on their graves. This is why, alas, Mardi Gras day always occurs on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday – one last, lengthy, debauched celebration of life before the ultimate story of death and rebirth which hangs over this predominantly Catholic city every spring is observed: the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

New York is the ultimate Cartesian plane of cities. It is rational, logical – a place of the mind. The central nervous system of the United States, if you will. New Orleans is a logistical mess without any rhyme or reason. It is a place of the senses: we feel life before we think about it. The sweat tracing down the neck under the invincible summer sky; the sound of jazz from an open barroom door in the middle of the night; the smell of magnolia trees and a crawfish boil in the gentle light of spring. If New York is the brain, New Orleans is the gut…the heart and soul. I live in New York and am told it is the city that never sleeps. I am from New Orleans and know that she never seems to wake from a certain slight intoxication.

Iberville and Bienville came down the Mississippi and settled along its banks in 1718, claiming a mosquito infested swamp for the French crown. (In the final instance, some Americans will have one more thing to blame the French for: the destruction of New Orleans by Katrina is their fault because they chose this point below sea level to place the city). Not coincidently, the fledgling colony was hit by hurricanes in 1721 and 1722. In the aftermath the colony needed people. So the French King emptied out the jails, insane asylums and prostitution houses, loaded up the ships and sent them over. From its origins, then, Nouvelle Orleans was populated with the derelicts of French society – derelicts and the Ursuline nuns who arrived around the same time... the sacred and the profane side by side. No flight from religious persecution, no austere Puritanism, no City on the Hill speeches on the good ship Arabella by John Winthrop, no Protestant Work Ethic: from its origins, Nouvelle Orleans was governed by Laissez le Bon Temps Roulez and the belief in redemption rather than Early to Bed and Early to Rise and the doctrine of predestination.

After a half century of foundering, the French gave Nouvelle Orleans to the Spanish in 1763 – partly because it was rather useless and partly to repay the Spanish for its assistance in the failed French and Indian War against Great Britain. The Spanish ran the city for nearly forty years, much to the dismay of the French Creoles already here. At one point they tried to lynch the Spanish governor. But in fact, the city prospered modestly under Spanish rule. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Spanish sold New Orleans back to the French. When Napolean needed funds for his foreign wars, he sold the city along with the entire Louisiana territory to Thomas Jefferson in 1803. Now, New Orleanians were Americans – which of course made neither the French nor the Spanish Creoles happy.

By the start of the nineteenth century, the waters of New Orleans would lead her to become a strategically important city – both militarily and economically. It is no coincidence that in both the War of 1812 and the Civil War New Orleans would be the site of some of their first and most important battles. Throughout the nineteenth century New Orleans was the second most vital port city in the country. Only New York City was more important. Cargo of all kinds departed and arrived in both places, including of course human cargo. The story of Ellis Island has been told, but comparatively little has been made of those European immigrants that entered the United States through New Orleans. It was here that my own family arrived from Sicily in the late nineteenth century. Some Sicilians came to New Orleans rather than New York because of the comparable climate, the fishing industry and the desire to stay away from the “Italians” who immigrated to New York. By the 1890s, the French Quarter would come to be called Little Palermo by native New Orleanians. Throughout the nineteenth century, New Orleans was one of the wealthiest cities in the United States.

It would not last. In the nineteenth century New Orleans tried her hand at material success and found she could not hold on to it. The great depression of 1873 began an economic decline that continued throughout the twentieth century, and which one could argue lasts until today. While her waters and her ports have remained important, New Orleans has been surpassed by other southern cities. Ports in Miami, Mobile, and Galveston have all come to rival New Orleans. Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Charlotte have become the financial centers of the “New South.” New Orleans does not have one Fortune 500 company headquartered here. One of its biggest companies, Freeport McMoran, has been looking for an excuse to leave and may have found it in the wake of Katrina. The Saints owner Tom Benson has threatened to pull the team out for years if the city does not build him a new stadium. Perhaps that time has come now with a season away from the Superdome. But who could bear to watch sports in that arena after what we witnessed in the days following Katrina? Before Katrina wiped them out, Gulfport and Biloxi had already surpassed New Orleans in the casino industry.

Despite her strategic location and her wealth of resources, there is grinding poverty in New Orleans. Despite her racial and ethnic diversity unlike any other southern city, there is still discrimination in New Orleans. These sins are no doubt self-inflicted, born of mismanagement, maliciousness, and a misuse of her means over the past century and more. Katrina’s wind and rains merely exposed these ugly realities to the rest of the world. But talk of “refugees” – the mostly poor, predominantly black New Orleanians left to wilt and die in the Louisiana sun for days before help finally arrived - fleeing their homes with nothing but the clothes on their back did not help the matter. It also exposed a suppressed suspicion in the country that somehow New Orleans was closer to the Third World than the First World.

That conversation is worth having in the coming months and years. Tourists come to New Orleans but are told not to venture too far from the French Quarter or the Garden District. Hotel operators, restaurant owners, and other employers in the tourist industry charge First World prices for their services but rarely pay more than the minimum wage with no benefits to their employees. The result is an exacerbation of an already dangerous wealth disparity. Nearly thirty percent of New Orleans’ citizens live below the poverty line – twice the national average. She is a city with poor social services, poor educational system, poor public transportation system, lower life expectancies, and high infant mortality rates.

How does one express it without succumbing to romanticizing platitudes about the poor or sanguine denials about racism? If New Orleans lacks material wealth, it possesses a cultural richness that defies description. A city founded by the French, turned over to the Spanish, and sold to the Americans, nonetheless owes as much of her cultural wealth to African slaves as it does to European colonists. In the end, perhaps this is why the term “refugee” was a useful instruction, if not entirely appropriate: New Orleans is in fact closer to the Third World than the First World, closer to Latin America and Africa than North America and Europe. But not by virtue of its poverty – or rather, not only by virtue of its poverty. Musicians, writers, artists, and chefs talk lovingly of the city as the Northern most point of the Caribbean, as the last pearl in the long gorgeous necklace forming the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. In many ways, New Orleans shares more in common with Port au Prince than with Paris, more with Cuba than with Spain.

My grandfather was a jazz trumpeter in New Orleans in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. He told me a story once which I did not believe at first: in 1959 after Fidel Castro seized power, he paid a visit to the United States. He met with President Eisenhower in Washington and asked for U.S. aid. Eisenhower declined and sent Castro home to Cuba empty handed. On his way back, Castro stopped in New Orleans, picked up my grandfather’s band and other New Orleans musicians, put them on the plane, and took them to Havana with him. For three days, my grandfather says he and his band rode behind Castro on the back of a flatbed truck playing what he calls the “cha cha cha” as the people of Havana danced in the streets.

Poverty abounds in New Orleans. But then again, I didn’t know what real poverty and ugliness were until I left home as a young man and saw the vapid suburbs and strip malls of America. I could not believe that Mardi Gras and Jazzfest didn’t exist everywhere. Or that a chef in the icy winter of Boston could actually try to pass a bowl of spicy tomato soup off as gumbo and then tell me he worked in New Orleans for years with Chef Paul Prudhomme. Maybe I didn’t want to believe that these things didn’t exist elsewhere…and still don’t.

In the streets of New Orleans during one Mardi Gras, I learned a simple lesson which I’ve kept with me all these years and was reminded of in the days after Katrina: material poverty in New Orleans cannot conquer an uncontrollable appetite for life in her people. As far as I can see, poverty in New Orleans never led anyone here to the truest cancers of all societies – envy and resentment. Why would it when everything around you leads you to celebrate what you have rather than begrudge what you don’t? When everything you want is right there before you? Go to a crawfish boil at a friend’s house on a beautiful spring Saturday, take in its abundance and you’ll know what I am trying to express. Walk the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras and revel in the joy – or sit underneath the Jazz Tent at the Fairgrounds during JazzFest. There, or wherever you are, just simply listen to the music that oozes from the city’s musicians like sweat and you will notice that it lacks one thing you find in heaps elsewhere in this world: anger. Yes, the music tells of hard times, of discrimination, of poverty. But anger? No. It expresses and encourages a freedom of the heart, a graceful abandon, and a detachment from human concerns which save her people from the resentment and anger that debilitates other places and other peoples. Which is to say, it gives the people of New Orleans something all the material riches in the world cannot buy: a certain nobility.

But perhaps one reads these lines and says I am fooling myself by merely passing the poor off as happy and the rich off as the unfortunate ones. This may be the case. But to feel an a attachment to a certain place, one’s love for a certain group of people, to know your heart is at peace in a spiritual home – for me it is enough. We always find our home at the moment of losing it. Which is what all New Orleanians, no matter where they live, have felt in the wake of Katrina. I am not an aristocrat but would like to believe I share in a piece of that nobility that lies between the Lake and the River. The same nobility worn on the faces of the thousands at the Superdome and Convention Center, those walking through water up to their chins to nowhere and those left to melt in the Louisiana sun on the Causeway overpass. Though I may not know them, come from the same neighborhoods, the same ethnic background or social class, my reply is simply: here are my people and my ancestry, here is what through them links me to everything I know in this world to be good and innocent. I’ll walk with thee through your toil and snares, and I with thee your burden share.

But some things cannot be revealed. One has to live it. I grew up close to the Lake in New Orleans and spent my childhood summers wading in its shallow waters with a fishing pole, a casting net, and a crab trap that had a chicken bone tied to it for bait. Just blocks from where the same Lake burst through the levees to blur the lines between land and sea, air and water, the living and the dead. These days I find myself spending time closer to the River upon my returns home. On one lazy, unbearably hot and humid Saturday this summer I sat on the levee overlooking the murky Mississippi. The sun intoxicated and mesmerized me for an incalculable moment as a brisk wind swept across my face like a blow-dryer, sending the caramel colored water of the River lapping against the rocky base of the levee. In the distance, a dark brown piece of driftwood whirled in the water’s crosscurrent; the tanker You Yi crawled lazily down river toward some unknown destination as the Natchez Riverboat slept in port. The Queen Mary Riverboat made her turn at the mighty Crescent, hugging the shore with its paddlewheel kicking up the water like hot popcorn. The sky darkened and turned a bruised, metallic blue; a thundershower was on its way to shed its tears and provide solace from the arrogant New Orleans summer sun.

Just then a group of German tourists led by a guide looked out across the River to Algiers Point as she describes in detail where Orleans Parish ends and where Jefferson Parish begins. Ten yards away three young New Orleans youths ask another perennial question of the tourists: “Say bra, for $10 I can tell ya where ya got ‘dem shoes…come on $10!” A German male smiles uncomfortably and then takes the bait. “Ya got ‘dem on da streets of N’Awlins! Nah, where’s ma money?” A homeless man on the next bench over laughs a hearty laugh and says, “Dat’s da oldest trick in da book!”