New Orleans to Atlanta - 3rd January, 2018
(New Orleans, French Quarter, Bourbon St, Plantations, Slavery, Creoles, Saint Charles Streetcar, New Orleans Times-Picayne, Amtrak, “The Crescent”, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Atlanta)
NEW ORLEANS:
Spanish, French and generations of American building and preservation have created a Plaza d’Armes Spanish Square, surrounded by cast-iron balconied terraces and colonnades.... In amongst the Tennessee Williams accents are regular gravelly Creole French tones, some Spanish, and a smattering of Vietnamese. From the bars of Bourbon St and Frenchman St come the pumping sounds of live jazz and blues and invitations for usurious drinks and into souvenir shops packed with new year beads, hats, boas, masks and offers of alligator jerky. There’s a strong visual Gallic influence of Fler-de-Lis flags, banners, and government crests on drains and wheelie bins.
Sunset: on the levee behind Jackson Square, a lone bagpiper strolls between the building works, playing a lament which is just audible over the roar and clank of shunting freight trains.
A father wrangles his adolescent tribe onto a crowded shuttlebus back to the St Charles streetcar: There is whining and there is complaining. “You will stop that: this is a GOOD day!!!”
Lee Circle: just outside my pub. An unkempt bearded white guy (many shopping bags) accosts me:
“You can’t say anything to offend anyone any more. See that column? They stole him. They stole that statue from Lee Circle. Robert E Lee is gone. It’s not right. We just can’t offend no one anymore...”
Public “history” is no longer dictated by white southern “charm”, it seems.
On TV they are playing new year “Thank You President Trump” advertising. Mawkish “typical Americans” thank President Trump for his achievements such as reducing taxes for workers (?), supporting Israel (!), and making it ok for Americans to say “Merry Christmas” again (?!!). On Facebook this morning there was a meme which commemorated the casualties of Fox TV’s “War on Christmas”. CNN and MSNBC seem to be repeating a wide range of Watergate documentaries as Trump enters year 2 in the White House and investigators are circling.
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New Orleans is another town that kept one line of streetcars in operation becoming a city symbol. The St Charles line is a declared National Monument of rolling 1920’s boxy dark-green wooden-seated cars, packing in the commuter and tourist crowds through the well-heeled oak-tree-lined “Garden District” of mansions and university campuses, largely unaffected by the Katrina flooding. The line has been running continuously since 1835.
Downtown in Canal St, in a revival of downtown streetcar services, boxy NEW 1920’s-style red streetcars process between palm trees and streetlights festooned with seasonal red bows and fairy lights. The gradual rebuilding of downtown streetcar lines is using and maintaining local trades’ skills, from restoring the St Charles cars, to creating a whole new fleet of red boxy wooden slat-seated “retro” streetcars that also attract the crowds.
Back in Canal St, dinner is the three brown-looking bowls of “taster plate”: Crawfish Etouffee, gumbo, red beans and rice, fried green tomatoes and a side of remoulade: enough salt and roughage and “browns” to keep me going for the following day of swamps and plantations.
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The wisdom of Tour Guides:
Ellen: proudly Creole (“speaks French, Catholic, born in Louisiana from a family that was here when it was Spanish and French”) explains that she’s not as gruff as Mr Torres, who took us through the swamps and duck hunters by flat-bottomed barge. She was sent from her small town into New Orleans so that she would sound like a “city girl”. She explains the area that was Creole, as opposed to “American”:
“Well, if I drove about 190 miles north of here, you start to hear the other banjos, if you know what I mean...”
New Orleans was planned out with a French Quarter and segregated black Creole, “African” and “American” (Protestant) areas. From the 1950’s the “African” area was forcibly demolished and dispersed to make way for freeways so white families, who had moved out to the new suburbs, could more easily commute into downtown work.
Algiers, across the Mississippi, was where slave boats arrived and Africans were “rested and fed” to maximise their market value.
After English was declared to be the ONLY official language of Louisiana in 1921, the previously fiercely independent Creoles painted their colourful green/yellow/blue plantation homes white, to “look more American”. Now, 150 French teachers are funded by the French government to immerse school students to keep the culture alive. “Some of them go home”. Some of the plantation houses are no longer “white”.
After a morning in the crowds (and rather good food) at white-columned “Oak Alley” plantation (which is the image of the genteel Old [white] South most of us would know from Stephen Foster and Tennessee Williams - and which had gone “belly up” as soon as slavery was abolished and they had to pay for labour), we moved up the road to “Laura”, a green/blue home on stilts that had been a Creole family plantation with more than 100 slaves.
It was less crowded, more authentically dilapidated/in process of restoration (“hurricanes and rainstorms permitting”), and with the best tour guide I have had anywhere: she knew her history, updated information as more research occurred, and pulled no punches about Creole family cruelty (to their own as well as to slaves). The staged tour and detailed narratives were spectacularly good. Every history teacher should be exposed to this woman’s storytelling skill. The slave quarters were the original shacks. Life after abolition: former slaves became indentured workers who could only shop at their own self-sufficient plantation store (building up huge ongoing debts that were deducted “up-front” from annual wages).
Paul Theroux in “The South” writes about indentured black families not being part of the wage economy until the late 1940’s, and the continuing indebtedness of rural workers. The “systems” remain historically, racially weighted still.
Our extended walk around “Laura” concluded with:
“You are standing on the land where the daughter of a slave gave birth to Fats Domino, who recently passed...”
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On a day when sharks are reported to be freezing to death in the oceans off New England, I am bemused by the local press: the “New Orleans Times-Picayne”: “Pet Celebration”:
“ Roger Mudd-Rick was foaled Friday May 6, 1983 in Texas. Past (sic) away on Wednesday August 22, 2012 at the age of 29 at home in Louisiana. His dam was Western Lady Bug and his sire was Jingo Leo...”
I swear I’m not making this up. There was more than a page of animal photos and several-paragraph memorials.
“Our dear Precious, we will always miss you. We’ve had wonderful dogs in our lives but none have ever been as special as our little girl. When you left us, even the cat and your little brother dog missed having you to play with...”
The SPCA “Pet of the Week” ad appeared at the bottom of the page, should grieving families be ready to replace those gone to “the Happier Hunting Ground”, but the “In Memoriums” continued relentlessly over the page:
“We gathered Sunday, April 2, 2017, to say goodbye to our Beloved Peek-A-Boo, Mischief. Mischief passed peacefully the morning of March 2 from a virus...” “... she was our Little Protector who would bite your booty in a minute!”
The newspaper itself was a multi-page weekend edition with some great hard news and commentary (funded by this bizarre advertising) including details of unexpected August city flooding following heavy rainfall when officials, eventually and grudgingly, admitted that most of the water pumps were not functioning (!) and the bureaucrats responsible(!!) were removed from their positions. When seen from roads over levees and canals, the water is often higher than the surrounding streets. The blue “Emergency Escape” signs around the suburbs took on new importance.
“Our sweet little boxer babies crossed the Rainbow Bridge 8 months apart. It was hard losing both so close together...”
I kept thinking of Evelyn Waugh’s conclusion to “The Loved One”:
“Your little Aimee is thinking of you in Heaven tonight and wagging her tail”...
Twenty pages on were the human obituaries. These too have a somewhat unfamiliar flavour to outsiders:
“Franklin David Kanost, known to all as David, entered into Eternal Life on December 24...”
“Shirley Mae Roby Taliancieh of Hanrahan, La, age 92 years old, entered her Heavenly Home on December 26...”
“You can now add a photograph, US flag, cross, or Star of David to your death notice.”
The back of the paper is a 4 page New Orleans Latin “NOL Amundo” news in Spanish.
I’m liking that I’m staying in a part of the city which offers free coffee to teachers on Sundays, and discounts for teachers and students at the local health club.
New Year’s eve in Bourbon St: the “open carry” law in Louisiana is very different from gu-uns in Texas: you can carry open alcoholic drinks a long as they are not in glass. By 5pm the crowd is already getting surly and local police are setting up “self-raising” cabins so they can look down on the crowd as the night wears on. Nearer the waterfront and Canal St the college football crowd is more friendly in their souvenir buying frenzy as they are “revved up” by the New Year’s outdoor concert.
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The “Crescent” train from New Orleans to Atlanta:
Stuck for an hour behind another freight, a mere hour-and-a-half into our journey, looking out over Lake Pontchartrain: a waterfront breakfast, with a former Faberge accountant and a mother from near Atlanta (think: Whoopie Goldberg in blonde dreadlocks and you are “there”) travelling with husband and 3 kids: “We promised them planes, trains and automobiles so we flew to New Orleans for New Years and we’re going back by train.
”So where was the “automobile”?
"That’s what got us to the station!”
I asked about arriving late into the remote Amtrak Peachtree station stop in Atlanta.
“Well, if we arrive too late fo’ the bus and there ain’t no taxi, you could just wrap yo’ nice baggage in a black trash bag, you all be able to sleep under the nearest freeway bridge unmolested. They won’t notice any differrrent!”
Faberge Accountant: “You didn’t bring the Louis Vuitton, did you?”
The morning was spent passing through prosperous looking, white-churched towns through Mississippi and into Alabama, each with its DOLLAR GENERAL store.
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Atlanta, Georgia - 3rd January: 7.30pm.
Good evening.
I’m sitting, unexpectedly in the Azteca Restaurant, Buckhead, on Peachtree St. Why?
Amtrak have sent me here with a meal allowance $20 note (duly signed for) after I checked in my bag (duly signed for) for a train to Washington that is more than 5 hours late. (“That’s because it was more than 12 hours late into New Orleans at 6.30 this morning,” says the perky bag check gal. “If I had been in coach, I would have been going L-O-C-O by that time!”)
The Mexican restaurant does not seem at all surprised at my arrival: “Amtrak recommended you. It happens all the time...”
The ethnic sound track to dinner is Greatest Hits of Olivia Newton-John. The alternative was 5+ hours on station benches watching Fox News. Azteca was highly, highly recommended by the Amtrak gal.
So, gentle reader, there is all the time in the world to tap out a travel rant while dipping into not-bad guacamole and frustrating an overly keen waiter trying to flog me a full meal when my gut is full of deep-fried (?!!?) spinach pie and salad from an Ellis St Greek(ish) diner.
Let me take you back two days to our arrival into Atlanta on New Year’s Day... (Cue: harp music and a foggy screen which clears to reveal):
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Atlanta, Georgia - 1st January: 9.30pm
Good evening.
Amtrak’s Atlanta-Peachtree station is a substantial taxi ride north of town and there is no taxi rank. It’s the equivalent of being chucked off a long distance train at somewhere like Leightonfield in Sydney, and being asked to find your way into town with no local trains and an unpromising bus top at the station (“Temporarily Closed” with no route or timetable info).
It took the Amtrak staff 45 minutes to unload and load passengers and for the train to depart north while our checked baggage was nowhere to be seen. (The priority seems to be loading the less able - largely obese - passengers using golf cart, wheelchair; slow elevator... then hoisting them up from ground level into the train. After that, bags are laboriously gathered and delivered, by elevator, onto a tiny token baggage carousel, by two exhausted looking but polite, hard working women.)
I haven’t been tetchy on this trip, so far, as anyone travelling Amtrak understands they are in vaguely parallel time continuum. What was giving me the severe “irrits” right now was one supercilious bloke in his 50’s, chemical-brown comb-over, leaning on his walker and smugly bleating and braying for all of the best-part-of-an-hour that this was all deliberate Amtrak plot of ineptitude blah blah stupid women blah blah .... with comments about their age, appearance and relative speeds and “humorous” asides whenever he espied a bag or trolley somewhere down the stairwell blah blah.
(Things could be much worse: a week ago Atlanta’s massive airport was suddenly blacked out and then without power for over a day due to a small fire, and thousands were put outside in the cold with all flights and services cancelled).
I was still pondering how to get to downtown Atlanta from this small suburban station with no taxi rank or phone. “Are you wishing a taxi, Sir?” Was muttered behind me. I immediately had a new best friend: a Nigerian taxi driver who tracks late trains on line and arrives in the hope of a fare.
He calmly/loyally waited the 20 or so more minutes for baggage delivery on the tiny conveyor belt and delivered me downtown through deserted pre-midnight streets for only double the usual fare. It was not a direct trip: we’d braked suddenly in the station carpark as Chemical-Brown Comb-over Man mistakenly exited the station house by the end door. He and his walker tumbled A-over-T down three steps to be sprawling in the car park next to the “No Entry” sign. The stoic Amtrak attendants he’d been critiquing so cruelly were the only ones to rush to his assistance (as we drove on...)
I’m not about to regail you with the details of the rather sobering and reflective visits to the Martin Luther King Historical Site (now a declared National Park, including the Ebenezer Baptist Church and MLK’s childhood home and the graves of King and his wife surrounded by reflecting pools at the King Centre for Non-Violent Social Change). Nor will I detail the extended visit to the Centre for Civil and Human Rights on the other side of Downtown which puts King’s role into broader historical and social context. There was a slow trickle of visitors to this museum (where the ticket clerk was keen to give me a teacher discount on precisely NO evidence... ) compared to the massed shuffling queue to the Coca Cola Museum across the park.
Here are couple of insights I wasn’t necessarily expecting:
MLK on why he opposed the Vietnam war:
“We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realise they would never live on the same block in Detroit...”
He watched as the equal rights/anti poverty legislation was signed off by LBJ (leading white Southerners to abandon the Democratic Party), but then defunded those programs to pay for an Asian war. The “Great Society” was quietly shelved for an unwinnable conflict. (Was it Eisenhower who warned that every dollar that goes to the military-industrial complex is a dollar that does not go to alleviating poverty? What a bleeding heart Liberal he must have been, when compared to today’s Republican Party!)
Andrew Young on 1960’s race relations (after a violent visit to Chicago: where housing was deliberately organised by the city machine around race):
“In the South they don’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t get too big... And in the North they don’t care how big you get, as long as you don’t get too close.”
The security to get into the CNN Centre (housed in a former amusement park building: make of that what you will) for an organised tour was more physically probing than any I have received at any airport. After a full unpacking of day pack/pockets, I was publicly “invited” to lean forward and place my hands on the wall for a full electronic frisk, then to raise each booted foot in turn for scanning and inspection (in company with an elderly woman in a hijab in the parallel queue) I was debating whether the surrender of my own personal rights was worth an hour of being herded through the technology and scope and self-promotion of Planet CNN. It was. Just.
In the Atlanta’s High Gallery (an excellent place to spend several hours escaping the -7 to -10 degree sunny midday temperatures) there was, amongst a small but impressive Impressionist collection and modernist and post-modern American art (and some truly hideous turn-of-the-19th-20th Century over-wrought furniture of the Gilded Age) was a “1968” photographic exhibition, placing the work of photographers of the Civil Rights protests into context, with some reinterpretation of the history of the time. There was a similar “Civil War” exhibition where visitors are invited to “construct” history using only the images available from the still photographic technology of the time which could not capture the action and bloodshed of war.
In an adjacent hall was an exhibition of decolonized Africa and the growth of African art and design, often with strong themes of the overthrow of colonialism and recasting of history from an African perspective (at this time of the removal of Confederate “heroic”statuary from southern cities, and of Trump and his gang trying to rewrite and reconstruct America in their own unique “image”). The African design exhibition is introduced with this prologue:
“UNTIL LIONS HAVE THEIR OWN HISTORIANS,
TALES OF THE HUNT WILL ALWAYS GLORIFY THE HUNTERS.”
- China Achebe, Nigerian Novelist, 1994
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