The New Orleans You Don't Know
by Harry Shearer
We know New Orleans. We, who see it on TV and in beer commercials, and in "Girls Gone Wild" videos, we know what New Orleans is: it's the more humid Gulf cognate of Vegas, a sin city where tits are bared and drinks are to go and the clock is a stranger. Except that casinos in New Orleans, instead of being the engine that drives the economy, are weak sisters always on the verge of bankruptcy and begging for tax forgiveness. And except that Vegas is flush with new construction and expensive TV ad campaigns.
So what about the New Orleans we don't know? The city has let the commercial and video makers define its image to the rest of the country for so long that it's hard to imagine a pitch being made for one of the many varieties of the "real" New Orleans. Because it would involve freedom but not license, pleasure for the senses instead of obliteration of the senses, and, most crucially, belonging to a community instead of visiting a high-security sinspot where "what happens here stays here".
I was on a New Orleans radio talk show recently, and the host asked me, in a tone of slight disbelief, what motivated me to make my home part of the year in the Crescent City. It was almost like being asked why one prefers to date one-legged girls. Thrown for a moment, not being able to call upon the standard reasons that explain a love of New Orleans to outsiders (brilliant food, brilliant music, extravagant architecture), I found myself forced to explain to an audience of locals why I found it more congenial to be among them than to be anywhere else I could imagine.
What came out, as usual when you're off guard and searching for an answer, was the truth: I grew up in Los Angeles, a highly agreeable place that was, and is, the quintessential individualistic city. You can be who or what you want in L.A., because nobody remembers who or what you were. Nobody remembers you, period. I loved that sense of promise and possibility and unencumberedness as a kid, but when I grew up, I realized that something was missing. And that something is what I discovered way down yonder.
That something was, and maybe still is, community. You may know the stats: no city in America, pre-Katrina, had a larger percentage of its population born in the city. New Orleanians stayed New Orleanians, generation after generation--people living not time zones nor miles away from their parents, but blocks away. What resulted was a city that, in the best sense, feels like a small town. New Orleans managed to combine the Southern American sense of gentility and chattiness with an absolutely urban air of sophistication and eccentricity.
This has as one of its results a definite effect on the way most people behave in public. In a goofy sense, they behave as if their parents just might be coming by. Very different from usual big-city behavior, which is to act as if your parents are in another hemisphere. But the sense of community expresses itself in numberless ways: in the ritual of Friday afternoon lunch (the Lunch That Never Ends), in the casual conversations that make buying the newspaper at the corner store so much more essential than buying it from a corner rack, in the web of organizations and rituals--Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, second-line parades, Carnival parties--that make every day on the calendar specific and freighted with meaning.
In a way, you can measure the intensity of community in New Orleans by the current post-Katrina reports of anxiety and depression in the city. Almost all of the reports key in on the difficulty for New Orleanians living in a disrupted social fabric, ripped apart from the tapestry of friends and relatives. But you can measure it in a more positive way by the tentative sprouts of life and energy in even the most damaged parts of town, by the remarkable resilience and guts of people opening up new restaurants, new gathering places in what "saner" folks would consider too challenging an economic environment. Just around the corner from where my wife records her music in the Bywater neighborhood, a new coffeehouse has opened: run by a young couple, he an artist and musician, she a new mother (and with maternal spirit grand enough to lavish upon all who enter), it's instantly become a magnet for the neighbors, and an expression of the community's will to mend itself. More people are eating out in New Orleans more often now, partly because it's not as easy to buy groceries as it used to be, but partly because, after a day fighting the contractors, the roofers, the insurance adjusters, the FEMA phone tree, people in town need to see each other, be with each other, eat and drink together.
The fabric of community has been ripped and rent by the disaster, but, to borrow the name of a once-futuristic technology, invisible re-weaving is already at work.
