Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Life and Death in New Orleans
It was a beautiful sunny morning in New Orleans. Spring was in the air, and Mardi Gras was a few short weeks away. Yesterday I had watched the feverish preparations and excitement at the warehouses across the river in Algiers where the carnival floats were being prepared. Last night I had strolled along Bourbon Street, where the atmosphere of anticipation could be cut with a knife. This morning I'm in a cemetery. What's going on?
Blame No More Mrs. Nice Guy. She's big on genealogy, and loves "collecting dead people" as she puts it. Almost any graveyard is a source of interest to her - she's dragged me through graveyards from Tombstone to Key West - but the boneyards of New Orleans are something else.
Technically they're not graveyards at all. In New Orleans you can't just dig a hole in the ground and put someone in it. The water table is so near the surface, the next time it rains, you're liable to see dear departed Aunt Mildred floating down the street. The Creole settlers of New Orleans learned this at an early stage - they had plenty of experience disposing of the victims of malaria, cholera and many other diseases - so they built tombs aboveground like miniature skyscrapers, with bodies sealed behind brick and plaster, and left to mummify until they had shrunk enough to make room for the next corpse.
At Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1, the tombs have grown larger and more elaborate over the generations. During the 19th century, trade groups and European immigrant groups vied to create bigger and more ostentatious monuments. Some tombs have room for thousands of bodies. But the creepiest tomb is that alleged to be the final resting place of voodoo queen Marie Laveau. To this day it's regularly festooned with candles, coins, photos, and the occasional doll head pierced by a needle, left by people who still believe deeply in the power of dark forces.
The cemetery is definitely a colorful place, and it's not surprising that it has appeared in many films, though often with a suburban cemetery standing in for it. Nowadays the diocese is generally loath to give permission to film in the cemetery. This didn't stop the crew of "Easy Rider" from filming the infamous bad-trip scene there; they simply sneaked in, and legend has it that Dennis Hopper broke the head off an angel statue in the process.
After taking a tour of the cemetery, we walk along Rampart Street to the Voodoo Spiritual Temple to meet Priestess Miriam. We squat on the floor in the darkness, trying not to think about what's in those jars on the walls, while Miriam goes into a trance and delivers a long monologue, of which I hardly understand a word.
New Orleans definitely has its spooky side. Just a couple of nights previously, we had gone on a walking tour of ghosts and haunted houses of the French Quarter. We learned of the horrific secret of the Maison LaLaurie, and the fiendish experiments of the mad dentist Xavier Deschamps. Take just a few steps off the teeming main streets, and you quickly find yourself alone in the shadows, haunted by ancient tragedies and real-life Lovecraftian horrors.
Leaving the Voodoo Temple, we walk back along the sunny, crowded streets of the Quarter. How strange that so much life and vitality should exist alongside so much darkness and mystery. Then it strikes me that maybe there's something a little frantic in all the partying on Bourbon Street. It's as if the revellers vaguely sense the shadows; they know they're living on the edge, and party all the hardier, desperately trying to keep the darkness at bay.
That was three years ago. Now I look at the pictures of devastation in New Orleans, and ask myself: has the darkness won?
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