Going South, Part III: I Wish I Was in New Orleans

 

Friday 24 June 2022, Birmingham to New Orleans

Like Montgomery, downtown Birmingham is marked by monuments, signposts, murals and sculptures commemorating the Civil Rights movement, but despite the influx of tourism that comes with these markers, the economic legacy of slavery and its engrained inequalities are still evident. Beautiful museums sit incongruously next to shuttered shops, derelict buildings, fast food joints and dysfunctional public services. There is perhaps a question to ask as to what role memorialising the civil rights movement has on poverty and racism in the USA today. More on this when we meet Mz Jackie of Memphis in a few days’ time. 

 

On the (correct) assumption that Amtrak would be late again (one hour), I decided I had time to try the local speciality: boiled peanuts in cajun spices (other flavours are available). My choice may also have been driven by sympathy for the people making a living standing over steaming industrial vats of boiling peanuts while the mid-day heat melted my rubber soled sandals and roasted a banana left in the car (which was still delicious).

At the station I join the queue on the platform and waited for the Crescent to arrive, chatting to Herbert next to me in line, an elderly gentleman who recalled joining Birmingham’s children’s marches in the 1960s. As the train pulled in a conductor called for groups to board first; Amtrak, in the 21st century, doesn’t have a seat reservation system so they have to shuffle people around manually. Herbert and his wife incorporate two young black women and me into their family so we could board together. The guard looked sceptical, as well she might, but lets us go ahead.

I bought a lot of work to do on the train journeys but it’s not getting done. There is a big window to look out of and an ever-changing landscape; I fear I might miss something if I look away. It’s the original FOMO. I know I sound old but people have lost the art of staring out of windows. We now look at screens or feel compelled to facetime someone rather than manage the discomfort of having to amuse ourselves with our thoughts. I catch a few podcasts, including The Grey Area's ‘The rise and fall of America’s monuments’ which seems a fitting programme to listen to while travelling through the South. Since the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020, some 200 statues connected to the slave trade and the Southern Confederacy have been removed, with most just put in storage. There is uncertainty about what should stay and what should go, which effigies should be destroyed completely or just moved out of sight.

But the puzzlement in the presenter’s question of why people might object to the removal of statues of slavers and confederate soldiers (and the Bienville monument in NOLA, pictured, really shouldn't last much longer) fails to recognise the emotional responses that underpin change. There is power in the hands of architects and sculptors and dead Generals astride horses; there is power in feelings of shame and humiliation that we will do much to avoid; and there is fear of what power will be lost if things disappear. 

 

As a metaphor for the USA today and the debate surrounding its past, the Crescent moves at the speed of the 19th century through forests of thin trees, patches of swamp and rice paddies. We must bow down before the heat of the day in case the tracks have buckled. We must bow down before freight. 

 

 

Pulling into a siding to wait, I lose track of time: no-one knows how far away the freight is or how long we will be here. No radios or mobiles or timetables can apparently help. One carriage is freezing, another is roasting. The conductor occasionally apologises over the tannoy and free water and snacks are passed around. At three hours late the conductor walks through to personally apologise, mentioning the obvious, that America is a ‘poor country in many ways’. I regale passengers with tales of a magical place called Europe where trains are plentiful and fast and cheap (ish; I leave the UK out of the fantasy). To put it in context, it’s just 314.3 miles by train from Birmingham to NOLA, a journey that took 12 hours. It’s 355 miles from Paris to Toulouse, a journey that takes just under 5 hours on a TGV. 

We stutter our way South, finally reversing into New Orleans at 2am, five hours late. I ask for a compensation form and Amtrak customer services laughs. Luckily my host is a night owl so was awake to let me in. He is also all biceps and chiselled torso, wandering into his kitchen naked except for a hastily wrapped scarf acting as a flimsy loin cloth … ah the joys of AirBnB.

New Orleans (NOLA), Saturday, 25th June, 2022

 

NOLA is the epitome of ‘so much to do, so little time’, with activities generally divided into eating, looking at stuff, and music. I have an ever-growing list of recommendations but as always the best option on the first day in a new city is just to wander. Admittedly it would have been better to check the weather before making this plan, as I soon realise on stepping out from my air conditioned apartment. It is mercilessly hot; 36 degrees on the gauge but taking into account the wet bulb temperature, the Gulf’s reverse equivalent to New York City’s winter wind chill, it’s feeling about 45. Welcome to climate change. Kim Stanley Robinson’s opening tragedy in The Ministry for the Future, where millions die in a heat wave because people can’t sweat enough to cool down, doesn’t seem that far away.

I blame the creeping lethargy for the loss of my navigational skills (always embarrassing when a geographer gets lost). After several diversions in the wrong direction, I begin to realise I’m going to need a paper map: the diminished detail of a phone sized screen is no match for a city bent along a very large river. 

Starting at the French Quarter, it is as the postcards depict: all low rise colonial architecture, boujie shops, restaurants and bars, mule drawn carriage tours, interspersed with tat and massage salons. I find a yarn shop … yes, it’s 45 degrees in the shade but I buy yarn. There are sheep in Louisiana apparently, just not on the coast.

In the French Market, lazy ceiling fans and jugs of iced tea keep the tourists cool, as cafés and stalls offer jazz and dixie classics, oysters and ‘gator burgers, cocktails and mouffelleta. 

Outside the French Quarter, there is the gentrifying neighbourhood of Bywater, with craft breweries and cafes tucked away between pastel-coloured wooden houses in tree lined streets. In the time honoured tradition of deindustrialisation, warehouses have been converted into artist studios, and their walls are now canvases for riotous murals. The whimsical JamNOLA is designed purely for Instagram; fun but not worth the $34 plus tips.

My strategy of walking 20 minutes then stopping at the nearest cafe/bar for liquid may have underestimated the need for water: beer and iced tea are no substitute. As the music started to wind up in the French Quarter, the rest of me started to wind down. The lack of sleep, and excess of heat, alcohol and luminescent pink created a slightly hallucinogenic effect not helped by night tours appearing on each block touting vampires and other hauntings. 

 

The scourge of Amsterdam-style ‘drink while cycling’ trolley cars and various other moving parties needed to be sidestepped. The final convulsion before complete bodily shut down was discovering that Bourbon Street, a place held in high reverence in my imagination, is in fact a study in urban ruin. The jazz and blues has dissolved into R&B sound systems and MCs, each trying to out-compete each other to attract roving hens’ parties and frat boys. I fell into a taxi heading for bed at 8pm.

Sunday-Monday, 26-27th June 2022

Recovered, and prepared for the heat, Day 2 starts, as all days really should, with beignets and iced coffee at Verte Marte, a hole-in-the-wall bodega famous for its takeout. There’s a quietness in the streets this early (9am ish). No crowds, no competing sound systems; just a few morning walking tours and the locals going about their business unimpeded by the hoards. I find a stoop and slowly cover myself with icing sugar. Cookery school adds to the food stains on my t-shirt so some fresh air and lazing about in the bayou seemed like a good idea for the afternoon. 

Honey Island swamp is enclosed by the arms of the Pearl River, and our captain, Ally, couldn’t be more of a cajun stereotype if he tried. Growing up hunting and fishing in the bayou, he regales us with exploits including tales of the Honey Island Swamp Creature (in cajun, the rougarou, or sasquatch), and catching an alligator with his cousin ‘by mistake’ and having to shoot it, putting six holes in their boat. He was 12. I ask the obvious question: ‘you had a gun at 12?’ Of course. When having to explain to their parents why they'd put six holes in a boat, it was their mum they most feared. The power of the matriarch is embedded in the Cajun greeting, regularly shouted across the river at other boat crews: ‘How’s your mum, and them’ (‘them’ being everyone else in the family of lesser importance than your mum).

Ally takes us into the nooks and crannies of the bayou, finding the alligators that we all want to see, who obligingly pop up in expectation of snacks and then hang around a bit to stare and generally freak us out with their jurassic appearance in a world where humans like to think we're the apex predators. 

 

Other swamp dwellers make cameo appearances: a raccoon family among the tangled roots of trees have learned that if they dip the crocodile pellets in water to soften them then they can eat them too, assuming they stay out of the way of the alligators. Kevin, the wild boar, keeps his distance. Herons stand stock still, ankle deep, waiting for lunch to swim by. ‘I wiiish I could fiiish as good as those birrrds’, says Ally. I wish I could bottle his accent, with its elongated vowels and rolling ‘r’s, and take it home. We pass the occasional cabin that might feature in Deliverance (including one resident bravely checking his anchor submerged in the same space as the alligators) but in signs of swamp gentrification there are now also some very boujie summer homes on the water.

 

If lazing about in the swamp generates a hazy slowing down, cruising the Mississippi has the opposite effect. This working river is all flow, industry, grinding metal and alteration. Paddle steamers still take tourists on afternoon, day or overnight trips and I sign up for the two hour history tour on the Creole Queen to the site of the Battle of Chalomet (better known as the Battle of New Orleans between British and American forces). It’s a proper paddle boat, no propellers the captain reassures the several hundred passengers who’ve paid for authenticity.

At this point we weren’t paying much attention to the tannoy as we discovered that our tickets, clearly stamped ‘No Lunch’, are being accepted at the buffet. I load up on ‘a bit of everything’ (gumbo, jambalaya, salad, more bread pudding) and find a window seat while lawyer, turned historian, Charlie Cheeseman, in a bass voice to die for, gives an informative and hilarious history of the settlement, the attempt by the British to reclaim NOLA and their eventual defeat. A Johnny Cash song dedicated to the battle is played and disturbingly I realise I know it. Somehow obscure US pop culture made it onto a very rural dairy farm in NSW and infiltrated my childhood playlist: ‘we fired once more and they began to running down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico’). The boat docks at a pier downstream and we can stretch our legs at the very non-descript battle site: a big open field, the remains of a defensive dyke, a reconstructed plantation house that has nothing to do with the battle, and large trees hung with Spanish moss.

 

The 40 minute cruise back included Charlie’s impassioned retelling of what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005), and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) do not come out of it well. The French Quarter is the highest ground and damaged the least, while to its east and west (from Esplanade and Canal streets) is reclaimed land below sea level. During the flooding many people drowned in their attics, unable to cut themselves out (it is emergency procedure in Louisiana now to keep an axe in the attic). For some in the city, FEMA's decisions, or lack of them, rank up there with desertion or dereliction of duty at least. 

 

NOLA is still marked by the tragedy even 17 years later. The expressway into and out of the old city passes the Superdome: an edifice to concrete modernity and human misery etched into the mind’s eye of anyone old enough to remember the aftermath. The city hospital that couldn't be fully evacuated is still mostly derelict, with a section only recently rebuilt by a university. The remains of the old bridge over Lake Pontchartrain has been left as a memorial. The last building with shreds of the blue FEMA tarp, a school still unrepaired, is visible from the boat. NOLA’s new levees look no more than a few metres high but are now reinforced with concrete cores and withstood Hurricane Ida in 2021, which is just as well as locals mutter concern in every bar room conversation that the weather and the ocean is already so hot that a bad hurricane season is expected.

One advantage of the flat landscape means that walking and cycling is a good way to get around NOLA’s various quarters, despite the heat. I choose a bike tour of the famous above ground cemeteries and the Garden District on a slightly cooler day with some cloud cover and the cycling generating a nice breeze. The cemeteries are practical: no one wants to see corpses floating through their streets when it floods. Vaults keep the bodies where they are supposed to be and often include a neat stacking system: a fresh body gets the top shelf and the previous occupant, now nicely decomposed after a year and a day, gets moved to the bottom.

 

The Garden District is southern ostentation at its best. The genteel streets are quiet and tree lined while the houses, previously occupied by plantation and slave owners, are copious Italianate and neo-classical mansions. The tour includes the obligatory celebrity spotting with big ups to those that contribute to the community (well done Sandra Bullock and John Goodman) and not a lot of love for Nicholas Cage who wants to be buried in the city but couldn’t pay the plot fees. After a couple of hours the midday heat kicks in again so it’s onto the Trolley car (the oldest continuously operating trolley in the world) and down the very boujie St Charles Avenue. For only $1.25 it’s a bargain although there’s only a handful of lines.

 

While there is plenty to keep the visitor active in the day it’s really the music and night life that draws the crowds. While the Bayou created Cajun Zydaco, with its washboard and off beat two step, NOLA created Creole 'second line', the jazz beat that marks out the sound of Frenchmen Street (where the real music now happens). The city is a titanic improv session, as musicians wander in and out of sets, joining bands for a number or two and then moving on. Performers are so laid back they are almost sliding out of their chairs, and so practiced that while one is having a solo other band members can step outside for a cigarette and collect tips … they know how much time they’ve got till they need to be back on stage. There is never a cover charge but the rules are generally one drink per set and the band plays for tips so be decent about it. 

Never have I felt so comfortable going out on my own into the wee hours. I park myself on various bar stools with assorted cocktails. I graze along Royal, Frenchmen, and Decatur streets to Envie Coffee House in the early hours. I sit outside and meet Desmond, an artist, at the next table. Sadly my taxi comes and I am now forever left wondering what if I’d just cancelled the car and spent an evening chatting with Desmond. NOLA has that effect. There’s no hassle: chat, don’t chat. It really is the Big Easy. Do your own thing, don’t bother anyone else, enjoy. As my driver, Gail, said the next morning, everything is laid back in NOLA: ‘we walk slow, we talk slow, everyone here has some creativity’.

Tuesday 28 June 2022

 

Food is NOLA’s other big attraction. In the space of three days I tried everything from ‘hole in the wall’ to the uber cool Bacchanal, a European inspired outdoor restaurant where you pick your own assiette of posh cheese and/or meat, to which they add an extraordinary amount of trimmings (crudites, bread, olives, chutneys). With just one morning to go I still have several items on my list of things to try. Cafe du Monde’s production line of beignets is more impressive than the actual product, churned out in their thousands and thrown into a paper bag, accompanied by a paper cup of iced latte. I figure the ten minute walk to Cafe Maspero is not really enough to justify a bowl of crawfish etouffe but it’s a NOLA specialty so has to be tried.

Then the stroll to Mothers is in the same direction as the railway station so I queue with the locals for PoBoy with grilled gulf shrimp to eat on the train, picking up their famous Debris au Jus (yep, all the meaty bits that fall in the pan from the slicing of roast beef for PoBoys) and bread pudding (third variation with brandy sauce) to ensure all food groups are catered for. Hands down one of the best meals you can have if you're flexitarian.

I roll into the station at the same time as The City of New Orleans: a giant of a train, double decker but with a dainty little compartment below the main seating area for women to powder our noses. There is an observation car on this line, one of the reasons that many people tell me they choose AmTrak despite its many deficiencies. Windows extend up into the ceiling allowing the landscape in, along with America’s underclass and poverty that should not exist in a country this wealthy: derelict terraces, decrepit industry, twisted and tamped metal, tyres and industrial waste on the outskirts and in the inner cities hurried through.

An Amtrak train crashed in Missouri the previous night killing three (two on board, one in the dump truck it hit) so I was not feeling totally secure, but at least we left NOLA on time. But the optimism for a scheduled arrival soon dissipated as we ground down to the speed curfew during the heat of the day and shunted into a siding to allow a train to pass. There’s no WiFi. According to the conductor: ‘The broadband in this region is terrible’ so Amtrak stopped paying for it. Geographic inquality between the South and the North made manifest in infrastructure disparity.

We skirt Lake Pontchartrain, its other side unseen, then chug slowly through bayou. The earth gradually becomes more solid, the trees bigger, the sky full of threatening rain, and finally we roll into Memphis, Tennessee, an hour late. Just after midnight my hotel is looking scarily locked up until the receptionist eventually appears and lets me in.