Reclaiming New Orleans

Sept. 1, 2005

Dear Leslie,

Anyone who has spent time in New Orleans is second lining today -- for the people who have died along the Gulf Coast because of Hurricane Katrina and for the thousands whose day-to-day lives have been devastated. Mourning may be due New Orleans itself, now mostly under water.

Life in New Orleans has always held some danger. In the Garden District, ghettos of want decay only blocks from the great mansions of inherited wealth. Soon after I moved to New Orleans in the 1980s, a med student was shot outside my apartment building because he refused to give up his jacket to a mugger. Putting pressure on an artery as instructed, I reassured him he would be all right, and he was. I wasn't so sure about myself.

New Orleans also offers the richest gumbo life in the United States can offer, from the jazz and Cajun music to splendid food and Caribbean sensuality. New Orleans' underbelly, its corruption and decadence, are there for anybody to see. Nobody trusts the police. You watch your own back. Do so and you'll be OK.

New Orleans rejoices in all life's experiences, the beauty and the squalor. Prayers are offered as every one of the Ten Commandments is being broken every day. No one apologizes.

A book I'm reading says we are born to learn to love ourselves not in spite of our failings but because of them. New Orleans loves itself just fine.

At the nightclub on St. Charles Avenue where I tended bar we wore tuxedo shirts and served the occasional $120 bottle of Dom Perignon. The manager was a sexy former hooker from Boston. The owner was dealing cocaine to pay the bills. Sometimes a team of two beautiful young hookers, Sharon and Teri, one black and one white, worked the bar. They were nice people with heartbreaking stories and no apologies.

My girlfriend and I decided to leave New Orleans after a man carrying a sword jumped out of a car and demanded her purse while she was walking home from work. Even crime is colorful in New Orleans.

When I think of New Orleans one defining image appears. After tripping and falling one night at the bar, I found myself lying face-up on a gurney at grungy Charity Hospital, getting readied for stitches and wondering how I'd gotten there. Looking up there was Teri, the light above forming a halo around her face.

One night I tended bar at Jean LaFitte's Blacksmith Shop, the oldest bar in America. LaFitte's was built in 1772. The very air smelled old. Now you have to wonder how much of New Orleans can be reclaimed. How much, when the water finally recedes, will have to be torn down and rebuilt? Will there be an Old New Orleans and a New New Orleans?

Maybe New Orleans can be reinvented. But not yet.

"We did a lot of our crying earlier," one resident told a reporter as the crisis and water level in New Orleans deepened, "but there is a lot more crying to be done."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missouri.