Back in the Big Easy
I drove into New Orleans late on a rainy night that followed a rainy day. I didn't even bring my luggage into my Airbnb that first night, just splashed up to the porch, found the key in its little combo-locked safe, got inside, locked up, took off my hooded rain jacket and wet-cuffed jeans, and fell into bed. In the morning there was a little break in the rain, about three hours, enough for me to put on my duck hunter boots (because this is one of the low-lying parts of the city and standing water during rainstorms is kind of normal) and get my stuff in. Then the storm got serious. In the evening one of my hosts, having noticed how low-slung the Prius is, informed me that the city had temporarily lifted the ban on parking on the raised grassy median strip between northbound and southbound Franklin Avenue and recommended that I should really do that before the rising waters got over my axles. So I put the duck boots back on, drove the half a block from this duplex on a side street, parked under a palm tree in the middle of a major street and waded back.
Yeah, the big, famous floods are rare but little floods are a routine thing here. There is no such thing as a basement in this neighborhood. Many houses, including this one, are on pilings about three feet high and nobody stores anything underneath. Like in most of the low-lying areas of the city, the overwhelming majority of the residents here are black. This is a black majority city and has been for decades, but they still had a struggle to get rid of their Confederate monuments because, despite its reputation as a bohemian party town, NOLA is very much the South.
The city government voted to remove the monuments in 2015 in response to the Charleston church massacre, over the usual objections by business owners who feared that the change would reduce tourism. (Yes there are tourists who sentimentalize the Confederacy and want their pictures taken with those statues.) They hired a contractor, but then they made the mistake of letting the contractor's name and the removal schedule be known. That contractor was subjected to a barrage of death threats followed by an act of genuine terrorism: one of the company's vehicles was torched while parked in front of the company's office. (No one was hurt.) "Opponents at one point found their way to one of our machines and poured sand in the gas tank. Other protesters flew drones at the contractors to thwart their work." The contractor backed out. Another one was quietly found and in 2017 the monuments were finally removed by workers who showed up without prior announcement in trucks with their employer's logo blacked out and wore bulletproof vests, helmets, and masks to conceal their identity.
Speaking of masks, and the South, this area has been a hotbed of anti-mask and anti-vaxx sentiment. This is Carnival season, the run-up to Mardi Gras. The parades have started up. And I don't think I'm going to a single one.
One of the first to roll after I arrived was the Krewe de Vieux, known for sexual explicitness and political satire, which rolls at night. This is from their website:
"The Krewe du Vieux’s seventeen sub krewes will each present their own interpretations of the theme. Sub krewes include the Krewe of C.R.U.D.E., Krewe of Space Age Love, Krewe of Underwear, Seeds of Decline, Krewe of Mama Roux, Krewe of L.E.W.D., Krewe of Drips and Dis-charges, Krewe of K.A.O.S., Knights of Mondu, T.O.K.I.N., Krewe Rue Bourbon, Krewe de C.R.A.P.S., Mystic Krewe of Spermes, Mystic Krewe of Comatose, Mystic Krewe of Inane, Krewe du Mishigas and Krewe of SPANk."
The theme for this year: Vaxxed and Confused.
Dr. Jennifer Avegno, the city's health director, was chosen as 2022 Krewe de Vieux queen but "decided not to ride... after unspecified threats caused her to be concerned for her personal safety and the safety of krewe members." So, yeah, the Goddess of NO (her title for this event) was (somehow appropriately) not actually there.
"Her throne was carried empty through the streets," said a news report, and when they say carried, they mean pulled by a mule. Did I mention that this is a non-mechanized parade? There's a security car at the beginning and another one at the end but all the floats are moved by animal power, pedal power, and I think I caught a glimpse of at least one handcart designed to be pulled by either four or six pedestrians. No recorded music, either, and because this is a non-family-friendly parade, no high school bands. Instead, there were small brass bands, groups of musicians mostly in ordinary clothes walking between floats playing traditional New Orleans jazz, unamplified, not needing it. Floats were small and light and from what I could tell (watching the videos afterward) unoccupied. The krewe members walked behind the floats, in costume, handing out "throws" that mostly seemed to be printed matter such as stickers and mock money. Aside from the bands there were no rehearsed performances. It was all very personal and low-key and fun, in sharp contrast to the bigger, more serious parades where the mood among the krewe members aboard the two-story-tall motorized floats seems to alternate between boredom and performance anxiety. This was my kind of parade; traditional to the point of somewhat archaic, more frugal and greener than the run of the mill, naughty and gaudy, with little or no commercial or official participation, just groups of friends and families out for a creative good time.
And I sat this one out. I didn't even look for a live cam to watch it in real time. I watched YouTube videos posted afterward. (The official New Orleans live cam at nola.com is run by students and was objectively terrible the one time I took a look, during a daytime parade; filmed by someone who didn't know how to frame a shot, on a device with a pitiful low-res lens, narrated by a kid who was described as a journalism student, which would imply that she was an undergraduate, but who looked and sounded about fifteen years old. I doubt that team would even be allowed to watch the Krewe de Vieux in action.)
So I am doing a lot of staying in the house. Happily this house has a lot of Old New Orleans character: high ceilings, wrought iron grills on the front windows, a "shotgun shack" layout. It isn't a true shotgun shack because the back door is on the side of the house instead of the back. (Architectural history nerdery digression: the style brought to the Southern colonies was very practical. The house was oriented toward the prevailing wind, with the front door and back door exactly opposite each other so that the doors could be opened to catch the breeze and high ceilings so that, when the breeze didn't blow or the doors couldn't be opened, the rising hot air would have plenty of room to get away from the humans. The rooms were all in a row and when a new room was added, it was added onto the back or the front. The result was long skinny houses like the barrel of a shotgun.) There’s a decently large bathtub, a full kitchen with a gas stove, and backyard composting so I don’t have to sneak my kitchen scraps into piles of leaves.
I am also eating one very special brand of king cake. Now, king cakes are a seasonal tradition here, like turkey at Thanksgiving. Originally they were served all over the Catholic Mediterranean and its colonies on one day a year, January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany, also known as Three Kings Day, which is also the first day of Carnival season. They can be any flavor of cake (I have seen chocolate king cake, cinnamon king cake, and chantilly cream cheese king cake, which I have to assume is some kind of giant Danish pastry, but most of them look to be ordinary white cake.) The defining features of a Mardi Gras king cake are a ring or bundt shape, icing in the Mardi Gras colors of purple, green and gold, and a fève, a little hard token, baked in. Traditionally a group would share the cake and whoever found the fève in their piece would win a prize or acquire an obligation. Fève literally means a fava bean, but could also be a piece of hard candy, an almond, or (most expensive back when they were handmade) a tiny figurine of the Christ Child. King cakes are only sold during the Carnival season; after Mardi Gras night they vanish from the stores.
Most king cakes are junk food, but somebody figured out that we people with food sensitivities would also like to participate in the tradition, so a gluten-free bakery in Texas (run by two people with celiac -- it's called the Unrefined Bakery, which delights me to no end) produces the "low carb dairy free gluten free grain free Ochsner Eat Fit ™ King Cake". It's based on almond and coconut flours, as gluten-free baked goods often are, and so long as I eat it in small servings, it doesn't seem to do me any harm at all. It helps that this king cake is very small, about six inches across, so I am able to finish one before it goes stale. (Ochsner Medical is the biggest hospital system in Louisiana. Its founder, Dr. Alton Ochsner, was one of the colorful characters of the Huey Long era. Its Eat Fit ™ program is a 21st century initiative mainly focused on getting local restaurants to offer healthier options.) The fève is a hard plastic bead in the shape of a baby, the pale pink-beige of a Barbie doll. I've got a half dozen of them now.
There's also visiting non-parade, non-crowded sort of tourist attractions. The Saturday after I arrived, I went down to the famous French Market to see whether it had resumed its function as a farmers' market. I found that, no, it has not, but it was a good excuse to wander around the French Quarter. The Market Cafè was open, with lots of outdoor tables and a live band, an actual three-piece jazz combo, performing at lunch. I had one of the few non-alcoholic options and enjoyed myself a great deal. The Steamboat Houses are on my list and I might rent a recumbent bicycle just to see what they're like to ride.