Blues, haints and bayous: snippets from the Deep South: The rising tide

On our first morning we headed down to where New Orleans started, taking a streetcar from directly outside our hotel in St Charles Avenue. The streetcar still had its old brass hand holds. Love that. For the first time on this trip we find ourselves among tourists. It is a shock. Another shock is that the streetcar attendants are tight-lipped, uncommunicative, unsmiling. No one getting on or off could cheer them up. That is not a good look in a tourist city.

Had the tracks gone on to the suburb of Desire I would have changed trams and gone out there. By myself, if needs be. Swooning, "Ah Marlon!" and thanking Tennessee Williams for his phenomenal work. Sometimes tourism has no idea how to make money out of people my age. They should reinstate that Streetcar named Desire that they stopped too many decades ago and let us all aboard. And put a performance on at the terminus.

Today our streetcar drops us at the French Market. Close here, native Indians rowed their graceful birch bark canoes down the big river, which became the Mississippi, portaging their goods and chattels across narrow strips of high ground between the southern lake and the big river in order to trade with strangers who came to their shores on big ships drawn by white sails.

The French wanted furs. In exchange, they had produce and trinkets from all over the world, captivating the locals. Then came the Spanish, who built a public market, here, a butcher’s market. But, after the Louisiana Purchase when the Americans took over, the trading heart was still called the French Market. And while the actual buildings have come and gone with hurricanes and floods over the years, the name survives today, in the heart of New Orleans.

A city grew up around the market. Many nations played a part in its evolution — Africans, Haitians, Italians, German, Irish, and so on. It became a mix of all of them, but, at heart, it was essentially Creole, enhanced by Cajun. Today that early cultural mix is reflected in everything about New Orleans: its cuisine, its music, its style, making it one of the most colourful and distinctive city in all of America.

And it is still changing. Ever changing. Not always for the better. When we were last here we stayed in the heart of the French Quarter, built on ground high enough to escape the worst of the ravages of the frequent flood waters and surges that are forever seeking to engulf much of this low lying land; too much of which has been reclaimed from the sea.

It is so like the Netherlands. Always playing a waiting game with rising water. And too much relies on levees, still. The buildings going up today are so heavy, too. I worry for their future. This whole area is so ecologically fragile. The authorities, trying to keep it all from sinking, will forever have to pump waters back to the sea. Yet one good-sized storm surge could see it all go under.

We retraced old steps. Beautiful St Louis Cathedral still rises up from behind the Place d’Armes, that green park and meeting place at the very heart of the old city, renamed Jackson Square after Andrew Jackson’s war wins down here. Haunted, it is said, by ghosts of brothers past; even a voodoo queen or two wails beyond its walls.

Increasing numbers of sky scrapers are edging ever closer to the beautiful red brick apartments, the Pontalbo buildings, lining two sides of the Place d’Armes, built by a baroness who lived in France. She built them, then seemed to forget about them for so long they fell into ruin, until an offer was made to the family, and they were renovated. Today, they still look beautiful.

We drank coffee and ate beignets in Cafe du Monde as of old. The tradition being that if this is your first visit you must blow the soft powdered sugar loaded over the sticky doughnut squares as you make a wish. Miss Bec did this. I think she wished that the coffee might taste better. The tradition, here though, is to serve the historical brew, Cafe au Lait, made from a mix of coffee grounds and ground endive root —chickory—which the French introduced as a substitute when coffee became scarce during the war. A bitter brew, actually. The place makes an absolute fortune on bad coffee and doughy doughnuts. And still we stop here. Nuts, all of us.

The lanes and arcades behind the waterfront still have an air of France about them, and are still called the French Quarter. The beautiful balconies are bedecked. Streets are lined with characters wanting to be seen and heard. Music groups of all sorts, ages and music styles can be found on major street corners all day long. We heard big band, soft folk, rock and country in the days that we were ambling. There is music everywhere. But very little of it was traditional jazz this time around, tho’ we chose never to stay too long after dark.

Because deep in the heart of the French Quarter, despite things having been tarted up for Mardi Gras with fresh paint, new purple, gold and green bunting aloft and stores bright with tacky t-shirts and tat that goes along with servicing such a tourist hub, there is, in general, an encroaching air of seediness, a subtle air of threat, hanging over the French Quarter—manifested in the many signs warning visitors to get around in groups, to stay together for their own security, to never walk alone after dark, all especially advised nowadays.

I remember when we were here before, perhaps ten or more years ago, restaurants hired security guards with long threatening guns to sit on chairs outside their eating establishments during night service, their eyes peeled. The French Quarter has long had an element of danger hanging over it. It is the place for tourists to hang out. It has always been where things happen. But, worse than ever, now, according to the crime statistics.

It even feels a little different. A little seedier. A whole lot edgier. The hustlers, more aggressive. The beggars more prevalent, more pervasive -- and, scarily, more insistent.

Cyclone Katrina is blamed for destroying many of the city neighbourhoods in the back of the French Quarter. As these fell into the waters and took too long to replace, or never were replaced, the 'control' those neighbourhoods used to provide — unwittingly, and for free — more often than not kept the lid on neighbourhood interactions and eruptions, and did much towards handling and limiting many outbreaks of violence and crime in the city. That ripple effect of pacifying has been diminished with the loss of these neighbourhood interactions. Gone forever, even. So, a constant whiff of danger lurks continuously throughout the French Quarter.

It was not so obvious a few streets away in the Garden District where we stayed, until we gave up walking and used our car to get around the city. You didn’t have to dig deeper than a block or two back to see more. There are scores of panhandlers begging at most busy intersections, holding aloft torn cardboard signs, where “Every little helps” is often the message printed in thick black letters.

You see homeless everywhere from the car. Hoards of them, hundreds of them, an entire community of men live below the pillars holding up the Pontchartrain expressway. These concrete pillars are stacked with piles of dirty quilts, cardboard boxes, and plastic bags of possessions. As we drove up one morning a group of dozens of these homeless men were involved in a massive fisticuffs brawl that had just broken out amongst themselves. Deep in the bowels of their ugly concrete hell hole where the sun never shines.

We drove on up the freeway entrance a'top the violent brawl. Shocked to the core. It is impossible to know the right thing to do when something like that happens. Sadly, we noticed, just a little way along, a bleak, blocky Penitentiary. Most of these homeless will likely end up there at one time or another. Even today. We feel so helpless. But ache for them. And are angry on their behalf. These people need help. They should not be living under this bridge. They need food. They need shelter. They need a bath. They need warm clothes. And that is just today. They need a future. And that is long term.

I hear these bloated presidential candidates night after night on CNN promising to Make America Great Again. The money they are wasting trying to get themselves elected just to satisfy their backers' needs and desires once they get into office is sinful. No longer acceptable. During this campaign alone--which goes for nearly twelve months, and makes no sense at all and even mystifies most Americans--billions upon billions of dollars are wasted on televising endless debates, renting convention halls, booking out entire hotels for the enormous entourage, bagging endless airline seats from here to there and everywhere while criss-crossing the country, hanging tonnes of red and blue bunting that goes into a skip after a one night stand, and crossing an endless procession of palms with silver -- just this year alone.

Many candidates will each spend over a billion dollars in this campaign. Most of which goes on to make the very rich, much richer. Many candidates promise nothing more than to repeal every single piece of the work, even legislation, that already has cost the American public billions upon billions of dollars from the last time they went through this process and had an election.

How bizarre has politics here become. The waste of money is wrong. How can it go on when America's poor are living like this in so many places. We have never seen anything like it. The desperation is all too apparent. America has never been great for these people living on these streets. Their problems never get better. Never go away. And, clearly, never get solved.

But if America would just take one small step -- a simpler, cheaper, more sensible route to electing a president, for example, that was not so aggrandising and wasteful -- they could, then, divert all those billions of campaign dollars into looking after the destitute in their own communities. That might offer a chance of improving the lives of an entire subgroup of their own American family — folk who have no way of helping themselves. Helping them find a way to have a life. And mayhap help America became a better place in the process.

Building walls to block off the unwanted has never been an effective solution anywhere in the world. And building levees does not solve structural problems when things are built on such flimsy foundations. Structural problems need to be solved. Because the tide always turns. And not always for the better.