Originally published as part of Adelaide Magazine’s 2025 Literary Awards Anthology.
Ten inmates escaped from the Orleans Parish Detention Center this past Friday. Most of these inmates were repeat offenders who were being held on charges ranging from burglary to sexual assault, and even murder. Their plan included several steps, and the execution of those steps required teamwork. More than that, these escapees needed to have an awareness of the facility’s weak points. They needed to know which locks, cameras, and electrical panels were in a state of disrepair. They needed to know how to bypass certain security measures and how to compromise others. On Thursday afternoon, approximately 12 hours before the escape had taken place, a group of inmates had broken into a handicap cell along the prison’s second floor. Once inside, these inmates had crammed an assortment of prison-issued socks, towels, and underwear into the cell’s toilet, thereby blocking its soil pipe and damaging an entire plumbing chase that ran behind the wall. The ensuing backup was so severe that a maintenance worker needed to be called onto the scene. That worker had detached the toilet so that he could shut off its immediate water supply. And that is how matters were left on Thursday evening: a vacant cell with an unlocked door giving way to a chute-like chase behind an extracted toilet. The pipes remained empty, and the entire cell, without water.
Just before midnight on Thursday, the 10 inmates, all of whom were being housed inside the prison’s general population area—an open floor plan—initiated the second phase of their escape. These inmates were patient. They waited until one of the overnight guards had abandoned his post, after which they advanced. First, these inmates shimmied a sliding door until it skipped off its track. Next, they hurried along a corridor that provided them with access to the handicap cell. Working as a unit, these inmates pried back the disconnected toilet (including its frame). They used blades from a set of electric hair clippers to saw through ¾-inch pipes. Having snapped those pipes back, each of the inmates was able to slither directly into, and then out of, the plumbing chase. They emerged by way of a doggy-door-sized breach along the other side. One by one, these inmates proceeded to lower themselves onto a loading dock. They used bedsheets to keep from getting snagged as they scrambled over a barbed-wire fence that bordered the prison yard. Free at last, half of the fugitives made a run for it across Interstate 10. The other half stuck to the side streets on their way toward the center of downtown.
And this is where matters got hairy. The Orleans Parish Detention Center is located less than a mile from the French Quarter, which means it is located less than a mile from the heart of tourism in New Orleans. What’s more, the prison guards were not even aware that any of the inmates had gone missing until 8 AM on Friday morning. That means the convicts had an entire night to either hole up or to get as far out of town as they could. Within 24 hours of the escape, the police had rounded up three of the fugitives, all of them within the city limits. In the four days that have passed since then, the authorities have only rounded up two more. The smart money has it that the five remaining escapees must have crossed into either Mississippi (45 miles northeast) or Texas (250 miles west). The smart money also has it that some of those escapees must have had somebody waiting for them at the exact moment when they disappeared across the interstate … somebody with a vehicle and a knack for understanding how to get to wherever they were going without running into any checkpoints along the way.
About an hour ago, I walked the stretch of I-10 that runs parallel to the detention center. I did not do this because I am intrigued by the escape—I am.—I did this because I am intrigued by the prison’s proximity to all-things-New-Orleans. I am also intrigued by this area’s contrarian spirit. Louisiana maintains a longstanding love affair with its outlaws dating all the way back to Jean Lafitte (1780-1823), a pirate and a slave trader who ruled the swamps and whose knowledge of the bayous provided the US with a strategy for beating back the British during the Battle of New Orleans. The city’s first-ever vice district (1820 -1880) was located on Gallatin Street in what is now the French Market. The term “shanghaied” originated along Gallatin Street. To be shanghaied meant to be drugged and kidnapped, and then forced into the service of a ship captain who treated you like chattel out on the high seas. During the 1890s, the locus shifted toward Storyville, a much more infamous vice district that had been born out of the idea of pushing all the city’s prostitution, gambling, and narcotics into one neighborhood where all the rackets could be regulated. Storyville survived for nearly 20 years prior to it being shut down at the behest of the US Military. Too close to a wartime naval base, officials claimed, although the reality was that too many sailors had been contracting VD. Be that as it may, the fact remained that shuttering Storyville resulted in a hardship, particularly for the sex workers, all of whom were being deprived of their livelihoods, and many of whom were being deprived of their ability to provide for their kids. Sadly, this was not the first time that underprivileged women had been mistreated during the early days of Louisiana.
In the 1720s, more than 100 women (in two separate factions) had been shipped to New Orleans under the guise that they would make suitable wives for the working-class men. The first faction, known as the correction girls, had been plucked from French penal colonies. The second faction, known as the casket girls (or filles a la cassette), had been plucked from European convents and orphanages. The majority of these girls were not considered appropriate for wedlock. And so they were left to fend for themselves, outcasts in a society that had never provided them with any support system or agency. The casket girls—so named as a result of the wooden chests that they had been allotted to transport their belongings—had a difficult go of things. People talked and the rumors swirled, and eventually somebody somewhere came up with the idea that the casket girls might be vampires. And so it went. God pity the poor immigrant. The world remains a silly place.
Alas, I do not mean to diminish the significance of such events by making light of them. Truth be told, part of what I love about New Orleans is that everything has a touch of evil to it, that everything comes singed around the edges … the warped wood, the padlocked houses, the mighty oak trees, with limbs that seem to be drawn back down toward the earth, narrow and spindly, like an old woman’s fingers. Those limbs speak of witchcraft, and yet there is a warmth to them, majestic in the very way that so many aspects of New Orleans still seem to be majestic, infused with their own permanence. The French, the Spanish, the Haitian, the West African, the Indigenous and all the in-betweens. Every point converges on these corners. The counties become parishes and the voting districts become wards. The artists search for meaning and they find it. During the 1920s, William Faulkner lived a half-block off of Jackson Square, and he once described the view there as seeming as if it had been “cut from black paper and pasted flat on a green sky.” I have seen that view, and that description still holds water. Bob Dylan recorded Oh, Mercy in the Uptown District, and in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, he summarized his thoughts on the city as follows:
“New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there’s a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There’s something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can’t see it, but you know it’s here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.”
I am drawn to New Orleans for a lot of the same reasons, but that is not why I have come here. I have come to New Orleans to be away from everything that seems familiar, at least for the next seven days. I am unemployed now and I am single. The lease on my current apartment is due to expire at the end of next month, and I have no intention of renewing it. Over the upcoming weeks, I plan to sell my car, and I also plan to move away from the place that I call home. I am an idealist, and to me, being an idealist means stripping away life’s distractions; it means taking a minimalist approach and distilling my day-to-day onto a point where I can go deep and make meaningful connections, where I can pursue new opportunities as opposed to simply clinging to a life based around control. And so now here I am, typing as I sit outside a coffee shop in the Garden District. There is a fan whirring above me. The sky has gone to apricot and the air here speaks of the currents. The clouds are moving slowly, and I can smell mesquite. I adore mesquite. The aroma has a heft to it. But it’s also got a hint of danger, and the danger makes everything else seem so much more potent.
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Today is Wednesday. This is my second day in New Orleans. After a late breakfast, I walk to 1020 St. Ann Street, the address where Marie Laveau resided from the 1840s until her death in 1881. Laveau was a voodoo high priestess, a rootworker in the Creole tradition whose legend has far exceeded anything that she might have accomplished on this earth. Laveau raised seven children, although local tour operators prefer to speculate that she might have given birth to as many as 15. There is talk of black magic, of Laveau rescuing a convict from the gallows, of her making that convict disappear at the exact moment when he stood hands bound and noose fastened, a door in the floor jerry-rigged to swing open as soon as somebody pulled the right lever. These are fables, and they are legion, but they have nothing to do with understanding Marie Laveau as a person. My interest resides in the fact that Laveau was a Catholic. More to the point, my interest resides in the long-standing relationship between Catholicism and Haitian vodou, a relationship that dates all the way back to the 1600s, a century during which voodoo emerged as a means for the enslaved to seek protection—if not spiritual liberation—from their oppressors.
It was the Haitians and the West Africans that brought voodoo to the colonial shores of Louisiana. The majority of French slaveowners were Catholics, and thus, those in servitude had been presented with an aristocratic version of the Galilean messiah, a blue-eyed and fair-skinned European who was deemed appropriate for the walls of any basilica. Voodoo patterned its early deities after the catholic saints, and it patterned its early rituals after the catholic ceremonies. I am referring here to sacred gatherings comprised of incantations offered by an oungan (priest), accompanied by the beating of rada (goatskin drums), with the whole of it building toward a manje Iwa (sacrificial offering). This was the mass, reimagined. I should know. I was raised Catholic. I spent 12 years navigating a faith-based curriculum (including four years as an altar boy). After graduating high school, I split from the church, and then I split from the suburbs. I split from my education and the strictures of a great many things that I had found to be unholy. It took me a long time to cleanse myself of those waters, to comprehend that despite all the gold trim and the vestments, despite the votive candles and the benediction and the promise of community and the worldwide infrastructure, well, it took me a long time to understand that opulence is not—nor should it ever be—a surrogate for substance. To me, organized religion smacks of exclusion, whereas voodoo is at least aspiring toward catharsis. Voodoo speaks to me of a curling mist beyond the smokestacks, beyond the pumpkin ash and the dark-water cypress. Voodoo speaks to me of the wetlands and the bayou; it speaks to me of a cabin along the far edge of the clearing. Voodoo speaks to me of night song, and it speaks to me of Spanish moss. It speaks to me of trinkets, locks of hair, and maybe an altar, and that is voodoo. It is the search for a place that is unreachable in the pursuit of a belief that is unknowable. Here in the south, the heart of voodoo is still brushing up against Catholicism. One is light and the other is shadow.
Marie Laveau’s legacy is largely a work of invention. The house that now stands at 1020 St. Ann Street is not even the same home that Laveau lived in during the 1800s. Laveau’s cottage was torn down in 1903. Nevertheless, people still jam tarot cards and beads and other bric-a-brac into the current building’s framework. Today there is a bouquet of dead flowers tangled into the lattice; there is a portrait of Baron Samedi propped up against the steps. Samedi is a Haitian deity, the protector of the dead. In voodoo culture, Samedi has customarily been depicted as tall and imposing, a black man in a black coat who has his black face painted white so that he looks like a calavera. Samedi is regarded as an agent of chaos. He hexes certain people and he rehabilitates others. Over the years, the deity has taken on many forms, thanks in large part to the entertainment industry. Baron Samedi was the name of an evil henchmen in Live and Let Die, a 1973 Bond film that opens with a jazz funeral in the French Quarter before cutting away to a voodoo death ceremony in the Caribbean. Baron Samedi was also the inspiration for a WWE character named Papa Shango who came and went during the early nineties. Haitian deities do not mix well with the hoi polloi, and neither, for that matter, do voodoo-centric movies. Successful pictures like I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Angel Heart (1987), and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) represent rare exceptions, although, if anything, those pictures prove that the most prudent way to approach voodoo, at least in terms of cinema, is by coming at it left-of-center. Consider Sinners (2025), a southern gothic set in the Mississippi Delta that pivots based on a plot twist involving soulless white men who have been feeding off of the black man’s artforms, draining the purity out of backwater blues by interrupting it at its source. Voodoo is implied throughout Sinners without it ever being exploited. The same can be said of HBO’s True Detective, specifically the first season, which borrows heavily from an actual case that was adjudicated in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. That case resulted in the conviction of several members from an evangelical church on more than two dozen counts of child sex abuse compounded by animal cruelty (to wit: mutilation). True Detective’s Rust Cohle (portrayed by Matthew McConaughey) alluded to there being something “deep and dark” at work in the Louisiana woodlands … an occult-like menace that stalked the night preying on women and children. The key to Cohle as a character resided in his day-to-day struggle. Cohle was far too cynical to believe that the world could be broken down into binary rules based on good versus evil. And so he suffered, caught between what was real and what he perceived to be otherworldly.
Regardless of all the ways that Hollywood has misrepresented voodoo, it stands to reason that a bit of buzz can mean a boon for business. Books, movies, and television, these are like portals for the laity. They provide a way in. To that end, I have been reading about Marie Laveau for the past several days. When I googled Laveau this morning, I discovered that the house at 1020 St. Ann Street had been damaged in an electrical fire less than 48 hours before I arrived in New Orleans. The building’s current tenant, Jody Boudreaux, spoke with a reporter from the Times-Picayune about the incident. Midway through the accompanying piece, Boudreaux shared her thoughts about the house’s significance, admitting that she relates to Laveau not as a mystic but as a practicing Catholic. And there it was … a perspective that I could use to help demonstrate the link. I wanted to speak with Boudreaux, and I had learned that she was a tour operator. If nothing else, I figured that I could offer to hire her if she would speak with me at length.
And so that brings us current. When I arrive at 1020 St. Ann Street, the front door is open. I let myself in. I know I shouldn’t, but I do. The first thing I notice is the smell of charred wood. It is pungent. There are lamps scattered throughout the area, and there is a loveseat with an end table stacked on it. “Hello,” I say, but nobody answers. I continue beneath an archway and into a bedroom where the mattress has been stripped. Along the right side of the room, there is a fireplace, completely sealed, and above that, a wall that has been streaked with drip marks and with soot. Along the mantle there is a rosary, and to the right of that, a pair of black roses. “Hello,” I say again, but nobody answers. One more archway, after which I step into a room where all the walls are blistered, and a pair of wicker shelves have been scorched from head to toe. And that is when I spot Boudreaux, or maybe she spots me. It’s difficult to say. Either way, Boudreaux is hurrying toward me now from a work area that is situated toward the back of the house. “Out,” Boudreaux instructs me. “Out. You need to leave.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I don’t care,” Boudreaux tells me. She is shooing me away with splayed fingers. “If you want to talk, then you can hire me as a tour guide.”
“How much?” I ask.
“Seventy-five dollars,” Boudreaux responds. “And by appointment only.”
Boudreaux chases me until I am back on the sidewalk, and then she apologizes. “It’s a trauma response,” she explains. “This week has been, well … whew.” It occurs to me that Boudreaux has propped the front door open so that she can air out the odor. It also occurs to me that I have been wandering through her house without any consideration for her privacy. I offer a mea culpa, and then I leave. Later that night, I contemplate emailing Boudreaux, but I think better of it. I don’t need a tour guide, really. What I need is to learn how to behave like a stranger. What I need is to learn how to leave the tender moment in its place.
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Come Thursday, my cousin Dave arrives in New Orleans. Dave is good company, and he is the right company for this part of the trip, a seasoned traveler whom I admire not only for his insights but for his inclination toward trying new things. When I was a teenager, Dave introduced me to rock ’n roll, and I owe him for that because rock ’n roll saved me. It seems fitting that he and I should reconnect in a city where one does not have to go looking for the music, a city where the music will find you; a city where the music will even shape you if you allow it. The range here is astounding. Every streetcorner has its own cadence. The performers are at it day and night, navigating the scene, and the weather, and the poor tippers, and the foot traffic, and the busking laws, and whatever tramps might be attempting to chisel in on their slice of what’s what. The brass bands gravitate toward the money corners. One might find them on, say, Bourbon and Bienville (across from the Royal Sonesta Hotel), or on Frenchmen and Chartres (beneath the Willie’s Fried Chicken marquee). The streetlamps are for the saxophonists, and the darkened doorways are for zydeco or voodoo blues. The open courtyards are for mambo and ragtime. The city as a whole prides itself on giving birth to jazz, although jazz was conceived out on the fringes, approximately one mile southwest of the French Quarter in a ghetto that the locals called the “Back ’o Town” (and that I have previously referred to in this essay as Storyville). The Back ’o Town was anchored by the 400 block of South Rampart Street, home to the Eagle Saloon, the Little Gem Saloon, and the Iroquois Theater—a trio of venerable jazz clubs, each of which has been added to the National Register of Historic Places. Louis Armstrong grew up in the Back ’o Town, and at age 12, Armstrong got arrested for shooting a pistol in the air at the corners of South Rampart and Perdido. That was New Years Eve, way back in 1913. Fast forward to today, and that same corner has surrendered its charisma. All of the sidewalks run jagged and a lot of the windows have been covered with plywood. There is a plaque commemorating the Eagle Saloon as a “hotbed of musical innovation,” but the thrill is gone, and so too are the people. Up the block on South Rampart, the building that once housed the Little Gem has reopened as a Cajun restaurant with an upscale lounge along its second floor. That lounge is called the Red Light District. True to form, every aspect of the Red Light District has been completely drenched in shades of scarlet. It’s like a dark room serving alcohol. It’s like a gimmick that’s masquerading as a bar.
Nowadays, if someone is looking for a primer on the pioneering age of jazz, his best bet might be to check out a show at Preservation Hall, a hallowed music venue tucked into an exposed-brick alcove a half-block east of Bourbon Street along St. Peter. Preservation Hall is not without its drawbacks. This is a tourist haven, and, as such, the house band might play 3-4 sets on any given night. Beginning and end times are based on precision. Both the stage and the performance space get packed tight. The walls are all worn, as is a pegboard that runs along the upstage border. Two-thirds of the audience pays to sit along benches, while the final third pays to stand shoulder-to-shoulder along the back aisle. There are no microphones, and no amplification, and this is the aesthetic. The room can hold up to 115 people, and it usually does. The house band is called the Preservation All-Stars, and it relies on a rotating cast of performers. Mark Braud is the bandleader. Braud is an acclaimed trumpet player who has toured with Wynton Marsalis and who has appeared on Broadway with Harry Connick, Jr. Throughout each performance, Braud sits front and center. He engages with the audience. Most of the selections follow a basic pattern, verse-chorus-verse into a bridge that spotlights the individual artistes. Music in the round, so to speak, with each passing solo—trumpet, clarinet, piano, drums, trombone, and upright bass—contributing to the momentum. Toward the end of the bridge, the players take to their feet, and they start mixing high notes with bent notes. They start stretching short notes into long. The tempo builds until it reaches a crescendo. One last surge and then they bring it on home.
My cousin and I attend the third of four performances at Preservation Hall on Friday evening. After the show, we file out just as another audience prepares to file in. Both of us agree that the set was entertaining, and that the format was unique, and we are discussing the song choices as we round the corner onto Bourbon Street. Bourbon Street. What a Gomorrah. Every city offers some version of this, a bustling midway where the parasites feed off the tourists. It’s like somebody’s caricature of what a city should be, some cartoon marketplace beset with scammers and sketch artists and chair masseuses and grown men disguised as Muppets or superheroes, perhaps a naked cowboy or some cereal-box preacher who’s selling roadmaps to the reclamation. It’s a sad fiction, and it leaves one feeling empty. On a night like tonight when the breeze falls slight and the sun has all but vanished until morning, the best prescription might be a cold beer and a spot of dixie, preferably over by the waterfront where one can take in the riverboats as they roll in, their upper decks aglow and all but shimmering in amber. My cousin and I do not go to the waterfront. We stop off instead for a drink at Lafitte’s, and then we stop off for a second drink at The Howlin’ Wolf. After that, we head back to the apartment that we are renting. We wander up to the rooftop and we listen to some Springsteen and we look out across Canal Street, and this yields its own form of tranquility. To be removed is to exist above all the white noise. It is to hear the music without any other fanfare competing for your ear.
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Every Sunday is sacred in New Orleans, and this has been the case since the city’s inception. For a time during the 18th century, even those in bondage were guaranteed the right to Sundays. This according to a set of ordinances known as the code noir that regulated how French slaves were meant to comport themselves in both their public and their private lives. Sundays were intended to be a time of leisure, a time for attending religious services, or for shopping, but not for working, or for serving someone else’s needs. As early as the 1740s, certain members of the African and Indigenous communities would convene at Congo Square (located in what is now Armstrong Park) on the seventh day. Once there, the Sunday set would sing and dance, their movements punctuated by the pounding of a bamboula. These performances represented a means of expression, yes, but they also represented a means of protest, if not a way of cultivating some forbidden language. There were costumes and there were masks. Certain masks had been designed for anonymity, whereas others had been designed to honor the gods, or a proud heritage, or an unspoken belief. Musical traditions were born out of Congo Square, and so too were the early seeds of what would become the New Orleans carnival culture. Several aspects of that culture will be on display this afternoon as part of a second line parade. My cousin and I intend on taking part in the parade, which is scheduled to begin around 1 PM in the Tremé.
A brief aside, if I may, regarding the term “second line” and its colloquial derivation. In a jazz funeral, the second line refers to a wave of mourners that remains a step removed from the lead procession. A typical second line might include community leaders and parishioners, along with the deceased’s next-door neighbors or acquaintances, even strangers. The first line is for close friends and family. There is a funeral master, and he provides the direction for a cast of pallbearers and a brass band. The mood is solemn throughout the walk to the cemetery and the music is a collection of dirges, each of which has been handpicked to ensure that the dead will not leave this world with an eye toward retribution. There is silence as the coffin is being lowered into the earth, but the mood shifts immediately after. The horns wail, and the feet shuffle. The saints go marching in, so to speak, and there might even be some bacchanalia. All told, a jazz funeral relates the story of a people’s triumph over suffering. It is the story of New Orleans to some extent, and that is a story of accepting grief, and then continuing forward.
My cousin and I arrive for the parade around 12:30. The temperature has just crept above 90, and the humidity has robbed all the clothing of its starch. Compelled by a sense of duty, a lot of the paradegoers are still wearing buttoned-down blazers over iron-creased pants. Today’s parade is a neighborhood affair, and, as such, there will not be any advertisers, nor will there be any shot girls or any brand ambassadors who are tossing out swag from the back of a float. The vibe is more akin to that of a tailgate party. Several of the spectators are sitting on upholstered couches that they have either carried to the curb or driven here themselves. Bottled beer is being sold for a few dollars apiece, and some of the well drinks are being handed out as a gesture of goodwill. To my left, a gray-haired man removes his plain-white tee, and he submerges that tee into a bucket of ice water. He wraps that tee around his head as if it were a turban, prompting a woman on his left to make quite a show of pretending not to notice.
By 1:15, North Villere Street feels like a thoroughfare, complete with porch-sitters and well-wishers, the resident old heads and the ebullient young. There is music, and several dancers have started filing out of the Tremé Center. These are the Money Wasters, a New Orleans social club that has existed since the early 1920s. Like a lot of social clubs, the Money Wasters design their own costumes and they secure their own funding. This is a point of pride, and it harkens back to the early days of carnival culture, a fledgling period during which a few of the original clubs, also known as krewes, began decorating the elongated decks of garbage wagons so that they could be enlisted as floats. Those original clubs established a standard, and it is a standard that still echoes, perhaps even more so as Louisianans prepare to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Katrina. To a northerner, so much of the devastation took on the form of a sideshow. I am referring here to the extensive coverage of President Bush flying over the flood zones despite never touching down (a metaphor if ever there was one). I am referring here to Kanye West telling a national television audience that George Bush does not care about black people, and I am referring here to Mayor Ray Nagin, who declared—four months after the levees had been obliterated—that New Orleans should focus on becoming a “chocolate city,” which is to say a black majority dedicated to looking out for itself. Race. Class. The rich versus the poor. These are the dividing lines in any capitalistic society. Capitalism, by its nature, implies that someone will always end up batting at the bottom of the order. I remember when Katrina struck. I was living in Philadelphia, and I had a tendency to come home drunk, at which point I would sit along the edge of my kitchen sink and I would look out across the city gray and I would finish whatever beer I still had left in the refrigerator. On that night, the night when all of the media attention had shifted to the Lower Ninth Ward, I remember sitting along the edge of that sink and listening to Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927” over and over and over again. Louisiana, Newman sang, They’re trying to wash us away/They’re trying to wash us away. This, all of it, it had happened so many times before. It had been happening forever.
Today’s parade is taking place approximately four miles west of the Lower Ninth Ward. There was flooding throughout this neighborhood during Katrina, and it was severe, although you would not know it to see the people who are filing out of the community center on this Sunday. The mood along Villere Street is one of resilience, the bulk of it rooted in rhythm and dance, the sounding of trumpets. As the second line makes its first right onto Orleans Avenue, my cousin and I fall in. Looking back, I notice an array of paper plates and discarded napkins. I also notice a loose pile of ice melting in the dirt. My cousin and I are not sure how long we will remain with the procession. The parade is scheduled to complete a half-mile loop that will conclude in Tuba Fats Square around 5 PM. That’s four long hours just to end up within a stone’s throw of where we began. Then again, it’s not about the time spent or the distance covered. It’s about the people that you meet as you move from one point onto another. I tend to forget that. I tend to look ahead instead of remaining present in the moment.
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It is Monday now, late evening. My cousin left this afternoon and my flight leaves tomorrow around 11 AM. I took a walk tonight. I wanted to collect my thoughts. I do not know when I will be back in New Orleans, I only know that I have enjoyed my time here, and that I have enjoyed wandering these streets. I like taking in the architecture. Every cottage has its own backstory, and every shack looks like it was constructed in the old ways, and with old hands. I love the gables. I love the shutters. Those shutters strike me like a house’s orthodontia, so prominent and pronounced. Every time I pass by a set of shutters that are in alignment (and maybe freshly painted), I assume that the house they are attached to must be in order. Every time I pass by a set of shutters that run crooked, or that are missing slats, I assume that the house they are attached to has been neglected. But this is blather. The fact remains that I will never know for sure, just as I will never know what it means to be a part of this city, to solve its riddles, to understand its codes.
“[New Orleans] is a story that will go on forever,” Allen Toussaint once said. When I think about Toussaint, I think about Southern Nights, but I also think about Randy Newman, and Dr. John, and Harry Connick, and Truman Capote, each of them of native origin. There is an ease about these artists, a cynical brilliance combined with a relaxed way of being. New Orleans instills that way of being, although it can only be absorbed over years and years of learning. A lot of transplants are not equipped to settle long here in the Delta. They extract what they need, and then they continue on their journey. During a visit to the Museum of Art this week, I learned that Edgar Degas considered himself to be a son of Louisiana. Degas was not born in this area, and he only visited New Orleans for all of five months between 1872 and 1873. After that, Degas never came back, and this raises the question: How many great artists have fallen in love with The Crescent City without ever committing to it on a lifelong basis? This city feels like a stopover for the creatively stymied. It feels like a hot spring for the innovatively unsure.
Such were the thoughts that went cycling through my head during my walk this evening. That walk took me across the east side of town, up to the waterfront, and then back down to Frenchmen Street, where I stopped off for a quick drink at The Maison. My cousin and I watched a band play at The Maison two nights ago. There was no cover and the crowd was thin enough that we had room to breathe. We found a spot along the bar only a few feet from the stage. I sat in that same spot along the same bar tonight. I even ordered via the same bartender. I remembered her. Not old, but not young. Mousy, but in a no-nonsense kind of way. She looked like a skater … tattooed arms, hair pulled back in a double bun, wide-leg jeans. That bartender made an impression, albeit the type of impression that reminded me more of my past than of my future. Needless to say, I kept to myself, and I passed the time by scrolling through my phone, which is how I learned that another one of the inmates from the Orleans Parish jailbreak had just been apprehended in Walker County, Texas. That meant there were eight fugitives in custody with two more left in the wind (and a single city maintenance worker who had admitted he played a hand in the escape). One of the two remaining fugitives was Antoine Massey, the alleged ringleader. Had Massey set a course toward the Lone Star State? Could he have slipped into Nuevo Laredo or Ciudad Juarez? He could have, but people are creatures of habit, and the probability was that sooner rather than later, Antoine Massey would resurface. For Massey, coming back to New Orleans would be a mistake. Too much heat, too many people with too much to gain by giving him up. The long-term play would be to sever all ties and start over. Exist, but lay low. Secure employment, and get paid in cash. Blend into the scenery, become a drifter. Make a promise to yourself that you will not hurt anybody, and that you will not make anyone else complicit in your deception. Become “the man with no name” just like all those guys in the old westerns. Make peace with your past and do some good if you can. It’s a lot, but it’s the only way for an outlaw. Then again, should Antoine Massey even be considered an outlaw? Outlaws are cool. Antoine Massey is a lifelong felon who is currently awaiting trial on charges of domestic abuse and grand theft auto. And in the end, am I even talking about Antoine Massey, or am I considering my own circumstances? I am not sure what life will hold in store for me a month from today. I only know that I will be starting over, and that I already feel alive again as a result. Alive or not, it is almost midnight and I still have some packing left to do before I check out in the morning. The tourist season is over now. All signs point toward a renewal.
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