New Orleans

Xerxes is currently situated in New Orleans. I evacuated immediately after the Hurricane hit the city in August. I have returned to the broken and ruined city to find genuine concerns about whether the city will be restored or even renewed. I offer these thoughts about the matter.

In the face of growing expressions of reluctance from some quarters nationally to restoring New Orleans, let it be understood that as New Orleans goes, so shall go the cultural soul of America. For just as surely as New Orleans was overrun by a storm surge because her buffering coastal wetlands had been allowed to erode through years of neglect, so too will American culture sink into terminal banality and homogeneity if it abandons the root city of American culture. I do not assert this out of a simple parochial chauvinism, as if we are deaf and blind to the rich cultures which abound throughout this land, but as a challenge to the nation's character to help New Orleans make itself whole having been so sorely wounded. True, the bedraggled and beleaguered City of New Orleans did not always shine with the sterling reputation of being an idiosyncraticcultural Mecca, and early on it beckoned few. In the early eighteenth-century, prisoners in the Bastille, offered the prospect of manumission if they consented to be colonists in the new colony of Louisiana, rioted in refusal. After all, Louisiana boasted a mortality rate of nearly eighty percent that beggared even that of the harsh New England winters that decimated the Pilgrims. Though
New Orleans\n boasted the first opera house on the continent, Thomas Jefferson did not scheme to relieve it from Napoleon for its cultural attributes, but because of its centrality for commerce, situated as it was—and still is—as the North American gateway to the \nCaribbean and the entrance and point of debarkation of all produce from the American heartland \nflowing upon on the Mississippi River. \nSupping on the Open Oyster of New Orleans And yet, culturally speaking, today New Orleans stands virtually alone as the most genuine, vibrant and unique of all American cities. In a Wal-Mart nation, it is the French market, coffee shop, snowball stand, po-boy shop, Lucky-Dog cart, mule-driven taffy wagon, and most of all, the local club and dance hall. With our unique and unprecedented mélange of peoples of many nations, ethnicities, religions, and hues we foreshadowed America\'s own polyglot evolution as a nation: French colonists and refugees from San Domingue; Acadians cast into diaspora by the British; Spanish administrators and soldiers; enslaved Africans and gens de couleur libre; indigenous tribes such as the Houma, Tunica, and Coushatta; Sephardic Jews; Sicilian and Lebanese vendors; and Irish laborers put to digging drainage canals in pestilential swamps because they were more expendable than slaves as they had no capital value. We were both multicultural and culturally sophisticated,--with offerings from French opera and chamber groups to masked balls and bordellos rocking with barrelhouse pianos and ragtime--before most American cities were a gleam in a speculator\'s eye, before they were a hamlet or a crossroads, before they had a barbershop quartet. \nNew Orleans was, is, and will be--even more so if we perish--the shrine and seedbed of American culture. Our patron saints are Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Scott Joplin, Buddy Bolden, Jellyroll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Louis Prima, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, Irma Thomas, the Neville Brothers, Ellis and Wynton Marsalis, and Kermit Ruffins. Few American writers attained any stature who did not sup on the open oyster of New Orleans, whether Walt Whitman, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, O. Henry, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, Anne Rice, Richard Ford, or William Faulkner. Supping on the Open Oyster of New Orleans And yet, culturally speaking, today New Orleans stands virtually alone as the most genuine, vibrant and unique of all American cities. In a Wal-Mart nation, it is the French market, coffee shop, snowball stand, po-boy shop, Lucky-Dog cart, mule-driven taffy wagon, and most of all, the local club and dance hall. With our unique and unprecedented mélange of peoples of many nations, ethnicities, religions, and hues we foreshadowed America's own polyglot evolution as a nation: French colonists and refugees from San Domingue; Acadians cast into diaspora by the British; Spanish administrators and soldiers; enslaved Africans and gens de couleur libre; indigenous tribes such as the Houma, Tunica, and Coushatta; Sephardic Jews; Sicilian and Lebanese vendors; and Irish laborers put to digging drainage canals in pestilential swamps because they were more expendable than slaves as they had no capital value. We were both multicultural and culturally sophisticated,--with offerings from French opera and chamber groups to masked balls and bordellos rocking with barrelhouse pianos and ragtime--before most American cities were a gleam in a speculator's eye, before they were a hamlet or a crossroads, before they had a barbershop quartet. New Orleans was, is, and will be--even more so if we perish--the shrine and seedbed of American culture. Our patron saints are Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Scott Joplin, Buddy Bolden, Jellyroll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Louis Prima, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, Irma Thomas, the Neville Brothers, Ellis and Wynton Marsalis, and Kermit Ruffins. Few American writers attained any stature who did not sup on the open oyster of New Orleans, whether Walt Whitman, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, O. Henry, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, Anne Rice, Richard Ford, or William Faulkner.
But do not mistake New Orleans for some antiquarian artifact, no quaint anachronism frozen in time. New Orleans is a seething pool of assimilation and syncretism, of reinvention and recreation. It is a negotiation and a navigation between grace and dysfunction. It is a Creole place where cultural intermarriage is a badge of honor and affirmation of humanity. Situated precariously on the edge of the American continent, New Orleans' marginalization is a special vantage from which to see the mainstream of American culture, a certain slant of light which sees nuance and possibility better than normality.
The Danger of Normalcy The danger we pose to ourselves is that in our rush for normalcy we achieve it. The adjacent suburbs and even our Central Business District--which abandoned their historical roots in flight to modernity- -should stand as fair warning for New Orleanans' capacity for victimizing themselves. After all, the architecture of our suburban ring and the canyons of Houstonized high-rises were not forced upon us by people from New Jersey. New Orleans can be whole only if it understands and respects its own historical antecedents. What New York hosts in its plenitude and wealth and Los Angeles postures in artificiality, New Orleans possesses in fact: the only authentic indigenous urban culture on the continent, the promiscuous and defining soul of a nation sorely in need of one.
(posted by permission of the author 11/10/05 )
Michael Sartisky, Ph.D.President/Executive DirectorLouisiana Endowment for the HumanitiesLouisiana Humanities Center at Turners' Hall 938 Lafayette St.; Suite 300
New Orleans, LA 70113