Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?
/by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director
When I travel, I have always tended to point myself north. I am the happiest in all the world in the Scottish Highlands. Imagine my surprise when, over a decade ago, I fell completely, head-over-heels in love with New Orleans. Of course, it had something to do with falling head-over-heels in love with James Dorau, whose connections to the city and its music go back decades. James had lived in Austin, Texas for many years, and regaled me with tales of driving his Isuzu Pup through the night with his best friend Patrick to see the sunrise over Lake Pontchartrain. They made an annual pilgrimage to Jazz Fest, the 10-day music extravaganza held on the old Fair Grounds Racecourse. When James asked if I would like to go to Jazz Fest with him in 2012, I knew I had made it into the deepest corners of his heart.
Still, I had no idea what I would find in New Orleans, nor did I care. I would have followed James to the moon. What I found there was a place both familiar and foreign, a place rooted in its complicated history and dealing with the legacy of this past as it looks to the future. New Orleans is ancient, steeped in mysticism, suffering, and ecstasy - all the things that I love about old Europe except you can wear a tank top in February and dance all day. There is an openness and a warmth, literally and figuratively, that gets into your bones and loosens up your muscles and those hips just swing all by themselves. New Orleans is hot yoga for the soul.
My happy place, following James and a brass band down the street in 2021. Note: open containers are legal in New Orleans.
That first visit changed me, as the best kinds of travel experiences should. I had been to Charleston and Savannah, so the American South was not foreign to me, but something about New Orleans stuck. Perhaps it’s inherited - my father, another escapee from the frozen North, spent his early college years at Tulane, and has been a trumpet player ever since. When he joined the religious movement that would define my childhood, it was a New Orleans preacher, Sam Fife, who led the group.
Over the past 11 years, with a two-year gap during the pandemic, James and I have returned to New Orleans as often as possible. Sometimes, when airfare suddenly spikes downward, we will go just for the weekend. We eat like kings and dance like loons and laugh and take naps all tipsy and sun-kissed and I wear big earrings and strut everywhere I go.
On the latest trip at the beginning of this month, I had a mission, and a vague sense that I was on the cusp of learning something important about the two most important places in my life – Newbury(port) and New Orleans. The research request for information about Huso and Short mentioned in the Poirier article above had come into the Museum of Old Newbury and I wanted to see the place that connected these two – the streets named after them.
Five Newburyport friends visited the neighborhood where Charles Huso and Samuel Short lived and worked two centuries ago.
We were staying in the Marigny neighborhood, so we walked (strutted) down Royal to Canal Street and hopped on the St. Charles Avenue Streetcar. There were five of us, all Newburyporters, and a reward at the end – a frosty beer and fried pickles at Cooter Brown’s Tavern. I told my companions the story of Huso and Short, or at least the fragmented version of it that I could recall. We took the streetcar to the bend and hopped out. The levee and the Mississippi River were right in front of us, Short and Huso Streets right behind. I took a moment to imagine what this place must have looked and sounded like when Charles Huso arrived in 1824.
There is no substitute for standing in a place. Short and Huso Streets are parallel to each other, the signs marking a relationship between these two men that continued across time and distance. We have so little information about them, but they were clearly connected through commerce, family, upbringing, and experience. The last remaining evidence of this is two streets signs in a city that seems a world away.
A quick visit to Huso Street, at the end of the St. Charles Avenue line.
This was my feeling when I stood looking down Huso Street, noting how it ends at the levee and what a perfect spot it would have been to load and unload ships. The area must have been teeming with seafaring folk, mariners and merchants from all over the world. When I came back home, I did a cursory look through the shipping news in the Newburyport papers. It was astonishing and, given what I know about the misery occasioned by the production of cotton, a bit sickening how often Newburyport ships went in and out of New Orleans. Whoever saved Huso from being kidnapped, it is not a stretch to imagine that it could have been a random, but regular occurrence for him to bump into someone from home. In the Newburyport Herald in 1824, the year Charles Huso took up residence in New Orleans, there were dozens of ships coming and going from New Orleans. The city is mentioned almost daily in surviving copies of the newspaper. We were bound up intimately with the ugly commerce of that beautiful place.
“Arrived, schooner Falcon, Captain Morrison, 20 days from New Orleans, and 16 from the Balize (the outermost point on the mississippi Delta);” Newburyport Herald, April 20, 1824. Digital Archives of the Newburyport Public Library.
I will always be filled with joy when I visit New Orleans, but over the years, I have come to better understand how much suffering is also present in that place. New Orleans is steeped in misery, from slavery to Hurricane Katrina to rampant gun violence and mass incarceration and poverty and racism and the list goes on and on. It is difficult to reconcile this reality – that a place that is so dark can spend its life in constant celebration. I mentioned this to a friend who lives in NOLA. She shrugged. “Life is hard,” she said. “Might as well keep dancing.”