New Orleans: on the Delta, in the Mind

By Crispin Sartwell

 

The truth about New Orleans as an American city is equivocal, double, always dual.

    We all acknowledge the uniqueness of New Orleans, its centrality to our history or even to the idea of America.

     But we should also acknowledge its marginality. A traditionally Catholic and voodoo city in a nation founded by puritans. A French city in a nation founded by Englishmen. A mulatto city in a nation that made miscegenation a crime. A Caribbean city somewhere south of Peoria.

     New Orleans is a city associated with joy: with the origin of ragtime, jazz, and the blues, which eventually changed all the world's music; with Mardi Gras, the greatest American party. When people around the country think about New Orleans, they think about a place to go to celebrate.

      But they also think about sin. New Orleans is built on alcohol and drug consumption, gambling, strippers, prostitution, girls gone wild; Jimmy Swaggart's adulteries, but also his sobbing recantations.

    Celebration is an affirmation of life, and I think this has never been more the case than in the Mardi Gras just past. Outside the quarter, where whoever had managed to return to their city was parading, the feeling was gentle; we were partying together and taking care of each other, still trying to rescue one another.

    But celebration and sin are the same. New Orleans always retains the seediness of degradation, the desperation of addiction and disease, the feeling in the French quarter or in your head the morning after.

     There was an element of desperation in this year's Mardi Gras as well, as if people were trying to reimburse themselves for their suffering, and people who were already drinking way too much managed to drink even more.

    A writer I know has said that New Orleans is where she's forgotten the best moments of her life. But forgetting must always make you wonder whether regret is in order.

     There is no more important testimony to the diversity of American people and culture and place than New Orleans. It challenges any simple story of America, or any simple characterization of her people. It is an African city, a French Canadian city, a gay city.

    But it is also an emblem of the problems of urban America: grinding poverty, miles of bleak housing projects, chronic joblessness and homelessness, drug violence, de facto segregation, corrupt politics.

     What happens now in New Orleans depends on FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the mayor, the insurance companies, and on literally a million personal decisions; to come back or not to leave; to rebuild or start again.

     But what New Orleans will be hereafter will be a product of the American psyche as well as of the state of the levees, an externalization of our ambivalences: skeletons and flesh, affirmation and destruction, love and loathing, Saturday night and Sunday morning, zombies and archbishops, fantasies and nightmares.

    And finally, what New Orleans means is that our fantasies and our nightmares are the same.