N'Awlins

NO  (New Orleans)

Well, I said I would be back to New Orleans to give you a better view of that great city, locally referred to as N'Awlins.

03 August 2014

I watched her as she worked on the sidewalk with her associate trying to shake that little mouse out of the electric fan. She was barely clothed, only in her string bikini, with her mildly seductive, no fat, anorexic looking sphinx body… looking somewhat like skin stretched over fibery thin muscle, desperately attached to her bones. She would have been more seductive in a dress, as she had a pretty face. It was Bourbon Street and beer at 32 degrees.

 

 

Yes, that famous iconic Bourbon Street onto which the ghosts of the whole world have tramped. That Bourbon Street, of that city, the birth place of Jazz, in Congo Park, of Charles “Buddy" Bolden…"The first king of Jazz,” using black blues and hymn vocal style. That city  of Louis Armstrong, of big Hollywood movies like The Big Easy and Easy Rider, of Hurricane Katherine, that virtually wiped it off the global map.

 

 

 

Yes New Orleans, Yes, that New Orleans, into which I plunged, with all the snakes of the world on my back, from 71 years of indoctrination. Mystics and voodoo shops lined the street offering fortunes and clairvoyance on your life… the past and the future. I should have been excited… was this not what I needed, insight into the mysterious darkness in my mind yet, I was afraid, to go there from all the stories of violence and corruption I heard from those who had never been there. My advice…never listen to those who have never been there!

 

I was overwhelmed, fell in love with it immediately. It was a fascinating kaleidescope, beguiling, bewitching, embracing throngs of people, signs, music, solicitors of all carnality and trades.  I never felt a violent underbelly, if it was indeed there. We were there for two glorious weeks on what might be called… the dark side of town, that got flooded out, the poverty side, in a cheap hotel, where all the staff were black, I seem to recall. Most obvious to me, the black people were at home there, they belonged there. They were friendly and courteous, with no apparent psychological baggage or hang-ups about  being “African Americans”. In fact, I checked myself from time to time… was this person serving me, black or white. I saw them as a child would seem them.

My hang-ups were gone. And I am from Canada’s East coast, Halifax North End where lives the biggest black population in the country where I lived for years before returning to Jasper Bog. The undercurrent, the dark underbelly is there, obvious, resentful, and rightfully so, as having their community literally bulldozed over and the population relocated by a hateful white racists indignity, that simply, thoughtlessly, inhumanly and violently expropriated their legal and centuries old homestead in the dark of the night.

But the streets of “N'Awlins” displayed none of that displacement. Yeah, I know, as a visitor, I am seeing it through a bit of rose coloured glasses. But, a  beautiful young lady artist/filmmaker I knew from home was killed there, in the dark of the night, in her home, by the street violence.   But the city survives and it is the seat of jazz, that invites trotters from around the globe. I plan to go back there to rent a room for while…. to play a bit of my blues.

 

I can say that I truly believe that the United States of America, with all of it vices, virtues, struggles is the embracing “chosen nation” though still evolving along that precarious yet hopeful thread, in that search for human decency, kinship and civility amongst all the diverse races of the world.

On Henriette Delille Street in the Upper Side of town we met Miriam, 86 yr sitting on her spot, in her deck chair on the sidewalk, across the street from her home in the shade of a banana tree next to a big old white plastered Spanish style church, “Shake the devil off” she said. She was my latest oracle and gave me permission to use her words for this blog. I hugged and thanked her and moved on to find places of Jazz and Blues on Frenchmen Street.

 

Before we left N'Awlins I had one more mission… to play my banjitar on Bourbon Street, that famous street that agitated my blood, my adrenalin, that street where I felt enwrapped in ancient arms of kindness. It felt a bit silly and I was very nervous but, it was a duty to myself within my mission that I had to fulfill. It would be my first ever busking. I set up and opened my Banjitar case, for the bucks that would roll in.

 It was easier than I imagined, sitting for about an hour, basically playing one verse of Wabash Cannonball, over and over, as travellers passed in quick succession. One passer-by proudly called out, “That was written in my home town in Tennessee” I made seven bucks for my first little foray in N'Awlins.  Still, yet, I have a long way to get over my childhood indoctrination… that “art is a waste of time in life” so, am constantly feeling guilty, which holds me back from truly expressing my feelings and the nuances in the lyrics when I sing. It is a dreadful curse on me! I see a picture, as if watching myself sing and I am embarrassed, always, always, always!!!... not confident that I will ever climb over that mountain, as hard as I try… it is Sisyphus. I do feel a sadness… as if I am being deceitful, a rebel against the customs of my natural place, which I did not chose and from which I broke away, fundamentally breaking the laws of my land. And as I write this, my chest is filled with a pumping anxiety and exhilarated heart rate…. coupled with a further determination to break that curse.

The vacation was over… we all went our separate ways.. Cal and Kim to Toronto, Lulu back to the Yukon and I off across Southern USA to New Mexico

One of two remaining family members from my previous generation… my father’s half sister lay in an Albuquerque hospital with dehydration and vomiting following a serious car accident. She is a fighter. I must be there for at least moral support. This may be her last days.