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New Orleans Yats: The New Spotted Owl
Arthur White, a former New Orleanian now teaching in Breaux Bridge, writes:

New Orleans Yats: The New Spotted Owl

Katrina and her aftermath are now written into the pages of our history as two immense catastrophes. It will be all too easy to make the rebuilding of New Orleans a third one. This will happen inevitably if we don’t understand what New Orleans was.

The outside world knows romantic, historic, fun-loving, gumbo-cooking, tourist New Orleans, and there is every reason to expect that this part - a very important part - will survive. There is a second New Orleans that consists of the port, industries, businesses, downtown high-rises, suburbs, shopping malls - the components of every American city. That can be rebuilt because we understand how to build an American city: you just let developers have at it and grudgingly add as little infrastructure as you can get by with. Many people, both in and out of the city, can’t wait to see it rise, all new, shiny, clean, wholesome, clad in glowingly improved socio-economic statistics.

But the third New Orleans is where the city’s soul lies - the soul that makes New Orleans utterly unlike any other American city. That soul is the product of the city’s continuity. We have a few cities older than New Orleans; a few small ones (Savannah and Charleston) and a few neighborhoods in others have a similar continuity. But New Orleans was the only city where almost every component of the population, from richest to poorest, whitest to blackest, whether they were French, Spanish, African, English, Irish, Italian, or Latin American, had been rooted there for generations, if not centuries.

This was a product of the fact that, since the Civil War, New Orleans has never been a great place to get rich and therefore did not attract large numbers from elsewhere. But at the same time, its port has kept it living and growing, preventing it from becoming stagnant. Thus, it has spent the last 140 years on simmer. That has been the ideal circumstance to keep it marinating in its own juices, producing the only place in America where an urban folk-culture has been strong enough to stand up to the mass-produced pop culture that has extinguished local folkways all over the country.

There is an upper end to this culture, the Boston Club, the Krewes of Rex and Comus, the families with their personal waiters at Antoine’s. They manage to be aristocratic without being stuffy - no small feat - and I think they will survive.

But the average Orleanians, the Yats (so-called from the greeting “Where y’at?”) are the core of the city’s culture and its most endangered species. Unexpectedly, they come in both black and white versions, typically living together in mixed neighborhoods. I knew them when I lived Uptown, but especially when I lived in Bywater, a part of the Ninth Ward.

In my Uptown neighborhood we routinely had real jazz funerals to see off the members of the Young and True Friends of Carrollton Benevolent Association, one of many burial societies that pool resources so that even the humblest can go out with style. Neighborhood kids played their own jazz in their backyard sheds instead of imported rock music. In the Ninth Ward I knew people whose neighborhood identity was so strong that they had never traveled to the other side of Canal Street. The neighborhood bars were powerful institutions that endorsed political candidates. Everyone knew the neighbors, first because you were probably related to them, second because people still sat on their stoops and socialized on the sidewalks.

Every tourist eats at the tourist restaurants, some of which haven’t seen a real Orleanian in decades. But they don’t know humble dishes like red beans and rice served on Mondays in every Yat household. When a Yat eats out, he goes to a place like Mandina’s in Mid-City; a family enterprise that got its start as a speakeasy during Prohibition and serves turtle soup with chunks of turtle egg topped off with a dollop of sherry. In the Ninth Ward he eats garlic bread whose garlic has soaked out through the crust on the bottom - not available in other neighborhoods.

Does anyone outside Louisiana know the difference between Cajun and Creole . . . and that New Orleans isn’t Cajun? You hear the difference in the inimitable Yat accent in which a sentence like “Wrench dem Ersters in de zink” makes sense. Female Yats address every stranger as “Dawlin’”, “Sweethawt”, or just “Hawt” for short. But your favorite waitress won’t kiss you like she might if she were Cajun.

People know that New Orleans is Catholic and easy-going, but do they know that a convent at the back of the French Quarter used to raise money by betting on the horses? Could they imagine the man who told me one Mardi Gras that “The first time I got venereal disease I was dressed as Pope John XXIII.” At my neighborhood convenience store I could choose from a wide array of Voodoo candles, including ancient ones dedicated to the “Five African Powers” and later ones to “Blessed Martin Luther King.”

I am often bored at parties since I left New Orleans. People don’t wear costumes and sing, and they go home before breakfast. We warmed up by singing Limericks for an hour or two at the King Charles the Martyr Party or the Viking Party, both of which were given annually for twenty years. It was not necessary to be invited or know the hosts; I would never have gone to the Viking Party if someone who crashed the King Charles the Martyr Party hadn’t invited me to crash it. I’m still friends with those people. Where else would a successful physician have a plastic larger-than-life statue of a naked woman riding on a banana in the backyard?

People have read the Confederacy of Dunces, but do they know that while the reviewers in New York were praising the authors inventiveness in creating the characters, everyone in New Orleans was sure they personally knew all of them. I’m convinced that the main character was partly based on a man I knew who had re-named himself “Farouk Von Turk.” Von Turk lived with his mother amid piles of old sheet music and was one of the founders of The New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra which played such classics as “If You Gonna Sheik on yo’ Mama, yo Mama’s Gonna Sheba on you.”

Much of what bred this culture has been destroyed. It will be impossible to save the thousands of shotgun houses that are its natural habitat. The people who thought that the Ninth Ward was the whole world are scattered across the lower forty-eight. Many won’t come back. Some of what went into the New Orleanian jambalaya - poverty, illiteracy, crime, and racism, - needs to be removed regardless of other considerations.

But this amazingly rich culture that has produced far more than its share of America’s artistic, culinary, literary, and musical riches is likely to be gone before we notice that we miss it. Outside experts will have no chance to see it alive before they decide to bulldoze it into oblivion.

Many locals can’t describe it because they are blind to it the way a fish is blind to water until he finds himself flapping helplessly on land. You cannot replace forty square miles of antique neighborhoods with a California vision of what a proper up-to-date American community should be and expect the soul of New Orleans to survive any more than a salmon can thrive in a parking lot.

We need to treat the Yat the way we do the spotted owl. That is, we need to restore the cultural ecosystem that provided his habitat. I wonder if anyone in Washington has even started to think of it this way? Is anyone thinking about how to provide more amenities and open space without destroying the dense fabric of the neighborhoods? There were hardly any garages in old New Orleans neighborhoods. What would be the consequences of introducing them? Are planners going to put back Markey’s Bar or The Bright Star, both lynchpins of their respective Ninth Ward and Uptown neighborhoods? Will anyone dare to interfere with the property rights of the slumlords? What about the Mom and Pop grocery stores that made deliveries and extended credit; will they be back? Will there be Sno-ball stands? What aesthetic will take the place of the Victorian confections that turned Ninth Ward shotguns into wooden wedding cakes? Will anyone salvage the tall louvered shutters that covered all the shotgun doors and windows? What will they put them on if they do? How will extended families re-establish their neighborhood roots? How do we avoid the extremes of neo-Levittown or what an NPR commentator called “neo-precious?”

I don’t see anyone in authority I can trust to ask these questions much less come up with wise and perceptive answers. New Orleans could easily become Disneyland, or Cleveland, or Pompeii. Only with the greatest care can it continue to be itself.

If no one understands how sensitive and how significant the New Orleans human ecosystem is, we will realize, a few years hence, that its been a long time since anyone called us Dawlin’ and that America is a lot duller than it used to be.

Across the street from the Astrodome, in the alcove of a motel where the night manager sits behind bulletproof glass, a young man leaned against a faded stucco wall.

A grin crept beneath his wispy mustache when a stranger approached.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

His name is Jabar Gibson.

The first bus to arrive in Houston loaded with Hurricane Katrina evacuees from New Orleans was not operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or any other government authority. It was an Orleans Parish school bus, its driver too young to drink but already a convicted car thief. His cargo: 60 of New Orleans’ poorest residents, the youngest a week-old infant and the oldest 59.

It was known as the “renegade bus.” Gibson, 20, was its renegade driver.

Gibson acknowledges he stole the bus, although in what has become Katrina lingo, he “commandeered” it to rescue himself and his neighbors. While the storm’s floodwaters ultimately did not advance into Algiers, there was no way of knowing that in the chaotic Tuesday morning after the storm. Water was filling up the east bank, Mayor Ray Nagin was on the radio that afternoon predicting several feet on St. Charles Avenue, and panicked residents crossed the bridge to the West Bank, telling tales of impending doom.