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Better Read than Dead: Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans

Inkville's "mostly New Orleans, much of the time" coverage continues with this installment. And by the way, the images after the jump sort of stray into NSFW territory. And definitely stray into "Ewww" territory.

The book pitch I have been kicking around for a few years now centers on ghost stories of old New Orleans. So what better research item than, well, Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans, Jeanne deLavigne's 1946 treatise on supernatural hauntings throughout the French Quarter and other NOLA neighborhoods?

The book is sadly out of print and going for around $125 online, so I'm indebted to the University of Oregon's interlibrary loan program, and to the libraries of the University of Texas at Austin and Brigham Young University.

Here's a photo of deLavigne, which she has signed as a gift for another favorite New Orleans author, Robert Tallant. Seem slike a nice older lady, doesn't she? You'd never expect she was a macabre freak.

deLavigne was part of the early-to-mid-20th century New Orleans artistic and literary renaissance as fueled by the Works Progress Administration, a contemporary of Lyle Saxon and a sort of spiritual inheritor of George Washington Cable. I haven't read an awful lot about this period of NOLA history, but on the surface, some of the relationships, artistic output, and activist bent of the whole thing seem reminiscent of the Irish Literary Revival's Yeats/Synge/Lady Gregory complex across the pond, just a few decades later.  It's temptingly easy, in fact, to cast deLavigne as a sort of Southern Lady Gregory, gathering the spooky tales of the common American.

Treme Flow Chart

Continuing what is evidently Inkville's new focus on wall-to-wall Treme coverage... Okay, is two episodes in too early for Treme fan art?

I made this flow chart and submitted it to GraphJam. Thus far, no response. Like other stuff I've done in a humorous (or is that "humorous"?) vein, you kind of have to be in love with the same things I am, to find this funny. And we all know that making arcane references to newly-premiered cable programming is the secret to good comedy, right?

Okay, here's the source material, the opening credits of Treme, featuring John Boutté wailin' on vocals:

Nevah be de' same, eh, cher? How's ya mama and 'em?

The Old Rugged Cross

I had been waiting for last night's premiere of HBO's new series Treme for months. An ongoing program that takes place in perhaps my favorite city in the world, bolstered by the usual deft characterization and commitment to world-building endemic of HBO shows like Deadwood and The Sopranos is too good to pass up.

Watching the series, even just the first episode, felt like coming home. Seeing the dive bars and grimy row homes, and even the Tower Records on North Peters, on television give me that weird little thrill one gets while seeing an accustomed haunt on the local news.

Whether the series is any good remains to be seen. HBO's programming is notoriously slow to start, and Treme's rambling, shambling, 80-minute opening episode is no exception, doling out juuuuust enough characterization for each of the principals to barely keep the viewer engaged. The music was slammin', of course, and the naturalistic writing and acting, de rigeur for HBO, more than make up for the plodding pacing.

It's difficult to watch John Goodman play a character and let the man simply inhabit it; he's always just so John Goodman-y. But I couldn't help grinning and nodding along as Goodman's character lit into a British journalist dismissive (or ignorant?) of New Orleans and what it stands for in the American imagination. Wendell Pierce's performance was reliably droll and understated, and his character's consistent shortchanging of his cabbies was not only duly funny, it was a compelling and simple symbol for the dire straits in which New Orleanians (not to mention musicians in general) found (and find) themselves. And Steve Zahn... well, maybe he'll grow on me.

The true crime behind Treme, the real sadness behind it, is that enough of the city is still in wreckage in real life that the film crew was even able to identify neighborhoods that could pass for the devastation of late 2005. Our trip there in 2008 revealed plenty of ruined homes, three years after their destruction.

Amusingly, with this summer's welcome return of True Blood, HBO will now have two series taking place in Louisiana. And did I mention that 2011's big-budget Green Lantern movie is filming in New Orleans, as well? I just hope the entire state of Louisiana isn't so trendy and gentrified that we're too priced out of it to, well, head down and move into a gentrified neighborhood, provided we someday, hopefully, relocate there.

Until then, I'm trusting Treme to present a nuanced, heartwarming, heartbreaking portrayal of the Big Easy, and to laissez les bons temps (et les mauvais temps) rouler. This opening episode of Treme ends with a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral, but only with the downbeat half that leads to the cemetery, the portion set to a funerary dirge. By forgoing the second, upbeat, from-the-cemetery portion of the jazz funeral, the portion traditionally set to hot jazz, the series indicates its characters are at their nadir, three months after Katrina has ravaged them. The central tension of the series, a tension to which I'm looking forward, will be in watching these characters rebuild themselves, and the city they love.

Chewing the Fat

Momma's Kitchen brings barbecue to downtown Springfield

Photos by Todd Cooper

It's tough reviewing a local business when the review isn't going to be all that glowing. This article, which appeared in Eugene Weekly's spring Chow! guide, required me, with the help of able editirix Molly Templeton, to make a call on just how aggro I wanted to be in discussing this place's culinary offerings. Trust me, this printed version isn't nearly so hardcore in slamming the food as was draft 1. I guess this is a sort of "damning with faint praise" situation. On the bright side, hey, check out the as-usual fine photographic work of Todd Cooper!

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Entering Momma’s Kitchen, one of the first things to catch my eye is a gleaming white host station, styled a bit like a church pulpit. The walls are a matching pure white, adorned with a framed print depicting an energetic African-American church service. Contemporary gospel music blares from a boom box by the kitchen.

With a restaurant that seems to be so much about the churchgoing experience, it’s amazing that Aline “Momma” Austin and Marian Austin, the mother-daughter team behind the Eugene-Springfield area’s newest Southern-style eatery, once served food in a nightclub. Aline Austin used to prepare and sell soul food at the Taboo club, now The Blueprint. “She couldn’t do the nightlife,” Marian says of her mother. “Her friends couldn’t even come there at all. She’s a churchgoing woman.”

The personable, gray-haired Aline does seem an unlikely candidate for slinging hash in a late-night hotspot. Originally from Alabama, Aline married a man from Texas, creating an impeccable pedigree for her barbecue. She imported her cooking chops, and her family, to Safford, Ariz., a small city just two hours to the northeast of Tucson. That’s where Aline raised Marian, along with her five sisters and three brothers. 

“We lived in a little community where all the African-American people lived,” a place called Little Hollywood, Marian says. “That was all we grew up with: Southern dishes, Southern food. We didn’t know it was a delicacy” until they moved to Oregon in 1985, following Marian’s eldest sister.

Here in the Willamette Valley, Marian decorated cakes for a living, while her mother worked as a care provider for senior citizens. Aline noted that some of her elderly charges lost their appetites as they aged, but “When she cooked, they ate,” reports Marian.

The nightclub location followed, but the opening of the current Momma’s Kitchen in June of last year, in a space formerly occupied by a St. Vincent de Paul at the corner of Main and 5th in Springfield, feels truer to Aline Austin’s roots and clientele.

Continue reading "Chewing the Fat" at Eugene Weekly.

Deep-Fried Soul

"I have some bad news," my wife said as she climbed into the passenger seat. It's not what you want to hear when picking your wife up from work, especially in a week in which death has seemed to shadow us and our loved ones at every corner. News of the passing of Ted "Papa Soul" Lee, an institution in the Eugene music and culinary scenes, has left me saddened.

I interviewed Papa for a grad school writing project, hanging around his restaurant a few times over the course of a week in 2007, notebook in hand. Papa was wary of me at first. His star was on the rise, and he'd been interviewed a number of times by various news outlets. My brand of narrative writing, though, calls for some good old-fashioned depth reporting, and Papa couldn't quite seem to put his finger on why I'd want to bum around in his joint multiple nights in a row, and scribble down what his regulars were saying to one another. He was always hospitable, however, even when I'd only buy a single beer and nurse it over an hour. Papa loosened up after I'd questioned him a bit, once he realized I was an ex-pat Southerner who, like Papa himself, was trying to make sense of his own lineage and cultural inheritance.

And when the article appeared in Eugene Magazine, in much-truncated form, Papa framed it and hung it on his restaurant's wall. In a way, having the man memorialize my writing that way was significant for me, perhaps even more so than it was for him: having a respected businessman value my work enough to have it framed was a big mental boost for a young writer, and gave me the confidence to approach other interview subjects fearlessly. I guess I have always thought of the man as a sort of spiritual benefactor, even if he never knew it. In fact, that grinning photo of me you see above and to the right was taken on the sidewalk in front of his place.

And what's more, Papa never forgot me, and hailed me warmly each time he saw me. (A perk of being a reviewer, to be sure.) He was a man with an enormous appetite for life, for both its nurturing and destructive sides... including some rougher elements (drug use, response to racism, a deadbeat father) that were understandably scrubbed by my editor for publication in a lifestyle magazine. And while I understand why the piece had to be gutted, I've always felt something was lost in translation. This seems an appropriate occasion to recognize the life and the works of Ted Lee, to mark what the man stood for.

So I hope my readers will indulge me in this, perhaps the longest blog entry I've posted, the unexpurgated, original version of "Deep-Fried Soul."

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It’s past the dinner hour, and most of the restaurant’s dining customers are on their way out the door, bellies and doggie bags full. In less than an hour the regular Thursday night reggae jam will usher in a new clientele, and in one corner of the tiny Victorian bungalow’s front room, a couple of DJs are already pulling tables into a makeshift desk for their sound equipment. The sound system is cranking out the cream of Motown and soul, all African-American artists. From the kitchen, a cook’s voice wavers as he sings along with “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas. A young waitress joins in under her breath and she putters about behind the front counter.

Peering down at the waitress from the upper echelons of the liquor rack that crowns the front counter, a rubber ducky with James Brown’s distinctive locks mugs next to a peeved-looking Snoop Dogg action figure. They’re mirrored on the opposite side by a grinning Louis Armstrong figurine. The walls of the cottage are plastered with retro-styled posters and “outsider art” featuring black musicians, Robert Johnson and Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jimmy Hendrix and Stevie Wonder. An oil painting features a large, heavily-tattooed man wailing away on a harmonica.

Pay As You Go

The train station of Raton, New Mexico, seemed little more than a cement slab, simmering in the June heat. In cooler weather, in less dramatic circumstances, I'd probably have enjoyed the history of the mission-style building. The station defied all my expectations of rail travel. The terminal building was locked.  No smartly-dressed porter in a tie greeted me. No one carried a pocket watch.

It was 1997. I was earnest and crying and twenty years old. I said, I can’t believe this is how we end. It’s not, she responded, we’ll see each other again. The capstone project of her senior year in college was to take place among the red rock of the southwest. My crappy summer job was to transpire back home in the humid flora of the southeast. I’d wanted to see her off, so we’d wended our way from school in Chicago to this train platform in Raton, from weeds to wheat to cacti to the simmering slab. I boarded the train with a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a whole supermarket rotisserie chicken. I had a change of clothes and a jacket and a couple of books. And I was broke.

I was always broke, of course, but now I was broker than usual, so broke I hadn’t contributed to gas or food on the trip. And now she was not only bidding goodbye to me, but to twenty-five of her dollars that she could not spare, pocket money for the train that more than doubled my pathetic savings. 

My Amtrak route would backtrack me from Raton to Chicago, then send me on home to Greensboro, North Carolina, where my father would meet me. Cacti to wheat to weeds to kudzu. Amtrak would demand payment in Greensboro when I claimed the boxes containing the contents of my dorm room that I had shipped ahead, but that was a problem for Greensboro.

The UpStairs Lounge: Dead Men Do Tell Tales

This article originally appeared in the Winter issue of Etude: The Journal of Literary Nonfiction.  A much expanded version of this story was incorporated into my final project for my graduate program.

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The psychic is already on his second glass of cheap red wine, and he’s been in the bar only ten minutes.

Phillip is in his late thirties, slight of stature, intense in disposition and nearly bald. He sits stoically, cloaked in the gloom of murky bar air at the head of the table, regarding his fellow ghost-hunter Kalila, her dark, straight hair bobbing as she dances along to the routine of four muscular young men, a Village People tribute group.

The costumed performers, on break from a show at a competing club down the street, are in the throes of an impromptu performance of the disco hit “Y.M.C.A.” here in Jimani Lounge, an Italian bar at Chartres and Iberville, in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Kalila seems especially enchanted by the cop character, a friendly African-American man in an incredibly tight tee shirt.

Phillip is hitting the red hard.  He’d much rather be ogling the beefcake, but he’s already picking up strong psychic impressions from the floor above, and the wine, he explains, “smoothes out the edges.”  He’s more forthcoming when pressed: wine drowns out the telepathic barrage of voices and impressions constantly battering at his consciousness. His daily intake is in the neighborhood of fifteen glasses.  Phillip makes a point of never beginning a supernatural investigation without first bellying up.

Instead of watching the high kicks, Phillip has busied himself unscrewing the top of a plastic salt shaker.  He neatly dumps the contents into a small plastic baggie he has produced from somewhere on his person. Phillip twists the baggie tightly closed and pockets it, as if squirreling away an ounce of cocaine.

“Do you believe in coincidence?” Phillip drawls at me, in an accent that reveals his backwoods Oklahoma origins. “I don’t,” he states flatly. We’re here tonight to investigate the site of the gay bar that occupied the space one floor above us in the 1970s, and Village People look-alikes “randomly” showing up feels like fate.  Or prescience.   

Just a quarter-hour ago, Phillip left his night job at Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo, a French Quarter occult supply shop catering mostly to tourists. Phillip is one of the store’s in-house psychic readers, advising vacationing secretaries and sloshed frat boys how to get laid or get loved.

 The Jimani, pronounced like “Gemini” but misspelled to incorporate the given name of its founder, Jimmy Massacci, Sr., occupies the first floor of a building whose second story once housed the UpStairs Lounge, the gay club. The UpStairs had been a gathering place for the Quarter’s nascent gay scene, even hosting homosexual-inclusive church services, until a Sunday evening in June of 1973, when someone lit an incendiary device, lobbed it into the stairwell leading up to the club and locked the street-side door from the outside.

Twenty-nine people, mostly homosexual men, died in the flames that night, while another three victims succumbed in the following days.  The destruction of the UpStairs was the most deadly fire in the city’s history, and an event that quickly evolved into a rallying point for gay rights in the Crescent City. The arsonist-murderer was never caught.

Continue reading "The UpStairs Lounge" at Etude.