Pastor of People’s Church, Minneapolis, Minn.
If you want to take a course of study in the liberal sciences of gayety
and godlessness, go to New Orleans, the Crescent City of climate, Creole,
carnival, cotton, conventions, cane-sugar, cafes and cemeteries. Though
there are more than thirty grave-yards, it is not a dead town. I found
week-day races and prize fights on Sunday, as well as other religious
services. It has been called the great winter resort of the United
States, and there are enough “resorts” by day and night for all the good
and bad who care to patronize them.
Pleasure is the big word in the dictionary of New Orleans life. Her
morals, as well as her markets, are French. She is the commercial gateway
to the Panama Canal. Her citizens have improved the city sewage and water
supply, paved the streets, erected fine hotels and public buildings, and
enlarged her port facilities. If she mends her ways as much morally,
she will be a safe place for pious as well as political and carnival
celebrations.
One night after I had taken in three dozen oysters and washed them
down with French drip coffee, I took in a night-court where people of
black skin were sentenced for cracking and breaking some of the laws;
a gambling-hell where money was stacked up and pulled down on the turn
of a card; a cafe and cabaret where the colored man was outshining his
white brother elsewhere; and then strolled through a shady district of
all shades of color and character. The denizens of the vice dens started
a street fight. They threw stones and shoes which I dodged, and hurled
hard, vile names which deeply impressed me. Girls, not cursed with
an incorruptible chastity, in tempting dishabille, tripped along the
street and ogled me. The doors of some of these places of contraband
amusement were wide open to welcome the visitor, while others were shut
and bore a placard with some such reassuring information that “MABEL
IS ENGAGED—CALL LATER.” During the war this Broadway to Baal, Avenue
to Avernus, Hell’s Highway, and Promenade to Perdition was temporarily
closed for moral repairs and sanitary improvements. Degradation slope
was graded, and a curb set up for evil-doers. But far be it from me to
injure the reputation of New Orleans for wantonness and frivolity. The
fact that these places were officially closed for a while need not deter
those who journey here today for these simple pleasures, and from easily
finding them. No war order can change the leopard spots of the city. The
Epicurean motto, “Let us eat, drink and be merry,” prevails according
to time-honored custom. I attended a theatre which offered a bill that
would not be tolerated in any other city of the United States. Jokes and
clothes were “pulled off” in a way to make the blase blush.
The Crescent City is cosmopolitan and has all the races, but the most
flourishing is the horse-race. Betting was the main thing. The horses
were fast, but the women at the track were faster. A petite Parisian
petticoat invited me to take her out here every day to bet on the
races—but I thought I better not. During the Mardi Gras Waterloo’s
“revelry by night” was outdone. Streets were a riot of rogues and rampant
ribaldry a mad pageant of music, masks and merriment, a mob of men and
maidens. Whatever the parade seemed to be outside, it was plain the
Devil’s spirit was inside. If one is afflicted with naughty propensities,
this is a fine place to get rid of them. I attended a Bal Masque. The
manager lamented the passing of the good old times when drinks were
allowed to be sold and dancers got stewed, yet said his real estate
ventures in =_maisons de joie_= were flourishing. The dancers, jumping to
the accompaniment of the jazz, acted no more like dancers than the blare,
blow and crash of the jazz seemed like music. They jerked about like
automatons and marionettes, “hesitated” like victims of locomotor-ataxia,
hopped like grasshoppers, and moved with a stop, spring and shuffle, a
squirm, a swerve, a swirl, a slide and a slip. It was enough to make
Terpsichore sick. The players made hard work of it and the dancers should
have received good wages for such strenuous labor, for it was simply a
dance “haul.”
In New Orleans, earthly gastronomy and not heavenly astronomy is the
science most studied in its “courses.” Many are the toothsome taverns in
this Lotus-eating town. I remember one time-eaten cafe where there was
a di-“stink”-tive garlic atmosphere, and where the soup was seasoned by
falling plaster. Over the tattered table-cloth, evidently changed for
every hundredth guest, French drip coffee had dripped. Antique china and
silver service had served their day and long since should have decorated
the windows of a curio shop. It was old with cracks, nicks and dents.
What jokes were cracked over them? What sweet stories had the ears of the
sugar-bowl listened to? With what wide astonishment had the mouth of the
pitcher gasped at off-color stories? What hands had caressed the neck
of vinegar and oil bottle? What cutting remarks and thrusts the knives
and forks suggested! What spooning of callow couples the spoons had
witnessed! The table was superannuated, shaky on its pins, and subject to
ague-fits, while the chairs had felt so many rounds of pleasure that they
were nearly all in with broken backs, twisted feet and elliptical legs.
The old lamps had looked down on eyes of beauty whose light had been
shut out by death, and the weather-stained walls echoed to steps that led
down to the grave.
Passing through the French Market, with its dingy stalls, dogs, dirt,
cobwebs, spiders and poverty, I came to the old Absinthe House, the
refuge rendezvous of the picturesque Bordeaux blacksmith, pirate,
smuggler and slave-trader, Jean Lafitte, the bold, bad buccaneer who
loved beauty, booze, and blood, and had barrels of money to spend for
them. Standing at the little old marble bar, I drank a befitting toast to
his memory in absinthe. “Look not upon the absinthe when it is green,”
yet I tasted it here and in Paris, though never sufficiently to get the
full benefit of excitation, hallucination, terrifying dreams, delirium
and idiocy. I left these spirits to call on those of the Haunted House
nearby where of yore colored slaves were found mutilated, held in sharp,
spiked iron bands, and chained to the wall.
The old time Southerners are gone. They did not have five-reel
thriller movies, horse races, prize fights and carnivals, but they
did have some innocent pastimes with which their simple natures were
satisfied—pleasures that beguiled the worn and weary hours. Public
executions and hangings were quite the rage then; pirates were hung on
the square for decoration; the heads of negroes were stuck on spikes
at the city gates. At the Calabozo there were whipping posts and hot
irons with which the fleur de lis was burned on culprit’s breaking some
of the laws; a gambling-hell where money was staked up and pulled down
shoulders. The only hangings I saw were of idlers hanging around the
corners. Then the old Plaza was the center of social and commercial life,
military fete and the fate of criminals who were shot, nailed alive in
their coffins, or slowly sawed in half. The attractions were sometimes
varied by hanging women on the gallows and breaking men on the wheel.
In those days there were no Sunday jazz bands or vaudeville circuits,
but in Congo Square in the open air there were dancing carnivals with
half-naked girls, and real Voodoo dancers at Ponchartrain, of the old
tom-tom fiddle and gourd drum variety, who danced themselves crazy and
fell into a frothy fit.
What modern social balls can compare with the Indian balls where
saffron sirens with sweet look and voice led the dance through love’s
labyrinth of jealousy! Now there is horse racing and private and polite
gambling—then there was wide open faro and roulette, and later the
Louisiana lottery.
Women did not possess the face and figure characteristic of modern New
Orleans belles, but there society was very select, in fact, they were
“selected” from hospitals and correction homes. Later there came a
shipment of “casket girls,” poor girls sent over from Paris by the King
as wives. They brought their trousseau in a chest of clothes. This seems
very primitive to us now, yet today men pick wives no better than these,
and some they choose do not wear clothes enough for a shroud in the
coffin.
The city was once a sink or swamp filled with deported galley-slaves,
trappers, miners, gold hunters and soldiers whose profession was dice,
dueling and idleness. Today it is the big, busy, commercial city of the
South. Once there was fever, filth and filibusters, but these things
are no longer in fashion. New Orleans now buys white rice, cotton and
sugar—in early days she bought black slaves from San Domingo and Guinea.
Charles Lamb liked old things—he would have enjoyed the old part of town
with its bizarre balconies, mountain-peaked roofs, hill-shaped sheds,
begrimed, battered stairways, open flowery courts, shady portieres,
quaint doorways, and ramshackle, rickety rows of houses marshalled on
both sides of the streets like awkward squads of soldiers. In the quiet
streets one looks in doorways where the inhabitants, listless lazy
lovers of pleasure, are dozing away Life’s afternoon. Here you find the
beautiful and bewitching Creoles, coquettish damsels whose baby years
were cuddled and cradled in sentimental songs such as “I love you as a
little pig loves the mud.”
The pleasure-seeker is “stuck” on New Orleans with its lasses, molasses,
lassitude and laissez-faire morals.
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