New Orleans 9/6/05

by Alan Greenblatt

The approaches to New Orleans were familiar; general aspects were unchanged. When one goes flying through London along a railway propped in the air on tall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms through the open windows. Similarly, in high-river stage, in the New Orleans region, the water is up to the top of the inclosing levee-rim, the flat country behind it lies low – representing the bottom of a dish – and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down upon the houses and into the upper windows. There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.
-- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1896)

The air is warm here in Louisiana all the time, and wet… It is something like Vietnam here. The rice fields and the heat and the way the storms come in.
-- Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992)

“Pieces of the beach goes all the time,” she said, “with the water sucking away at it. And when it comes to a hurricane, big chunks of it goes. All the trees that used to be out here went with one of them, my papa says. And then it wasn’t no time till the sand moved up, right up to the porch.”

She reached out and patted the bleached, sun-split boards, patted them the way she would a dog or a horse.

Inky said, “I sure wouldn’t want to be in this place when a hurricane’s around.”

“I don’t know, me,” she said. “I seen old things not lose a shingle and new things get smashed into pieces and sunk in the bay.”

“I still wouldn’t want to be here.”

Cecile shrugged. “I don’t reckon it matters much what place you in.”

“Hell,” said Inky. “I sure think it does.”
-- Shirley Ann Grau, The Hard Blue Sky (1958)

It is lunch hour on Canal Street… A warm wind springs up from the south piling up the clouds and bearing with it a far-off rumble, the first thunderstorm of the year. The street looks tremendous. People on the far side seem tiny and archaic, dwarfed by the great sky and the winding clouds like pedestrians in old prints. Am I mistaken of has a fog of uneasiness, a thin gas of malaise, settled on the street? The businessmen hurry back to their offices, the shoppers to their cars, the tourists to their hotels. Ah, William Holden, we already need you again. Already the fabric is wearing thin without you.
-- Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)

The very day of his birth there was a terrible storm, one of the worst New Orleans had ever had. Houses were blown down, people and animals were killed and thousands were homeless. The storm broke with great suddenness when I was in the street on my way home. The wind blew so hard that slates were torn off the roof tops and thrown into the streets. I should have taken refuge, for the slates were falling all around me and I might have been killed as a number of people were.
-- Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954)

Homeless people were walking in a steady flow across the southern part of the country, back and forth across the surface of the earth, seaweed on a tide that ebbed and rose according to the seasons, following rumors and hopes.
-- Shirley Ann Grau, Roadwalkers (1994)

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day I know I'm not wrong... this feeling's gettin' stronger
The longer I stay away

Miss them moss covered vines... the tall sugar pines
Where mockingbirds used to sing
And I'd like to see that lazy Mississippi... hurryin' into spring

The moonlight on the bayou...a Creole tune... that fills the air
I dream... about Magnolias in bloom... and I'm wishin' I was there

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
When that's where you left your heart?
-- Eddie DeLange and Louis Alter (1947)

Thirty years later, only the thick walls were standing, with the dull red brick showing here and there through a matted growth of clinging vines. The huge round pillars were intact; so to some extent was the stone flagging of hall and portico. There had been no home so stately along the whole stretch of Cote Joyeuse… The two lived alone in a three-room cabin, almost within the shadow of the ruin. They lived for a dream, for Ma’ame Pelagie’s dream, which was to rebuild the old home.
-- Kate Chopin, Bayou Folk (1894)

“Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
-- Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

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