The Crescent City blues

Henryville, Pa. — UNLIKE THOUSANDS of American families, my kin and I received at least one precious splash of good news from New Orleans. My daughter-in-law, Eva Hughes Raines, her 3-year-old daughter, Sasha, and the family pets fled town a full day ahead of the evacuation order. Her husband, my son Jeffrey, and his mates in the funk band Galactic were performing in Seattle, watching from afar as Katrina inundated their homes in the USA's most distinctive city. Soon the little family will arrive here in the Pocono Mountains where we will wait, for weeks or months, to see if their antique neighborhood of distinctive "shotgun houses" can be made habitable again.

In the personal realm, there is no relief like the relief arising from the safety of loved ones. In the civic realm, there is no communal grief quite like the sorrow of watching as a beloved city is hammered by an unstoppable malice. Everybody now knows about the inundation of the famous "bowl" formed by the city's levees. What may need a little reviewing is why New Orleans has been for generations a golden bowl of memories, both sacred and profane.

In Colonial times, it was the one American city where Afro-Caribbean and Creole culture enjoyed at least a measure of tolerance under a succession of masters -- Spanish, French, English and American. In 1815, it was the site of the United States' most complete victory over the redcoats. Even the handful of Americans who died at the Battle of New Orleans did so in Mardi Gras style, dancing in front of the barricades.

For millions of Americans who grew up in strait-laced towns, the Big Easy has always been the place to dance -- the one Southern place where the Bible Belt came unbuckled. A hundred years ago, the Storyville section was America's best place for the world's oldest profession and the birthplace of America's best contribution to world music, jazz. Like other young people in the preacher-haunted South, I bought my first legal drink in the French Quarter. We went for the booze, and in that world of cobbled streets and hidden gardens, some of us glimpsed the glory and costs of pursuing art or individualism.

This was the place where Thomas Williams of St. Louis became "Tennessee" and where that much-ridiculed postal clerk from Oxford, Miss., made himself into William Faulkner, novelist. This was the place where you could come to find or lose yourself. In the back room of the Maple Leaf Bar on upper Magazine Street, my classmate Everette Maddox, a poet so precocious he was published in the New Yorker before he left the University of Alabama, succeeded after two decades of steady effort in drinking himself to death.