Reporting Live from the Lost City of New Orleans
By: Andrew Jazprose Hill
Tags: Love, History, Equality, Family, Race

When I worked in TV news, New Orleans was never on my assignment list. My jobs were in San Francisco and Atlanta, the cities where I lived and worked.

But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the storied city where my mother was born. Call it chance, the Universe, or synchronicity — the Crescent City has been coming up for me in unexpected ways.

It’s not as though I ever really liked the place. Too hot, too humid, too dirty, too far removed from my structured upbringing in Atlanta, the bourgeoning Black mecca my father swept my mother to after their marriage.

But like it or not, we spent every summer in New Orleans.

To get there, we took our seats in the colored waiting room at the Atlanta Terminal Station, then boarded the Crescent, where my father worked as a dining-car waiter. When the train crossed the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge between Slidell and New Orleans, my mother grabbed her rosary and closed her eyes.

Normally a lover of statistics, she found no satisfaction in knowing the 5.8-mile span is the longest rail bridge over water in the world. All she knew was that it took an eternity to make it from one end to the other. Her only comfort was that the crossing brought her closer to God.

For us kids, though, the trip was a delight.

We loved unpacking the string-tied shoeboxes filled with crispy Southern-fried chicken, apples, grapes, cookies, candy bars, and the sugary white bread of our peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches. For us, this journey was a treat, an adventure. Traveling free on my Dad’s employee-rail pass, we entered the mysteries of his world.

Dressed in starched white jackets, crisp white shirts, and black bow-ties, Dad’s work buddies looked out for us. Made sure we were comfortable. Joked about the lengthy vacation that came with his seniority. Praised the beautiful family he had.

We never got to see him in that uniform.

When he left the house for his three-day run, he wore a suit and snap-brim fedora. At his side was the small leather satchel that held his work clothes. I’d watch him from our porch till he rounded the corner on his way to the trolley that took him to work.

From his appearance, he could have been a doctor or a jazz musician heading to his gig. For him, it was never about the servility of his work but the reason he did it. The Pullman porters and waiters who cared for us on the train understood that reason because it was their reason too.

They made us feel privileged. Like members of a special club. Years later, I learned that railroad men like my father and his friends fueled the Great Migration, shaped the Black middle class, and helped launch the Civil Rights Movement.

As children, we had no idea of the humiliations they endured on those trains or the cruel irony of those shoebox train-lunches. We did not understand that although my father spent his life serving other passengers in the Crescent’s famed table-clothed dining car — neither he nor his family was allowed to eat there.

But no matter

These understandings would come later with adulthood and the professional credentials my father made possible for us to aspire to — a lawyer, two psychologists, and this writer — but never lived to see us achieve.

While we were in the bubble my parents created for us, we felt protected from the world’s evil long enough to get some idea of who we were, even as the false imprint of racial hierarchy pressed in on us from the outside.

Thus, for us children, the trip from Atlanta to New Orleans was not about the injustice of segregated accommodations. It was a journey to the pink green-shuttered house on Columbus Street in the city’s 7th Ward near the Tremé district, where my grandmother lived with two dogs: Blackie and Whitey.

For us, New Orleans was the smell of hot sausage crackling over a blue flame and a crunchy crust of po’ boy dipped in its grease. It was a big pot of gumbo as only she could make it. It was her daily blast of coffee with chickory in the morning and her glass of sweet red wine at night. It was fried okra, hog-head cheese, fresh oysters, and crawfish.

It was my uncles drinking beer and belching freely, while cracking crab shells over newspaper spread wide across the kitchen table. It was street-corner jazz and my grandmother talking about knowing Louis Armstrong when they were both orphans — she living and working in a convent, he running rudderless through the clamshell-covered streets.

Not my grandmother’s house, but those colors nail it. Photo by Mary Hammel on Unsplash

New Orleans was also my annual journey into our family’s multiracial past.

It was a history we came to know at my grandmother’s feet. Stories she told in lantern-lit rooms deprived of electricity by sharp hurricane winds that rattled the louvered green shutters of her big pink house.

This is how I came to understand why my great aunt and cousins across the street looked white while some of us were black, brown, or café au lait. Looking different on the outside, we were nevertheless bound by blood, our common DNA, and by our love for one another.

There’s always some reason to feel not good enough.

Despite the bubble of parochial school, the huge fenced-in yard of our three-bedroom home, and the mythical belief that Christiantiy automatically made all men brothers, I began to peer beyond the protective illusion as early as first grade. What I discovered about race and class, I learned mainly from other Black people. And found myself lacking in areas held in high esteem by others: light skin and money.

But when we “Georgia Crackers” set foot in New Orleans, that nagging sense of inferiority disappeared. Although that city is certainly known for its colorism, the whole family celebrated our arrival. My mother, the only daughter among five siblings, had always been popular. And during those sweltering summer months, when caterpillars crawled on the wide green leaves of my grandmother’s tropical garden, my light-skinned cousins treated us like celebrities.

As if skin color did not matter. As if we were already good enough because we were part of them. We were their distant kinfolk from fancy-dancy uptown Atlanta. They trusted us with their secrets, were generous with hugs and kisses, took us frog-hunting at night, played in our hair, slept beside us on pallets during forced nap-time in my grandmother’s back room, taught us swear words we’d never even heard of.

Wasn’t it Lawrence Durrell who said in the Alexandria Quartet that in order to love a place you must love someone who lives there? Well, that’s how I feel about New Orleans. I never liked it. But I couldn’t help loving it because I loved my grandmother, my uncles and aunts, and especially my dozen or so cousins.

This is the lost New Orleans of my youth.

The one that existed before the French Quarter dodged the bullet that eventually struck the Tremé district instead. That bullet took the form of a monstrous freeway, which destroyed the verdant parklike lawns of the Claiborne neutral ground. The wide boulevard where my cousins and I marched behind my grandmother like young geese as her strong legs took her to the historic Circle Food Store.

My New Orleans is from the time before Katrina, which ravaged the city even more, taking some of my loved ones with it. Not immediately. But in the months that followed, when they returned to empty lots where their homes once stood — and died mainly of heartbreak.