“There’s debauchery everywhere!” Jeannie from Maryland leaned back on her bar stool for a contented swig of beer and a deep drag on her cigarette. She was clearly enjoying New Orleans, with its reputation as the most un-American of American cities. By extension, Louisiana must be the least American state. Far removed from the Puritan work ethic and WASPish ideals of New England, this land of joie de vivre owes more to its French and Spanish heritage than a couple of hundred years of American statehood. The place is easier to understand if you imagine it at the top of Latin America, rather than at the bottom of North. “Laissez les bons temps rouler,” say the locals – let the good times roll.
When I arrived in New Orleans, the city was doing what it does best: partying. In the state that hosts over 600 festivals a year, it didn’t matter that I was too late for Mardi Gras, too early for JazzFest. The colonial-era streets – all wrought-iron balconies and colourful walls – were pulsating to the sounds of the French Quarter Festival. One old man was giving it his all on a hurdy-gurdy, while a lone trumpeter was so lost in his jazz that he barely registered the coins clinking into his hat. Latin sounds were pulling in the crowds around a makeshift stage, and by the river, Smilin’ Myron’s blues were interrupted only by the blast of a steamboat’s horn. The crowd clapped and toe-tapped to the fiddle, accordion and guitar of traditional Louisiana zydeco, and it seemed the city had emptied out onto the streets.
Music was only part of the party. In Jackson Square, the hub of the ‘quawdah’, Dixieland jazz was overlaid with the buzz of people trying to decide what to eat. Spicy, rich smells drifted around stalls offering gumbo, crawfish étouffée, jambalaya, shrimp po-boys – dishes whose names, never mind ingredients, give away the foreign influences that have gone into this pot. There wasn’t a hotdog in sight.
Over the next few days I came to realise that a devotion to music, food and general good times is not just something that’s saved up for special occasions – it’s part and parcel of New Orleans. Breakfasts the size of three good dinners, sandwiches that hang over the side of your plate and a local speciality for every month of the year made me send up a silent prayer to the Saint of Elasticated Waistbands. The Creoles – those descended from European colonists – took buttery French recipes and New World ingredients and left it to their often African cooks to come up with something. Hey presto, a new and unique cuisine that’s become a tourist attraction in itself. A New Orleanian friend told me, “You can best measure the time you spend here in meals rather than days. But,” he warned, “it can be an endurance test.” It was a test I was happy to take.
And of course the music of New Orleans is legendary – as the birthplace of jazz, it has a lot to live up to. The festival had given me a taste of what was on offer but I was eager for more. Walking down Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, the blues blaring out of one bar merged into the country of the next, followed up by a bit of gay disco. It was like listening to a particularly loud radio being tuned.
The seize-the-day, live-it-up attitude might be explained by the climate. When the French began colonising the region in 1699 they soon realised that a swampy, subtropical atmosphere isn’t the healthiest. Death was a part of everyday life, and even in the 19th century, epidemics of cholera, yellow fever and malaria made a serious dent on the population figures. Living for the moment must have been pretty important. But it’s not just about sensual pleasures here – there’s a lot of the spiritual about the place too.
A shoe-shop slogan reading ‘Sole searching? Come in and be heeled’ tells you that the staff are fond of their puns. But it’s also a sure sign of a place that’s got religion. The city reputedly has more churches (and bars) per capita than any other city, although Catholic and gospel services are not the only ones to get people going. This is voodoo city.
Voodoo is most often associated with pins-in-dolls spells and cackling witch doctors. But behind the ‘tourist voodoo’ of dolls and amulets sold in souvenir shops lies a living religion. Like candomblé in Brazil and santería in Cuba, it began with the slaves who merged their African beliefs, rituals and deities with their masters’ Catholic ones. Initially practised in secret, voodoo now has more acceptance, but it remains a mystical religion and not one that everyone likes to talk about. At least, the monosyllabic woman who let me in to the Voodoo Spiritual Temple didn’t. Evasive and vague, she clearly didn’t want to answer my questions, so I contented myself with a self-guided tour.
The two small rooms were a jumble of offerings and props – on one table a statue of a black Christ stood next to one of Stan Laurel, amid beads, money, skulls, cigarettes, cakes, candles and shells. The book collection was an eclectic one too, with titles as diverse as The Last Temptation of Christ, The Complete Book of Amulets & Talismans and The Omnibus of American Humor (a thin volume). I was intrigued by the paraphernalia, but I didn’t dare ask the woman at the door about it. Melissa, a tour guide I met later, was more forthcoming. She explained that, “any offering is valid as long as it’s meaningful to you and the intention is right.”
A visit to the Historical Voodoo Museum shed a bit more light. A slick albino python cast its pink eyes over more heaps of icons and gifts, while a video playing in a back room helped explain the rituals and beliefs of voodoo in a modern context.
Sitting next to a turtle shell and a stuffed snake skin, I heard Ava Kay Jones, a voodoo and Yoruba priestess, explain that, “it’s not about devil worship or putting hexes on people. It’s about positive self-help. But it’s not one of the mainstream religions and people tend to fear what they don’t understand.” There are nevertheless thousands of black and white practitioners, many of whom are also practising Catholics. Melissa, herself a Wicca adherent, told me that it was believed that, “anything that leads you closer to God is fine.”
The queen of voodoo in New Orleans was Marie Laveau, a powerful woman who popularised voodoo in the city in the mid-19th century. According to Melissa, Laveau’s grave in the St Louis Cemetery No 1 is the second most visited grave in the southern states. The most popular, she said, is Elvis Presley’s – “After all, he was The King and she was the queen.”
It was an oppressive, sultry day, and there was a solemn atmosphere among the high-rise graves. Early settlers weren’t too impressed by the sight of bodies emerging from the swamp, so above-ground burial became the norm. I was dwarfed by many of the family and society tombs, which are the size of small houses. Nicknamed ‘The Cities of the Dead’, New Orleans’ cemeteries certainly look more urban than the garden-like English graveyards I was used to. Marie Laveau’s tomb, only two metres high, was one of the more modest ones. Many of those who’d come to pay their respects had left offerings, but others had marked their visit in a more literal way. Hundreds of XXXs have been daubed on in brick dust – a symbol that Melissa told me is supposed to get Marie Laveau to open the gates to the other side.
New Orleans’ spiritual side must have been getting to me. Anywhere else, I wouldn’t be remotely interested in the hocum of tarot and palmistry. Walking through Jackson Square later on, though, I was tempted to have a reading. Hurkey the Bone Thrower sat at a small table between an I Ching reader (one of many) and a pet portrait artist (one of understandably few). Telling me how he’d learned his art from his grandmother, he rubbed his hands with High John – a powerful oil, he said. He took a bag of small yellowed bones, put some oil on them, rubbed my hands, jumbled up the bones and threw them on the table. Grasping my hands, his eyes shut in concentration, he went into impressive detail about my life. It wasn’t all good either, which seemed to make it more credible. “Men are scared of you, and women are jealous,” he told me. Fantastic. Admittedly time and distance diluted my conviction, and I still haven’t had the salt bath he recommended to rid me of ‘jagged negativity’ – but in a New Orleans setting, it all seemed to make sense.
Driving north west out of New Orleans, I thought I’d left all the spirituality behind. The restored plantation houses that line the River Road are beautiful examples of colonial architecture, invariably set amid huge oaks draped with the fuzzy tinsel of Spanish moss, and offer a glimpse of the more prosaic side of antebellum life. Then I arrived at Myrtles Plantation in St Francisville. The tour guide did point out the friezework, French furniture and other antique finery, but the focus was firmly on ghosts – Myrtles is known as America’s most haunted house. Now the rocking chairs creaking on the veranda, the tall, dark windows and the mossy oaks took on a more eerie air. Even the birdcall coming from the pond sounded spooky. And it was too late to cancel my reservation for the night.
The story goes that Chloe, a slave who was caught eavesdropping, had her ear cut off. To exact her revenge, she laced a cake with the poisonous juice of oleander leaves. The mistress of the house died along with two of her children, and Chloe was executed. Now the spirits make their presence felt by rearranging furniture, appearing in photographs and mirrors, holding noisy parties and tucking guests up in their beds. I had been told that St Francisville was the sort of town that didn’t lock its doors at night. But going to bed with my head full of these spectral activities, in a room full of period furniture, I made sure that my doors, windows and eyes were all tightly shut. As it turned out, of course, the night was almost disappointingly uneventful. Sleeping with my head under the covers had obviously done the trick.
The next day I took the highway north to Natchitoches. Expanses of flat cotton fields were interrupted only by bumps covering Indian ceremonial burial grounds, but any hint of the supernatural had evaporated into the hazy sunshine. Natchitoches itself was more olde worlde than otherworldly. The town was founded before New Orleans and proudly wears its history on its sleeve. Streets are still rues, the fleur-de-lis motif figures on buildings, flags and the pavement, and the architecture – Creole townhouses with lacy iron balconies – is genteel, urban French. The accent certainly isn’t though. Unlike the Brooklynish drawl I’d heard in New Orleans, here the mellow twang is straight out of Steel Magnolias, the film that put the town on the modern map. “Hayow’re y’all doin?” I was asked by incredibly friendly local after incredibly friendly local. At the Pioneer Pub, a local blues musician entertained the crowd of mid-week bon viveurs who were pouring in from the local eateries. I was reassured that even this far from New Orleans, the good times were kept rolling.
Down in Lafayette they were doing their bit too. Thousands of people were out on the streets for the first night of the Festival International de Louisiane, a gathering of musicians from around the French-speaking world. The French influence here is Cajun rather than Creole. The French-Canadian Acadians (shortened to Cajuns) were expelled from Nova Scotia in the 1700s and 1800s and settled into a simple, rural life here in south-west Louisiana. The culture has remained pretty much intact, and people in their 60s and 70s still speak French as their first language, hence the festival. Families, couples and groups of friends danced to music from Quebec, Senegal, Guadeloupe and Louisiana – a mixed bag of sounds united only by the language. Eating a pot of gumbo and listening to a Malian singer banter with the crowd in French, I felt far from Anglo-Saxon, apple-pie America.
The music didn’t stop the next morning. In Breaux Bridge, a sleepy town near Lafayette, the Café des Amis’ zydeco breakfast was in full swing. It’s not everyone’s ideal Saturday morning to eat a cooked breakfast then spend a couple of hours dancing energetically. But for plenty of people here, it obviously was. I was struggling through a huge plate of eggs, muffins and crawfish when the zydeco band struck up on the accordion, fiddle and scrub board. I decided I was better off leaving the experts to it as men in dungarees, stetsons and ‘kerchiefs whirled and hopped their partners around the floor. As I’d found everywhere else in Louisiana, eating, drinking and being merry were what life was all about. Tub-thumpers from other parts of the Deep South would be shocked. This was way below the Bible belt.
When to go: The subtropical climate means it’s warm and humid for most of the year, with lots of rain. Between March and May is best – before the 30°C + temperatures of the summer and out of the June-October hurricane season. It’s worth timing your visit to coincide with a festival, though with 600 to choose from, that’s not difficult. Mardi Gras in New Orleans is the obvious choice, but do book ahead.
Food & drink: Creole food is urban and nominally more refined than the spicier, countryish Cajun cooking. Both are hearty, rich and delicious. The equally filling southern soul food is popular here too. Gumbo is a roux-based soupy stew with seafood or meat, étouffée is any dish smothered in a rich gravy, jambalaya is a stew of rice, vegetables and meat or seafood. Po-boys and muffulettas are enormous, overfilled sandwiches and are good for vegetarians. Fish-eaters will love the crawfish, oysters and other seafood that are on menus everywhere.
New Orleans has hundreds of excellent restaurants; Arnaud’s, Olivier’s, Brennan’s, Patout’s and the Court of the Two Sisters are recommended. Café du Monde on Jackson Square is great for breakfast beignets (square doughnuts). The Central Grocery Store’s muffulettas are fantastic. Good food is easy to find elsewhere in Louisiana, though Lea’s Pies near Alexandria is worth a detour. The zydeco breakfast in Breaux Bridge’s Café des Amis is unmissable.
Things to do: Spend a few days in New Orleans and you might scratch the surface of things to do. Museums, walking tours, swamp tours and cookery courses are just some of the activities on offer. Antique shops in the French Quarter’s Royal Street and on Magazine Street are excellent, and the farmers’ and flea markets are fun.
The state has numerous restored plantation houses open to the public. Definitely worth a visit are Laura Plantation on the River Road, and Melrose Plantation, which is situated about 20 minutes from Natchitoches. Natchitoches is a great place for finding out more about Creole history and culture, and Vermilionville, the living museum in Lafayette, paints an excellent picture of the Acadian (Cajun) way of life.
