This is a blog entry I forgot to publish, back from 2020. Enjoy!
I may be a latecomer to New Orleans, but it seems I’m making up for lost time.
Before my son Sasha chose Tulane, I’d never visited the city. I knew NOLA purely through the novel The Awakening and a vague sense of its great jazz. I had standard images that flickered across my lids: the filigreed second floor balconies, Creole and Cajun culture, Mardi Gras, which I glimpsed through the beads and feathered masks I found in my late mother-in-law’s drawers.
Then came our research for our book, Sugar Changed the World. Louisiana, New Orleans, is sugar. Louisiana was a slave state where the death rate exceeded the birth rate—because of sugar’s brutal conditions. New Orleans is where Norbert Rilleux, a free man of color, invented a more efficient crystallization process for sugar, on the plantation that is now Audubon Park. One cannot walk the streets of NOLA, especially Uptown, without realizing the gouging imprint of sugar and slavery–each of the main arteries that cut down to the winding Mississippi, streets like Louisiana, or Jefferson—were the boundary lines for the narrow plantations that fronted the river. At Tulane there was an old iron bell that the freshman touched for good luck—until it was revealed that this was the bell used to direct the slaves in the fields, and it was recently removed. 
On one of my first evenings in NOLA, a neighbor at my Airbnb and a history aficionado, showed me his framed copy of the map that shows those plantations—thin, thin dominoes of land—and I was reminded of the narrow parcels of land that made up the plantations on the coastline of my father’s country, British Guiana. As my dad used to say, “Booker [the sugar company/conglomerate] owned us.” Sugar definitely owned a lot of folks in New Orleans, too.
To say that I have fallen in love with New Orleans is an understatement. Every time I go to visit, I start with a long list in my head of all I want to explore, and I leave with an even longer list for the next trip. I seem to tackle areas swath by swath, and always leave hungry for more. We stayed in the French quarter the time we dropped Sasha off (which I’ll never do again, given its touristy, drunken crowds) but we did buy some cool clothes at Rubinstein’s on Canal Street, one of the last of the Jewish department stores, where a Morehouse graduate treated my husband very well in his search for some finer summer threads. I then read up on the Jewish peddler community and learned that inter-marriage was accepted—Jewish men marrying local women–and so the early Jewish community was Creole in nature. Maybe as someone mixed race, mixed culture, that’s why this place is so irresistible to me—its DNA of mingling and blurring boundaries to make its own vibrant medley feels just right.
On this visit, every day after writing in the high-ceilinged Uptown apartment, I walked miles and miles. The purpose of this trip, beyond seeing my son, whom I greatly miss, and doing a writing retreat, was to heal my back, which suffers during the cramped cold months of winter. I am at heart a warm weather girl, and NOLA offers the perfect soul and muscle therapy. I threaded through Uptown, the Garden District, the Irish Channel and Magazine Street, chatting with shop owners; I traipsed along St. Charles Avenue, listening to the metallic slide and clank of the street car; to Tulane, over and around in Freret (taking out my son’s roommates to a new hip taco place made out of a vintage gas station with picnic tables outside), around Audubon Park with its draping Spanish moss lit up in the sun like gray-green mantilla lace. That it was the Covid era was something of a boon: safety, a light sense of enjoyment in the outside, but none of the grunge and crowds. Continue reading
