I’m revisiting New Orleans reading EA Hanks’ The 10. I was there a decade ago, on a road trip with my mom. Unlike EA, who in 2019 drove from the West Coast to Florida, I took to the road from western Florida to Key West and flew into New Orleans. She took the same route she did with her mom in 1996. I took a 2015 road trip with my mom. In our drivers’ seats, we were both looking forward and backward, and at our relationship with our mom.
I loved New Orleans. I didn’t figure out why.
“America only has three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.” – Tennessee Williams
”New Orleans isn’t a city; it’s a universe, a very small one, with its own language, its own values, its own heroes and villains. New Orleans can convert even the most suspicious into true believers, and before you know it, years have passed and you’re not just an acolyte in this church, but a priest proselytizing the healing, medicinal qualities of Sazerac.” – EA Hanks
Perhaps we didn’t stay long enough in New Orleans for my mom to be a convert.
-> Two pieces of advice EA Hanks got – park on level ground and don’t walk alone after dark. Anywhere, in any neighbourhood. Perhaps my mom sensed this.
EA’s The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road
I’m enjoying reading her travel memoir. It resembles my own style of including the history of the place while traveling both the outer and inner worlds, in all directions and somehow the stories connect. What is a place devoid of the stories of the people that sharped and were shaped by it?
”Perspective, when you’re trying to see big things, vast even, can be hard to come by. Soft eyes help, but when you’re trying to simultaneously understand the national, the cultural, the personal, and the political, it’s impossible to take it all in. I want to understand how the places I’ve been to are uniquely American, but we are a big place, and we tell big stories, stories like Manifest Destiny. American Exceptionalism. Mothers and Daughters.”
Her book has been interesting for me, for me to learn about the US. As a Canadian, we often define ourselves as “not American.” Only half in jest. As a Canadian, I did veer from Americanisms. Since I majored in International Relations, American politics invariably were part of the curriculum, especially in nuclear deterrence. I still remember those night classes where the professor lectured on Mutual Assured Destruction, treaties, curtains, and walls….the madness has not gone away.
Since 2020, I understand many things more and many things less. I see how some acts that seem odd to those both outside and inside the US are defiance against over culture and control. The last stance of independence, against mandates, globalist agendas, and more control.
“It makes total sense to me that the explorers had to get off the boat; that only by getting lost in the delta did they find what they were looking for. You can’t observe the parade to understand it; you have to dance in it, ecstatic and alone, in rapture and en masse so ‘the armies of those I love engirth mad and I engirth them.’ Maybe then you’ll see the river.”
She was talking about how the French explorers couldn’t find the Mississippi from the south after coming in from the north.
After 51 years, Gene’s closed in July 2019. Before its last servings, EA went for lunch. “Gene’s pink palace of po-boys and daiquiris is leaving its home on Elysian Fields, and no one wants to talk about it. It’s another culture death in a town that is famous for its ghosts. Can you be haunted by the ghost of a sandwich? If it’s possible anywhere, it would be here.”
Over Ethiopian, EA met with her friend, cinematographer Zac Manuel. His family goes back generations in New Orleans. They discussed change. Here’s what he said.
“There’s nothing wrong with change; I’m not an anti-change person. But I think it’s symptomatic of something else. Which is that in order to sustain a city, you’ve got to bring industry to it. And industry means money. And we’re not a city that’s had a lot of money, and our culture has come from that lack of money. It’s come from ingenuity, and it’s come from creativity. It’s come from having to work a shit ton, and having to work in shitty conditions, and blowing all your steam off and creating something that’s beautiful and something that’s unique to you and your community and your friends. And the more that we need to be sustained, literally to survive, the more that we need big industry, the further culture is going to go from the city. It’s just going to go way.”
Perhaps I like New Orleans because like EA points out, “money-based culture is all the same.” It’s boring.
“In New Orleans, culture is born and refined int he streets, then travels up through the social echelons.”