C. Morgan Babst's Blog, page 2

And the River Don’t Rise

The flash flood warning blared through the car’s speakers as we forded a side street rushing with high water. The rain crashed against the windshield.

“Don’t worry, we’ll make it to camp,” I told my six-year-old.

She laughed. “Go, Mom, go!”

It had started raining early Wednesday morning and just hadn’t stopped. Instead, without warning, the storm had tightened into a purple splotch that blotted New Orleans from the radar map. On the ground, the rain exposed the city’s subtle topography: how the earth slopes gently downward from the river to the lake, how high the uptown-downtown avenues rise. Water banked up for blocks. The countervailing forces of gravity and deflection made the water roil.

Audubon Park, where we were headed, works as a swale. In any flood, it fills briefly, the oaks’ roots covered with water. I knew we wouldn’t be able to cross it, but still, I drove forward. I suppose I wanted my daughter to see what I had countless times: the park turned into a temporary sea.

“Wow,” my daughter said.

“Your first flood!” I yelled over the sound of the thunder. “You’re a real New Orleanian now!”

The House of Myth

The house my grandparents built was one story, brick. It sat modestly on its suburban lot, a stone’s throw from New Orleans, its front door shaded by a small portico and hidden from the street by a young live oak. Inside, beyond the foyer, a paneled great room was lit by a wall of windows. Through them, every Sunday, we watched my grandfather circle the kidney-shaped pool in his Speedo, fishing for leaves. The house always smelled like cooking. Snapping turtle turned to sherried soup. The ducks my uncle hunted became gumbo. In the spring, there were crawfish boils under the carport’s overhang, Southern spaghetti after baptisms. Wakes were held in the formal rooms blanketed in deep white carpet, the sideboard heavy with lemon squares, rum cake, macaroons. On the parlor upright, my aunt, laughing, interminably played “The Spinning Song.”

But inside this house was another house. Hidden in the private corridor that led from master bedroom to guest, beside the powder room door, was a photograph, in black and white, of Rienzi, the Thibodaux mansion where my grandmother was born. It was a house divided into thirds: dark roof, veranda, floodable ground floor. Eight columns broke the façade into seven bays. From gallery to grass ran two sinuous stairs, one flight for ladies, I was told, one for men. It was the stairs that fascinated me—the idea of belles descending in wide crinolines. The building, otherwise, was unremarkable, flanked by oaks and painted white, as plantation houses invariably are.

I liked that house. I stared at it a lot when I was hiding from my cousins or the old ladies, with their butterscotch and damp hankies. I liked the story I was told about it: that the house was built for Empress Josephine, la reine of Rienzi, on speculation that she would come to French Louisiana upon her exile following the Napoleonic Wars. This story was less than legend, the truth of it so tenuous that my family never bothered to check our facts—we had the wrong queen, wrong etymology, wrong colonial power, wrong timeline. The story’s wrongness, though, was a powerful opiate, the fuel for further fantasies. I imagined my grandmother’s birth in the half-tester bed where a queen had once slept, imagined her brushing her long red hair—one hundred strokes a night. I imagined her walking along a long, dusty road to the schoolhouse where she taught or leaning against the railing of the veranda, looking out over vast, empty fields of cane. The fields, when I imagined them, were always empty. The people who’d worked them did not appear in the story we told, because really it was a myth, built to do what myths do: mask the truth.

If you’re an American, you know this house, too: Scarlett runs in white ruffles from the awkward bulk of Tara. Django rides postilion up the red road toward Evergreen. As a teenager, maybe you got off a bus with your gaggle of classmates, tried to keep it together as a hoop-skirted guide led you on the rounds: dovecote, widow’s walk, cone of sugar. Maybe, as a young man, you drank bourbon beneath Edison-lit oaks, cringed at the cotton in the bride’s bouquet. Maybe this house appears in the bottom drawer of your bathroom vanity, printed on the handfuls of soaps that you stuffed at some point in a suitcase. Or maybe you’ve avoided this house, country-driving, hunting boudin. Maybe, slowed behind a bridal limousine, you averted your gaze as the white pickets flashed, grumbled something about how no one would host a wedding at Auschwitz.

For a long time, a book by surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin lay on my mother’s coffee table. Full of images of plantation houses—Rienzi among them—this book, Ghosts Along the Mississippi, seemed seductive to me, occult. Like William Mumler, the charlatan photographer who used double exposure to produce pictures of “spirits”—ostensibly the ghosts of loved ones his clients had lost during the Civil War—Laughlin exposed house upon house, collaged colonnade within colonnade. Trying to create an “elegy” for plantation culture, Laughlin shot the houses from low, close vantage, so that their columns stand against clouds that rise “like the smoke of destruction.” Looking at these buildings through the lens of the “mythos of plantation culture,” he wrote, characteristically maudlin,

we often sense . . . the swish of a silken invisible dress on stairs once dustless, the fragrance of an unseen blossom of other years, the wraith momentarily given form in a begrimed mirror. These wordless perceptions can be due only, it seems, to something still retained in these walls; something crystallized from the energy of human emotion and the activities of human nerves. And, perhaps, it is because of this nameless life of memory and desire and, correlatively, because of a superior power of suggestion, that for those who are sensitive, the ruined houses have a fascination far exceeding that of the intact, and inhabited structures.

Indeed, looking at these pictures as a child, I thought I was looking at something ancient, something over. Gutted by fire, eroded by rain, reduced to a colonnade choked by vines (Laughlin called this one “Enigma”), these places seemed safe to romanticize, like the ruins of ancient Rome. Slavery was over, I thought—white supremacy was over—and these houses were beautiful in their destruction, emblems of decontextualized despair.

What it took me a long time to grasp is that beauty is often a con—a lure, an advertisement, and a blind. Think of Stalin’s symmetrical Seven Sisters, the Cathedral of Light shining above the Zeppelin Tribune during Nazi rallies. Think of Vivien Leigh’s face, that dress made of drapes.

Preservation

When our daughter was just a month old, Hurricane Sandy pummeled the eastern seaboard, flooding our neighbors’ houses, burning towns. While the peaks of a rollercoaster showed like volcanic islands above the surf, I sat on the sofa, nursing, and watched with strange glee as our windows curved inward like heavy balloons. Your first hurricane, I whispered into her bald head. See, you’re a New Orleanian after all.

Nothing made sense: After a hundred and fifty years, I was the first one in my family to build a house somewhere else—to bear a child somewhere else. And why? Because of my husband’s job? I could not articulate it, but the storm was no excuse. Sure, my parents’ roof had come off, but many had lost so much more and still returned.

We visited, of course. We’d feed the ducks and ibises, climb the oaks whose limbs bowed like elephants getting down on their knees. We taught our daughter how to roll down a levee, throw a line, and we danced in the crush at the Blue Nile where ten years ago, a girl sang through a blackout while I spun in an orange dress, falling fast in love. On holidays, I set my grandmother’s table with oranges and palmettos and a long starched cloth, let the crabmeat-man in through the side door. When are you coming back to me? my grandmother said at ninety- two—then ninety-three.

My father held my daughter to his chest and sang the songs he once sang to me, and my mother sat with her on top of a tall black horse. I turned on WWOZ, and my daughter shrieked, That’s jazz!, and her mouth was green with spearmint snowball; she smelled of earth and dogs and sweat.

Death is the Way to Be

In the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina, bodies floated in the streets and slumped in folding chairs in the sun. They lay on street corners for days, and cameramen took their pictures while National Guardsmen, policemen, other journalists passed them by. “That’s where the dead guy was,” my friend points out as we pass the Circle Food where the I-10 peels off of N. Claiborne, and I see again the water rippling under the overpass, the dead guy floating in his ballooning shirt, face down. Like a dog, we say. Left in the street like a dog.

The care we owe bodies is reliant on our understanding of their humanity. Humans do not die like dogs, because, unlike dogs, we live in death’s anticipation. Our mythologies are clear on this. “You are dust,” God says as he expels Eve and Adam, “and to dust you will return”—they were animals in the garden, in their ignorance, and now they are men. Knowing that we will die, we concern ourselves about what will happen afterwards, to our bodies, which we, intuiting a truth perhaps belied by talk of souls, find it difficult to separate from our conception of ourselves. What does it say, then, when we the living fail to care for the bodies of the human dead? What does it say about our humanity, and about what we think of theirs?

From Louisiana’s Code Noir of 1724, XI: Masters shall have their Christian slaves buried in consecrated ground.

Giambattista Vico: Indeed humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, “burying.”

The deceased is still more than just stuff, Heidegger writes, and yet, when we leave a dead man under an overpass for days covered in only a garbage bag, aren’t we treating him as though he weren’t? The slowness with which the dead were recovered in New Orleans following the flooding was not simple impropriety but revealed a profound disrespect for the humanity of the victims of the storm and levee breaks. And bringing the corpse back into our funeral rites is not a desecration or an impropriety, either; instead, perhaps unconsciously, this custom reasserts the body’s importance and restores dignity to the deceased, insists on the humanity of the dead. Uncle Lionel standing in his suit with his watch around his hand and Mickey Easterling in the floral pantsuit she’d specified in her will reassure us that proper care has been taken. In short, a funeral that ignores the body is not a luxury we can afford.

Confessions of a Recovering Debutante

We sat around on folding chairs, pinning ostrich plumes into one another’s hair, sharing college gossip. Near the door that led into the bowels of the Municipal Auditorium, our chaperone was shouting about curtsies — demonstrating, in her tight satin skirt, how we were to bend at the knees without bowing our heads. Our bodies must not betray one trace of submission, she said; we were debutantes, not subjects, after all. Her breath — tuna-laced, necrotic — tossed our feathers. They bobbed as if they were in the bridles of carriage ponies. This felt apt.

My father was offered goats for me once at a dinner party Uptown. The host’s friend, just back from a stint for Shell, had a son as yet unmarried; he thought we’d be a good match. A camel and four goats was the right price, he said, for a basic model like me, but, given what my daddy had paid for my schooling, maybe an Arabian horse should be thrown in too.

He laughed, looking down my dress. I took my mother’s scarf from her chair. My father, bless him, barely chuckled before he started talking. My father has a talent for talking; he can go on for hours about things that interest no one but himself: circuit-court rulings, collegiate a capella, etymologically incorrect usages of common words. That night, huddled under the coral pashmina, I didn’t even try to interrupt so that, by the time dessert arrived, the rest of the table had forgotten about the goats.

My father chuckled again as he took my arm and lead me to the dance floor of the Municipal Auditorium, through a tunnel, into the spotlight. The carriage feather bobbing above my chignon, I felt a little bit like a linebacker, a little bit like I’d died. Patting my hand through two layers of kid gloves, he whispered: Just like a yearling sale.

He meant the subversion to be obvious. Meant the whole thing, I think, as a lesson. Meant for me to see the antique pistons that drive the debauch of Mardi Gras: classism, racism, patriarchy, the commodification of my sex.

I suppose he believed some things are best learned by doing.

***

One thing I learned: The “Greatest Free Party on Earth” is paid for by debs’ daddies. I shared this revelation with my college friends in Connecticut, trying to get them to stop making those faces at me. They were horrified by all this: the white dress, the pageant. They spoke to me in those tones that people use to speak to the brainwashed, lecturing me on the history of something of which they were not a part.

I tried to explain how funny it was. That all this had originated in a joke — Mardi Gras as a reprisal of Roman Saturnalia, a sort of class-based opposite day. I quoted Bakhtin — “All were considered equal during Carnival” — explaining that every socioeconomic stratum had a “krewe” that threw its own parade and ball. I got into the innate symbolism of rhinestones and the hermeneutics of the Zulu parade, whose African-American members wear whiteface under blackface, a send-up of minstrelsy that consternates still today. I told them about the hot-sauce heiress, who’d passed out, drunk, on her way to the throne. I made fun of Rex, the “King of Carnival,” who proclaimed his throwing of lead-tainted plastic pearls to be pro bono publico. It was cringeworthy, sure. But I figured it was my civic duty to be cringeworthy too.

An Artist Drawn to the Beauty of the Bayou

Inside the Gentilly studio of the artist and designer Annie Moran, okra flowers twine up a clear blue sky. Nearby, lotus leaves unfurl, damp against dark water, while roseate spoonbills fluff their pencil-sketched feathers. A Zulu masker blows his whistle under a crown of plumes. New Orleans is as lush and alive on the wallpapers, textiles, prints, and murals Moran creates as it is on the streets and bayous beyond her doors.

“When I was little, I wanted to have an insect collection,” Moran says, handling a glass case full of iridescent feathers. “I was really into dragonflies. I’d find dead things and save them, wrapped up with cotton balls.” She shrugs. “I never really lost that obsession—I guess I just draw them now.”

Though she still keeps some dead things—pinned butterflies and dried flowers that serve as reference points and inspiration—the creatures captured in Moran’s work are full of life. The fleeting gestures of a flock of ibis become a wallpaper that seems to squawk and flutter. In a sketch, a heron crouches like a parasol over shallow water, blocking out the sun to better spot its prey.

Moran grew up in Cane River, Louisiana—also known as Isle Brevelle, a community founded as a sanctuary by and for people of color in the late eighteenth century. A descendant of one of Cane River’s founding families, Moran, as a girl, roamed the land her family had farmed for generations, scrambling down the muddy bank of the river to draw the jumping fish, the diving birds. “I spent a lot of time just staring at the plants, looking for four-leaf clover,” she says. “But it was the birds I was obsessed with—and bugs. Anything with wings.”

The post An Artist Drawn to the Beauty of the Bayou first appeared on C. Morgan Babst.

100 Years of Oysters

In the antique kitchen of his family’s restaurant, C.J. Gerdes slips a handful of corn-floured oysters into one of the six blackened pots on the stove. The fat froths like sea foam. Two minutes later, he pulls them out, their crisp coats crinkled and golden. Sandwiched between thick, buttered slices of “pan bread”—Casamento’s version of Texas toast—the oysters crackle as you bite into them, the crust crumbling down into the creamy centers.

I’ve been eating at Casamento’s, a New Orleans institution that turns 100 this year, since I was a child, but, somehow, I’ve never asked what C.J. fries his seafood in.

“It used to be we couldn’t tell people, or they’d make a face,” Linda Gerdes, C.J.’s wife, says with a laugh. “But then lard came back in style.”

Chasing the Blues

I met her on a Monday night, sometime after ten. Just off the plane from New Orleans, I could still smell the city in my clothes. I’d dropped by Casamento’s before heading to the airport, gotten a hug in the kitchen and an oyster loaf for the road. But if I’d thought that smell—buttered bread, grease, and mollusk—would stand me in good stead with the stranger waiting for me in Brooklyn, I was wrong.

As I banged my suitcase into the apartment, bellowing, “Hello, Little One! I’m home!” I caught a flash of kohl-rimmed eye, a flick of tail. Then she vanished under the sofa.

My husband had picked her up from an adoption event at a mansion in the Hamptons earlier that day—a skinny stray trucked in from the mountains somewhere, snuffling around a dog party Gatsby would have liked. She’d slept soundly all the way across Long Island, waiting until they’d reached home to unload her baggage: Dandruff. A garbage-bag phobia. And a terror of umbrellas so strong that when my husband had opened his, the little stranger had nearly hara-kiried herself under a Subaru.

I crouched down, tried a gentler tone. “Hello, Miss Pup. Would you come out now?”

Her smoky eyes glinting in the under-sofa darkness, she only slunk farther back.

A rescue dog is a four-legged mystery. Parentage, place of whelp, method of abandonment, are sucked into the twin black holes of dog brain, dog tongue. All the rescue group would give us was a vaccination record from a vet in West Virginia, an unlikely guesstimate of breeds (“dachshund/ beagle”), and a note, purportedly from the pup herself, that I’d swear she didn’t write:

Hi, I’m Hiro and I would love to become a part of your life. I am a happy, playful pup who loves to snuggle!

You can’t blame an orphan for tarting herself up a little, but snuggles did not seem to be forthcoming. We couldn’t even be sure that Hiro was her name. So we grilled her:

“Someone hit you with an umbrella, honey?”

“How did you escape from that Hefty bag beside the road?”

But no matter what or how we asked, the sleek little girl kept mum.

As she would not respond to the alias she’d come with, we decided to rechristen her. We wanted something funny but New Orleanian, something that would mark her as one of ours. That she was not native like us did not matter; a New Orleans name would be fitting. Like me, gone from home since Hurricane Katrina, she was one of the displaced. After rejecting a slew of monikers—Sazerac, Tchoupitoulas, Tipitina—we settled on Professor Shorthair (Shorty, for short), in honor of the late, great singer and pianist from Bogalusa, Henry Roeland Byrd, a.k.a. Professor Longhair, with whom she shares a lolloping singing voice, if not the mane.

Go Hubig’s or Go Home

New Orleans—and especially one local author—celebrates the promised return of a beloved brand of fried pies

Garden and Gun

July 23, 2019

In the Marigny of New Orleans, on my friend Miriam’s kitchen wall, hangs a picture frame containing one crinkled white wax-paper wrapper. The fat chef we call “Savory Simon” stands staunch in the center of it, twirling a pie on the tips of his fingers, his toque a mushroom cloud the color of lemon curd. The word Hubig’s scrawls across his belly, over what was once the belly of the hand pie sealed inside. 

Seven years ago, Miriam opened that wrapper and bit through the sugar-slicked thick fried crust into the jammy peach middle—the last Hubig’s pie she expected ever to eat. 

That morning—Friday, July 27, 2012—a fire had broken out in the fry room at the Hubig’s Pies factory on Dauphine Street. Since 1921, when Fort Worth baker Simon Hubig opened a chain of shops across the South, the sweet aromas of pie had emanated from that white brick building. Now, it just smelled like smoke. As the fire-fighters battled the five-alarm blaze, legend has it, they began to cry. Though the New Orleans factory had been the only of Hubig’s plants to survive the Depression, even the tears of the firemen couldn’t save it now. The factory burned to the ground. 

As news of the fire spread across the city, people dashed into drugstores, hardware stores, gas stations, and grocery stores and stocked up on Hubig’s pies. My dad snagged two, which he doled out in small slices for days. Over the coming years, plans to rebuild the factory would fail to yield fruit, and, until last Thursday, we believed that these pies—stocked in freezers or long since scarfed down—were the last we’d ever eat.

Continue reading at GardenandGun.com

And the River Don’t Rise

Growing up in New Orleans, and dreading the river’s rise

The Washington Post

July 15, 2019

The flash flood warning blared through
the car’s speakers as we forded a side street rushing with high water. The rain
crashed against the windshield.

“Don’t worry, we’ll make it to camp,” I
told my six-year-old.

She laughed. “Go, Mom, go!”

It had started raining early Wednesday morning
and just hadn’t stopped. Instead, without warning, the storm had tightened into
a purple splotch that blotted New Orleans from the radar map. On the ground,
the rain exposed the city’s subtle topography: how the earth slopes gently
downward from the river to the lake, how high the uptown-downtown avenues rise.
Water banked up for blocks. The countervailing forces of gravity and deflection
made the water roil.

Audubon Park, where we were headed, works
as a swale. In any flood, it fills briefly, the oaks’ roots covered with water.
I knew we wouldn’t be able to cross it, but still, I drove forward. I suppose I
wanted my daughter to see what I had countless times: the park turned into a temporary
sea.

“Wow,” my daughter said.

“Your first flood!” I yelled over the sound of the thunder. “You’re a real New Orleanian now!”

Continue Reading at WashingtonPost.com