Ch a p t e r On e

H A R D CA L L S
D O T H E R I G H T T H I NG
ITS 10 A.M. ON A SUNDAY AND IM AT MY DESK, WRITING. OUTSIDE
the window, across the street in Audubon Park, a group of Mardi Gras
Indians are practicing for St. Josephs Day, one of the lesser-known holi-
days on the New Orleans calendar. Mardi Gras is the biggest blowout of the
year, but we celebrate a lot hereformal occasions like St. Josephs Day and
Super Sunday and informal ones like second-line parades and jazz funer-
als. People take to the streets all year long, swept up in tides of music and
movement.
Looking out my window, I see that the Indians are wearing their
costumesextravagant scaffolds of plumes, rhinestones, and beadwork.
Theyre riveting. Arms flung wide, feet stomping, the men execute pea-
cock struts and ruffle their feathers. The tambourine shakes out a beat and
strange words float in the air.
10 T H E I NE V I T A B L E CI T Y
The Mardi Gras Indians are African American, with possible traces
of Caribbean and Native American heritage, strains that are evident in
the songs and dances. According to local lore, the impulse to dress up as
Indians stems from a feeling of kinship with the Native American tribes
who took in runaway slaves in the nineteenth century. Some of the chiefs say
that another motivating force for the creation of tribes was opposition to the
predominantly white Mardi Gras processions. Feeling unwelcome, African
Americans made their own parade.
One of the complicated things about New Orleans is the racial divide:
How divided is it? You talk to different people, you get different answers.
On the one hand, theres a lot of easy warmth and acceptance, a feeling of
were all from here. Theres also a strong multiracial element, with many
genetic mixtures and many shades of skin color. On the other hand, there are
occasional collisions along racial lines. Even so, its not like elsewhere. The
civil rights movement stopped short of New Orleans, at least in the sense of
open hostilities. Everything down here is more subtle, more encoded, than
elsewhere.
I should add that Im not from here. Im originally from New Jersey, a
place with very different social codes. I was also, for a long while, a transplant
to Cleveland, Ohio, the rust belt city derided as the mistake on the lake
but in fact a place of interesting textures and customs. Still, New Orleans
is different: more intricate, more layered. Theres something in the air, a
complicated, liberating ethos of permissiveness, indulgence, acceptance,
forgiveness. As my wife Margie puts it, shes never lived in a place where
shes known so many people whove been in jail, not for violent crime but
for white-collar misdeeds, shady dealings, minor corruption. People tend to
shrug off other peoples mistakes, as they shrug off their own. Thats the way
it is down here.
In my seven pre-Katrina years in New Orleans, I was, in a way, a tour-
ist. But since Katrina, I feel more like Im from here. Ive become engaged
with everything New Orleansthe music, the food, the artists, the history;
the hurricane parties, the Mardi Gras floats, the smell of jasmine, the glit-
ter of the river. Ive met remarkable people, like the late Jefferson Parish
H A R D CA L L S 11
sheriff Harry Lee, who figured out how to get Tulanes database files out of
a downtown building when the city was under martial law, and like Quint
Davis, the mastermind and producer of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage
Festival, who almost singlehandedly brought the citys musiceverything
from the Mardi Gras Indians chants to Professor Longhairs bluesto
national prominence. And then theres Bob Breland, my regular cabdriver,
whose colorful turns of phrase, careening sense of humor, and encyclope-
dic mind for city detail remind me of Ignatius from John Kennedy Tooles
A Confederacy of Dunces.
There are also the people I dont know personally but who make me feel
like I know them. I was in the grocery store not long ago, and a woman in an
extravagant hat, some sort of feathered thing sitting on the rim, passed by
me in the aisle. She smiled warmly and said, How ya doin, baby? I smiled
back and told her I was fine, how was she doin? Its like old home week
everywhere you go. In the pre-hurricane years, I grew to love this town. It
was Katrina that changed the landscape, literally and figuratively, and gave
me the chance to do something here.
I turn again to the window. The Mardi Gras Indians are still chant-
ing, and I try to make out the words. Hey Mama, hu tan nay, pock a
way pock a way. Its patois, mixing English with what sounds like non-
sense words. We have a group of linguists at Tulane who are analyzing
Indian songs to try to identify their roots in French, Spanish, and Native
American dialects. We also have a group at the law school trying to copy-
right the costumes of the Indians as works of art, so that the tribes, some
40 of them, will benefit whenever theyre displayed at art museums or on
the web.
I love watching the Indians dance, but Im aware that Im only an
observer. I see them framed in the window: Theyre out there, Im in here.
A lot of the life of the city, vivid, messy, exotic, is out there, while I spend
my time in offices and conference rooms. Maybe Ive become more part of
the city, a transplant with roots, but Im still somehow separated from the
culturewhich may be one reason Ive been able to do certain things, hard
things, that people born and raised here couldnt or wouldnt.