Keeping the faith in New Orleans

The city where the Bible Belt unbuckles is working hard to re-focus the world's attention on all it has to offer. The Big Easy is back in business, writes John Moran

In a famous old hotel at the Royal Street entrance to the French Quarter, the little black waitress approaches my table. She has a warm smile and an unexpected greeting. "Top of the morning," she says, mysteriously.

Whatever gave the game away? I wondered. Was it the curly hair? The rosy cheeks? Not a bit of it. Lucille had been oblivious to all clues of Irishness. "If a guest looks friendly," she explains, "I always say that." So just a coincidental bit of the old Blarney, but nice.

Over a strong coffee in that literary landmark Hotel Monteleone, I wondered though, if Lucille's felicitation might be some kind of a survival from a time the Irish and African-Americans were the largest minority groups in the city, often sharing the same districts where both practised voodoo, worked the riverboats, and miscegenation was not necessarily the crime it was elsewhere.

When heartbroken Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn fled here in 1877, he was running from a storm that had overwhelmed him in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hearn had been sacked by his newspaper, fiercely criticised and ostracised as a moral delinquent. His crime was to "live openly" with a former slave, Alethea "Mattie" Foley, whom he had married at a time when to do so was illegal in Ohio.

In New Orleans, Hearn immersed himself in the mysterious world of local culture and his reports were widely read throughout the US. His prodigious output of translations, literary journalism and colour sketches recorded black music and culture, and captured forever the Creole and Cajun traditions that fascinated readers. He was rumoured to have had an affair with voodoo queen Marie Laveau, and he first introduced - among significant others - the word "zombie" to the English language.

Hearn's funky New Orleans literary oeuvre helped create a secret garden of romance which was tended over time by others, until its exotic flowering into the collective imagination where it settled and bloomed as a fabulously wild orchid that the world took to its heart.

Into this steamy ambience down the decades were drawn writers, painters, poets, musicians, as well as free spirits, innumerable eccentrics, sundry street characters and legions of lost souls. Under a hypnotic spell of moonlight and magnolia, hot cuisine and voodoo queens, it became the Big Easy, a shady haunt where the Bible Belt unbuckles, a Caribbean carnival washed up on the American shore.

Hearn had a tough time at first in New Orleans, but although broke, suffering from dengue fever and missing Mattie, he wrote in a letter to a friend: "But it's better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio."

As a fan of Lafcadio and a lover of New Orleans, I was happy to return as one of a small Irish press pack invited for a research visit to meet the tourism people of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau (gulp) for the launch of its worldwide campaign to re-focus attention on all the good stuff the place has to offer.

Our two-day tour took us to the heart of southern sensibility, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Its wonderful collection brings vividly to life all the contrasting colours, textures and shapes of the old and new South. For me, the strongest feelings were not evoked by a painting, but a window. I noticed it looked out onto the interstate highway where, days after Katrina broke the levees in August 2005, bedraggled refugees huddled and baked on a flyover in a heat-haze, becoming universal emblems of abandonment and despair, and sounding the alarm bells at the shocking frailty of civil society in vulnerable cities.

Ogden director Dr Richard Gruber and chief curator Dr David Houston told us that in the darkest days and months after the deluge, a time when people had few places to gather, the Ogden became a communal meeting point. On a street where parking tickets are issued by the coastguard, Katrina survivors did well to discover as fine a refuge as this. If art is sometimes an act of survival, in the Ogden it's also an act of hospitality.

FOR THE CONSOLATIONS of cuisine, the Irish press pack dined in the divine trinity of legendary French Quarter restaurants: Brennan's for breakfast, the Court of Two Sisters for its jazz brunch, and dinner at Arnaud's, which is as well-known a line here as breakfast at Tiffany's (the film was based on a novella by local writer Truman Capote).

The big push for new and lost tourism is a vital one for the city. Tourism is the lifeblood of the New Orleans economy, with many tens of thousands of jobs depending on it directly or indirectly. It is of particular importance to the 200,000 evacuees, roughly half the pre-Katrina population, who have yet to return.

While the attractions of the Warehouse District, the French Quarter and the Garden District are intact - indeed in some cases enhanced - there's still a painful legacy from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and a mountain of work still waiting to be done in the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly and Lakeview.

One of our hosts from the Visitors Bureau is Christine DeCuir, who had to abandon her home when the waters rose in the Lower Ninth Ward. She went to live with relations in her hometown of Opelousas, Louisiana, three hours' drive from New Orleans. An African-American, DeCuir and her youngest daughter Ashlie had just moved home the night we spoke in Arnaud's.

"I'm so happy to be back in my house," she says, "even though it's not completely finished. I'm just thankful to God for keeping my family safe and sound until we can reunite again. I was delighted to return to work, as I'm the only one who can put my house back together while my family is still displaced."

DeCuir is critical of some of the media for negativity, and for not giving the full picture of people in places such as the Lower Ninth Ward. "The best thing was the way people got together as a community and helped each other out," she says.

With other New Orleanians you can sometimes sense a malaise, a heavy weariness with the slow pace of reconstruction, and on occasion you sense pangs of frustration and anguish. But, like Christine DeCuir and little Lucille, they're a hardy lot in this troubled old town.

Another such person, who has been working throughout in New Orleans Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward, is Fr Joe Campion, an Irish-American Jesuit priest. Fr Campion is with the Josephite Order, which serves the African-American community in the US. His people come from Co Kilkenny.

"Fr Joe", as he's affectionately known, is a cool cat who likes a laugh, but there's a simmering anger when talk turns to the unconscionable delay in rehousing families. "The people of this area understand the vast devastation wrought by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But they also feel the blow of Hurricane Politics. Inefficiency, incompetence and enduring corruption have dramatically hampered progress." Fr Campion believes the ethnic make-up of New Orleans will change dramatically. "African-Americans will probably still constitute a majority, but that number will be far less than it was pre-Katrina (70 per cent)." He says more and more Hispanics will work on the reconstruction and then decide to stay.

Our driver, former Times-Picayune reporter Jeff Richard from Baton Rouge, says before Katrina, Mexican immigrants mostly didn't cross the Sabine River, which forms much of the boundary between Texas and Louisiana and was once part of the national border between Mexico and the US. Back then it was Americans crossing the river, and in the other direction. The tide turns.

Fr Joe Campion says that despite the slow pace of recovery beyond the tourist vista, there have been some notable improvements since Katrina. "Slowly, the infrastructure is changing for the better . . . but people need grants, not loans. I see a strong resolve in so many to get their lives and homes back in order. They press on each day, and get a little bit more [ work] accomplished."

But there are other problems, such as serious concerns about crime; complaints of a lack of federal engagement, particularly in terms of releasing funds for rebuilding homes; stories of failures of civil and judicial administration; and a tradition of political "malfeasance".

With regard to the latter, while being escorted around Arnaud's museum, our host points to a picture on the wall: "That's our former governor," she says drily, with a resigned drawl, "he's in jail."

WHILE FOR NEW ORLEANIANS, storms on the horizon are nothing new, this year's hurricane season brings more than the usual insecurity.

Last year the Gulf of Mexico area was protected by the El Nino effect, which blew storms back into the Atlantic. But meteorological experts say El Nino has now completed its cycle, and with the hurricane season starting in May a number of powerful elements are now combining to make New Orleans more vulnerable than ever to hurricanes. For one, the protection formerly provided by Louisiana's vast southern wetlands is vanishing, having been turned into a vast honeycomb of canals and pipelines to serve offshore oil wells. Prior to Katrina, National Geographic magazine reported that the State of Louisiana loses 25 square miles every year - 33 football pitches every day - to coastal erosion.

However, most scientists say the greatest threats are not hurricanes or coastal erosion, but rising sea levels caused by global warming. Most of New Orleans is below sea level, and some scientists warn that unless global warming is reversed, by the end of the century the city will be bypassed by the gulf coastline.

Global warming is also heating up the waters of the gulf, scientists say, which has increasingly boosted the strength and frequency of hurricanes - as always the most pressing and immediate concern. If there's a "Big One" this year, some fear the levees Katrina's tidal surges didn't break might now be breached. Also, Katrina was barely a category three hurricane when it landed, and its malevolent eye actually missed New Orleans. So what if the next one is a direct hit, and a category four or even a five?

Maybe in some smokeless room in Washington DC all these factors have already been mulled over. Maybe if there's a Big One this year and the city is flooded again, low-lying areas - mostly inhabited by African-Americans - will officially be abandoned. Maybe that's why funding for rebuilding is so slow in arriving.

The tourist areas are as safe and beguiling as ever. However, unless industrial impact on coastal erosion is challenged, and unless we all tackle Al Gore's "inconvenient truth" on global warming, we will witness the beginning of the end of New Orleans as we know it. If, that is, the claims of scientists are correct.

It is sad to think that in any malign scenario the community that will lose out is that which has for generations provided the joys and consolations of the best of jazz and blues, from Mahalia Jackson to Louis Armstrong, from Fats Domino to Wynton Marsalis, and others such as Muddy Waters, who migrated north from the Mississippi Delta but looked back south in so many songs for thoughts of home to lift the blues of exile.

In today's more benign reality, visitors are flocking back to the city. The weekend saw the 21st Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, and again it was a sell-out. Next up is the New Orleans jazz and Heritage Festival (Jazz Fest) at the end of the month, featuring Van Morrison, Allen Toussaint, Norah Jones, Dr John and Jerry Lee Lewis, to mention just a few.

Meanwhile, back in Le Cafe in the Hotel Monteleone, Lucille Williams works away, still waiting for her home to be rebuilt in the Ninth Ward, while she lives in a trailer. Her two adult daughters are in Houston, Texas, still waiting to return.

Lucille looks into her crystal ball for answers to the Irish guest's queries about hurricanes, coastal erosion and global warming. "You know, honey," she declares, "the Lord gives us more than enough to worry about each day without upsetting ourselves with all that stuff.

"And He always provides . . . well, almost always," she concedes with a giggle - looking scarcely half her 56 years. In the home of jazz, it looks like they always find a way to beat the blues.

You keep the faith now, Lucille.