Property of Walker Jackson

New Orleans

New Orleans is central to all my writings, and I’ve become very fond of “The Big Easy.” I’m deeply saddened by the devastation Katrina wrought on this historical and unique City. New Orleans rose from a swamp and she will rise again. Her people are resilient. America without The Crescent City is unthinkable.   I’ve gleaned this from my third Hackney McTrite PI adventure “Deader Than A Coffin Nail.” It’s a salute to all victims of Katrina. A review by a peer states, "Jackson paints a vivid picture of New Orleans, giving the book an extra character and terrific flavor. My agent said, "I was taken by it." So will you.

Hackney and his partner Deloris are going to Algiers across the Mississippi to discover a body.  He obtained the lead from a “Ball” Jar he found in Lake Pontchartrain. Hmmm!

I felt the nudge of inertia and the ferry slowly distanced itself from the dock. It executed a 150-degree turn, when it cleared the dock and headed for Algiers. Deloris became fascinated watching the eddy currents and skyline of her beloved New Orleans and my mind was drawn to a short narrative I’d written in high school about the Mississippi’s influences on my beloved New Orleans. My teacher Mrs. Bennett gave me a C-minus. She said the writings were too provocative.

   The Mississippi has had many different meanings to people upstream and downstream of New Orleans. Some will say she’s the third longest sewer on earth's landscape behind the Nile and Amazon. If this is true, the pollution is due to man's thoughtlessness and greed, and it's high time for man to clean up his act.

   In 1927 she broke through the levee in twelve places leaving 690,000 people homeless, killing more than 300 people, destroying $295 million of property, and to those who were there, she is heartless. Undaunted, the natives are willing to chance prospering or perishing under the crest of this impartial body of water with seemingly limitless dimensions.

   She brought the sailors and river people to the brothels of the infamous red-light district, Storyville, which has long been destroyed for modern progress. The river rats, who came for the eroticism and jazz, often waited for a bed behind citizens perceived to be more lofty of purpose and respectable.

   Many of the famous New Orleans jazz and ragtime musicians worked in Storyville's sporting palaces, perfecting their art and nurturing the sounds of jazz with the salt of their sweat. The pay was paltry, sometimes only tips, but a crumb here and a crumb there is better than the chaff or working in the hot fields or doing yard work for white folks or washing white folks' clothes or some other menial drudgery known to man.

   Louis 'Dipper Mouth' Armstrong, a favorite of millions, hung out in the District learning how to make a trumpet shout. The gaiety in the bawdy houses was much more exhilarating than delivering coal to white folks. Louis said, about that job of hauling coal, "I'd get up religiously in the morning and look at that mule and say, ‘Let's go’. That mule looked ’round as if to say, ‘You here again?’" My! Oh! My! Didn't he ramble?

   At the stroke of midnight, go stand on the corner of Canal Street and Bourbon Street, facing the Vieux Carré, eyes closed, hands cupping your ears and listen keenly. It's possible to hear the sadly hued tones of Charles 'Buddy' Bolden's trumpet lamenting Storyville's passing and all the wretched, sinful souls whose demise most likely has come by now.

   Thoughts of Storyville may cast shadows of a thousand forbidden pleasures, and the sporting palaces might have been considered the devil's den of iniquity, but the wampum collected for a shot of rum, a painted face, and clean sheets afforded the jazz bands and Professors, the ragtime piano players. In retrospect, Storyville might very well be considered the cradle of this hot, syncopated, improvised music once called jass, and now loved by the world and named more respectfully jazz. If not, she certainly had a tremendous influence on its evolution.

   Surely, the musicians loved to play the devil's music, but nourishment of the body was a necessity and red beans and rice cost money. You can't spend gratitude at A&P. If money couldn't be made playing music, they would've been forced back to the fields. This would have decreased the musician population and slowed the evolution of jazz. In this illumination, a reasonable and rational being might philosophize that nothing can be so evil, that some good can come from it.

   For all the good things and evil things the Mississippi has been, as perceived by man, she is, without fear of contradiction, a romantic link to yesterday. Her winding, rippling waters of silt stir up nostalgic memories of steamboats, river boat gamblers, Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, pirates, voodoo queens, slavery trade, naval battles, plantations, Antebellum mansions, Cajun and Creole cooking, Gumbo, Poboys, new beginnings, fortunes made or lost, cotton bales, a polyglot society, and so many more wonders good and evil.

  I thought my way through the entire voyage of ten minutes. The ferry was carefully being docked, when my awareness of the present kicked in. “Chief," said Deloris, "I looked at you several times and your face was masked with child's wonder.”

Red beans and ricely,

Walker Jackson