At Graveyard Number 1, the guide spoke of the water table under New Orleans, the city that floats between Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. Conventional graves couldn’t be dug, so these were built up, like coffin-sized ovens, and used over and over. Families gave notice that a funeral would be taking place, and the graveyard keepers would precede the cortege, pushing the previous occupant’s meagre, baked remains off the upper shelf down a space at the back of the mini-mausoleum.
People came, he said, to see where Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda freaked out in Easy Rider, or to kiss Marie Laveau the voodoo queen’s grave, but he was proud of his hometown and wanted people on his tour to experience far more than the frisson of ancient folklore. As he said, people came to his city for the party or the jazz or the voodoo history, and while all of it could be found, packaged and price-tagged for the tourists, it didn’t fully represent the city he loved. So he guided these tours in the hopes he could paint a clearer picture of the Big Easy for those who came with eyes to see.
She strolled back to the hotel, down Royal Street, avoiding the drunks on Bourbon Street. She bought a print of an old French Market Coffee sign in one of the galleries, and the owner showed her the courtyard where Steinbeck had been married, and offered to take her photo there. Back on the street, she spotted green Mardi Gras beads in the gutter, bought in some souvenir shop so far from Lent, and she felt so far from home.
♦
Janice MacDonald is best known for her amateur detective, Randy Craig, who stars in the first mystery series set in Edmonton. She has written non-fiction, children’s fiction, short stories, plays and music. https://janicemacdonald.ca/
More about Marie Leveau, the voodoo queen
— & a song in her honour (happy Mardi Gras!)
♦♦♦
Up Next:
“No one wants to be an it but don’t gender them. Imagine them instead as adversaries—”
The Litter I See Project 