Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 118

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Popular Culture Review

in and of the same hot, humid air, very flat earth and plentiful
vegetation, all the textures and scents as you grew up on. This might
be easier to imagine if speaking of some bucolic Swiss mountain
village or even some quaintly decaying Acadian town way out on
Bayou Teche; but oddly enough, for a New Orleanian it includes the
decrepit neighborhoods' shotgun houses and the smellier pavement
and stones of the Vieux Girre. And always, of course, the night smells
and mournful sounds off the Mississippi, sometimes accompanied by
breezes or a solitary clarinetist whose deep woodwind fills Jackson
Square with echoes of Barney Bigard. The river is the living, flowing
crescent in whose embrace this tribe has always lived. (So much so
that here the very directions are never the north/south/east/west
compass points the rest of the world uses, but simply the riverside or
lakeside, downtown or uptown directions. No other references make
sense where daily the sun rises from and sets on the west bank of the
river, and where many main avenues reflect its lengthy crescent.)
This has of course nothing to do with idealizing or praising New
Orleans. 1 cannot even recommend my hometown to anyone else, not
without severe qualifications and warnings.
Despite "new"
enhancements like the Superdome, Interstate 10, a splendid aquarium
and zoo, and the wonders of Jazzfest (already a quarter-century old),
its unchangingness includes appallingly old-fashioned and casual
racism, sexism, and homophobia. Physically, much of the town is
shockingly decrepit and tacky, having set records for consecutive
decades of going unrepaired and unpainted. Worse yet is the spread
of bad drug problems, overtly dangerous even in the (Quarter, and the
material and sociological decay and demoralization brought by more
than a decade of bankrupt economy. Nonetheless, for worse and
better, I confess that for ntany New Orleanians, their physical place
and local culture really root them, defining their world and selves,
uniting and individuating all their other (officially different)
religions, values, and social identities.
As many African tribal members blend Christianity and modem
medicine with traditional practices and tribal ways (with that
combination now being traditional), so native New Orleanians blend
their Catholic or other official religion and their modem scientific
and technological skills with their town's older, ancestral ways. As
primal tribes include different family clans, so the extended "tribe"
of New Orleans includes many intense sub-groupings each of which