“the roots of the oak trees in Audobon Park make strange music to me”

Another excerpt from Lives of the Saints, a novel of New Orleans, by Nancy Lemann.

It was Latin American Night in the Quarter, in Jackson Square, starting at eight o’clock. The time is gone when we were “the gateway to the Americas” and ships left our harbor daily for Havana with all the men wearing white suits. But all the men still wear white suits in New Orleans, on certain summer days.

There were bulbs strung up in Jackson Square among the lush green of the banana trees and the elephant ear, with small black children tap dancing to the Latin band. I met Claude at the Hilton Hotel, where he was smoking Tareytons and wearing a dark blue suit — distinguished, familiar, and dear. His dark hair was slicked straight back austerely. But he looked like a cross between a crackpot and a normal, conservative young man. You couldn’t tell which would win out.

We went to a party on St. Claude Avenue, as it happened, across the Industrial Canal in Araby, at the corner of Desire. There was another Latin band and magnolia trees. After that, we ended up going to a party in the country through the Louisiana green. We went through the rows of sugarcane and pending hurricanes and all that which is strangely comforting.

I swear, when it comes to the place you are from, even the dirt looks different. For even the roots of the oak trees in Audobon Park make strange music to me, of my childhood in a town which is gentle to the bottom of its bones and which is far from peril.

Everyone was in the garden by the oaks, a collection of laconic young men in khaki suits who had conventional jobs downtown and were perfectly willing to sit in that garden until four in the morning, calmly and devotedly out on a binge. Among the venerable oaks and Spanish moss and the haze of the late afternoon, I was looking out at the tropic night from the slightly unintelligible elegance of the plantation style. I felt a loyalty to it, and to its refuge, its defeat.

We were at St. Louis Plantataion in Placquemines, which is the heart of the remote, unknown South. There you see an unlikely glamour, pink antebellum mansions suddenly alone by the levee in their obscure grace almost as though it were a joke, a sort of sad one, though, as if the madcap Southerners had put one over on the world, to set these mansions at the edge of the world where there is no one near. Now there are huge oil distilleries and grain elevators along the River Road, which make it seem like Mars. But they, too, are hidden here at the edge of the levee and the rows of sugarcane, against an orange sky.

The halls of the plantation were mahogany, with huge four-poster beds and Audobon prints and cots on the attic floor and otherwise no furniture but threadbare elegance. This threadbare elegance meant more to me than any glittering metropolis and busy companies of men.

There was a house party on the glittering lake. We had a boating party on the lake. We went into the bayou to the Boguefalaya with dead tree trunks all black and twisted and cows standing in the water. We had boiled crabs and cantaloupes and tomatoes for dinner. Some people got plastered. Claude dropped his plate on his lap after some girl paid him a compliment. He dropped his entire plate, amid formal dead silence at the table. Then when he went to get another one and was returning across the lawn, while the whole table was watching him approach, he stepped on a can, which made a loud noise, and then tripped over it and nearly fell, while everyone watched his catastrophes.

****

“Louise, watch that boy in the street,” said Claude while I was driving the car. “Honey, watch out, this is a one-way street,” he said as I weaved my way in and out of the traffic, under the marvelous oaks, ther ein the late night down the Avenue. He kept telling me directions and cautions as though he were some kind of Frail Older Gentleman, the way he sometimes seemed as though he were about eighty, even though he was wild.

In truth, Claude was different and wise and older. He had an air of distraction, striding along beside me, as though he looked far down somewhere in the Quarter where I couldn’t see.

***

In Napoleon House, with the crumbling walls, the “Hallelujah Chorus” was playing when we walked in, by the portraits of Napoleon brooding while his soldiers sack the Tuileries. The night was fairly balmy. No one was there. The waiter knew us. It was very pleasant. Until some got too drunk and threw their coats down in the gutter and had no cash and I had to stop the order for more champagne and became alarmed. But some decaying social conservatives in seersucker suits in the back room saved us and took care of the bill.

There was some sort of jazz revolution going on in Armstrong Park, formerly Congo Square, with black men in gold suits with sequins or dapper summer whites. A black man in a white suit came across the lagoon in a pirogue, standing up and playing a mournful trumpet solo in the night, and then he landed over at the Gospel Tent. There were rickety old black men in pink ruffled suits with jazz umbrellas, dancing for the crowd — and you felt that if at least you were near to people like that, then maybe you were not weak, if you could even be near to such as them.

Summer whites, green gardens, Mississippi, white summer suits and seersucker suits, those were the sights. In the Garden District, Claude stopped and pointed out the jasmine and the cicadas in the night. That was his innocence to me. He had the sweetness of the town itself and broke my heart completely into a million pieces on the floor, as he himself would say, for he touched my heart, to such degree, that I had to steel myself, or my heart would break, like his, into a million places on the floor. For in Claude Collier I saw my very youth, a fateful green garden, parades on the Avenue, an orchestra on a bandstand, my youth in New Orleans.

I knew him so well that I knew him in my bones, and I saw, among other things, that in him. But at the end of the night what I did not see was that Claude sat with a bottle and was unable to lay his head down, went back out dancing until dawn, back to the party on St. Claude and Desire, and got in a minor car wreck on the bridge over the Industrial Canal on the way home, and had to go to Night Court in Araby.

But there he could talk to his friends, no doubt, in Central Lock-Up.

***

Youthful folly is a thing which we had a great deal of in New Orleans. It is a thing which has its season, and its season is youth. I was surprised when I came back from college in the East to see how long it pended with some people I knew. But I still felt there was a season for it and that we were still in it. If it went on too long — that would separate me from those who did it too long. Nor do I know how you can tell someone to be sensible — simply, to be sensible.

I left New Orleans when I was young, to go to college in the East. But I came back immediately after, and spent many palmy days there. The Defeat and Humiliation of the South is a true thing. Among the Yankees I have known, I only met one who had the grace to apologize to me about the War. So as peoples throughout history have been chastened and put down, I retreated in Dignity and Pride back to New Orleans.

As an obscure provincial who was once in New York, I can say that my experience in New York was not a pretty one. I went on dates with New York boys who were writers and journalists who were total strangers who were intellectuals. It was mentally exhausting. I thought of my absent beloved, who was wise in the heart, who did not talk like them. But he, who had his own money, and did not appear to have ambition, was sweltering in the dream of his native town.

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1 Response to “the roots of the oak trees in Audobon Park make strange music to me”

  1. Dave J says:

    I can see all these places as she describes them: I know them well. This made me cry. Again, for the umpteenth time.

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