Losing My New Orleans
Steinbeck Prize-winning novelist and New Orleans native John Gregory Brown mourns the devastation of New Orleans, his childhood home.
RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
No matter how many funds are raised, no matter how the city is repaired and rebuilt, commentator John Gregory Brown fears that something of New Orleans will be lost forever.
JOHN GREGORY BROWN:
Anyone who's been there has his own New Orleans. Mine isn't Mardi Gras or Bourbon Street or the Patio Bar at Pat O'Brien's. It isn't the bread pudding at Commander's Palace or the languorous rattle and sway of streetcars on St. Charles Avenue or the sagging wrought-iron balconies of the French Quarter. My New Orleans is a child's city, the city I left behind 24 years ago, but which remains, as hometown so often do, somehow at the very center of who I am. I will never be from anywhere but New Orleans.
Until now that simple fact, those few words, `I'm from New Orleans,' were of immense comfort to me. My New Orleans is the summer's melting tar and the cracked streets. It's the slimy algae on the seawall steps of Lake Pontchartrain. It's the low, smooth branches of the live oaks in City Park where my grandfather took us on Sundays. It's the Royal Castle on Robert E. Lee Boulevard where we ate greasy hamburgers pulled from a drawer. It's riding the bus and watching the passengers, in a magical silent blend of choreography and faith, make the sign of the cross in unison every time we rode past a Catholic Church.
And it's the great fan slats in my grandmother's Lindell Street attic through which my brothers and sisters and cousins and I watched hurricanes approach the city, all of giddy with the fabulous danger we faced. We never imagined--children never do--that we might lose anything truly valuable in such storms. We had our families. We had the great unending promise of the future. The wind howled, the windows burst, the power went out, the streets filled with water. But when the hurricane passed, we splashed around outside in our bare legs while our parents surveyed the damage and figured out how to set the world back on its proper path.
Until now New Orleans has remained for me, in memory, in my imagination, unchanged. Of course, in all that heat and humidity, with hundreds of years of sweltering history behind it, in the ruined grandeur of its cemeteries, in the endless muddy currents of the Mississippi River, New Orleans has always seemed to be falling apart. It's that ancient blithely elegant decay that explains so much of the city's romantic allure. New Orleans was always a wizened matron in rouge and pearls who saw, when she looked in the mirror, the sparkling debutante that decades ago she had been.
I don't know what will happen now to New Orleans, how long it will take to clear the rubble, how or when or if life there will be resumed. But there is nothing romantic about what has happened, about the death and destruction the residents of the city have endured. I will never be from anywhere but New Orleans, but I've learned for certain that the New Orleans I knew, that I carry with me, that has fed my heart and soul, is gone.
MONTAGNE: John Gregory Brown teaches at Sweet Briar College in Virginia and writes novels, including "Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery."
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
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