Reavant Singh

Afterthoughts

I have never visited a place as a “tourist” for this long – almost a month on this trip. Knowing that I will be leaving New Orleans to head back into my ‘normal’ life; that I do not know when, if ever, I will come back to this city, feels uncanny. While I wouldn’t be arrogant enough to say I have become assimilated into the city – returning to the same hotel after our three day stops at Baton Rouge and Lafayette – there was a sense of familiarity to a degree that I had never experienced before. 

I deliberately avoided blogging about Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, because I felt emotionally and academically detached from it. To put it bluntly, it did nothing for me. Listening to Andrew and others in the group unpack the book underneath the shade of a tree in Audubon Park; drawing universal messages from it about recognizing the importance of the little shared experiences and relationships, I was affected, but I did not feel like it altered my relationship with the book. Returning to New Orleans, however, I constantly find my mind drifting towards The Moviegoer. 

Perhaps it was my attitude at the time of originally reading and discussing the novel. We were immersed in the city – touring, blogging, and writing our papers. It was hard to truly grasp the feeling of “everydayness” when the things I was doing every day were so different – so distant from what I picture as everyday. These last two nights in the city, without any large plans and only one seminar for reflection and self-evaluation, the everydayness finally sunk in. 

Binx talks about needing to “learn something about the theater or the people who operate it, to touch base before going inside.” I always found this fact about him rather interesting – he goes to movies to immerse himself in fictional worlds – a very self-aware form of escapism, but a necessary prerequisite to this is being aware of the space itself. We watched Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story at Prytania theaters at canal place. While my memories of the movie are vivid, the movie theater itself has blended into the other movie theaters in malls that I have been to. So much of what I remember is the experience of watching a movie, the experience provided to me by the screen, but the space itself escapes me. 

Thinking back on these past few weeks; perhaps, my eyes were too drawn to the metaphoric screen, and not the space itself. Of course, I was detached as I am just watching a movie, but, in a sense, the difference between Binx and I when we visited a movie theater captures the shift in attitude I had. Experiencing a new place through the filter of its literature is something I have never done before. For most of the books, this enhanced my engagement and immersion in their stories, but for The Moviegoer, paradoxically, the filter of literature blocked my ability to emotionally connect with Binx’s solution to his existential angst at the end of the novel. In a way, this is not too different from Binx needing to see past the layer of movies that tint his perspective. 

Initially, after we returned, I was still partly experiencing the city as a moviegoer. Early on, when I visited Arcadian Books and Prints, the owner gave me a map of all the independent used-bookstores in the French Quarter. I visited every one of them except Dauphine Street Books, and the first thing I wanted to do when we were back was visit it to complete that map, which I did do. 

But after this, even though there was a lot of the city I wanted to revisit, new places, museums that I wanted to explore, the everydayness set in. Maybe my mind was preparing itself for what followed the end of this trip. Regardless, reaching the end has finally given The Moviegoer a more definite place in the version of New Orleans that is in my head. I still do not completely connect with it at this stage – the ending feels far too resolved – but I do not feel as detached from the book. 

Unveiling the mask of fiction

Although Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying is categorized as a work of fiction – it is set in the fictional town of Bayonne and the characters’ names are made-up – the tangible details of Dr. Gaines’ description of Black life in a segregated town in Louisiana feel strikingly real. Cheylon, the head archivist of the Ernest J. Gaines’ Center at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, who guided us through the center and Dr. Gaines’ house, discussed the role of fiction in Dr. Gaines’ writing. The veil of fiction allows us to refer to real people and places, while maintaining a distance that allows us to analyze the behavior of people and the sociopolitical structures they operate within without directly naming them. Visiting the locations that the novel is set in, and that Dr. Gaines grew up in, I hoped to keep in mind this thin veil of fiction. 

The town of Bayonne is the fictional representation of the town of New Roads. Dr. Gaines describes the segregation within the town geographically being divided with the white people’s church, movie theater, and elementary school being located ‘uptown,’ and the same institutions for Black people being located in the ‘back of the town.’ Driving into New Roads, we pass rows of pretty houses facing the false-river. This was ‘uptown’. Andrew also drove us into the back of the town; the further away we got from the river-bank, the greater the economic disparity in the houses. While there are no explicit signs that mark spaces as ‘white-only,’  this economic disparity maps onto the segregation of Black communities through processes like redlining. Moreover, the plantations that made the parish wealthy still exist; they are now mechanized commercial farms, but the economic structures that made the white population of the town money are still intact.

We visited the New Roads courthouse. This was where Jefferson, a young Black teenager, falsely accused of murdering the owner of a liquor store, was sentenced to death by electrocution in A Lesson Before Dying. Jefferson was based on Willie Francis, who was sentenced to death at the age of 16, accused for the murder of a pharmacy store owner, who, Cheylon said, molested him. Unlike Jefferson, Willie faced electrocution twice, because the first attempt failed. The cruelty and injustice of these experiences occupied the back of my mind during our cheerful encounter with the parish’s Sheriff René Thibodeaux, and as Tammy, the Deputy Sheriff guided us through the empty halls of the new courtroom. The cruelty and injustice were brought to the forefront as we took the caged elevator up to the old prison cells. 

During our visit to the courthouse and old prison-cells, I had a copy of the text pulled out to compare Dr. Gaines’ description of the setting to what I was seeing. There were certainly some differences. The book says that “a statue of a Confederate soldier” stood outside the courthouse door. Instead, outside the New Roads courthouse, we see the statue of General Lejeune, a member of the marine corps and World-War-1 hero, and a newly erected statue of the former Louisiana Chief of Justice, Catherine Kimball – the first woman to be elected from her district. While there was no confederate statue, its intended effect in the novel – to symbolize the courthouse’s intimidation and white-supremacy, was felt. 

The cell was roughly six by ten, with a metal bunk covered by a thin mattress and a woolen army blanket; a toilet without seat or toilet paper; a washbowl, brownish from residue and grime; a small metal shelf upon which was a pan, a tin cup, and a tablespoon. A single light bulb hung over the center of the cell

The depiction of the inside of the cell, in contrast with the outside of the courthouse, vividly described what I was seeing as I walked through the dark corridors of the old jail-cells. The stairs, “made of steel;” the “heavy steel door;” the grime on the open toilet seat and washbowl; the single lightbulb; I could imagine Grant Wiggins (the school-teacher protagonist of A Lesson Before Dying) walking through the corridors to visit Jefferson. 

I could feel the multitude of lives that had left their traces on the walls; the presence of the incarcerated Black men, like Jefferson and Willie Francis, despite their physical absence. All that was left were scattered piles of prison-records. The cells were repurposed as storage. Interview transcripts, records of judicial proceedings, old tape-recordings, and evidence for crimes lay scattered on the floors of the cells. A jumbled archive of all the people who once occupied the cells. 

Opposite the door was a barred window, which looked out onto a sycamore tree behind the courthouse. I could see the sunlight on the upper leaves. 

This was a key detail in A Lesson Before Dying that was missing from my experience surveying the prison cells. Unlike the novel, the barred windows that I saw were coupled with a sheet of opaque glass. I could not see any trees outside these windows; rather, I could not see anything through them. Although it seems to be a fictitious detail, the image of the  ‘sycamore tree’ is of great importance in the novel; Gaines keeps coming back to it. 

The sycamore tree reminds me of Miss Jane Pittman’s oak that we visited. The tremendous tree, according to Cheylon, is an important figure in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman because it has seen history, and carries the memories of the community into the future. The sycamore tree in A Lesson Before Dying has witnessed all the lives that have passed in the prison cells, peering at them through the gaps in the barred window.

The plantation cemetery, where my ancestors had been buried for the past century. The cemetery had lots of trees in it, pecans and oaks, and it was weedy too, and since there were so few gravestone

Dr. Gaines is buried with the rest of his family in a green, shaded patch of land amidst the sugar fields. Although there are a set of marked gravestones now, Cheylon talked about the number of unmarked graves in this area, many of which had been plowed over and converted into more sugar fields. I was reminded once again of the importance of the trees in Dr. Gaines’ writing, and the memories they possessed. The ‘big house’ and the quarters that Dr. Gaines’ aunt used to live in are visible in the distance from the cemetery. Cheylon told us that the property is still owned by the same family that owned it when Dr. Gaines was born. Dr. Gaines and his wife, Dianne, had to fight to hold onto this land, preserving the memories of both the marked and unmarked Black lives that had been buried here. 

The Gaines house too is an impressive project of preservation and reclamation. It is built on land that used to be the property of white slave-owners. Behind the house is a large sugar-bowl that, on plantations, was involved in the dangerous process of boiling sugar-cane. It marks the injury and pain of the enslaved people and tenant laborers who used to work on the plantation, but it has been repurposed as the centerpiece of the house’s yard. At one point, it was even the home to Koi fish. 

Further behind the house is a small church building, that is modeled after the type of church that Dr. Gaines studied in, and Grant taught in. In the book, this building is marred by poor ventilation and a lack of schooling resources. It is a constant reminder of the “vicious circle” of inequity faced by Black people growing up in the town.  

At the same time, it is a site of learning. Cheylon told us that, when Dr. Gaines was still alive, he used this building to teach students creative writing and literature. The reclaiming of these sites of oppression make them a beacon of potential. At the same time, they remind me of the continuing systems of exploitation. The big house still stands, neighboring Dr. Gaines’ home, but it is decaying and on the verge of falling apart. 

“I could not imagine this place, this house, existing without the two of them here.”
— Ernest J. Gaines

(Note: the “two of them” are Aunt Emma and Tante Lou who used to work in Henri Pichot’s house)

The Capitols of Louisiana

Image found online: DesignsbyMinaD on Etsy

In the crowds of the Money Wasters second line parade, a particular T-shirt slogan caught my eye. It read: “I’m from New Orleans NOT Louisiana.” This perfectly captured the uniqueness of the parade – the mix of dance, jazz, and eccentricity that could only be found in the city. While we did start our trip in Grand Isle, the past two weeks, we have been immersed in the culture of New Orleans. However, the t-shirt begs a crucial question: What is life like in Louisiana outside New Orleans? After traveling to Baton Rouge, the capital of the state, I have a glimpse of this. 

“Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.”
— John Kennedy Toole
 

The only excursion that Ignatius Reilly, the protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, has taken out of New Orleans is to the city of Baton Rouge. Although, for us, it was just an hour and a half’s drive away, to Ignatius, it is comparable to venturing out into an unknown continent. Ignatius’ perspective is certainly unreliable: his failed attempt to land a job at LSU seems to retroactively color his experience of Baton Rouge and Toole exaggerates this for comic effect. This exaggeration nevertheless touches on the great sense of change as we moved upriver and North from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. 

St. Joseph’s Cathedral

Geographically, it is instantly noticeable that, unlike New Orleans, Baton Rouge is slightly elevated over the Mississippi. Driving in, it was incredible to see the vast empty stretches of swamps and fields. While New Orleans is a lot larger and sprawling, the buildings and streets of Baton Rouge are more spaced out. As a capital city, its buildings feel imposing and authoritative. 

Although Ignatius seems to have detested Baton Rouge, a lot of what he idealizes politically seems to resonate with its history. Ignatius seeks a “good, strong monarchy,” and a “good, authoritarian Pope.” In our seminar, we talked about Louisiana’s former governor Huey Long and watched the 2006 film adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, based fictively on the life of Huey Long. He has a near legendary status in the city – his infrastructure, education, and health programs modernized the state – and is remembered as a champion of the causes of the poor against big oil industrialists. At the same time, he is also remembered as a near-dictator and demagogue who used corrupt political tactics, including violence,  to eliminate and threaten opposition.

“A perfect democracy can come close to looking like a dictatorship, a democracy in which the people are so satisfied they have no complaint.
”
— Huey Long

While he was assassinated on September 10, 1935, I can sense the specter of his authority in the buildings he constructed. The imposing feeling that struck me when we initially drove into the city seems to be tied to Huey Long. 

The Old Governor’s Mansion

I walk a few blocks down the road from our hotel and see the Old Governor’s Mansion that Huey Long built in 1929. The house is painted all white. It is on a slight elevation from the large green lawn that surrounds it. The entrance is held up by four large pillars that emulate Greek columns. The sheer size of the mansion exudes a sense of power that distinguishes it from the buildings that surround it.

Patriots

The New State Capitol building, however, epitomizes this sensation of power and authority. Huey Long’s tombstone statue towers over the capitol’s gardens. Towering over this statue is the art-deco style building itself. The inside of the building has immense grandeur, and I could feel the importance of the space as I observed the governmental representatives working at their desks. Yet, when I walk outside the building, I feel like I am meant to be intimidated. 

Pioneers

On either side of the grand steps to the entrance of the building are the two statues, “Pioneers,” and “Patriots.” The “Patriots” statue, which intends to commemorate those who have died defending the country, has a large medieval soldier thrusting his sword into the ground.

Andrew remarked that the art-deco style often could teeter into fascistic realms, and this unnerving statue gave off that impression. The “Pioneers” statue features a giant woman, supposedly representing progress, surrounded by French and Spanish explorers, as well as the Native American inhabitants of the land. While it is nice to see an acknowledgement of the indegenious population, seeing them grouped under the colonial label ‘pioneer,’ has an unsettling effect. 

The Old Capitol building, by comparison, is not nearly as imposing. While the eagles sitting atop the iron fence that surrounds the building, and its fort-like appearance do signify authority, I remember Andrew telling us about what Mark Twain felt about the building – it was a “whitewashed castle,” an “architectural falsehood.” While striking, it does stick out like a sore thumb amidst its surroundings. 

The place seems caught between the idealization of the past and the celebration of progress. The gothic-revival architecture echoes the middle ages. Some plaques right outside the building remember the 1779 Battle of Baton Rouge, where French and Spanish forces captured the British fort here. This was before the capitol building was even built. 

A model of how the capitol looked in 1852

Inside, there is a museum of political history that describes the repeated restorations of the building. Originally constructed in 1852, the building had to be reconstructed after the civil war in 1882, and then restored yet again in the 1990s since the building had fallen into disrepair after the capitol was shifted by Huey Long. There seems to be a need to continually reconstruct what Twain would see as an artificial medieval image of the past. 

Yet, the museum itself is built around teleological progress. A video exhibit, describing the history of Baton Rouge, goes over enslavement and segregation, proclaiming that this was supposedly ‘short-lived.’ Another room documents the history of voting rights and the progress toward democracy. Yet, this simplistic notion of progress seems to be at odds with the very building the exhibits are set in. 

A plaque outside one of the rooms marked that it was underwritten by the “Shell Oil Company Foundation.” This is the type of corporation that Huey Long was fighting against.

On the second floor of the old capitol building, I walked into a room that was filled with images of weddings – especially, pictures of the bride in front of stained glass. Looking at these wonderful images, the cynical part of me remembered Mark Twain. It was almost as if this room revealed the real significance of the building; not the museum exhibits.  Perhaps this was part of what Huey Long wanted to leave behind when he created the New Capitol.

The excesses of new orleans: Embracing incompletion

“The excesses cloud up the page . . . the rest of your life a desert of facts. Cut them open and spread them out like garbage.”
— Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter,” often feels like an archaeological project. Unearthing histories whose traces are scattered throughout the urban ‘desert of facts’ that is New Orleans. The image of spread out ‘garbage’ is incredibly off-putting, but that is the harsh reality of most material histories that are not preserved in conventional archives or museums. Yet, there is something potent about this ‘excess,’ the capacity to overflow that transgresses a more curated and manicured history. 

Of course, Ondaatje is transparent that these “facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction,” yet, the polishing of these facts does not make Buddy Bolden’s story, as told by Ondaatje, any less excessive. As I read the novel, it felt like I was collecting detailed fragments of a larger picture; each character: Nora, Robin, Webb, Bellocq possessed their own fragments of Buddy. Yet, as I reached the end of the story, the larger picture never fully formed – I was just left with a collection of fragments. This lack of completion, to me, enables the excesses of Buddy to ‘cloud up the page.’ After two weeks of traveling, I have come to embrace this sense of incompletion. 

When speaking about my travels to places, I, like a lot of tourists, have the tendency to remark: “I have done this,” almost as if an entire place has been rendered complete by my mere act of visiting it. This is simply untrue. 

I had about an hour to meander around the French Quarter before the Preservation Hall Jazz performance. I decided to visit a second-hand book store I had heard about: Arcadian Books and Prints. Shelves of dusty books covered the walls of the tiny room; piles of books seemed to sprout out of the ground. The place was overflowing. Weaving through walls of precariously stacked books, I was overwhelmed. Usually at a bookstore, I like to scan every shelf from top-to-bottom, but rummaging through everything here would be impossible. I just had to give in to the excesses of the forty-one years of history and literature. 

“The right ending is an open door you can’t see too far out of.”
— Michael Ondaatje

Before the Jazz show, we were made to stand at the back of the antiquated Preservation Hall. My vision of the stage was obscured by a wooden pillar that cut through the center of the room and the backs of others in the audience in front of me. Restlessly, I continually adjusted my angle of viewing to see as much as I could. It was exhausting. 

Preservation Hall

Eventually, I leaned against the wall behind me and just listened. I remembered how Buddy Bolden described the parades he played in. People walking past him would hear “just the fragment” he was playing – they could “come in where they pleased and leave when they pleased” – they could hear “all the possible endings.” During the jazz performance, I often missed what the drummer was saying as he introduced each new piece; sometimes, the music faded into the background as I zoned out into my thoughts; other times, I could clearly grasp the rhythm of the song and tapped my feet in sync with the music. 

After one of our seminars in Jackson Square, where we discussed the literary history of New Orleans, Andrew sent us a map of the French Quarter marked with key locations visited by authors who were associated with the French Quarter’s Bohemian zeitgeist: Truman Capote, Sherwood Anderson, Tennesse Williams, William Faulkner. It felt like a scavenger hunt. Although these authors’ legacies are preserved a lot more concretely in the canon of New Orleans’ culture, I felt an affinity with Ondaatje – visiting spaces and digging out the individual histories contained within them.

Some of the locations, like the inside of the Hotel Monteleone or Faulkner House Books, seemed to be preserved through time. The ornate carousel bar was still operational inside the Monteleone. Faulkner’s house was now a sophisticated bookstore with first-editions of his books, and framed letters written by famed authors like T.S Eliot.

On the other hand, I felt a little underwhelmed by some of the other locations. Hotel Maison De Ville, where Tennessee Williams supposedly wrote parts of Streetcar, was closed. All I could see were its old doors and a commemorative plaque. 538 Royal Street, where Williams used to live across from a gay bar, the St. James looked no different, now, than the other shops on the street. It housed a cosmetic store. The Old Absinthe House, the meeting place for celebrated literary figures, was now more of a sports bar with football helmets hanging from the ceiling.

“. . . the neighborhood of five million strangers, each shooting out his own personal ray? How can I deal with five million personal rays?
”
— Walker Percy

Although my interest was directed towards these specific authors, there were millions of strangers who may have left traces of their ‘personal ray’ in those spaces. Even though there are attempts made to preserve and sometimes commodify the presence of these authors, most of their material presence is smothered by the multitudes of other unnamed presences. While it is exciting to individualize these spaces, I increasingly felt like the authors I was tracing were dissipating into the excesses of history.

“He was scared of everybody. He didn’t want to meet anybody he knew again, ever in his life.
”
— Michael Ondaatje

Buddy is frightened when he realizes that he does not have complete possession of himself. He dissociates. When history becomes so fragmented and dispersed, it is easy to feel lost. Is it even possible to hold onto something that is so scattered

When I visited the Hurricane Katrina exhibit at the Louisiana State Museum in the Presbytère building, I saw one way this might be possible. The main room of the exhibit had clusters of television screens with speakers attached to them. A spotlight directed us sequentially to each of these screens, where we listened to multiple accounts of the harrowing experience. The people speaking ranged from policemen, firemen, and nurses to regular New Orleanians who lost their livelihoods. Everyone’s experience was essential.

There were recurring themes: the dehumanization of the victims of this disaster by the media, the ineptitude of institutions, and the profound cooperation between people that allowed them to endure. Still, I do not think it is possible to paint a complete picture of what happened. I left the exhibit knowing that there was so much more to the experiences that I could never begin to comprehend. These shared, yet personal experiences could never be contained within a desert of facts.

Search and Rescue on Humanity Street - David Rae Morris

Exploring Queer New Orleans

“It didn’t seem to me to be a sadness for Lestat, for that smart, gay vampire who used to live there then. It seemed a sadness for something else, something beyond Lestat that only included him”
— Anne Rice

On the third day of my stay at New Orleans, I finished reading Anne Rice’s “Interview with a Vampire” at 2 am, in bed. My first thought, as I reached the last page was: “Wow, this book is so queer!” As someone who identifies as queer, I was vaguely aware of the cult following that the movie adaptation of this book had gathered within gay communities, but I had not anticipated queerness being so explicit in the book. While I do not know Rice’s exact intentions with this queer-coding, the quote suggests that the queerness of her vampires moves past just individuals such as Lestat; it is “something beyond,” that seems to be submerged in the culture of New Orleans. So, over the past few days, in my exploration of the city, I have tried to unravel the city’s unique queerness; particularly, in the French Quarter. 

As I gaze out of the window of my room on the fifth floor of Hotel Lafayette, the first thing that grabs my attention is a pride flag hanging from the window of a building, a block away from where we’re staying. There is no shortage of queer visibility in New Orleans, especially in this time of the year. The flags are peppered throughout the city in balconies, bars, and storefronts; they are anticipating pride month (June). Walking through the city, I have even been greeted by strangers with the ‘limp-wrist,’ signal for queerness. 

“This was New Orleans, a magical and magnificent place to live. In which a vampire . . . might attract no more notice in the evening than hundreds of other exotic creatures”
— Anne Rice

Although Louis, Lestat, and Claudia, the three vampire protagonists of Rice’s novel, live, quite literally, in the darkness, there is something remarkably disruptive about New Orleans that lends itself to their vampiric eccentricity. The very fact that the three are living together as found-family of two men and their daughter in 19th century New Orleans is radical to envision. 

Townhouses at the French Quarter

Yet, I do not want to romanticize the vampires of Rice’s novel, and the culture of New Orleans. The exploitation of enslaved people grounds the city’s cruel history.  As a port city, New Orleans was a prime location for the auctioning of enslaved people. In our seminars, we learnt that the Business district, where we are staying, used to be full of auction blocks and slave-pens, which have now inconspicously been transformed into hotels, restaurants, and banks. Before coming to New Orleans, Louis and Lestat ran a sugar-plantation. In order to conceal their identities, they burn down the entire place, massacring the enslaved people who work there. They live in a lavish townhouse in the French Quarter with enslaved domestic servants. Enslaved people are depicted most frequently as unnamed victims of the vampires’ killings. I kept this parallel history in mind as I ventured through the quarter.

Hotel Monteleone is hard to miss

To better understand the queer history of New Orleans, I looked into important landmarks in the city, and marked them virtually on my map. Hotel Monteleone, where Truman Capote lived, whose large sign towers over the French Quarter, and the house of Tennesse Williams were literary landmarks that we will probably visit as a group later in the trip. Instead, I was particularly interested in two gay bars – sites of queer socializing and organizing. 

The first of these bars was called “Cafe Lafitte in Exile,” named after the notorious French pirate Jean Lafitte. To approach the bar, I walked down the infamous Bourbon street. Although it was the early afternoon, the street was grimy and brimming with partying tourists. Still, the licentiousness and unruly decadence of Bourbon is a significant aspect of the city. Anne Rice’s novel draws from this licentiousness. She describes Lestat sucking Louis’ blood in rich erotic detail, as they hear the throbbing of each other’s hearts. Lestat forms an intimate relationship with a musician boy who ‘allowed’ Lestat to feed on him while he slept. 

That said, the bar cannot simply be reduced to the licentiousness of Bourbon. Established in 1933, the bar is one of the oldest gay bars to be operating continuously in US history. As I walked to Cafe Lafitte in Exile, an archaic bar called Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop caught my eye. Later, I learnt that this was the original location of the bar, before 1953, when conflict with the landlord, ironically, exiled the bar down the block to where it is now. Guests dressed up as famous figures in exile such as Napoleon and Oscar Wilde to commemorate its reopening. Lafitte, as a pirate too, was frequently in exile. The notion of being in exile perfectly embodies the queer experience with its transgression and embrace of otherness. 

“A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth”
— Anne Rice

The ‘fugitive’ and ‘vagabond’ vampires of Rice’s novel are constantly in search of community. While this status of being in ‘exile’ can embraced and celebrated, the novel also makes it feel melancholic. Louis and Claudia’s search for meaning and community is futile, as it takes them to France, where Claudia dies. Louis eventually returns alone to New Orleans. He is filled with a constant sadness and sense of loss. 

The firetruck about to pass by me at Crescent City Books

On the way back from one of our group’s outings to the French Quarter to a concert at the Preservation Jazz Hall, I split from the group and decided to pass by the second bar marked on my map: The Jimani. The purpose of my visit, however, was the UpStairs lounge, a former gay bar, that used to operate on the floor above the Jimani. On June 24, 1973, this gay bar had an arson attack that killed 32 people and injured 15. 


As I strolled down Chartres Street, I could faintly smell a pungent odor of smoke. I thought my brain was vividly imagining things, given the history of the space I was approaching. Ignoring this as delusion, I continued further down the street. I stopped to admire the quaint “Crescent City Books.” Suddenly, the piercing sound of sirens broke through the earphones I was wearing. A firetruck, with its flashing red-lights, hurried past me. It wasn’t heading in the direction I was, fortunately. Yet, this coincidence was tragically surreal.


Standing across the street from the building, staring at the decaying green walls and shuttered windows, I felt that sense of loss. I was reminded of the specter of violence that haunts queer history. Once, when waiting in the lobby of our hotel, a queer individual who works there, narrated an incident of them being fired from another hotel for being “too gay” (Unfortunately, since their shift was ending, I never got the chance to ask them their name). In different forms, this specter of violence persists, despite the celebration of queerness in the city. 

My short pilgrimage through the French Quarter was more often grim than joyous. Yet, it also marked the importance of communities that hold onto their connections through the violence of the past. Communities that are unified in their joint celebration of difference. 

The Aftermath of Disaster at Grand Isle: Unwinding and understanding

The white shimmer of the sea in the distance

After crossing the Mississippi River, the drive from the New Orleans Airport to the Grand Isle was in the darkness. The water and swamp that surrounded the narrow road was illuminated only by the dim streetlights. Sometimes, there was a white shimmer in the distance. Glimpses of the vast sea caused by the flashing lights of ferries, oil rigs and fishing boats. The orange glow of a large fire grabbed my attention. Two men seemed to be burning a pile of scrap wood, leisurely watching the flames from underneath a stilted house. I had only then realized that all the houses that we sped past were on stilts. We were in Grand Isle after all, and it had only been a year since Hurricane Ida violently hit its shores. Perhaps debris from the damage caused by the hurricane was fuelling the fire.

 

The next afternoon, I started reading Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, sitting lazily on the beach with my legs spread out in the sand. Chopin’s descriptions of the ‘soft’ and ‘languorous’ breeze, the intense glare of the sun, and the ‘seductive’ whispers of the sea reflected what I was experiencing with my senses. As I read about Edna Pontellier’s vacation at the Grand Isle, I felt the oppressive heat of the sun, and the continuous soft crashing of the waves. I was overwhelmed by the fact that I was, quite literally, in the world of the novel.

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
”
— Kate Chopin

While Kate Chopin’s writing is dense with description, this description is not just a realistic account of the life and geography of Grand Isle. Edna’s mental state is embedded within the sea. Gazing at the horizon with the book open in my hands, I too drowsily drifted into these ‘mazes of inward contemplation,’ often getting lost in them for hours.

I contemplate my foreignness to Grand Isle. Edna, too, is an outsider – she is a presbyterian from Kentucky trying to assimilate into the French Creole world. Meanwhile, I am an international student from India, studying in Los Angeles, and visiting Louisiana for the first time through the Bookpacking class. The circumstances that brought me here couldn’t be more different, yet I felt an affinity with Edna’s position. Even though the environment encourages idle relaxation, I feel unsettled.

There is an intense sense of loss in Grand Isle. While the guesthouse we are living in has been repaired, the effects of the disaster are clearly visible throughout the town. When I step out of the guesthouse onto the main road, and stroll to Jo-Bob’s Gas and Grill or the Sureway Supermarket, I pass the remains of once-intact homes. The remnants of a house dismantled by the hurricane. It is unlivable, but still held up by its stilts. The destroyed house, enveloped in overgrown vegetation sits right beside a newly painted yellow two-story bungalow with a trimmed lawn and a neatly arranged row of trees. When we visited the western edge of the island (that is connected to the rest of Louisiana by a bridge) to take photos for this blog, I felt the absolute violence of the hurricane. Half of a jetty, painted green, was demolished. What seemingly used to be a pier was now just a chaotic collection of ruptured wooden stubs sticking out of the water.

A few years before The Awakening’s publication in 1899, the Chenière Caminada hurricane, in 1893, killing close to 2000 people in total. About half of these casualites was the entire working-class fishing community Chenière Caminada. Although The Awakening’s story is staged before this time, Kate Chopin seems to be reckoning with this disaster, as she preserves memories of the space in her novel, describing a jovial mass that the characters attend at Caminada. This blog post is, in a sense, my reckoning with Hurricane Ida and its effects that intertwine with my relaxing experience at Grand Isle.

These past two days have been filled with lethargy and leisure. I resonate with the French Creole culture in The Awakening of winding down and appreciating the delights of life, Yet, this is a partial story. As a visitor, I have the privilege to choose when to visit the Grand Isle. Were it in a state of complete disrepair, our group would not have been able to visit the place. On the other hand, the community living and working here is always preparing for the possibility of natural disaster. It is a grueling cycle of destruction and rebuilding. As a tourist, I am separated from this, in the same way the wealthy Creole families in The Awakening are separate from the people who died in the Chenière Caminada hurricane.

An endless stretch of sea and sand

“She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end.
”
— Kate Chopin

I experienced something similar to Edna in the above quote when I set out to walk the entire stretch of the beach, parallel to the sea. I faced an endless stretch of sand in front of, and behind me, and to my left was the horizon of the sea. I felt calm and at peace. I was also a little terrified by the lack of visible boundaries.

Slowly treading deep into the endless sea, Edna drowns herself. She, too, experiences a brief terror. Reading Kate Chopin’s novel while on the beach awakened within me a morbid curiosity with death by the sea. I stared at and clicked photos of a catfish and half-eaten crab washed up on shore during the low tide. The corpses of a pair of sharks caught the attention of our group. Maggots were crawling over them and decomposing their flesh. While these might be regular, though gruesome, sights on a beach, Chopin’s writing drew my attention to death in nature.

At the entrance to the beach from our guesthouse, there is a cross made out of driftwood. I do not know why it is there. Someone jokingly suggested that it was an unmarked grave that haunted the beach. I like to see it as a recognition of the casualties of Hurricane Ida.

As I get ready to depart from Grand Isle these images of death and disaster stay in my memories. But, I will also not forget laying in the hammock on the balcony overlooking the ocean. Falling asleep to the gentle sound of waves and a warm sea-breeze. Throughout this blog I have emphasized that the locals of Grand Isle are dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. But, they also fish calmly on the rocks by the sea. They enjoy fried crawfish at the Starfish restaurant after a day of work. An appreciation for the pleasures of life still exists in the face of constant disaster. I hope to carry traces of this way of life with me as I continue my travels.

The mysterious cross on the beach