Visiting New Orleans

I’d like to say we did something Monday to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. And in a way, perhaps we did: we visited New Orleans for the first time, site of a once flourishing slave trade, but also of prosperous free people of color - gens de couleur libres they said in Louisiana. We actually didn’t visit any relevant sites, but we did see the baptistery where slave and free were all baptized since the mid 1700’s at the old Basilica of St. Louis. I wonder if babies baptized in such an old font have a special connection to the communion of saints?

We went as a day trip, a short drive under 2 hours, but we felt like we were stepping onto another continent as we drove down the streets of the French Quarter before pulling into a cramped parking garage that seemed identical to one where we parked in Spain two years ago. A stark contrast to the drive through the desert of urban blight on the eastern outskirts of the city. Remnants of Katrina’s destruction still linger.


I suppose everyone who has been to the city has been transported in a similar way. The narrow streets, the tiles on the walls, the wrought iron balconies and columns on the buildings all make you feel you’ve crossed the Atlantic. We peeked into an old hotel that had once been a convent, the doorman telling us to check out the ballroom. The kids tramped up the curving staircase in their jeans and tennis shoes, but surely weren’t we all in our finest under the crystal chandeliers? Peeking out the shuttered balcony, we could see across the street evidence that this wasn’t all maintained as a tourist destination. Someone actually lived in those garrets…not Sara Crewe, but someone with raggedy curtains and a window air conditioner. Had to be hot, even malarial, in the summer.

Gearing up for Mardi Gras

After consuming beignets and café au lait, we spent the morning walking up and down the streets. Watched the fortune tellers set up in front of the basilica, peeked in shops, hunted out the little building that now houses Faulkner House Books, which about hundred years ago, once housed William Faulkner and a friend while Faulkner wrote his first book, Soldiers’ Pay. It’s a narrow little building, and you can only enter the front room and part of a hallway, which are now lined floor to ceiling with book cases. The hallway houses faded first editions of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren. Look but don’t touch. Even though the space was tiny, hours could easily have been whiled away browsing.

Faulkner House Books

            With the fortune tellers in front of St. Louis

Same thing with the many antique stores. We stopped to stare in one that had elephant leg stools, and noticed a beautiful wooden pieta, paint flecking off, on a pedestal surrounded by other statuary. I went inside to peek at the tag to see how old and how much: 1550s, $95,000.

I wonder who will buy that. A church? A collector? Someone who just wants something pretty in their house? What cost beauty?

Too often I’m too cheap to buy pretty things. A house with 6 kids is not a place for 500 year old statues, even if I had a spare hundred thousand. But I wonder if I lived somewhere like the French Quarter, a place that begged for décor, if I’d spend more time and money trying to make my home as pretty on the inside as it is on the outside. Interior decorating is not one of my talents, but every once in a while I see something that would look nice in our house. I’m not one to buy something that we don’t need, except books - and ice cream – but I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t be more generous with beauty. I’m grateful when someone else was, in these churches and parks and buildings of New Orleans.

Basilica of St. Louis