New Orleans on My Mind

By: Anne Stockwell

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September 13, 2005

After the hurricane my mother put my brother and me in the car and we drove down to visit New Orleans. It was the same as if a beloved aunt had just scraped through a medical crisis—my brother and I knew we were not to let her know how awful she looked. We were to pay our respects, look cheerful, tell her she’d be up and around in no time.

This wasn’t Katrina. You already know that, because after the storm passed there was still a New Orleans to visit. This was Hurricane Betsy, many years ago, and it was bad enough.

My mother loved New Orleans. It was where she came of age, where all her most exciting adventures happened. She was a great storyteller, and New Orleans never left her short of material. She arrived during World War II, green as could be but determined to find her way. She had a knack for drawing, and after one evening watching a friend handle dividers and a straightedge, she faked it well enough to land a job as a draftsman working on plans for naval vessels at Higgins shipbuilding.

My mother’s New Orleans was a place where you could raise plenty of hell even if you didn’t have two cents to rub together. The city had everything. There was the opera—to illustrate, my mother would get out the long gloves she wore, and the mother-of-pearl opera glasses that had been a gift from her aristocratic Creole friend Miss Lessie. There was Miss Rettie (Mrs. Florette) Morrison’s boarding house, where my mother lived in the basement, and where members of Louisiana’s politically dynastic family would gather, including Hale and Lindy Boggs and their baby girl, Cokie, whom America now knows as Cokie Roberts.

New Orleans back then was Tulane, where my father went, back from the army and France on the G.I. bill; it was Steven and Martin’s restaurant, where my mother used to see the young veteran laughing with his fraternity brothers at Sunday dinner. There was the Mardi Gras ball where she asked that funny guy from Steven and Martin’s to be her date. Not long after, they were married at Christ Church Cathedral in the Garden District.

When we drove down in our Plymouth Belvedere after Hurricane Betsy, things were peachy, compared to Katrina. The big stuff was intact. There was the French Market, just fine, though historically much diminished from the wartime days when my mother arrived. Back then, she loved to tell us, vendors still strolled singing through the streets. “Strawberries! Buy my strawberries!”

On St. Charles Avenue, though, my mother cried as she drove. The towering Queen Anne mansions seemed largely on the mend, but Betsy had uprooted live oak after live oak, their fantastic curlicued trunks and branches laid out on the median…now rubbish, never to return. They were as ghostly as the past itself.

Amid all the sadness, and, god knows, all the anger, of watching the last two weeks’ events on TV, I’m glad about one thing. I’m glad my mother didn’t live to see what happened to New Orleans.

However much money celebrities donate, however much money the government slaps down—now that it’s too late and the damage is done—New Orleans can’t be rebuilt with money alone. It needs laughter and scandal and the smell of fried oysters and a little voodoo just beneath the surface. New Orleans needs our memories and desires in order to weave its spell.

Even if I can’t bear to look, I know what my mother would want me to do. She'd want me to put on my good clothes and go pay my respects to New Orleans. No matter how hard it is, no matter how ridiculous, I have to go tell the poor old lady how good she looks, how she’ll soon be sassy as ever. And who knows? Years from now, it could be true. When the moon parts the clouds just right and the music floats down Rampart Street, New Orleans will be lovely. She’ll be young again.

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MoneyPants

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