Forget gumbo
It’s the people that give New Orleans its flavor
NEW ORLEANS — Between the po’boys, gumbo and beignets, it could be argued that every day is Fat Tuesday in New Orleans. Yet the locals are mostly lean, mean party machines, especially on Mardi Gras, the French name for the last day of feasting before the skinny, dark days of Lent.
The Mardi Gras season technically begins in January, but this year, the krewe balls and other good times really start to roll (Laissez les bon temps
rouler) about two weeks before Mardi Gras on Feb. 25. If you’re going but don’t want to spend all your time on Bourbon Street, know this: It’s not the food that makes New Orleans easy to love. It’s the saints, sinners, Cajuns and characters, some of whom have been been dead for hundreds of years. Here are a few of our favorite New Orleanians and where we found them.
World War II Museum
The Word War II Museum can be overwhelming with so many artifacts, videos and displays depicting battles, weapons and strategy in the war’s European and Pacific theaters. But the Dog Tag Experience shrinks it down to a personal level by allowing visitors to follow one American service member through the war. At numbered kiosks throughout the museum, my plastic dog tag let me see and listen to the story of Joseph V. Lafleur, a Catholic priest who joined the Army Air Corps in 1941.
When Japan attacked Clark Field in the Philippines, the Cajun chaplain from Opelousas, La., tended to the wounded and gave last rites to the dying, earning a Purple Heart and two other medals. After U.S. forces surrendered to the Japanese, Father Verbis was sent to a penal colony on Mindanao, where he celebrated Mass daily and traded his eyeglasses for medicine for his fellow airmen. Imprisoned on an unmarked Japanese “hell ship,” he died when it was torpedoed by a U.S. submarine.
Through our dog tags, my wife and I were also introduced to Roland and Walt Ehlers, two Kansas farm boys who enlisted in the Army. Both served in Europe and fought on Omaha Beach, where one died. Seeing and hearing the survivor talk about his brother and his war experiences was as moving as it sounds.
New Orleans Pharmacy Museum
I was skeptical when Frommer’s Travel Guide and locals recommended the Pharmacy Museum in the French Quarter. How exciting can a drugstore be? Pretty thrilling it turns out, if Owen is your tour guide.
For just $5 you can walk around this early 1800s building filled with the mostly awful cures and treatments dispensed by pharmacist Louis Dufilho Jr., who belatedly discovered voodoo priests were onto something when they fed their patients moldy bread (penicillin) to cure infections.
Once a day, for the same price, you can catch Owen’s stand-up routine on how Victorian women’s beauty ideal — pasty, sallow skin, like you’re dying of tuberculosis — could be achieved with bloodletting, mercury injections, strychnine, heroin and cocaine. If you’ve never shuddered and laughed at the same time, you will when you see Owen gleefully pantomime an athome tonsillectomy.
Ghost tours
Several companies offer nighttime ghost and cemetery tours in the French Quarter. I don’t know if Haunted History Tours of New Orleans is better than the others, but our guide, Jennifer, brought the dead to life for 14 of us.
We started at Muriel’s Restaurant, the home of Pierre Antoine Lepardi Jourdan in the early 1800s. After losing it in a card game, he killed himself in an upstairs bedroom and has been stopping by ever since.
Every night, the restaurant’s owners leave a glass of wine for Pierre (you pay extra to dine at his table). Jennifer, whose other job is making Mardi Gras costumes, showed us a photo on her cellphone of a shadowy figure standing by the table. The visitor who sent it said the figure doesn’t appear in any other pictures taken at the same time.
Photos also figured into Jennifer’s story about the giggling ghosts who haunt the Andrew Jackson Hotel and its neighbor, The Cornstalk Hotel. In the 1790s, five boys died in a fire in a boarding school that once stood where the hotels are now, Jennifer says. Their laughter and footsteps have been heard and they’re blamed for at least one prank on two hotel guests about 25 years ago.
When the couple awoke one morning, they found someone had shot the last three photos on a roll of film in their 35 mm camera. The developed prints were creepy not just for what they showed — the couple sleeping — but for their vantage point: the ceiling!
Street performers
NOLA native Louis Armstrong got his start in the saloons of Storyville, the city’s red-light district in the early 1900s. After World War I, the strip joints moved to Bourbon Street and Satchmo became a jazz legend, lending his name to the New Orleans airport and two statues in Louis Armstrong Park.
Today, the streets of the French Quarter are filled with music from morning till late at night. Boys drum on plastic buckets and people of all ages sing into portable mics and play electric keyboards, violins and other instruments. Full jazz bands — including a cornet player who looked and sounded like Louis — perform on street corners and sidewalks.
But no one told us about the human statues. In Jackson Square, we saw at least three people holding poses next to plastic buckets marked “tips.” Most spraypaint their clothes, hair and faces gold or silver.
Our favorite was a golden guy lying next to a dog playing dead. After a couple of hours of lying perfectly still by the French Market, he accepted a few $1 bills from the dog’s owner and wandered off, massaging the crick in his neck. Our second favorite statue was a teenager posing one night in the middle of Bourbon Street wearing nothing but tighty whities and tube socks.
Even the panhandlers were entertaining. Dan stopped us one evening and handed us ballcaps, whose cost he tried to recoup by “fining” us $15 each for being seen with a good-looking date. When we politely declined the hats, Dan asked for a dollar to support a soup kitchen. I gave him a buck and received a Hare Krishna pamphlet.
The Presbytère
As part of the Louisiana State Museum, The Presbytère brings together two disparate aspects of New Orleans history: Mardi Gras and Hurricane Katrina. We enjoyed learning about the krewes, floats, debutantes and costumes (the gay Krewe of Petronius had the wildest outfits). But the artifacts and stories from Katrina, which struck in August 2005, were much more powerful.
Displays included Fats Domino’s broken piano and pieces of a wall on which survivor Tommy Elton Mabry scribbled a daily diary after the hurricane. Seeing and hearing stories of heroism and loss in the Lower Ninth Ward made us want to go there. We stopped the next day, hoping we would find a rejuvenated neighborhood. Instead, we saw a collapsed apartment complex, some new houses and lots of rundown buildings, dollar stores and people barely getting by. I’m not sure what we expected, but this is what we learned: There are no easy answers here.
St. Louis Cemetery No. 2
Where else but New Orleans would you find a redlight district bookended by churchyards? St. Louis Cemeteries Nos. 1 and 2 were already well occupied in 1897 when Alderman Sidney Story laid out an area for legalized prostitution. Storyville, also known as The District, was bordered on the east by St. Louis No. 1 and the west by No. 2.
We had decided early that we wouldn’t have time for both a ghost tour and a cemetery tour. Then, with two hours to kill before our flight, we discovered what the locals call lagniappe, a Cajun-French term that means something a little extra — or even free. For us, it was a Lucky Beans online tour of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2.
With my wife and her cellphone as a tour guide, we found an above-ground tomb belonging to Ernie K-Doe, the self-anointed “Emperor of the Universe.” His main claim to fame, the R&B hit “Mother-In-Law,” earned him this donated resting place not far from his Mother-In-Law Lounge in Storyville.
Across the aisle were musicians Paul and Onelia Barbarin and Danny and Louisa “Blue Lu” Barker. Paul Barbarin was a well-known jazz drummer and marching band leader. Blue Lu, who had a hit with the risque number “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” performed with her husband, Paul’s nephew, alongside Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie and Lena Horne. All were accompanied on their final road gigs in St. Louis by a marching jazz band like the ones they joined in life.
Another drummer, who made his mark more than 200 years ago, is buried in one of the arched chambers that line the cemetery walls. Jordan B. Noble, a former slave, was just 14 when he drew praise from Andrew Jackson for precisely communicating the general’s orders on his drum during the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.
Next to the drummer boy’s tomb is the Wishing Vault, which some say is the secret resting place of Voodoo queen Marie Laveau. Most believe she lies in her family tomb in St. Louis No. 1, but that cemetery is only open to family members and tour groups. This tomb is marked by orange Xs, made with pieces of cemetery brick and representing either voodoo’s intersection of the physical and spiritual worlds or Catholics’ Holy Trinity.
In New Orleans, it’s likely to be both, or neither. Depends on who you ask. Everyone has a story.