The Big Easy

  • 7 January 2005
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Only in New Orleans will you hear 'Summertime' played at a funeral. Vitali Vitaliev finds hope, optimism and joie de vivre in abundance

A life-long admirer of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, two Russian satirists, who travelled in the USA in 1935-36 and recorded their impressions in the book Little Golden America, I was rather disappointed by their sketchy and half-hearted description of New Orleans, the country's most idiosyncratic city, which they visited towards the end of their 11-month-long trans-American journey .

The reasons for such aloofness were explained by the writers themselves: "New Orleans is a beautiful city. But the feeling of indifference and boredom, which overcame our automobile group after New Year's Eve, like a never-ceasing rain pouring constantly from an ever-cloudy sky, did not even think of leaving us. We have skimmed the cream of the journey. Man is not equipped to enjoy himself eternally. Therefore, all the beauty of New Orleans was appreciated only with our minds. The heart was speechless."

What a pity! According to the 1938 WPA guide to the 1930s, New Orleans, at the time of the Russians' visit, was still a half-European, half-American melange, a sultry meeting ground for "the imps, the pimps, and the shrimps", with a characteristic "live-and-let-live" liberal attitude toward human frailties. It was the place, where a thriving voodoo cult could still be found in Congo Square; where sixty cents could buy you lunch at the famous Galatoire's; where a seven-cent streetcar ride took you past banana wharves and molasses sheds; and the French Quarter still rang each morning with the calls of the coal peddler and the blackberry woman – while at night ghostly denizens walked the upper stories of grand mansions and humble cottages alike. One had to be deaf and blind, or else extremely tired (which was obviously the case with Ilf and Petrov), to skim through a city like that.

Retracing the writers' footsteps 68 years later, I couldn't help being influenced by their attitude to New Orleans. At least initially.

My first couple of hours in the city substantiated Ilf and Petrov's feeling of detachment: I liked the un-American smells of tobacco and chicory permeating Le Vieux Carre – the city's French Quarter – but otherwise, its shabbiness, its eclectic colonial architecture, its ostentatious (and somewhat threatening) hustle-and-bustle left my heart "speechless". The French street names sounded pretentious, and the whole place looked a mess – a bad imitation of Europe, uncertain of its past, present and future.

This initial impression gradually transformed as I was dining at Arnaud's, the much-celebrated Creole restaurant in Rue Bienville, where the waiters were so friendly and intelligent that I felt like inviting all of them to my next birthday party. Creole dishes struck me as coarse and spicy – a bit like New Orleans itself. And the cocktails – the indigenous Sazerac – was an unlikely mixture of Bourbon whisky, vermouth, absinthe, sugar and orange bitters, whereas Ramos Gin Fizz was a concoction of gin, egg whites(!), sugar and lemon-and-lime. They both tasted great.

"In New Orleans, we take something simply delicious and make it into something decadent," one of the waiters commented in response to my protracted mmmm...

I also noticed that, unlike in many other American restaurants, women were still invited to place their orders first at Arnaud's.

"We don't embrace all this PC garbage in New Orleans," another waiter explained.

After dinner, the French Quarter's cheerful raucousness was no longer irritating. "New Orleans is a Sazerac of cultures," I scribbled hastily in my note-book while elbowing my way along bustling Bourbon Street – the hub of New Orleans' never-ending fun. It was the first of the many metaphors that kept haunting me in Big Easy (one of the city's numerous nicknames).

I ended my first night in New Orleans dancing in the plywood shed of Preservation Hall, home of one of the city's best-known jazz bands, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. A lonely saxophonist was playing 'It's a Wonderful World' all night long behind the windows of my Monteleone Hotel in the heart of the French Quarter.

The macabre mood, in which Ilf and Petrov arrived in New Orleans, explains their gruesome fascination with "above-ground" cemeteries - the only detailed description in their woolly portrait of The City That Care Forgot (another New Orleans' nickname). But even there they largely missed the plot. Having noted that "no matter where they try to dig the ground" in New Orleans, "they find water" and hence "people always bury their dead in the manner of the ancient Egyptians, in sarcophagi, above the earth", they concluded that this "two-storied brick dullness makes the cemetery reminiscent of a small American town".

To me, the cemeteries of New Orleans were anything but dull. I was quite taken by the way a caretaker (or a "director of operations" – her modern PC job title) of St. Louis Cemetery No 1 greeted a funeral procession at the cemetery gates – with a broad smile on her face. Like everything else, they seemed to take death easy in Big Easy, where it is not unusual to have jazz played or a cocktail party held among the double-decker tombs.

"New Orleans is a rough place, but my cemetery is safe," the same caretaker told me with pride which reminded me of the dubious Soviet-style poster I once saw in a Moscow graveyard – "Let Us Turn Our Cemetery into Muscovites' Favourite Resting Place".

The plush Bultman's Funeral Home in the prestigious Garden District of New Orleans is often hired out for fun gatherings, musical recitals and business functions. Having a company's board meeting at a funeral home would be bizarre anywhere else, but not in Big Easy, which constantly celebrates life even after death. "People come to us to have fun," a black-clad Bultman's official assured me with a professional sombre grin.

In 1980, a businessman from Houston, Texas, chose New Orleans' Lafayette Cemetery as the site for his wedding. The ceremony was held in one of the cemetery isles, while a lone trumpet played 'Summertime'. The bride and groom, both married previously, told the graveyard superintendent (executive director of operations?) that they had come to New Orleans to bury their past.

Indeed, there's no better place to recharge yourself with hope, optimism and joie de vivre. "Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler" ("Let the good times roll") is an old Cajun expression which remains New Orleans' main (and only) rule of life. On my last night in Big Easy, as I was lying wide awake in my bed listening to the muffled sounds of street jazz, mixed with distant nostalgic whistles of South Pacific trains, I visualised New Orleans as a deviant vintage rail car that had come uncoupled from the gleaming express train of modern America. Derailed and rudderless, it keeps rolling ahead on its own - jingling, clattering and opening its sqeaky doors only to those who board it with singing, not "speechless", hearts.

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