New Orleans

We rumbled along a four-lane highway, slow enough that I could almost count the blades of grass sticking out from the dark, muddy bank to our right. Behind it lay an endless sea of single-storey wooden houses propped up on short stilts, the only form of flood insurance affordable to America’s poor in a city that sits almost entirely below sea level. It was an unbroken expanse of rickety shanties honeycombed with cracked asphalt lanes and short-cropped grass, sprawled under a tangled spiderweb of power cables trailing loosely through the air.

“Not what you was expecting, huh?”

I looked over at him, which wasn’t hard because I was already looking over his shoulder and out the window behind him. We were sitting facing each other, on opposite sides of the aisle in a bus that remained curiously empty even though it stopped every two blocks on its way downtown. He was black, mid-fifties maybe. White stubble, dark blue baseball cap with some kind of logo on the front.

“I guess not.”

“Not like what you see in all them magazines. Right now, we uptown.”

“This the bad part of New Orleans?”

“Everywhere’s the bad part of New Orleans, man. It’s a struggle out here. Gangs, drugs, pros-ti-too-tion, all ‘a that. But out here in the wards, there’s mostly good people, people doin’ what they gotta do to pay their bills on time. And when they done with that, then they be makin’ music.”

The driver pulled into another stop, and we added another two passengers to our manifesto. A cab would’ve been quicker, but I suppose chief among the perks of unemployment is that you’re never really in a rush to get anywhere. I’d picked a seat about two thirds of the way down, putting me near the rear side door for a quick exit in case a melodramatic character of some sort got onboard, as experience suggested was often the case across inner city America.

“You been living here a while?”

“Only for sixty-two years. I know whatcha thinkin’, that I don’t look sixty-two, that’s cause I’m sixty-four. We was up in Lafayette for a couple years after the flood. Don’t matter that we boarded up our windows like they told us to, water came by and picked up our whole house clean off the ground.”

New Orleans was built on a swamp, where the Mississippi meets the ocean carrying a slurry of rainwater and runoff funnelled in from across forty percent of continental United States, an area the size of India. America’s drainpipe hits the Gulf of Mexico with such force that its dark plume is continuously visible from outer space. And so New Orleans wages an eternal, existential and losing battle against the water, and now and then nature wins.

When Katrina hit in 2005 and the levees failed, eighty percent of the city fell underwater, and some parts stayed that way for over a month. Almost its entire population was forcibly evacuated, although evicted might be the better word, because they weren’t given anywhere else to go. By the end of it, one in five New Orleanians had left the city, never to return.

“That’s the only time,” he said quietly. “That I didn’t hear the music no more.”

The bus pulled over on Tulane, right before the road threaded its way through a set of concrete pillars under a brutalist, eight-lane elevated highway that could’ve been anywhere in the United States. We both stood up.

“This city, ya can’t get it nowhere else. See you smilin’? We friendly. Take it easy, mah man.”

I slung my backpack and watched him disappear into the growing crowd of pedestrians, each bearing the distinctly forlorn expression universal to rush-hour commuters desperate to get home. The mythical Crescent City seemed, thus far, to be an agglomeration of normal people with normal problems trying to make their way through a complicated world.

Still, I had touched down in the home of Mardis Gras and jambalaya, the birthplace of Louis Armstrong and also The Dixie Cups, who rode high for years after knocking the Beatles off the charts in 1964 with Chapel of Love until the pop-girl trio were themselves rendered homeless by Katrina. Behind the roaring scene of a bustling city whose existence pre-dates the United States by a good fifty years lies an ugly side of history — a century and a half of slavery, followed by another century of forced segregation under the apartheid Jim Crow laws.

Civil rights were finally enshrined in law by the 60s, but centuries of poverty and oppression don’t get undone with the stroke of a pen. Besides, what the law says and what people do don’t always marry up — as recently as 1989, the year of my birth, a young David Duke went straight from the Ku Klux Klan into public office as an elected Republican candidate in the Louisiana House of Representatives.

Today if you’re an African American man in New Orleans, you’re more likely to be murdered than to die of heart disease.

++++

The August Louisiana air was heavy with humidity, blanketing me with a dewy warmth even as I watched the sun dip below the horizon. Even as a child of the tropics you never really get used to this kind of heat.

Bourbon Street was starting to pick up. Well, pick up is an overstatement, because Bourbon Street never really quietens down. Seventeen million tourists, about the population of the Netherlands, walk down this street every year. Muscled frat bros rub shoulders with bearded hipsters and small-town soccer moms at all hours of the day, all vying for a slice of the free-flowing booze and escapism that New Orleans has always been famous for.

It’s actually not that debaucherous. The city’s party-town reputation only becomes pronounced when held against America’s small-c conservative society, which bizarrely slapped The Kings Speech with an R-rating for use of the word “fuck”, all the while letting thirteen-year-olds watch hapless victims get gruesomely eaten alive in The Mummy. It is a cultural hangover that dates back to waves of ultra-religious Puritans crossing the Atlantic in the 1600s, after getting booted out of England for their excessive zeal.

When Jefferson purchased French Louisiana in 1803, instantly doubling the size of the fledgling United States, its stubborn francophone locals refused to instate Anglo-Protestant bans on drinking, dancing and gambling. New Orleans, at one point America’s third largest city, remained a bastion of Catholicism and was already developing a burgeoning reputation as the place to go for a rollicking good time.

What an age to live in, when Catholics were the most fun and loose people in town.

I walked at a slow clip, weaving through the French Quarter’s many side streets, quietly savouring the familiar feeling of being somewhere unfamiliar. Unlike the garishly opulent plantation mansions of the Garden District, buildings here were tightly packed against one another, wooden balconies with wrought-iron railings leaning out from pastel-stuccoed brickwork mosaiced with wooden shutters. The whole place had a decidedly Provençal feel to it, except everyone wore cargo shorts and drank beer out of red plastic cups.

The wide straight lanes of Esplanade opened up in front of me, and I crossed over into Marigny where the streets were noticeably quieter and the buildings more spaced apart. And there it was. The Spotted Cat announced itself in bright yellow letters on the outside of a narrow detached house with wood-decked walls and a steep black roof, which made it look like a solitary upturned boat stuck in the muddy turf. A bored-looking security guy waved me in without a second glance.

There was an empty bar stool near the front, so I took it and sipped a cold Heineken whilst the room slowly filled up with a bustling evening crowd. We were in a tiny space, sandwiched between almond-green walls decked floor-to-ceiling in art and memorabilia, cosy under low-lit iodine spotlights. It looked like it could’ve been somebody’s living room, or maybe it actually was at some point.

I love jazz. Now God help me, I know nothing about jazz and can’t tell my swing from my bebop, but there’s something magical about watching musicians improvise entire set pieces on the fly. I’d always seen music as something to be carefully composed and rehearsed endlessly to perfection, like an important speech, but jazz wasn’t a speech, it was a spontaneous flowing conversation between masters of their craft doing what they did best.

The band was starting up about five feet away from me, and a young chap with a black skinny tie was getting going on the piano whilst the bassist warmed up with a slow beat. Then a man with a saxophone stepped to the front, and in an instant I was lost in a wondrous cascade of alto poetry, breathtaking music that was not simply music but the first-hand story of a people who survived against insurmountable odds.

For all the French Revolution’s proclamation of universal human equality in the motherland, slavery continued unabated in its colonies for decades after. Still, they took a somewhat more lenient hand in contrast to their Anglo-Saxon cousins, allowing slaves to purchase their freedom, keep their native languages and take Sundays off. New Orleans’ Congo Square (today called Louis Armstrong Park) thus became home to weekly gatherings of up to a thousand slaves and free people of colour, where Senegalese drums met Angolan trumpets in a fiery medley like no other.

Nobody knows for certain who invented jazz, but everyone agrees that these congregations in Congo Square laid the foundations for its birth. A feel for rhythm and some good old-fashioned creative magic papered over a lack of sheet music or even standardised instruments. Sometimes you improvise because you don’t have a choice.

++++

They put chicory in my coffee. I was still deciding whether I liked it or not when she turned up.

It took about ten seconds for her to close the distance from the parking lot to where I was sitting on the terrace. My first observation was that she had on a pair of good walking shoes, which seemed sensible given a very excited dog was pulling madly on the lead in her right hand. My second observation was that she had ignored the footpath and made a casual bee-line across the wet grass, clearly unperturbed at the prospect of a little muck.

Written from her perspective, she probably observed that I was stuffing my face with a plate of beignets piled higher than my head and covered in enough powdered sugar to grit her entire driveway for the winter. Oh Tinder, you emissary of disappointment, has it come to this?

The air smelled earthy and damp as we set out through City Park, still home to the world’s largest collection of oak trees even after two-thousand of them died in the flood of 2005. Overhead, colourful birds I didn’t recognise looped in lazy circles, coasting on a breeze that didn’t make its way down to ground level. We came to a fenced-off section where all the other dogs were running loose, and I watched her take Pebbles off the leash.

“What’s it like,” I said. “At your hospital?”

She stood up and looked at me. “As a doctor or as a patient?”

“Both.”

“Well I remember in the early days, doctors would be really condescending because my diabetes was tricky to manage. And they loved reminding me that I’ll get my limbs amputated, or go blind and get kidney failure, which as you can imagine isn’t awesome for mental health. It really put me off wanting to see them and I knew a lot of other patients felt the same way, so I wanted to be a physician who could appreciate how much it sucks to be sick.”

I tipped the last of my funky coffee over the grass, mulling over her story. “I guess I thought of my doctors as always having been doctors, in the same way you think of your parents as always having been parents. They came along for the show, they tried to fix me, then they left.”

“Well a lot of doctors see their patients as cases rather than humans. But then again, a lot of patients don’t see their doctors as humans either. Doctors can get sick too, or they are sick, and mostly we’re just trying to get through life like everybody else. Empathy goes both ways.”

The radio said there was a shooting in Tremé and the I-10 was backed up, so our cab looped the long way round until we were back in the French Quarter and I could smell the Mississippi. We stepped into a bistro with black and white mosaic floors underneath warm yellow lights and ceiling fans swirling gently in the summer heat. Half the narrow space was taken up by a lovely mahogany-panelled bar, and the other half was dotted with plush cotton armchairs in dark wood frames.

“What do you think you’ll do when you get back?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never not had a plan. I guess I’ll have to find a job at some point, but I spent so many years chasing a dream that wasn’t even mine, so now I want to focus on what actually makes me happy. Like ordering a drink.”

Ignore what the Churchillian-machismo cult will tell you: a proper martini is made with six parts gin and one part vermouth, stirred gently with whole ice cubes for half a minute and served with a twist of lemon. The vermouth is what makes it a cocktail. Mine came with Noilly Prat, Original Dry, just like my sense of humour. I liked this bar already.

“Do you think,” I said, “that there will come a day when you and I can ditch the sick-person label?”

“What’s worse than labels,” she said, ”is that I can’t forget about it myself. I have to deal with it every day. Sometimes I worry about going to sleep at night, because my blood sugar can get low enough that I might not wake up. And of course, if you’re thinking about it all the time, it affects everything you do, and it’s never going to be easy for people to look past that.”

I called for the bill and let her do the math. Knowing when and how much to tip comes instinctively to the Americans, just like excessive apologising does to the British. I paid cash, something I’d almost forgotten how to do after eight years in London, and it had a pleasant kind of old-school anonymity to it.

She got into a yellow taxi with a broken side mirror and I watched the car head westbound towards a long-faded sunset. I doubted if I’d ever see her again, but still, I had her story and that was enough.

I kept walking. Not because I had anywhere to get to, but because I just liked walking.