Home is where the heart is
Someone asked me in Atlanta “Why do you live in New Orleans?” – my instinct was to say if you don’t know then you don’t know, but she had never been here and so I tried to answer it – music, food, architecture, people. But surely all of those things are transferrable – are they not?
Didn’t citizens of the diaspora (Katrina 2005) bring with them a bit of New Orleans everywhere they went? Couldn’t music be made in other parts of the world? Food?
I walked through the park yesterday – limbs are down, a new sign is destroyed, a large Sycamore felled, the new oaks and crepe myrtles are listing – and all I could think is the food here far surpasses most any other city’s, it inspires rapture not to mention gluttony (from an oyster poboys to puppy drum that tastes like it leaped from the water to your plate). Since we returned, I have seen people fishing everywhere – in the lagoon, the bayou, the lake – I saw no one fishing in Atlanta.
Our music makes even the most rigid body bend and sway because it’s drawn from a primal African beat that has been distilled through Spanish, French, Acadian, and some points east, west, south and north.
Architecture – we boast houses erected in the 1700’s – all of Atlanta was new again – and new and new and new – and what have they learned. Here we learned to build with cypress to weather rain, we paint our houses white to protect against the elements, we raise our houses from the floods. We have a vocabulary that is unique to this area.
The people come here because they’re scrappy – they yearn for life that has meaning in every breath, every visible cue, every day – they want to dance to their graves, not sit in front of the television and watch someone else live for them. We have festivals for every occasion and thing that we can possibly think of celebrating – like Irma Thomas says “We celebrate frogs, roaches, and when our pregnancy test comes back negative.”
New Orleans is a city unlike any other in the United States and is unique among cities in the world, why do we live here? – because we can’t live anywhere else.