“Don't mock the afflicted.”
“Or I would've dropped by, except I've been to New Orleans to deliver a certain vegetable. Ye know what I mean?”
“All too well.”
“I do have good news. Marcel 'Bunny' LeFever has successfully buried his Uncle Luc and has aimed his wondrous nose again in our direction. Dr. Morgenstern and I — he sends his regards, by the way — are planning another dinner party, if we can coax the university scientists away from their research for the CIA. A week from tonight, I think, and ye must come. Only this time ye must sit next to me; to me left, would be proper, so's I can rest me left hand on your tender thigh while I am liftin' a sociable glass with me right.”
“Wiggs?”
“Yes, love?”
“You've had me to dinner, and now Marcel LeFever is coming. I'm curious why you haven't had my stepmother or V'lu.”
“Oh, I invited them. As a matter of fact, I just learned on this trip to New Orleans that V'lu actually flew to Seattle to attend the last dinner. I have no idea why she didn't show up.”
“Wait a minute. V'lu was in town the night of that party?”
“Yes. Stayed overnight and returned home the next day.”
Adrenaline welled in Priscilla with such pressure it was practically shooting out of her major orifices.
“Wiggs,” she said, “I have to make a trip to New Orleans myself.”
“When?”
“Right away.”
“Will ye be back in time for the party?”
“I hope so. If I am, I'll have a surprise for you.”
“Goody. I love surprises.”
“Good-bye then.”
“Bye-bye, Pris. Have a lovely trip and watch out for the bees.”
After she hung up, she thought, Watch out for the bees? Whatever did he mean?
She would find out soon enough.
The Chinese discovered gunpowder by accident while trying to invent a potion that would alchemically lengthen life.
It is unclear what the Chinese were trying to invent when they discovered spaghetti. Perhaps the spaghetti noodle, too, was a byproduct of longevity research, of an effort to live a won, won ton; a futile attempt to avoid facing the question, “Who's going to chop your suey when I'm gone?”
No matter. It may be prudent, however, for would-be immortals to bear in mind the Chinese experience. Seeking prolonged existence, they ended up with gunpowder, the elixir of death, not life; the propellant of history's innumerable tragic bullets, including the ones that felled Gandhi, John Lennon, and Bambi's mother — and the one that left Bingo Pajama facedown on Royal Street.
Figuratively and literally, New Orleans was buzzing. It was an angry black buzz in counterpoint with a terrified white buzz: historically typical of that city where slaves liberated themselves long before Lincoln, where a black aristocracy flowered to rival the only true white aristocracy in America, where a black voodoo queen once ruled as completely (if covertly) as any Catherine of Russia; where African mystery, large, organic, and powerful, has provided a soundtrack of primeval rhythm against which all metropolitan life — stodgy white commerce as well as fierce black pleasure — has had to unfold.
Even in slavery, the blacks called the tune. Proud and virtually fearless, they danced in Congo Square in such a graceful abandon, in such harmony with unseen forces, that their owners acted to outlaw African dancing lest it escalate into rebellion. And all the while, even as the owners drafted proclamation after proclamation of wiggle prohibition, their white toes tapped in their shoes. White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fête champêtre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.
Due to their poverty, anger, and moral imperatives, some New Orleans blacks were disposed to create a jazz of robbery. Due to their insecurity, fear, and religious philosophy, some New Orleans whites were disposed to compose hymns of brutality. The thieves tooted out of the federal housing projects — they were young, spirited, and pessimistic. The cops lumbered out of the bayous — they were paunchy, insensitive, and easily manipulated by authoritarian dogmas. On the one side, playground slam-dunkers, jive-talkers and second-line parade dancers with an easy propensity for redistributing wealth; on the other, good ol' boys who, up until getting their badges and patrol cars, went slender-pole fishing by day and slammed each other around by night. Clashes were inevitable, but the white boys had the law on their side.
Umm, but the air here is getting thick with sociology. We are discussing New Orleans, after all, the city Louis Armstrong said “has got that thing.” (As for the identity of “that thing,” Louis said, in the most Zen statement ever made by a westerner, “If you have to ask, you'll never know.") Perhaps it is time for a riff.
"New Orleans"
She went to the school of Miss Crocodile
Where she learned to walk backwards
And skin black cats with her teeth.
Soon she could wear the loot of dead pirates
Cook zee perfect gumbo
And telephone the moon collect.
But it took sixty-six doctors to fix her
After she kissed that snake.
New Orleans was buzzing. A Jamaican flower peddler and street singer named Bingo Pajama had been shot and killed by two off-duty policemen who claimed they were trying to make an arrest. Pajama, a suspect in the bizarre death of a fellow officer, made a threatening move, according to the cops. They pulled down on him with their.38 Specials.
The black community was not swallowing that trash. Too often, in Louisiana, blacks suspected of having killed policemen were themselves slain by their arresting officers. It smacked of revenge by execution, and it had become routine. Also routine were the hearings in which the cops were cleared of any wrongdoing. It was the sort of situation that turned a second-liner's bile a dangerous hue, the sort that could build into a “race riot.”
Although Bingo Pajama was from out of town, a foreigner with a funny accent, a bum who kept bees but had no hive; a mysterious, clownish figure known well by none, the blacks of the city adopted him posthumously. They went so far as to send him off with a jazz funeral.
Mourners poured out of the projects, out of the shotgun houses below Canal Street, out of barrooms and gumbo parlors, out of the Baptist church at Liberty and First and the Hoodoo church on Rampart, and with a mighty brass band leading the way (horns wailing in the modes of both Satchmo and Bird, drums re-creating the phantom energies of the Congo), with umbrellas twirling (although the day was dry), feathers flashing, joints smoldering, bottles gurgling, and fingers snapping, they strutted and stomped, rambled and hooted, all the way to the French Quarter, through the Quarter, and back to the Central City again. A horse-drawn hearse bore the coffin, but there was no corpse in it. The police had the corpse and wouldn't release it. Inside the coffin was a bouquet of jasmine branches, crushed and faded but so potently sweet it perfumed the length of the parade.