N’Orleans The French Quarter And Beyond, New Orleans Sets Itself Apart With Its Food, Its Music, Its Atmosphere And Its Unbeatable Lifestyle

When Charles Kuralt left television, CBS News called it his “retirement.” It was nothing of the sort, he says in the foreword to his new book, “Charles Kuralt’s America.” “I had spent nearly all my life traveling in the United States, but there was one more fanciful journey I had always wanted to make. I would revisit a dozen favorite American places at just the right time of year … I would go alone and without a program and without a budget … and I wouldn’t do anything that felt like work. … I would drift with the current of life. … and I’d have a perfect year in America.”

In this excerpt from that book, it is January, and he is in New Orleans.

“Unique” is a word that cannot be qualified. It does not mean rare or uncommon; it means alone in the universe. By the standards of grammar and by the grace of God, New Orleans is the unique American place.

This would be so if all the city had to offer were the flickering gas lamps in the soft nights, or the delicate tracery of the ironwork on the galleries of the French Quarter (in New Orleans, they are galleries, not balconies, and they hang above banquettes, not sidewalks), or the open doors of the Dionysian dives bellowing loud music into Bourbon Street. But there is also the all-important matter of grillades and grits, of red beans and rice, of crawfish, or crawfish etouffee and file gumbo and pompano en papillote.

“If you understand New Orleans food, you understand New Orleans life.”

This is Joe Cahn talking, standing in the bountiful herbs and spices aisle of his Louisiana General Store in the old Jax Brewery building on Decatur Street.

“Most of the United States was settled by Anglo-Saxons and Puritan types. The work ethic prevailed and all the pleasures of life were frowned on. It’s real simple: Work ethic equals bland food.

“But New Orleans, on the other hand - oh, man, New Orleans didn’t know what the work ethic is, still doesn’t! We were settled by Catholics from Spain and France who thought work should never interfere with the enjoyment of life. And that’s what makes this place different from the rest of America.

“People in New Orleans believe in living in the present, and skimming off as much pleasure as they can today and eating as well as they can tonight. That goes for everybody. If you go to confession and say to the priest, ‘I over-ate, Father,’ you’ll have his interest right away. He’ll probably ask you, ‘Where did you eat?’ “

I have been overfed in this city, Lord knows, but I cannot remember ever being poorly fed, and I return frequently to New Orleans, always in anticipation, my eyes, as my mother used to say, always bigger than my stomach.

This January, it felt peculiar at first to have no assignments, no duties, nothing to do for a change but enjoy myself. I am a product of the Puritan work ethic Joe Cahn was talking about, and it seemed wrong not to be working. I kept these misgivings under control, and after a while they began to go away.

By mid-morning in the French Quarter, after breakfast is done, a parade of familiar characters begins to appear. After a few days, as I met them or they became known to me, I could identify Ruthie the Duck Lady, who used to walk with a live duck and now carries a stuffed one; Willie the Dancer; George the Street Cleaner; the Chimney Sweep advertising himself with his top hat; the Clothes Pole Man selling forked poles to hold your clothesline up; and a changing cast of peddlers, shoeshine guys, mimes, painters, caricaturists and musicians, all seeking a living in the street.

Some of the street performers are precocious beginners, like Joseph Urby, 9 years old, who tap dances on Royal Street in sneakers with bottle caps tacked to the soles.

Some are old pros, like David Leonard and Roselyn Lionhart. She plays guitar, mandolin and several African instruments … he plays guitar, cornet and harmonica. They both sing. They are very good, and their open guitar case fills quickly with cash whenever a crowd gathers.

Here is Roselyn explaining New Orleans jazz funerals to a knot of tourists: “You’re not supposed to cry at a funeral. Did you know that? You’re supposed to rejoice that another poor soul has escaped this vale of tears. And if you can’t rejoice that another poor soul has escaped this vale of tears, at the very least you can be glad it wasn’t you.”

At that point, the two of them launch into a fine swinging “Saints Go Marching In.”

The French Quarter street scene offers livelier sounds than most of its indoor music clubs these days. Sad to say in the city of Buddy Bolden, King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, there is no single place to go to hear consistently superior traditional jazz.

Banu (Gibson) is a bright, pretty, grown-up woman who thinks and walks and talks music and dancing and records with her own “New Orleans Hot Jazz Band.” She came to lunch with me at the Bistro on Toulouse Street and brought along a copy of her itinerary for the coming spring: Spokane; Kansas City; New York; Chattanooga; Little Rock; Vienna, Austria. … There’s a place for her and her New Orleans band everywhere but New Orleans.

But she’s not leaving. “I can’t imagine living any place else. I hope to find a regular gig, maybe open a jazz club of my own in a new hotels.

“However it works out,” she said, “I’ll say this for music: It’s a business that doesn’t hurt people. You go through your whole life singing and dancing, and you do no harm.”

Thinking about it later, I realized she had put her finger on the reason I have always liked musicians so much, though I can’t carry a tune myself.

I made the rounds: Preservation Hall, the Famous Door, Pete Fountain’s nightclub at the Hilton, the jazz brunch at the Court of the Two Sisters. All good tourist fun, but the best music seems to have drifted out of the Quarter downriver into precincts where tourists rarely venture.

I concluded that jazz is hanging on in New Orleans, if not exactly flourishing.

This frustrates Ellis Marsalis Jr., father of the celebrated Branford Marsalis (saxophone), Wynton (foremost trumpeter of our time, I say), Delfeayo (trombone) and Jason (drums), and a fine pianist himself, who plays at Snug Harbor.

I found Marsalis pere in his office at New Orleans University, where he heads the jazz faculty. “Louisiana doesn’t care a thing about its own music,” Marsalis said. “Nobody encourages the young musicians.”

A procession of young students came and went in the hall outside Marsalis’ office as we talked. Most of them are going to find their opportunities outside New Orleans, which doesn’t encourage them to stay. What a pity, as they say. Ain’t that a shame?

I tramped all the streets of the French Quarter in the cool January afternoons, in love with the arcades and shaded courtyards, the ferns in hanging baskets, the glitter of old silver in the shop windows, the faded pink patina of brick walls in the sun.

I made one extravagant purchase, at Waldhorn’s on Royal Street, the oldest antique shop in town. I meant only to walk in and look around. Before I knew it I’d bought an 18th-century English partner’s desk, an old leather armchair, a stylish architect’s table and a library ladder to equip the small office I planned for myself back in New York.

That’s what happens to a man suddenly liberated from the sheltering bosom of a big corporation. He gets drunk with freedom. Temptation overcomes prudence.

New Orleans is a city teeming with temptations, of course, and always thinking of new ones. They are building a world-class casino for organized gambling which strikes me as a world-class mistake. Las Vegas is one kind of a city, New Orleans is another, and I’d hate to see the two become confused. But New Orleans is not without greed. They are already selling potions for gambling success in the voodoo shops on the side streets.

If you are comfortably situated in a French Quarter hotel, as I was, with just a fountain murmuring, the greatest temptation of all is to settle for the fascinations just outside your door. This is a local attitude of long standing.

A visitor shouldn’t succumb to such constraints, so as the days went by, by a force of will I directed myself from the Quarter into the other 350 square miles of the sprawling reclaimed swamp of a city (two hundred of which square miles are said to be more or less on dry land).

I took a rickety 70-year-old streetcar out St. Charles Avenue - ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling, clickety clack - a satisfyingly slow, stately way to travel through the quiet precinct of live oaks and crepe myrtles and great antebellum houses. This other New Orleans was put here by the Protestant planters and entrepreneurs who floated down the river from the east after the Louisiana Purchase.

The Garden District stands in elegant contrast to the crowded Creole city only a mile or two away, and it reflects an entirely different view of what life should be: serene and sumptuous, not brazen and exciting. I admire the mansions the newcomers built, but I think I would have preferred the more stimulating company of the Creoles.

Look at the names of the streets where the Americans built their most beautiful dwellings: First, Second, Third and Fourth. These people were long on orthodoxy and short on imagination.

Half a dozen blocks away, the stroller seeking more felicitous streets comes, sure enough, to Felicity, and then to the Greek Muses in turn, Polymnia, Euterpe and Terpsichore, pronounced Terpsy-core. Never mind pronunciation. Who wouldn’t rather live on a street named for Thalia, the muse of comedy, than on First or Second or Third?

The Americans supplied the pluck of New Orleans, the Creoles supplied the rapture, the Africans provided the cadence. But that still doesn’t account for a certain spice in the life of the city. The spice was the gift of the Cajuns.

I fell to wondering how Cajun habits and music and language are prospering these days, so I drove down through the swamps to Houma to see an acquaintance, Lenn Naquin. He and his brother, L.J., took me to lunch at Savoie’s Restaurant, where Jimmy and Sandra Savoie, mistaking me for a celebrity, couldn’t be stopped from preparing seafood gumbo, stuffed bell peppers, jambalaya, sauteed oysters, shrimp and fried perch, and serving all these dishes at once while Lenn and L.J. talked about Cajun life and how it has changed.

“It’s the hunting and fishing life that appeals to me,” L.J. said, “and I’d say that hasn’t changed at all. I go deer hunting and duck hunting - mallards, wigeons, pintails, ringnecks. And I go fishing for red drum and speckled trout and bass and sac-a-lait - that’s our Cajun spotted perch.”

As our talk meandered on, though, I inferred that aside from the sporting aspects, Cajun life is being watered down by the influences of the world outside.

“I wish you could meet one old woman I know,” Jim said. “She lives back in the swamp. She knows every bird and animal. She calls the alligators up to be fed. There are still some old folks like that, but not as many as there used to be.”

Was the day coming, then, when Cajun country would be like every other place?

“Well, the day may be coming when Cajun country isn’t here at all,” Lenn said. “Terrebone is the largest parish in Louisiana, but it gets smaller with every storm. The erosion is terrific. The Gulf is taking the land and we’ll never get it back again.”

A night or two later, I had dinner alone at Antoine’s, the 150-year-old restaurant that is one of the abiding charms of the French Quarter. I ordered Oysters Bienville, baked in white-wine sauce, flavored with onions, pimento and peppers, a dish created at Antoine’s sometime in the last century - six oysters, nothing more. I ordered a noble bottle of white Burgundy, Mersault Le Charmes.

I ate slowly, thinking about the taste of the oysters. I drank a silent toast to all things traditional and enduring, and to a month without care in one of the last places on Earth that cares about such things.