Special Saturday

All of us slept in,  until 9.   Off we go to the Quarter.  TR obligingly parks off Esplanade near the house in what was the neighborhood of the very wealthy free Creoles of color there, close to the house that is supposedly the model for the Pontellier's home in The Awakening.  It's right across to what prior to the Civil War was a slave market barracks (barracoon) on the side street, and which in Edna Pontellier's time would have been housing for the house servants -- of color, natch.  We take photos.  TR, however, believes this isn't really the house Kate Chopin used as model for Edna's house in The Awakening, because it isn't quite close enough to the Quarter, as described in the novel.  He shows us that one too.  At the end of the semester he'll be leading his students on a tour of all these places in the books they are studying in his course.

We're there to sign stock at the 1850 House, which is the museum store on Jackson Square for the Cabildo.  This is a thrill, to walk in and see the books displayed at the front.  I visited the 1850 House every historical, photo shooting jaunt I took on my own, and used to fantasize seeing Vaquero's works there, just like I keep fantasizing being published by Viking.  Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January books are in the store, and I took photos of them back then.  So I had to take photos of Vaquero in the 1850 House, with da new book.  Got a couple of good ones, I think, if he'll ever send them to my hard drive.

Then it was Faulkner House to sign stock there.  So I snapped a couple of photos of the FH people too.  FH was very busy with customers who needed help, in spite of it being so early on a Saturday -- for the French Quarter, anyway.  Faulkner House is densely shelved and stocked, so it was crowded.  So we got in and out as quickly as we could.

We meet up with TR to have brunch at the Gumbo Coffeehouse.  The staff  is all "We love you.  Go away.  Come back and eat."  They were turning over for the afternoon crowd, so you can understand their attitude.  As usual I am astounded at how the architecture of these buildings in the Quarter mirror the architecture of Habana Vieja, as I climb the open to the air stairs in the courtyard to the facilities.  I've climbed these very stairs, with these very same colors, this very same layout many times in Havana.  Since the original architect of Jackson Square and much of the Quarter was that of Cuba's Governor O'Reilly, well, yes, it would be like this.  Havana and New Orleans are sisters.  May the trade that they shared until the embargo return!

TR takes us to Holt Cemetery, then, the potters' field for New Orleans.  We've all been there before.  It's very different from the other cemeteries which tour buses and many tour guides visit.  (At least two of the best New Orleanian tour guides have incorporated The World That Made New Orleans into their tours -- they show us their 'tour' copies, all marked up with highlighters and post its.  It's weird, in a way, seeing copies of these books used, and used so hard, whether by students, by someone like RC from the Community Book Center encounter, and with tour guides.)  We have photos from previous visits.

With so much rain all summer, Holt is mucky.  It isn't cared for.  You walk on layers and layers and layers of bones and human remains.  You see them everywhere, some recent.  At least half of it was bulldozed a few years ago to make a parking lot.

Deep, deep culture, reaching back hundreds of years now, into slavery, into the past before slavery, particularly Kongo.  Bob Thompson has to come here when the Congo Square conference meets in November.  Though this is the potters field, it is vital -- it is used, filled with African traces and memories.  It is an intense experience walking this ground.  So many soldiers' graves, from every war after the Civil War. For all the lost and forgotten in this cemetery, the number of those that haven't been forgotten or neglected is remarkable.  I called these the 'living graves.'  So much love and creativity is written upon this field.   Unlike so many paupers' grave yards there is charm and loveliness here -- scattered venerable live oaks, as well as what those who are remembering their beloved dead have created here. Head stone, many more than you might think more than a century old.  Birds call as they do in all cemeteries' quiet.  There are benches now, scattered under the live oaks that weren't there on the previous visit less than a year ago. These benches are from deconsecrated churches or churches that were so damaged that they couldn't be 'redeemed.'  One of the benches says, "Lean on me."  My significantly painful extremities are grateful for this bench.  The sky is thickly clouded over.  The first drops fall as we return to the car.  By the time we're back at TR's the sky is clear, the temperature has dropped some and the humidity is less.

We stop at Bingham's Piety Street studio to pick up a guitar (on a previous trip JetBlue smashed Vaquero's travel guitar -- he's not about to trust the Ramirez to planes these days -- or any day).  As well as doing a presentation and reading at Beth's Books and Audio Cafe, Vaquero will premiere himself in New Orleans as a singer and songwriter-- perform in public, which he's never done here.  He will also provide a sneak preview of some the repetoire of "Kiss You Down South," which will have the official premiere at the concert he'll have at the New Orleans Museum of Art November 11th.  TR is particularly anticipatory, because though he knows Vaquero's music, and has heard the recordings Vaquero's made of the songs on "Kiss You Down South," he's never been at a Vaquero music performance.  One of his observations post the performance is how interesting to him it was see a whole other persona emerge when Ned is on stage, with music, one very different from his presentor or historian personas.

This is a computer cafe.  The books part, in a separate space, in the back, is less significant.  The cafe, the coffee and the food, and the local bands performances are what the space is really about.  It's a community center for mostly white kids, students and not.  Neighborhood kids' bands rehearse here.  However, a group of older people are there, residents of the community ,who had already read The Year Before the Flood, and couldn't wait to see all us 'historical figures' in person and ask us questions.  They declared how much happier I would be if I lived in the Marigny, and yes, they are right about that!  A woman who traveled on the same plane and buses to Nancy for a festival back in 1980 is present with her husband -- she brought a Mardi Gras Indian troupe, and Vaquero brought the Southwesterners from Portales, a group of elderly amateur musicians, who happen to be very good, the fiddle contest winners and so on.  The Nancy festival that year was sponsoring indigenous U.S. folk musics, you see.  She and her husband gave us a gift of local hot sauce.  Other friends were present too, like HR, who probably knows more about the Indians and Second Lines than white person around -- she's an anthropologist who has been doing this work for many years -- and she's so young (and also lovely)!

This was a long one.  Vaquero gave a presentation, then read, then -- finally, he performed.  It was successful.  There were people taking notes, and they'd come prepared to do it.  There were attendees who'd already read all three books. Stock signed, ready to leave, a fellow rides up on a bicycle carrying an hc of The World That Made New Orleans.  He's a lawyer who recently moved here with his wife.  But on their trip for Jazz Fest last year, when they decided they wanted to live in NO, they acquired TWTMNO. They read to each other all the way back to Chicago, taking turns driving.  He bought a copy of TYBTF, and got them both autographed.

I've never seen New Orleans so beautiful as it is right now.  My first trip here was in winter, in March.  When we lived here, was relatively dry, for a swamp.  Then it was the ugly, horrible damage of the hurricane and the floods.  Enormous progress has been made in repair, renovation and rebuilding in the last two and a half years. So much is bright and new, even buildings that were dilapidated prior to the hurricane and the flood. Two and a half years of faith, work and love have accomplished miracles -- without very much help from the Fed or state of Louisiana for most people. With all the rain this summer, the foliage is beyond lush.  Oh, yes, breathing again, the Japanese Tea Jasimine -- the very scent of New Orleans!  The light is always spectacular here, in the mornings and late afternoons, evenings.

We and TR have dinner, finally, at the Praline Connection, which is Southern cooking, rather than New Orleans cusine. Then we go on a night drive of beauty, beats and beer, (don't worry, TR drove and he doesn't drink alcohol) all over downtown and the lower ninth.

The soundtrack is the soundtrack from The Year Before the Flood.  Oh, the brilliance of Jay-Z!  We drive and drive.  We see the puzzling development in the dark lower ninth sponsored by Brad Pitt -- who in that area could have afforded these homes?  We spin down the new strip of black music clubs, oh, wow, on St. Bernard's. Tourists won't be going here.

It was a film unwinding of our past here, our many pasts, all the pasts of the many New Orleans.  It was old.  Time rolled past the open car windows, and we, inside, rolled through space.  It was a time of extreme beauty, in the seductive velvet night, under the huge half moon riding over the bowl of water within which the city floats.  A low rider city.

Smells: pockets of acrid cigarette smoke -- from where?  no one on the street, no other cars around us; night blooming flowers' perfume, lighter fluid, fried food, diesel fumes.  I'm like a dog, ears blowing in the car's slipstream -- really my hair, of course not my ears! -- nose quivering in the scent sort, in ecstasy, riding in the car with my loved people.

We're asleep by 12:30.  My ankles aren't swollen.  Still, no Second Line for me tomorrow.