We’ve been in New Orleans for a week! I’ve been really fortunate to really be able to drink in the rich experience of the exuberance of the city in this short time, from its beautiful colonial architecture and chaotic yet syncopated jazz to its spicy gumbos and decadent beignets. While visiting Bourbon Street the first night in New Orleans may have not been the best experience , being able to explore the French Quarter, the Business District, the Warehouse District, Faubourg Marigny, Tremé, Storyville, and the Garden District to get a picture of the incredible Catholic, Creole, African-American, Protestant, French, Spanish and Cajun influences that make this such a unique and beautiful city.
However, as our class dug deeper into the history of New Orleans, I got to understand the complex and unjust history that built the foundation of such a vibrant city, which gave greater context and helped me to recognize the undertones of melancholy that runs under the joyous party-style atmosphere as Andrew had previously described. As we walked through the busy business district where slaves had been sold, there was no trace of the previous wrongs that had been committed. This was just one of many layers of the city that I have come to ponder as we uncover the complexities of the city.
During our seminar on Saturday, Andrew posed a great philosophical question to our class that has been an altogether deliciously tricky one to ponder: what makes a good death? It may be something morbid to think about, but it’s something that I thought was fitting to grapple with as we read our book for the next leg of our journey, Anne Rice’s classic gothic horror novel Interview with a Vampire. In a city famed for its connection to the gothic supernatural, the novel aptly tackles themes of love, danger, culture, and the passage of time through the chilling confessions of Louis, a vampire from the tail-end of the 19th and the early 20th century who recounts his story and experiences as he wanders the lonely streets of New Orleans.
““This was New Orleans, a magical and magnificent place to live. In which a vampire, richly dressed and gracefully walking through the pools of light of one gas lamp after another might attract no more notice in the evening than hundreds of other exotic creatures””
A Live Oak with Spanish Moss drooping off of its branches in the French Quarter, where Claudia loved to search for her victims.
“Years passed in this way. years and years and years.”
The passage of time is something that is felt very poignantly in Rice’s novel, as the immortality of vampires such as Louis and his vampiric love, Claudia, plays a large role in how they interact with their environments over the course of this story. Louis, a wealthy former indigo plantation owner turned vampire in 1791, describes how his family built their wealth off of indigo and the exploitation of black slaves in the early period of Louisiana’s history. Claudia, a child he turns into a vampire who later becomes his lover, is described as “the demon child…moving toward womanhood, never to grow up”. As these immortal beings are stuck in the bodies of their former selves, they see people they once knew and the city and culture they come from change as they themselves are captured in that state of being for supposed eternity.
As I myself have spent two decades on this Earth, it would be a stretch to say that I have felt the passage of time keenly. However, I have seen how I have grown and changed both physically, emotionally, and as an individual over this time to reflect my lived experience, my knowledge and my sense of self. I’ve seen how places I’ve walked as a child change with time, old neighborhoods rusting away and new, shiny buildings rising to take their place. I’ve seen friends as they’ve grown old with me, met new friends and grown distant from others, seen family members come and go—it’s all just a small part of this experience we call life.
“Though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.”
Now going back to the question of what makes a good death. With death, one must contemplate life, and what it means. Unlike the vampires of Rice’s novel, we will all die—in fact, I would hate to live forever like Louis and Claudia are cursed to, to be quite literally an adult in a child’s body. Instead, the goal is to be a part of or make something that will. So rather than what makes a good death, I instead choose to look at it from the opposite side of the same thread. While Andrew posed the question to us in terms of what makes a good death, I'm choosing to approach it from the perspective of what makes a great death, for what makes a great death is a great life. It's a subtle distinction, but when I look back on my life, I don't want to have deemed it just a perfunctory obligation to live, eat, breathe, sleep, exist in a vacuum, what could easily be defined as a "good" life. It’s not about the length of my life, but about the depth of it, as no one is going to remember me for the good grade I got in my accounting class, the extra hour I spent working. Instead, my legacy will be left in the people and relationships I had. My faith is something that is really important to me, and so I choose to live my life in the perspective that while my life on Earth may be short, what comes after is forever. A great death isn’t just about it being painless, or content, or even surrounded by loved ones, even though that would be nice to have. For me, it’s about knowing that I’ve lived a life worth living, and having accomplished what I’ve set out to do in my life.
Because vampires in Rice’s novel have eternal lives, if anything, they fear death even more. Each responds to death in their own way—where Louis’ mentor Lestat chooses to laugh at death, Louis himself looks at death with a sincerity and somber attitude, elaborating in his interview that he “never laugh[ed] at death, no matter how often and regularly [he] was the cause of it.” It’s a grim and sobering response from a man who quite literally feeds off the blood of innocent victims to survive, an interesting parallel to his former life as a plantation owner metaphorically feeding off the blood of innocent enslaved individuals to build his life and his wealth.
Tomb of the Unknown Slave
As we’ve spent our time here in New Orleans, I’m in awe by how much the threads of death are woven into the very fabric of the city, as we’ve explored graveyards and tombs, and seen how voodoo influences the city, which in and of itself is tied with the supernatural and of the interplay between life and death. We’ve explored the plantations where enslaved people have literally lost their lives building the backbone of the exuberant wealth of the South at the time, and even stood in front of an unmarked grave commemorating the unknown who were discarded, their lives treated with so little respect they weren’t even buried with their names, their identity.
Yet it can also be a beautiful thing, as we paraded down the streets with the Moneywasters social club— we were supposed to go see the Divine Ladies, but they had apparently moved their parade up a week in commemoration of famed musician Ellis Marsalis, who had passed during COVID-19 but hadn’t had a proper sendoff until this past week because of the pandemic. While we weren’t there to experience it ourselves, from the social club’s gathering we were in, I was touched to see how family, fans, and friends would have come together to celebrate with music and color Marsalis’ life rather than simply mourn him. Death is a regular part of time as it moves ever so steadily forward, and so while the city of New Orleans will continue to be an exuberant force of celebration and excitement, it’ll also stand as a testament to the ones who were enslaved and gave their lives to fuel and bring prosperity to the sheer exuberance and decadence of the Big Easy.
Louis Armstrong Park Statue