Wednesday morning dawned with branches and trees down all over the city, some sections without power (thank heavens, not us), and a brilliant blue sky and bright sun. It was a fine day for an Expotition. T was dead to the world, so L, M, and I began by walking over to the Café du Monde for beignets and drink-of-choice (milk for M, iced tea for L, and—naturally—café au lait for me) Really, it was a quite reasonable price for breakfast and stayed with us nicely. After that, we walked back to the hotel, got the car, and headed out to tour a couple of plantations on River Road.
In the spirit of “trying all the ways there are to cross the river,” we took the Canal Street ferry across the river to Algiers and struggled our way through the town to US 90. I’m rather glad we did, since there were a ton of houses with wonderful vernacular late-Vic architecture. Eventually we did find 90 and headed out to look for River Road. Along the way we saw several Entergy crews out clearing fallen branches from downed power lines.
The road (Louisiana state highway 18) took some finding; it doesn’t meet 90 directly and the cutoff route to it was very poorly marked, so I overshot and had to come back to it. Eventually we did get going, but I was annoyed to find that most of the highway had a 35 MPH speed limit, which delayed us a lot. Eventually LA DOTD grew daring, and increased the speed limit to 45 MPH. We drove through a lot of little-bitty communities that reminded L and me both of Tidewater Virginia. Both have the same continual straggle of houses and communities along the road, and both have a water-culture feel to them. We passed several refineries also, as well as the Waterford 3 nuclear power plant. After a couple of hours’ drive, during which I kept wondering aloud whether we’d got lost somehow, we came to the gates of Laura, one of the two plantations we’d meant to visit.
The tour was rather odd, because the Big House at Laura burned down last August, and the foundation that runs it is in the middle of reconstructing the house. Probably they’ll be able to do it successfully, because under the frame exterior Laura was brick-built, so the bones of the house are pretty much intact. Of course, much of the original historic contents are gone forever, but the house itself will come back. Our docent was a very entertaining and well-informed Creole woman from New Orleans named Jenny, who had no intention of taking any shit from anybody, and that included the hayseed from Missouri who insisted on needling her. She needled him right back, and if I’m any judge, she got the best of it. We did get to see some of the outbuildings that are under restoration, got a good explanation of slave life and treatment during the Creole and antebellum periods, and went through one of the slave cabins that’s almost completely finished. Once the foundation recovers from the fire and gets back on track with restoring the rest of the surviving buildings (which may be a while; Jenny said the Big House fire set them back ten years), they’re going to have a fine historical exhibit of a what working plantation was like. At L’s insistence, I bought M a copy of Compère Lapin, an version of the Br’er Rabbit tale that was collected at Laura in 1849, which far predates the Joel Chandler Harris stories. As Jenny pointed out, the rabbit Trickster character is found in Wolof folklore in Senegal, and Atlanta, where Harris lived, had no significant Senegalese population either at or before the time he was writing. Also, Harris was a friend of Alcée Fortier, who collected the Compère Lapin stories at Laura from the late 1840s to the 1870s, so it’s very likely he did help himself to Fourtier’s work for source material. The story certainly has a more West African feel than any of the Harris tales do.
Once done at Laura, we drove a few more miles down the road to Oak Alley Plantation, where we had lunch and then took their tour. The tour there was rather disappointing after seeing Laura, because Oak Alley’s tour was far more Stately Homes of the Mississippi than anything else. If I’d had only one tour to do, I’d have picked Laura.
We got back to the city late in the afternoon, just in time to register for the AG, say hello to a few other early arrivals, and go out to dinner. Lunch at Oak Alley, although good, had been more expensive than I’d expected, so I was just as happy when we were able to scrounge supper in the hospitality suite. After supper we visited with people in hospitality for a while before going to bed.
Thursday morning was a repeat of Breakfast at Café du Monde, and after we went back to the hotel where, oddly enough, L and I went to some speaker sessions. I attended one session given by Gerald Patout, librarian of the Historic New Orleans Collection, on their project to digitize and automate the entire New Orleans Obituary Index, all 650,000 names of it stretching back to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Currently the transcribers have done about 310,000 names, digitizing not only the index-card information itself, but the original text of each obituary! As someone who’s done a little bit of genealogical work, my mind boggles at the sheer scope and reach of such a project and the benefit it’ll have for future researchers. Later, I got to hear Lary Hesdorffer, head of the Vieux Carré Commission, speak on historic preservation in the French Quarter. The Commission is obviously the great-grandaddy of Austin’s Historic Landmark Commission and many others, and I was again astonished to find that they have almost complete control over any exterior feature of every building in the Quarter. (It turns out that “exterior” means “exposed to the weather,” so open courtyards within buildings fall under the Commissions’s jurisdiction. The speaker told us that they’re currently engaged in a lawsuit against someone who roofed over his internal courtyard, and still can’t for the life of him understand what he did wrong, though everyone has explained it to him ever so many times.) I learned further that in the Commission’s lexicon, a “balcony” is not more than four feet wide and is cantilevered or braced to the structure itself. Wider than four feet, and it’s a “gallery,” which has its own independent supports to the ground. This is vitally important to property owners because balconies don’t count as “living space” while galleries do, and the Commission has perpetual fights with owners and developers who want to stick historically-wrong galleries onto buildings with balconies so they can advertise—and charge for—more square feet of living space. As with any governmental commission, sometimes politics trumps the staff’s recommendations for building changes, but Mr. Hersdorffer said that the staff win more fights than they lose before the city council, and in particular the council member for the district that includes the Quarter has publicly said that she will never, ever vote against the staff’s recommendation on any case before the council. Now that’s clout.
In the afternoon I went out and wandered in the Quarter a bit, taking refuge from an afternoon shower in a couple of bookshops. I only bought one book, a T. R. Pearson which I didn’t know existed. After that I stopped in an Irish bar and drank a Murphy’s, then went back to the hotel. BIIIIIIIIIIG debauch of an afternoon, no? That night we went out looking for a place to eat and found the Gumbo Shop, which was quite reasonable. The food was well-made, although I now wish I’d ordered something besides the Chicken Espagnole. I was not up to eating a full half-chicken, and I got tired of biting down on bits of bone where someone with a meat saw had cut up the chicken all anyhow. L took M for the evening, since she was going to want to be out late at dances for Friday and Saturday, and I went down to the hospitality suite and visited for a while with a friend or two whom I hadn’t seen in several years.
Next: our correspondent goes Uptown in search of an Ethiopian grocery.
You should weed the bed of Primatene in the early Pre-Cambrian slip. Fnord.
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