New Orleans: Rediscovering Sense and Sensibility 

What makes good sense for New Orleans?

Over the last 300 years, few commentators have accused New Orleans of being too intellectual, too industrious, overly modern, or remotely boring. A fine French lady visiting the colony in the 18th century wrote home mocking pretensions she saw everywhere. She was most annoyed by local ladies “trailing long silk dresses across rough floor boards as if in court.”

Things haven’t changed much. With such a penchant for theatrics in our youth, did we really have a chance, having reached a certain age, to buckle down to ordinary good sense? Other senses we have aplenty, and they have always inspired contradictory reactions. Today what is partly driving our survival or revival is that sensory tenacity, and no matter what, our style will always be fashioned in this peculiar realm of the senses.

We are color in every sense of the word, and our sounds, forged in personal triumph and defeat, swell on the street corner and in the symphony hall. There are now, and ever will be, smells both sweet and foul that conjure up lessons of dark, old allegorical paintings warning that every Eden has its worm. Rarely do we think of ourselves without some reference to taste; the spice rack should be on the city’s coat of arms. And who can walk these streets without being touched by errant soft palms pushing through rusting ironwork, dusted by crumbling plaster, swabbed by the heavy liquid air, and jostled by the ever-brimming merriment born of living in an impossible place?

Here the world has come to an end enough times for it all to seem vaguely familiar. A couple of generations after its founding, residents despaired when the French king traded the town to the Spanish (who ultimately weren’t able to change more than a few architec­tural details and last names). Over the following 200 years, neither apocalyptic fires nor plagues of yellow fever, neither submission to enemy troops nor an influx of immigrants demolished whatever was at its core. An old friend repeats a story he heard often from his mother. She had a maiden great-aunt who, sometime around 1910, rushed home after Mass to slam closed the shutters and collapse because the sermon had been preached in English. It took weeks to convince her that the Last Judgment was not at hand. Only reassurance that the opera was still being sung in French finally lured her out of doors to Bourbon Street, where the beloved French Opera House stood proud. It too vanished in flames by 1920, and then part of the world really did end. Some precious things can be lost forever, overnight.

Since the hurricanes of 2005, there has been much talk about New Orleans -- some of it utter nonsense, some heartbreaking truth. People have cooked the city’s soul into clichés as brittle as pralines. In all this prattle, we who live here and those from afar who love here have tried to define who we are and to find some agreement on what to nurture or abjure, what to preserve, what to propose. The process is wrenching, and there still isn’t a consensus, but then there never has been.

Thank God for the Women of the Storm, the French government, the National Guard, and Qatar’s generosity to local colleges. Without the high-powered and talented individuals who have stayed or come back to help, we would still have only a handful of mud. No gratitude will ever be sufficient for the waves of church-affiliated workers and young people who gave up vacations and put careers on hold to drive south and sweat and hammer and paint, or for the thousands of locals who sweep, pick up, and grind on every day. Even those who rebuild against conventional wisdom, driven by simple attachment to a familiar area or to neighbors, fund the deep well of energy that electrifies the air, even when power lines still fail.

If any part of us is rooted in a folk soul, it is our sense of color and the pageantry it inspires. Though there is every reason to feel drab, the façades of resurrected houses assert a palette that is luscious and playful, sometimes even in-your-face. They outrage, then leave you smiling. Even Uptown, the old tyranny of les Américains’ tasteful white and dark green is giving up the ghost. The Garden District isn’t vanilla anymore but is swathed in a daring swirl of sherbets and chiffon. People who want to make this town monochromatic are set to fail. Like our skin, our houses are as varied as a Delta dusk.