Sizzling, sensuous, the Big Easy is an experience

What do Americans love so much about New Orleans? I did some firsthand research while visiting the city for a professional conference late in April.

I sniffed its tropical musks and funks, enjoyed earfuls of the long vowels its people speak, and ate my weight in Creole cuisine. I swam the humid streets, saw tossing mosses and fronds, and ogled blooming magnolias and live oaks.

Indoors I read my conference paper, on colonial nature writing, and heard dozens of other presentations on American art, politics, literature, and religion by people from around the nation and the world.

The annual impact of tourism on New Orleans is measured in billions of dollars. Too few visitors, though, look beyond the French Quarter - its strip joints, bars and keepsake shops - to hear the voices and see the faces that make this steamy city unique.

Language and speech are more resonant in New Orleans. Take the word "here." Up North its pronounced like a grunt or croak, as if a frog just awoke. But winter always is mild in New Orleans. Amphibians sing and fiddle all year instead of sleep, and indigenous humans luxuriate in the spoken word.

In New Orleans, "here" is exhaled or sighed invitingly, in two syllables: "He-ah. Come he-ah, fray-end."

And you do. Your frayed ends heal in the balm of speech.

Such elongated vowels become a sort of spoken repose, an indulgence that makes words seem more than just another tool. If time is money, as we Yankees like to believe, then speech is intended to be given and spent. Or so the Southern tongue suggests.

If language is slower, so is life. Northerners stand out for the pace they set. Eating a meal, walking a street, delivering a professional speech, Yankees often try to cram in too much of a muchness. One's patience suffers. Some Yankee scholars at the conference, the American Culture Association, grew conspicuous for a sort of strained erudition.

Maybe I was part of the problem. When I swam laps in the hotel pool, I noticed I was the only one. Other folks looked on as if I was nuts. On the streets the good old boys wear sweat beads and dunlaps. Their bellies, they say, have done lapped over their belts.

We visitors sprinted past, racing to meetings, chasing cable cars, going nowhere fast. From the natives I finally caught a clue. I learned to chill, as my students say.

No wonder locals move slowly. Those lunches and buffets, po-boy and muffaletta sandwiches, crawfish and shrimp and crab feeds, gumbos and grits and gravy, macaroons and beignets and petit fours, daiquiris and hurricanes - would devastate me inside a month.

The surfeit of food in New Orleans is best embodied in the turduckhen. This decadent treat for eaters of meat involves stuffing a hen with dressing, cramming the hen inside a duck, and engulfing both within a turkey. This trick is accomplished by removing the bones in all three birds. The roast turduckhen is sliced gently, with dental floss.

Such a delicacy, of course, is a matter of class. The privilege has to be earned, the delicacy deserved. The nobleman in me recommends a side dish of lark tongues in aspic.

The less wealthy, the less jaded in taste, eat rice and beans as a matter of routine. When I searched for this simple fare, surprise! I could find no rice and beans in Mike Anderson's Restaurant on Bourbon Street. The waiter sneezed when I tried to order some.

On this visit I hoped to see more than scholars' pasty faces and hotel rooms. From the celebrated Riverwalk where interpretive plaques quote Mark Twain, who trained to be a riverboat pilot there, I caught a ferry across the Mississippi to the tiny town of Algiers.

The colors of many cultures blend in old Algiers. One yard featured an eight-foot Easter bunny hung with dozens of strands of Mardi Gras beads. Another sported bouquets of bright plastic flowers tacked to clapboard walls that faced the street.

Hand-woven grapevine wreaths adorned some doors. The paint on the Victorian bungalows, proud without being loud, emphasized sage and avocado, eggplant and rose. The sun seemed hotter. No high-rise buildings shaded the streets or tunneled the breeze.

Back in New Orleans that evening, I did my best to dodge the hawkers and souvenir shops, the street musicians and mimes, the tap dancers with cardboard boxes to gather grateful change.

But before I could wheeze "Big Easy," I was rubbernecking down Bourbon Street, swimming in the sea of humanity, seeing other tourists just like me.

Copyright 2000 Cowles Publishing Company
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