Bill Caraher |

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about New Orleans this summer. To be clear, I haven’t spent much time in the Crescent City. So when I say that I’m thinking of New Orleans, I’m not thinking of New Orleans as a literal place, but as a place that somehow has appeared in my imagination.

There are some real solid reasons for this. Earlier this summer while doing field research on Cyprus, I got up early and made coffee and settled in to watch Regis Prograis fight. He’s from New Orleans and his nickname is “Rougarou” which the fans in the city were chanting this morning. He won the fight, but it was a snoozer. Prograis fought in a way that evoked some of the old films of fighters in the 1960s and 1970s with lots of upper body movement contrasted with very stable and even plodding footwork. He tried to keep his opponent at range, cut off the ring, and only landed the occasional punch or combination. His game opponent, tried to counterpunch, but since Prograis refused to come inside or even throw for rounds at a time, the fight was largely an awkward dance of two fighters more confident in their opponents’ ability to do damage than their own. This was fair enough since both guys got knocked down in the early rounds (although only one was scored as such), and both guys had some power.

I also re-read James Sallis’s The Long Legged Fly (1992) which was the first of his Lew Griffin novels and it was set in New Orleans. Sallis’s style seemed well-suited for my imagined city. Like Regis Prograis, he largely stayed outside, moved strategically, but avoided landing shots (or taking them) unless absolutely necessary. Sallis’s book was a tour of the city — dingy bars, shotgun style houses, balconies, tourists, the river, traffic, and, of course, roaches — which only sometimes led to the kind of direct action. This isn’t to say that things didn’t move, flow, skitter, scamper, and shift. The city moved constantly, but for Griffin (and for Sallis) this movement didn’t necessarily lead anywhere.

(Sallis is a long time contributor to NDQ as regular readers of this blog know! Check out two recent pieces in the Quarterly set in New Orleans: Storey Clayton’s “Jorgia Wants a Chapter” and Lane Chasek’s “Surviving Mardi Gras”.)

The enduring character of New Orleans throughout the almost 30 years in Sallis’s novel evokes the image of New Orleans produced by archaeologist Shannon Lee Dawdy of a city that used the weight of its own history to slow, displace, and complicate the forces of capitalism. For Dawdy, the patina acquired over decades or even centuries creates its own value that can support and subvert the forces of the market and its constant pressure for the new. One wonders whether James Sallis, as a white author writing about a black character, gets the Black ambivalence toward the city’s patina right. Or whether Dawdy unpacked the role that Black residents in New Orleans (at least imagined New Orleans) play in tempering the pressures of capitalism that Black slavery (and the city’s famous slave markets) made possible.

Ishmael Reed’s work, The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), which I also read this summer, has its roots in New Orleans. For Reed, Louisiana Red was the voodoo corporation founded by none other than Marie Laveau. The efforts of a Berkeley business man, Ed Yellings, to dethrone Louisiana Red’s monopoly on “The Work” led Louisiana Red to kill Yellings and try to destroy his “Solid Gumbo Works.” Yelling’s Solid Gumbo Works had managed to use voodoo remedies to cure cancer and was on the verge of a cure for heroin addiction. This kind of advancement would have undermined the monopolistic domain of Louisiana Red whose mail-order business had expanded to include both medicines and the disease. Papa LaBas, a voodoo worker from New York, was called to Berkeley by a rival concern to settle this dispute and solve Yelling’s murder. Reed’s attitude toward capitalism here is interesting. Reed clearly see Louisiana Red as a kind of toxic capitalism dependent on corruption, violence, and monopolistic practices (perhaps derived from the kind of malicious and exploitative capitalism upon which New Orleans was built). On the other hand, the kind of bourgeois capitalism characterized by Yelling’s Solid Gumbo Works was clearly seen as both acceptable and a necessary counterweight to Louisiana Red.

One wonders whether the history of capital and the history of New Orleans are so densely intertwined that it makes it impossible to talk about capital without talking about New Orleans (whether real or imagined) and race, religion, and literature. It makes sense that Laurie Wilkie chose New Orleans as the basis for her archaeology textbook, Strung Out on Archaeology (2014) and taught us how the study of contemporary Mardi Gras beads can unpack a world of ritual, economic connections, and memory which cluster densely around a putative center for not only archaeology of modernity, but modernity as archaeological practice.

Maybe this is the reason that Tom Dent has a picture of businesses on the cover of his book of New Orleans’ inspired poems Magnolia Street (1976). In the poem of the same name he reminds us that:

                                          that broken winding street
that breathes naw/lins

which is everybody knowing your bizness.

~

Bill Caraher is the editor of North Dakota Quarterly and who enjoys dabbling in Mediterranean archaeology and history.