« TT: So you want to see a show? | Main | TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger? »
September 1, 2005
TT: The vanished trail
I've never been to New Orleans, though I always meant to go, and was planning to pay a visit this fall. I started writing a biography of Louis Armstrong back in January, and the time had come for me to pay a visit to Tulane University's Hogan Jazz Archive and start trawling through its massive collection of documents and other source material. More than that, I wanted to see Armstrong's home town for myself at long last. It was mostly a matter of curiosity: I'd been reading about New Orleans all my life, and I longed to put the flesh of first-hand observation on all that I'd learned from books.Needless to say, book learning is not to be despised. For one thing, it made it possible for me to write the first paragraph of the first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong:
To the northerner New Orleans is another country, seductive and disorienting, a steamy, shabby paradise of spicy cooking, wrought-iron balconies, and streets called Elysian Fields and Desire, a place where the signs advertise such mysterious commodities as po-boys and muffuletta and no one is buried under ground. We'll take the boat to the land of dreams, the pilgrim hears in his mind's ear as he prowls the Vieux Carré, pushing through the noisy hordes of tipsy visitors, wondering whether the land of his dreams still exists, or ever did. Rarely does he linger long enough to pierce the thick veneer of local color with which the natives shield themselves from the tourist trade. At the end of his stay he knows little more than when he came, and goes back home to his bookshelf to puzzle out all that he has seen and smelled and tasted. A.J. Liebling, a well-traveled visitor from up north, saw New Orleans as a Mediterranean port transplanted to the Gulf of Mexico, a town of civilized pleasures whose settlers "carried with them a culture that had ripened properly, on the tree." He knew what he was seeing, but Walker Percy, who lived and died there, cast a cooler eye on the same sights: "The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle." Unlike Liebling, he also caught the scent of decay....
I showed that passage to several friends of mine who knew New Orleans well, not telling them I'd never been there until after they'd read and commented on it. None of them suspected that it was the unaided product of book learning, a fact of which I'm sinfully proud.
Nevertheless, I took it for granted that I'd need to spend some time wandering around New Orleans in order to write Hotter Than That, though the more I thought about it, the more I wondered exactly what it was I expected to find there. Armstrong left New Orleans in 1922, never to return save as a visitor. The only home he ever owned is in Queens, New York, not far from the Louis Armstrong Archives, to which his fourth wife Lucille left his papers and personal effects, and Flushing Cemetery, where he was laid to rest in 1971. All the really important sites of his youth vanished long, long ago: the honky-tonks where he played his first gigs, the children's home where he learned to play cornet, the shack on Jane Alley where he was born. Even Jane Alley itself has been swallowed up by urban renewal. Nothing recognizable remains of Storyville, the whites-only red-light district to which he delivered coal as a boy, or black Storyville, the violent slum where he grew up, and the guidebooks warn visitors in no uncertain terms to steer cleer of Louis Armstrong Park ("It's still a bad idea to walk through the park alone day or night").
It was different when I was writing about H.L. Mencken. A half-century after his death, Mencken's scent is still strong in Baltimore. All three of his homes still exist, and I spent a day in the Hollins Street row house in which he spent nearly the whole of his childhood and all but a few years of his adult life. His personal library and the bulk of his private papers belong to the Enoch Pratt Free Library, where qualified scholars can rummage through them at will. I spent innumerable hours doing just that, and dined several times just around the corner at Marconi's, one of his favorite restaurants. I even made a point of visiting his grave. It's no exaggeration to say that I simply couldn't have written The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken without passing a vast amount of time in Baltimore.
By comparison, New Orleans contains few surviving traces of Louis Armstrong, yet it never occurred to me for a moment not to go there. To some extent, I suppose, it would have been in the nature of a pilgrimage. Though he had no illusions about it, Armstrong loved New Orleans with all his heart, and wrote about it in his autobiography with surprisingly uncomplicated affection. For that reason alone, I felt I owed it to his memory to pay the place a visit. Moreover, I was well aware that New Orleans is a city like no other, and it seemed self-evident to me that I owed it to myself to walk the streets and smell the air.
Such, at any rate, was my plan. Then came Hurricane Katrina, and as I sat in front of my TV on Sunday and Monday, gawking at the unfolding disaster and in the process seeing more of New Orleans than I had in the whole of my preceding life, I realized that I'd missed my chance. It's not at all clear how much of New Orleans will be left to see when the waters subside and the folks come back home, and the greater part of what remains will doubtless have been altered beyond recognition by the time I finally get there. Or perhaps not: New Orleans, I gather, is as much a way of life as a place to live, and the lure of that lifestyle may well be powerful enough to inspire its surviving citizens to restore it to something closely resembling what it was mere days ago. But even if they do, it won't be the same.
Josh Levin, who grew up in New Orleans, wrote the other day about how it felt to watch his home town drown on TV:
As the endlessly looping aerial footage shows little more than a giant lake with highway overpasses peeking out, I'm glad I wasn't there and terrified I never will be again. A friend from high school told me he took the scenic route out of town on Sunday morning so he could remember the places he needed to remember: Molly's at the Market, the Warehouse District, the Uptown JCC, the corner of St. Charles Avenue where he drank his first beer. I squint at the screen, searching for some kind of landmark to say goodbye to, but the only thing that's recognizable is the Superdome, which now looks like a potato with the skin peeled off to reveal the rotten insides....
I don't remember much of what I did when I went down to visit my folks a few months ago: ate some fried seafood at some hole in the wall, went to my grandparents' house, probably walked under the canopy of oak trees in Audubon Park. Maybe it's a heartless thing to say when there are still people down there in the muck, but it's tragic to think of all those beautiful trees, in the park and on the Uptown streets that I drove through every day, toppled and on the ground, waiting to be chopped into bits and trucked away. There are friends' houses that will no doubt be so much flotsam, neighborhood restaurants that won't serve another oyster po' boy, bars where the jukebox won't ever play Allen Toussaint or Ernie K-Doe again.
I can't know how that feels. I think I'm glad I can't. But this I do know: I'm still going to go to New Orleans, once the levees are rebuilt and the floodwaters have receded. Maybe not right away, but soon, even if there's nothing left to see there but the shadows of shadows. Now more than ever, I owe it to Louis, and to the music I used to play and will always love so well.
Posted September 1, 2005 12:05 PM
