One sultry night not long ago, a middle-aged professional man sat at the Cafe du Monde at 4 in the morning, recovering from a rollicking night on the town. He was medicating himself with that popular local antidote to New Orleans excess, beignets and chicory coffee. ”New Orleans,” he proclaimed, wiping powdered sugar from his chin, ”makes you do things you wouldn`t do anywhere else in America.”
Anybody who spends time in New Orleans is apt to reach the same conclusion, and the reason is simple. Culturally and geographically, New Orleans is only marginally American.
Sure, America is pressing in on the place as surely as the humidity presses in on it in August. T-shirt shops have infested Bourbon Street. In the past 10 years, the number of tourists tripled. In the past 20, the number of permanent residents in the French Quarter fell by half. Conventioneers from Cleveland and Chicago throng the Rouse Co.`s relentlessly cheerful Riverwalk shopping mall on the Mississippi River, march down to the paddlewheelers for a quickie cruise, buy boxes of beignet mix they`ll never open and complain when the weather or the jambalaya`s too hot.
But as close as New Orleans comes to forsaking its foreign flavor by exploiting it in the name of economic development, it remains one of the most exotic cities around.
The City That Care Forgot lies 5 feet below sea level, down in the soggy reaches of the continent`s Southern rim where the Mississippi River rolls into the Gulf of Mexico. It is a civilization risen from the primoridial muck and murk of swamps and bayous, one that prospered despite floods, fevers, mosquitoes, hurricanes and a kind of joyous political corruption that Chicagoans could admire.
From the start, New Orleans was a settlement of sin, sophistication and cynicism, a city that mixed Parisian gaiety with Mediterranean languor and moved to an African beat. The French wrested it away from the Choctaws, handed it over to the Spanish, took it back and finally, in 1803, sold it as part of the Louisiana Purchase to the United States for 4 cents an acre. It drew more foreign immigrants-French, Spanish, Sicilians, Irish, Germans, Africans, Caribbeans-than any other part of the South. The result is a place that, even today, looks, sounds and feels like no place else in the country.
Wander around the French Quarter, also known as the Vieux Carre, and as long as you steer clear of the T-shirt shops and ”Girls! Girls! Girls!”
signs on Bourbon Street, you can convince yourself that you`re continents away, on Paris` Left Bank or in Rio or Barcelona. Vendors at the French Market-black, white, Vietnamese, Arab-hawk potatoes and pecans, handbags and jewelry, fresh shrimp and smoked alligator. All over town, the air seems permanently tinged with coffee, gardenias and decay.
Even the waiters in New Orleans move with a foreign flair. At restaurants such as Mr. B`s Bistro, they whisk around, elegant in black coats and starched white shirts, swift and deft as the servers in Parisian cafes, only a lot less surly.
The streets of the Vieux Carre are narrow, the buildings low and old. Hidden behind the facades, with their louvred doors and wrought-iron balcony rails, are flagstone patios shaded by palms and plantain trees. Though the street names are predominantly French (Bienville, Iberville, Chartres), the architecture is predominantly Spanish, the result of a fire that destroyed much of the Quarter during Spanish rule, allowing the Spaniards to rebuild according to their taste.
Much of New Orleans feels foreign outside the French Quarter as well. Along St. Charles Avenue, as well as on the smaller streets of Uptown and the Garden District, survive reminders of another foreign country, the antebellum South. Million-dollar mansions (which would be multi-million-dollar mansions in any city without such a depressed economy) stand as tribute to an aristocratic South that has disappeared in almost every other part of the South.
New Orleanians don`t even speak like other Americans, not even like other Southerners. Their accent is sort of a Brooklyn drawl with a French twist. Their vocabulary, too, is peculiar to the place. They talk of beignets, gris- gris and neutral grounds. In other words, French doughnuts, voodoo charms and street medians.
Religion also distinguishes New Orleans from other American cities. Here, surrounded by the Protestant Bible Belt, lies one of the most Catholic cities in the nation, though New Orleans Catholicism isn`t always the kind that makes a pope proud. This is merry, lazy, carnal Catholicism with some voodoo thrown in, Catholicism that, as much as anything, is an excuse for the bawdy annual party called Mardi Gras. It is in the name of religion, too, that many New Orleanians abandon work every year on All Saints Day, pack picnics and head for the city`s above-ground cemeteries to commune with their ancestors.
Just as New Orleans` architecture is a melding of styles, so are its music and food. It has a native cuisine developed by black cooks working in the culinary tradition brought over by the Creoles, the original French settlers. It has a musical sound that grew from European classical music, European brass bands, West Indian tribal dances and African rhythms.
Critics, of course, complain that music isn`t what it used to be in the birthplace of jazz, home to such greats as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis. It`s true that some French Quarter establishments that once pulsed with live local music now screech taped rock `n` roll. But music remains an important part of the city`s life.
Every year the city sponsors a Jazz and Heritage Festival. Veteran New Orleans jazz musicians still play nightly at Preservation Hall. Clubs such as Tipitina`s and Snug Harbor are among the best places anywhere to hear popular music of all kinds. When Dutch Morial, the city`s first black mayor, died last December, the town gave him a traditional jazz send-off, with hundreds of mourners clapping and singing through the streets, led by the Olympia Brass Band and members of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the city`s original all-black Mardi Gras club.
The music, the food, the speech, the architecture, the legends-all those things make New Orleans feel foreign, but there is something else, too, a matter of spirit, of soul. It feels wild, even when it isn`t. It feels indolent, even when it isn`t. It makes us ordinary Americans feel that in New Orleans, anything could happen.
