Nawlins

[Sweder]

I wanted to write something about this great city that has a special place in my heart.
And then along came todays' Guardian, and this piece by Howell Raines, the former editor of the New York Times. It says all I wanted to say.

Thursday September 1, 2005
Guardian

Unlike thousands of American families, my kin and I received at least one precious splash of good news from New Orleans. My daughter-in-law Eva Hughes Raines loaded her three-year-old daughter Sasha and the family pets into an SUV and fled town a full day ahead of the evacuation order. My son Jeffrey and his mates in Galactic, one of the city's better known funk bands, were performing in Seattle, watching from afar as Katrina inundated their homes in the US's most distinctive city. Soon the little family will arrive here in the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania where we will wait, for weeks or
months, to see if their antique neighbourhood of distinctive "shotgun houses" can be made habitable again.

In the personal realm, there is no relief like the relief arising from the safety of loved ones. In the civic realm, there is no communal grief quite like that kind so well known to Londoners and New Yorkers from past disasters, the sorrow of watching as a beloved city is hammered by an unstoppable malice. Millions around the world now know about the inundation of the famous "bowl" formed by the city's levees.

What may need a little explaining is why New Orleans has been for generations of Americans a golden bowl of memories, both sacred and profane.

In colonial times, it was the one American city where Afro-Caribbean and Creole culture enjoyed at least a measure of tolerance under a succession of masters - Spanish, French, British and American. In 1814, it was the site of the United States' most complete victory over the Redcoats, a victory all the sweeter because it was crafted by the raw Celtic cunning of our most quintessentially American president, Andrew Jackson, and the Gallic conniving of his pirate ally, Jean Lafitte. Even the handful of Americans who died at the battle of New Orleans did so in Mardi Gras style, dancing atop the barricades before the last of the British snipers had skulked away.

For millions of Americans who grew up in strait-laced towns, the Big Easy has always been the city to dance, the one Southern place where the Bible Belt came unbuckled. A hundred years ago, the Storyville section was America's best place for the world's oldest profession and the birthplace of America's best contribution to world music, jazz.

Like millions of other young people in the preacher-haunted Southland, I bought my first legal drink in the French Quarter. We went for the booze, and in that world of cobbled streets and hidden gardens, some of us glimpsed the glory and costs of pursuing art or individualism.

This was the place where Thomas Williams of St Louis became "Tennessee", and where that much-ridiculed postal clerk from Oxford, Mississippi made himself into William Faulkner, novelist. This was the place where you could come to find or lose yourself. Across the river in Algiers, William Burroughs shot his wife, and Kerouac and Cassady ate Benzedrine like gumdrops. In the backroom of the Maple Leaf Bar on upper Magazine Street, my classmate Everette Maddox, a poet so precocious he had published in the New Yorker before he left the University of Alabama, succeeded after two decades of steady effort in drinking himself to death. Oh, wondrous city of music that floats from the horn and poems drowned in drink! Oh, cheesy clip-clop metropolis of phony coach-and-fours hauling the drunken Dodge salesmen of Centralia, Illinois, of shaky-handed failed watercolourists hanging unloved pictures on the wrought-iron fence at Jackson Square, of gaunt-eyed superannuated transvestite hookers, of Baptist girls suddenly inspired to show their tits on Chartres Street in return for a string of beads flung by a drunken college boy on the balcony of his daddy's $1,500 suite at the Soniat House - must we lose even these dubious glories of the only American city that's never been psychoanalysed?

I hope not. I am 62. If New Orleans is to be pumped out, its soffits re-replastered, its live oaks replanted before I'm gone, I'll be happily surprised. I'm just glad I saw it, and I'm glad my babies got out alive. For now, we wait and ponder this question. If it's gone or permanently altered, what memorial would be fitting? Surely it would not be some monument of stone, but perhaps a political memorial suitable to the city of Huey P Long and his fictional iteration Willie Stark, or a spiritual remembrance befitting the City That Care Forgot.