New Orleans in my bones

In May, 1968, when I was twenty-two and my son Chris was a toddler, my then-husband got a job offer in New Orleans, and I went with him to the interview and was seduced by the city. I left the marriage before another year had passed and was living in the French Quarter by mid-1969. I was quivering to be alive, and New Orleans taught me how. 

It was a city full of people who had come from all over the world to be there. Without even trying, I found myself hanging out with waiters and secretaries who were escapees from small towns in Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee; and with a dancer from Cameroon, doctors from Thailand and Ethiopia, a parasitologist from Germany, a Grecian poet, and an Iranian sculptor. The city was fecund; every crack in the sidewalk was alive with weeds, insects, and history. It was a city of talented black people whose families could play horns, bead Mardi Gras costumes, and cook crab-stuffed mirlitons while hosting meetings of the Black Panthers or the Perfect Gentlemen Social Aid and Pleasure Club. New Orleans in 1969 was heaving with politics, jazz, sex, and wild-eyed artists with eccentric ideas of success. I knew a woman who painted pictures of nudes using her menstrual blood as medium. I knew a man who painted pictures of toys, a man who built wooden toys, several photographers, and a woman who draped herself in window curtains, called herself a psychic, and set up a table telling fortunes on the sidewalk. I knew men who’d been born as women, and women who’d been born as men, and when the tuba and the bass drum started up, everybody danced in the streets together.

It wasn’t just newly decadent; orgasmic cries of delight had resounded from open windows of second-floor bedrooms for centuries. Free men of color had wrought the iron for French Quarter balconies and had fashioned plaster medallions for slave dealers’ ceilings. Independent women had found work as milliners, dress-makers, pastry chefs, and strippers. Tennessee Williams lived in New Orleans off and on for decades. He lived in an apartment on St. Peter Street when he published Streetcar Named Desire, next-door to where I would live, across the street from the Gumbo Shop. William Faulkner had lived around the corner in Pirates Alley, and while I lived there, Ruthie the Duck Lady was parading around the Quarter in a wedding veil, followed by two or three loudly quacking ducks. It was a haven for drag queens, and gay men said that in New Orleans, S&M meant Sequins and Mascara. The city was famous for debauchery, and I was curious about debauchery. It was famous for literature, and I thought maybe I was both Eudora Welty and Eleonora Duse reborn. My first published poem was about the French Quarter; it appeared in 1971 or 1972, in a magazine called Bitterroot Quarterly. My first job in the city involved photography, and those are some of my old photographs I’ve arranged around a picture of Duse that graced my altar for years. My son Seth was born there, I came out there, and I lived there longer than I ever lived anywhere else. I will beat that record in Portland if I live here another four years, but I’ll always wish the Lady Buckjumpers and the Rebirth Brass Band could second-line at my funeral.