New Orleans 3

It was in the middle of one of these monsoons that Caro and I decided to take a tour of the city, which was a great decision as we went with a tour company that employs local historians as guides.  Our guy was called Leonard, a lecturer in local history as well as being a bus driver or "Tour Conveyance Executive" as he put it.  "Y'all gotta learn The Phrase That Pays, if'n y'all wanna git on," he explained.  "So ah ahm a Tour Conveyance Executive, a garbageman is a City Refuse Operative and a drug dealer is a Pharmaceutical Goods Facilitator."  Then he insisted that we learn the Phrase That Pays pertaining to New Orleans:
 
"In N'awlins Everything Is Mo' Betta".
 
Y'all got that?
 
Anyway.  So Leonard was GREAT.  He drove us out of the French Quarter while explaining how New Orleans came to be the way it is.  Are you sitting comfortably?
 
New Orleans – The History According To Leonard
New Orleans started out as a dumping ground for French undesirables.  Kind of like Australia, only without Rolf Harris which, in itself, is something of a plus.  Early French settlers had been duped into buying the land by mendacious explorers who promised vast tracts of rich, fertile land.
 
Said French gullibles then sailed out to the Promised Land to find a swamp.
 
"Ah non, zees cannot be ze New Orleans we were told off bah le exploreur chapeez," they said speaking English in a funny French accent for some strange reason.
 
But, as they explored further they found there was more to New Orleans than swampland.  They also found alligators.  And snakes.  And native American tribes, who were only slightly less antisocial than the alligators and snakes.
 
The poor Frenchies then embarked on the only course left open to them.  They died.  Well, mostly they did.  The rest of them decided to focus on the priorities of the French, namely shagging, and petitioned the king for suitable brides, who promptly sent them a job-lot of convicted prostitutes.
 
New Orleans was born.
 
Les Nouvelle Orleanistes discovered that the land was cultivatable, reclaimed some of the swampland and began growing sugar.  In order to do this, they grabbed some slaves out of the neighbouring American tribes, who promptly embarked on the only course of action open to them - namely either legging it back home or dying.  Without adequate labour, those froggy French chaps would have had it, so they replaced those unreliable Native Americans with Africans, who would have a great deal more trouble legging it back home, although they did manage to die equally easily.
 
Actually, that's not quite true.  Some slaves did attempt to escape to life in the swamps where they found aid and support amongst the Cajuns.  Some people think the Cajuns were the French - mais non mes petites!  Les Cajuns were in fact, French-Canadians of Viking descent who had buggered off out of Canada to escape the nasty Scots after General Wolfe had captured Quebec.  On reaching French territory, the poor Cajuns without a centime to their names had been forced to settle in the swamps and exist on a diet of possum and frog, which appears to have sent them a bit mad.  The Cajuns became a self-enclosed community which shunned contact with the outside world and perfected the art of really spicy food (which was probably something to do with that possum and frog diet).

Leonard explained that just one of the Cajun specialities was Alligator Sausage on a Stick.  "Now THAT'S some good eatin' right there," he said.  He went on to say how one of his tourists had sampled one of these delights on his tour, and had been remarking how tasty it was when he told her what it was made out of.  "She threw up right then and there, all over me," he concluded.
 
The Creoles, meanwhile, were the descendants of those unfortunate Frenchies and their tarty wives.  However, by now Napoleon had decided to give Louisiana to his brother, the King of Spain.  That’s a heck of a present.  All I ever get from my sibling is socks.   So now, Louisiana was Spanish and the Creoles became a mixture of French and Spanish.  Following all this?  It gets worse, because after a few years, those Spaniards got sick of Napoleon, and had a bit of a scrap with the French in Spain. The Spanish were led by Wellington, The Iron Duke himself, Arthur Wellesley and old Boney had to claim Louisiana back for the Frenchies again.  However for a period, New Orleans was Spanish, which is why the buildings have that Spanish flavour.  In fact, “The French Quarter” is a complete misnomer, because all the buildings are in the Spanish style.  I do hope you’re taking notes.
 
The Creoles were a funny bunch.  They had rules and regulations for everything, partly because they were Catholic, partly just because they liked rules.  Creole society was very strictly broken down and everyone was labelled.  Young Creole men found this sort of thing very restricting.  Young ladies had to be covered from head to ankle and just seeing a woman's ankles meant you had to get married.  Imagine!  You catch a glimpse of some young lady's foot and it turns out she has puffy ankles or ugly feet.  And it's too late!  You have to marry the horny-hoofed monstrosity, because you've compromised her foot-modesty.  Chiropodists must have had a heck of a time of it.
 
Because of this, many of these old houses had two separate staircases for men and women, to avoid accident foot-spotting incidents which resulted in young Harry ending up marrying elderly aunt Eunice, but these naughty young men also had a habit of hanging around the women's staircase, waiting for the woman they wanted to hook up with and then leaping out saying "Ah-HA!!  I've seen your ankles!!  Now you are MINE!"
 
They were a bit mad, those Creoles.
 
Once they were married, the Creole ladies would put out, but unfortunately men being what they are, they often fancied a bit of the other.  This being so, the Creoles invented another set of Rules and Regulations for Having A Bit of The Other.  Basically, the Creole men would maintain what was called a "Shadow" family with free women of colour in a fine house on the other side of the tracks.  Free men or women of colour were the illegitimate sons and daughters of slaves and their masters.  Under The Black Code, they were free, although they had to carry papers proving that they were not slaves.  Once again, the Creoles outdid themselves in fastidious labelling of everything, and their rules and names broke down like this:
 
One white parent, one black - Mulatto
One black parent, one mulatto - Sambo or Griff
One white parent, one multatto - Quadroon
One white parent, one quadroon - Octoroon
One white parent, one octoroon - Musterfino or Mameloque
 
These women and men could be completely black or white, but so long as they had one of these labels, they could kiss polite society goodbye.  The men were allowed to pursue careers, but nothing professional (many became musicians) while the women simply attached themselves to a rich Creole gentleman and became his shadow wife (or placee, in a form of marriage referred to as placage).  The Black Code placed severe restrictions on these women, forcing them to wear coloured bandanas, so they would be marked out, no matter how white they were.  Placees were kept out of the best shops, prohibited from marrying a Creole, owning a horse (though they were allowed to own slaves) or just being "uppity" (which basically meant anything that upset a Creole woman).
 
The Black Code back was used partially as a way of labelling the population, partly as a way of ensuring the rights of slaves and people of colour.  Yes, slaves actually had rights under the Creoles, who worked out that with at least half a dozen slaves to every Creole, they had better be treated decently, unless they wanted to end up with pitchforks up their bottoms.  As a result, slaves in Louisiana had weekends off, and could only be disciplined by the wives of the landowners, who at worst, would merely spank the slaves.  (Although the wife also had the threat of "putting him in her pocket" which meant selling the slave on to the Americans and pocketing the profit).  Since the slaves knew that slavery in the US was a great deal more severe than in Louisiana, this was often enough to keep them in line.  The Southern Belles, it turns out, were a pretty tough bunch actually.  With their husbands constantly going off drinking, gambling or shagging about, they were often left to run the plantation themselves.  Often they worked in the fields alongside their slaves, as well as running a household and having enormous families.  "Gone With the Wind" and Scarlett O'Hara, Leonard informed us, is all just a pretty myth.
 
Back in Louisiana, it turns out that the slaves out often didn't want weekends off - they preferred to cut sugar to make money for themselves and use that money towards buying their own freedom – although  this was a practice the Creoles did not allow and again, could result in that slave being sold to the Americans.  It seems the Creoles preferred their slaves to have weekends of so they could entertain their masters with gris-gris ceremonies - voodoo rituals.
 
Voodoo had come to New Orleans via Senegal and Haiti and reached its height under a free woman of colour named Marie Laveux who worked out that adding a little Catholicism to the pot would make it still more enticing.  Marie Laveux, and her daughter (also named Marie) were the ones who really popularized voodoo in Louisiana - the two women's lives were so intermingled, the myth is that she was actually just  one woman who lived to be 120 years old.  Sort of like Donatella Versace.
 
In the end, Lousiana was sold by Bonaparte to the Americans, whom the Creoles considered a lower form of life than the slaves.  This led to yet a split between the Orleanists who thought Bonaparte a betrayer of the French and the Bonapartists who would have nothing said against the man.  Meanwhile, the uneducated Kaintucks, as they were known, were loathed as loud and vulgar Americans.  Worse still – they were Protestant.  New Orleans is divided today into French and American quarters, with Canal Street being the dividing line.  However, our tour guide, Leonard told us that one of the biggest causes for friction between the two societies was the height of the Americans.
 
"The Creoles, they wuz jes little people - the men were 'bout four foot six, the women even smaller.  And when those little Creole women laid eyes on them big ol' Americans, well they didn't behave as proper as they should if you know what I'm sayin'."
 
So there you go.  Once again small men lose out to six-footers.  I should invest in some lifts.
 
"'Course," Leonard continued, "when them little four foot Creole women gave birth to children that turned out to be six foot.  Well, them four foot six Creole men, they say 'Hey those goddam Kaintucks jumped mah fence' and they took them their swords and they chased them Kaintucks back over Canal Street."
 
The Americans also considered the Creoles to be huge hypocrites for sniffing at the American's habit of sleeping with their slaves, since to American eyes, all people of colour were slaves.  In their eyes, the Creoles, with all their placees and fine houses and shadow families, were doing just the same as them.  So there was no love lost between the two societies, with frequent duelling breaking out.  People were always dropping dead in New Orleans, what with the duelling, the high crime rate and the disease.  Living in a swamp is not good for the constitution, and when you add in all the diseases that arrived via the port, yellow fever and typhoid epidemics would regularly wipe out sizable portions of the population. 

This, together with voodoo, accounts for New Orlean's fascination with death.  Well that, and the fact that due to the water table, you can't actually bury the dead.  "They tried that at the beginning," explained Leonard, "but then came the first flood, and all them coffins popped up and all them folks jes' watched as their aunts and grandfathers floated on by."  As a result, New Orleans has these graveyards, referred to as cities of the dead, dominated by aboveground tombs.  Leonard took us to Saint Louis Cemetery Number Three.
 
"Ah woulda taken you to number one, because it's more interestin'.  Marie Laveux, she's in there, and even today people leave her offerings and be doin' ceremonies and such, but it's a dangerous place.  You do NOT go there alone, and if anythin' happened to you people, I would be in trouble."
 
So we wandered around the rather tidy number three instead.  It didn't look particularly frightening or macabre, but I imagine it would be quite different at night.  Leonard explained how these tombs contained about 200 people and...
 
You WHAT??!!  Two HUNDRED?
 
Well, I mean these things are BIG, but not THAT big.  How do they get 200 people inside?  

Do you really want to know?
 
It turns out that in the days of the old plagues, the church and the scientists had no idea what was causing the epidemics.  They tried to rid the city of typhoid, malaria and so forth by firing cannons, which is about as much use as Robert Downey Jr. after a trip to Columbia, so the church came up with this rule:  Anyone who dies, gets put in the tomb for a year and a day to stop the disease spreading.  This too, didn't work, but it was a rule, it was all they had and you know how those Creoles are about rules.  So anyway, these poor buggers were entombed for a year and a day after their death.  Medical science being what it was, sometimes they were buried alive.  That's a pretty scary thing.  Can you imagine waking up in a TOMB.  Fortunately, those Creoles thought of everything and put little bell-towers in these tombs so if the dead should wake up, they could yank on a little chain and let everyone know that they had been misdiagnosed.  And that is where the phrase "saved by the bell" comes from.  Isn't that interesting?!?  Isn't it???  Oh, bugger you then.

After a year and a day, if the deceased had failed to ring for assistance, they were taken out, cremated and shoved into a little pit in the middle of the tomb called le caveux at which point any new family members could be inserted.  If, however, the family tomb filled up (there was generally room for about 3 bodies at a time) before the year and the day expired, then the surplus body went In The Wall.  The Wall is not a good place to go - it's where people who couldn't afford tombs ended up.  Being put in the wall generally means some antisocial type will drag your poor old bones out of there and grind them up for use in a voodoo potion.
 
"You might think that voodoo is just some tourist thing," said Leonard, "it's not.  It's very real and very dangerous and there is still a huge trade in human bones.  That's why you never go into these cemeteries without a guide."  
 
The other danger in the cemeteries is that fact that, as church land, it does not have a police prescence.  As such, it has become a home to junkies and drug dealers who have taken over many of the tombs and made them their home.  They refer to themselves as "Gutter Punks" while the New Orleanistes call them "zombies".
 
All this death and disease is what gives New Orleans its rather hedonistic philosophy.  If you had to sum up the philosophy of New Orleans it would be something along the lines of "Oh, let's shag and get pissed, tomorrow we'll be dead anyway."  The locals, of course, have more poetic ways of putting it – “laissez le bonne temps rouler”, another phrase I liked is “lache pas la patate” which means, "Don't let go of the potato."  It probably loses something in translation.  The point is, that it is a city used to death and decay – in fact a it is a city that feels like it is decaying all around you - the heat and the humidity cause paint to fade and masonry to crumble almost in front of your very eyes.  Add to this the constant flooding and the fact that the city is sinking into the mud and we will be lucky if New Orleans lasts another 100 years.  Book your trip now.
 
Storyville played a big part in this hedonistic atmosphere.  This was an area set up by (ironically) a moral crusader named Story who wanted an area for the strumpets to be sent and in order to leave the ordinary decent folk in peace.  Of course, the ordinary decent menfolk soon found themselves in Storyville and the area became a den of vice and naughtiness that made the Pigalle look like Lourdes.  Storyville no longer exists, but is still famous as the birthplace of jazz - or, if not the birthplace, then the place where jazz got drunk and contracted a social disease.  If I'm making New Orleans sound horrible, then I apologise.  I loved the place - it had real character.  The atmosphere and the history of New Orleans is so palpable you absord it with every step and every time you look around.  Part of that history - actually a big part - is sort of horrible and grotesque, but very much alive - it might be alive in the same way a dead cat is alive with maggots, but it's still jumpin'.  
 
In conclusion, if New Orleans was a person, it would undoubtedly be some syphilitic old hag, hacking and wheezing on a cigarette but with great stories to tell about the women she'd met and the men she'd shagged.  Her voice would crack like a marble slab being prised off and her breath would stink of whisky and tobacco.  And just when you were giving her a chaste kiss goodbye, she'd slip you the tongue.  THAT'S what New Orleans would be like if she was a woman.
 
(And if she were a man, she'd be Keith Richards.  Enough said.)