I Have to Ask, I’ll Never Know
“You’re either local or you’re not,” proclaims the banner at the Rouse’s in Mid-City where I go to make groceries. This is a dig at the outpost of the Winn-Dixie chain that moved in across the street, but I take it personally.
I live in New Orleans, but I am not from New Orleans. My hurricane is Sandy. My biggest disaster happened in September.
I take it, too, as probably the most true thing that’s been said about New Orleans in the ten years since Katrina and the failure of the levees, and the failure of the president, and the failure of the governor, and the failure of the mayor, and the failure of the media, and the failure of America, and the failure of well-meaning white people like me, who moved here in droves after the storm, and who have harmed what we love, and will do it again, like a wife-beater.
Oh Nola, don’t you know I love you? Don’t you know I’d never mean to hurt you? But good intentions pave the way to New Orleans. By moving here in 2013, I am one of the people helping to drive up rents, pushing out the very people I came to be near. By my insistence on a lower murder rate, and a less corrupt government, and equal protection under the law, and yes, even safe bike lanes, I am changing the culture of the city whose culture is its greatest asset. And I won’t stop, either. You drive me crazy, but I can’t even wish to quit you. I love you, New Orleans. I need you. You made me do it.
As my friend Abram Himelstein rightly pointed out in his beautiful essay, “I Moved Here and Ruined the Scene,” we came “looking for a place that had not been created to order by the Protestant Work Ethic…a place where the fundamental values of the city were not so linearly pointed away from joy.” But in a small corner of its totally depraved, irresistibly graceful heart, New Orleans is a brimstone Calvinist. No good works will get you the keys to this kingdom. No amount of time served, or knowledge amassed, will earn you a seat. In fact, by striving, you’ve already shot your chances. In this way, it is the polar opposite of New York, which doesn’t care if you’re a native, as long as you don’t waste its time. New Orleans doesn’t care how much of its time you waste, how much of its water, how much of its 19th century bargeboard and cypress weatherboards hit the dumpster, as long as you’re a native. The rule is, you can be a New Yorker if you’ve put in ten years or can tell a tourist the best way to get from anywhere to anywhere, whichever comes first. But to be a New Orleanian is to be predestined, by grace alone. You’re either local, or you’re not.
2. Come on Down to New Orleans
The second most true thing ever said about New Orleans was a comment tossed over his shoulder by my friend Seth as we biked our way downtown from his house on Dumaine Street to have a pie or three at Domenica’s happy hour, a pizza better— and by saying this I am irrevocably revoking my citizenship in NYC — than the best in any of the five boroughs. He said, “New Orleans is the place that invites the rest of the world to come and bring its worst self.” Come on down, y’all. Strew the streets with your cups and piss and vomit. Cheat on your wives in our hotel rooms. Show us your titties. Get your thrills touring Treme by Segway. Do whatcha wanna, as long as you tip well, and as long as you leave. The real message isn’t what you see plastered over every Geaux Dis and Who Dat: “Be nice or leave.” It’s “Be nice AND leave.”
Like all tourist towns, New Orleans presents part of itself up for consumption, and reserves the rest, the best of itself for itself. Lundi Gras, the Monday before Fat Tuesday, is better than Mardi Gras. An unsanctioned neighborhood parade is often more fun than the main line. To eat with locals, you’d best get out of the Quarter. New Orleans protects itself from the tourists it depends on by sequestering them in a sliver of the crescent. Likewise, these days anyway, it insulates itself against the working-class people of color it depends on by housing them out in the East, or back of town, or on the other side of the canal, wherever the ground is low and the prospects slim.
The people who moved here after the storm have upset a delicate balance. The corollary to welcoming the world’s worst selves is to be wary of those who’ve packed up their best selves and moved here. New Orleans isn’t that big anymore, and it’s certainly not easy, but it is The City That Care Forgot. Come for a week each year to rebuild houses, and you’re a hero. Come for keeps to spend 12-hour days teaching in the still-unequal schools, or developing one of its 30,000+ blighted properties, and you endanger a way of life held dear by both the exploited and those in power. To put all that idealism and energy in residence is to care too much, like the Abominable Snowman, who squeezes the life out of his love. Rebuilding New Orleans is one thing. Reforming it is quite another.
True, some of the newcomers act superior, as if there haven’t been many heroic local people struggling mightily for years to solve the city’s problems. And some just have terrible manners. Not “raised right,” some don’t know that the proper use of a car horn is a quick toot-toot to signal your neighbors that you’ve made the block or are rolling out, but that to honk in impatience is an offense. Some people haven’t yet learned that pecans and figs on their trees belong to everybody, or, bless their hearts, that to be so busily important at their jobs that they neglect friends and family is to inspire pity, not envy. We have come from a cold world, and need time to thaw.
Back in the day, the “neutral ground” — what’s elsewhere called a median — was established to keep the American interlopers on the Uptown side of Canal Street, away from the real heart of the city. But these days, all ground is contested, as the new residents settle in Bywater, Treme, the Seventh Ward, St. Claude, and in the Lower Ninth Ward, on “the other side.” Dealing with water and mold, corruption and poverty — these are skills New Orleans has had centuries to master. Now it’s learning to survive the influx of America.
If there was a way besides grace of birth to belong here, a test to be taken to assess whether a candidate is ready to cross from “hipster paradise” to join the locals as just a neighbor among neighbors, it would be this:
Q: How many New Orleanians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Two. One to change it, and the other to say it was better the old way.
You will have passed if you laughed until you cried.
I grew up in Louisiana, but I am not from Louisiana. We moved from North Carolina to Lafayette when I was nine and my father took a job in the oilfield. We’ve been Saints fans since the ‘80’s, when Morten Andersen was the only decent player, but still, you gotta believe.
One thing I’ve noticed: I get a warmer reception from locals when I say I grew up in Lafayette than when I say I’ve come to New Orleans from Brooklyn. Both are true, but in a place where the expression “carpetbagger” is not archaic, I have come to lie whitely, by omission.
Louisiana formed me. It was where I first fell in love, where I learned to drive and to drink. It was where I was graduated from (public) high school, and where I first learned grief, when in 1989 my sister Jan died driving drunk. That year I left for college up north, and ended up living in Brooklyn for 20 years, until I bought a house in New Orleans, on the Internet, sight unseen, and moved here in 2013 to rebuild it and me.
I am trying to learn what it means to live in New Orleans, but I am not a local. So I will always have to ask what New Orleans means, what it means to miss New Orleans. And because I have to ask, I’ll never know.
Still, I have learned a lot since coming here. I can pronounce Burgundy and Calliope. I know that you have to go to the West Bank or New Orleans East for the best Vietnamese food, but you can get good fried chicken at nearly every gas station. I know what is a misbelief tree, how sweet its fruit. I know how to raise a house, and where to get shutter hinges for cheap. I know how to sister a joist, jet a drain, and set a temp pole. I know that HDLC spells a royal pain. I know that New Orleans is less Paris, more Sicily. I know a guy who knows a guy who can make a call. I know that the compass points to riverside, lakeside, uptown, downtown. I know where the chime tree is, and the end of the world. I know what it means to spend my life savings rebuilding shotgun singles, to go from an income in the low six figures to one in the high four figures, and to be happy. I know what it is to drive five miles to make groceries, to be too cold in winter and too hot the other ten months of the year. I know the battle with cat’s claw is never-ending, and I know that, on the nights in spring when termites swarm, the thing to do is run inside, close the windows, shut off the lights, and wait for the plague to pass over.
New Orleans is full of code words to learn. Not just the visual X-codes on houses, the spray-painted, lop-sided crucifixes that tell who came, and when, and what was found there, and who was lost. I mean the spoken codes, the words that don’t quite mean what they purport to. It can be confusing until you realize that most of the code words point to the same thing: poor Black people. “A certain element” = poor Black people. “Thug areas” = neighborhoods called home by poor Black people. “A blank slate” = those same neighborhoods, once the poor Black people are exiled and eradicated. “Sketchy” = a neighborhood of mostly poor Black people, with a few poor white people. “Quiet area” = a neighborhood where there are some poor Black people, but a perception of less crime than in other areas. A “good area” = a neighborhood where mostly White people live. “Coming up” = a neighborhood in the process of shedding a “certain element” to transform from “thug area” to “quiet area” with nary a pause at the “blank slate” stage. “L9” = the Lower Ninth Ward, aka where “a certain element” used to live, and the place that, even now, is struggling mightily to “come back,” which is not a synonym for “coming up,” not at all. “Coming back” is what some in the city hoped the people of the Lower Nine would never do. “Holy Cross,” where I live = a “quiet area” sub-section within the Lower Ninth Ward. Holy Cross is “coming up,” for worse and for better.
Some of what I learned, I remembered. I re-learned how to swim, so that a day spent fighting with my house could end with a surrender to the water at Stallings Pool, one of a dozen excellent free public pools in the city. I had to remember how to start a lawn mower and prune a tree. Coming from “the safest big city in America,” I had to learn to be afraid again, and to be also unafraid.
After twenty years traveling by subway, I had forgotten how to drive a car. Before learning, I’d ride my bike five miles each day from where I stayed, at Seth’s house on Dumaine Street in Mid-City, to work on my own broken, beloved house in the Lower Nine. Gearing up to brave the St. Claude Bridge, I’d pass the building graffitied with “You go girl!” and I took that message personally too.
Much of the grousing about us newcomers comes from other white middle-class and upper-class people. For instance, many architects and planners here deride the much-lauded-elsewhere Make It Right houses as being “out of place.” The people I know who live in those houses love them. They are spacious, well-built, energy-efficient, and beautiful. To make such places available to working-class and poor Black people is considered ahistorical.
As ever, though, it’s people of modest means who seem to offer the most generous hospitality. Seeing me haul lumber and rip up old vinyl by hand, my neighbor Clarence, who salvages scrap metal when he’s not on a road crew, brings me a dolly and a scraper, and won’t take money. Margaret, a teacher, brings grapefruit jam made from the fruits of her own trees. John, a retired carpenter, sits me down, looks deep into my eyes, and says, “I’m glad you’re here, that you bought this house and are bringing it back up. Not just that someone’s here, but that you’re here.”
Restoring a house all these years later, by choice and not necessity, is a privilege, and not the same thing at all as what my neighbors who have come back went through. But Maria, who drives through the Lower Ninth Ward selling sno-balls out of her van, gives me ice water and cuttings from her garden. “I know, mami, it’s so hard, what you’re doing,” she tells me. “My husband and me did it too, after the water.”
I love my neighbors and my neighborhood, but since I’m not a native, I don’t have to be as fiercely partisan New Orleanians tend to be. I can admit that Seth’s block on Dumaine Street is at least as friendly and welcoming as mine, and claim honorary citizenship there too, due to all the months spent crashing in his front room. When he, a white guy from up north, bought there in 2010, his neighbors, mostly Black, clapped for him. Twine’s porch is the center of the action, his speakers the block’s soundtrack. From late afternoon into the evening, there’s always someone there to visit with. Seth cuts the grass for his older neighbors. Glenn comes by with a baby gator or a turtle and gives the kids a lesson in biology. It always smells like somebody’s grilling. When the sun is too hot on one side of the street, you can go sit on your neighbor’s porch on the other side, or drag a festival chair and a cooler over and sit under John Henry’s tree. At the most recent block party, some out-of-town friends of friends stopped by and, after hanging a while, pulled me aside and said, “We have never seen this before, blacks and whites mixing so freely, enjoying each other. We want to move here.” Like so many of us, they want to join the party, to help make a mythical city real.
There’s a big flock of chickens that lives on the block too. They roost at night in the big tree in front of John Henry’s, but he says they’ve lived there since way before Katrina. The chickens were there when he himself moved to the block forty years ago and planted the sapling. Lately, though, someone has been calling the city authorities to come and “do something” about the chickens. They can be a pain, scratching up people’s gardens and dirtying the porches, and maybe somebody new to the block is less tolerant. It’s pretty funny watching a dogcatcher chase chickens, and he can’t figure out who to issue a ticket to. As John Henry tells him, and as we all attest, “Man, those are free chickens. I don’t own them. Nobody owns them. They belong to themselves.”
But John Henry is getting up in years, and his house needs more care than he can give it, so, despite our lamentations, he has decided to sell. The block has exploded in value in just a few years, being so close to Whole Foods and the new hospital. It’s a good bet that the new owners will be younger, richer, and whiter even than me. But I love the feeling on the block the way it is, and I don’t want it to change. What if the new owners don’t want their fancy car covered in chicken shit each morning? What if they cut down the chicken tree, or hire a private squad of dogcatchers? When I suggest to Twine that when people come to view the For Sale houses, he should turn his music way up and try to look menacing, I’m just kidding/not really.
