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I visited New Orleans for the first time in March 06, only a handful of months after Katrina hit. My partner is a New Orleans native, relocated to London, and tries to make the visit every year. My impressions were of a City that had just received an almighty kicking and was starting to pick itself up off the ropes and take a few faltering steps again.
As a tourist, the damage from Katrina wasn't really noticeable in the places where tourists might go. The French Quarter and Uptown seemed more or less untouched on the surface, but my partner was shocked at how quiet everything was and how few people compared to how it used to be. Not having any previous experience of the City, a lot of this went over my head.
When we got out of the centre, that's when we saw the real damage, especially on the roads out to the swamps, where things were still pretty fucked. Boats stuck up trees. Houses gutted. Whole housing projects abandoned. Closer to the coast, we saw the most shocking damage, such as a seven story casino/hotel complex split down the middle as if someone had driven a gigantic axe through it from top to bottom.
But in the City itself, you had the impression of people living hand-to-mouth, trying to keep their businesses going and struggling to return to something approaching normalcy. The widespread belief that New Orleans was literally wiped off the map by Katrina - and that there was no longer a City there - had massively impacted the tourist industry, and you had people returning to their home City and trying to get things going again but struggling to make ends meet.
There was a big sense of defiance and gallows humour about what had just happened. Lots of people selling t-shirts making reference to receiving blow-jobs from Katrina and such like. Lots of people appearing to take it in their stride and trying to get on about their business. But when you actually got people talking about it, you heard stories of a City that only a few months back had been frontier territory.
Some friends of my partner had not evacuated and were missing for months. I remember this time two years ago having to call her away from the television set which she was obsessively watching in the hope that she might catch a glimpse of some of her missing friends in the shelter and know that they were OK. It turned out that they had survived, hiding out in the upper stories of a shop in the Quarter until the police told them they had lost control of the City and could no longer guarantee their safety. They were moved to the Superdome, and had to wait it out there until the police said they could leave. I have no idea what it must have been like there, but the accounts I've heard conjure the impression of it being somewhere between an internment camp and John Carpenter's "Escape from New York", with little encampments of survivors huddling together in the night, constant threat of gang trouble, and corpses here and there.
Other people I spoke to gave accounts of desperate post-storm missions back into the city to rescue their loved ones, lifelong pacifists buying guns to defend themselves as they venture back into what was once their home to find out if they still had parents. When people talked about any of it, you could hear the movements of the knife in their hearts as they spoke. Like someone who has lived through a war, trying to choose words that would convey something of their experience and its enormity, but not disturb the painful shards still lodged within.
But even against this backdrop and with this pain so fresh in the memory of the City, the magic of the place was overwhelming. From the moment my first offerings of rum hit the crossroads at Harmony Street, the mysteries of the City opened to me. Visiting New Orleans was like an initiation in itself, and my short week there had a profound influence on my magical practice. Changed my life forever, pretty much. I think of New Orleans as a Holy City now, in every sense. The Spirits are so strong there. Pour rum for them and they turn up, large as life, in the guise of flesh and blood Voodoo Queens and Two-headed Doctors. If the City of New Orleans is dead, then it's dead in the same way that Baron Samedi is dead. Dressed up in top hat and tails, drinking fine rum and smoking a fat cigar, dancing the banda and flirting outrageously with all of the girls. It's a city of magic and mysteries, soulfood and jazz, drive-through daquiri stalls and botanicas with veves chalked outside, swamps filled with hungry alligators and a streetcar named desire.
On my visit I felt weirdly like some sort of emmissary of London, another City of magic and mysteries - and one which has, over the years and in various ways, also had the shit kicked out of it again and again - coming to give love and support. We made offerings to the Dead of the City in St Louis No.2 and prayed for their souls, and for their living descendents struggling to put their lives back together. We made offerings to Marie Laveau and petitioned her, great Voodoo Queen, to look after her children and help the City get back on its feet again. We raised drinks in bars, at crossroads, at the altars of the Lwa, and prayed for the City with our every sip of rum and smoke of cigar. Materially, I spent far more than I could really afford in the botanicas, bringing back many precious treasures of the City for my altars and - in whatever tiny way I could - trying to feed some business back into places that seemed to be feeling the sting of reduced tourist trade.
This year, we celebrated Mardi Gras by throwing a party in London. We made a spectacular altar for Doctor John and Marie Laveau, decorated with carnival masks and beads which we had ordered in from the City. My partner cooked a big pot of gumbo, enough to feed all of our guests, and baked two king cakes - one for the altar and one for everyone to share. We played New Orleans soul music and jazz till the early hours, drank huge amounts, and I got more spectacularly hammered on a Tuesday night than I have for a long while. We celebrated the City, its mysteries, its people and its Spirits.
I will be accompanying my partner again on her visit this year, my second visit, which I'm looking forward to immensely. This time we'll be there for Halloween and Day of the Dead. I'm looking forward to spending more time drifting beautiful, exotic streets that are like no other place on Earth, eating amazing food that could have originated from nowhere else, and spending more time in the Crescent City where the Spirits walk the streets and the daquiris flow like water. |
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