Visiting New Orleans is really more like being in a foreign country than visiting a U.S. city. It has its own language – many languages, actually, local patois, foreign accents of tourists, Midwestern accents like ours. It has unique architecture – narrow streets, two-story buildings hugging the sidewalk, fabulous mansions, tiny houses on the outskirts. It has its own sounds, besides the usual city traffic and noise of crowds: horns from ships on the river, the clopping of horses’ hooves on the cobblestones, the cries of their drivers hawking tours, and jazz music, always jazz on every corner, from the solitary trumpet player who distracted us from our tour of the French Quarter with a soulful rendition of “Misty,” to an electric guitar player with his own battery-powered amplifier, to a very young band, guys who looked like college kids, complete with tuba, playing less traditional, edgier jazz outside a cafe. It has its own customs, such as the mandatory above-ground burials. And it has its own smells – the river, fried foods, seafood, incense and handmade soaps and cosmetics which blasted out along with frigid air from streetside shops.
Despite being one of the hottest trips we’ve ever taken, it was a great time. We took walking tours of the French Quarter and the Garden District along with Lafayette Cemetery. We saw beautiful homes of famous people, and many others with interesting and odd architectural features.
We stayed in a campground right in the city of New Orleans, backed up against a railroad yard. The trains made incredibly loud crashing noises. It’s anybody’s guess what they were doing, because the ground actually shook, but since the noise stopped well before bedtime it was all right. We took full advantage of the swimming pool to cool off in the evenings. The campground was overrun with cats. The owner said she works with a local charity that takes homeless cats off the streets, neuters and immunizes them, and returns them. They were everywhere but did not seem to actually bother anyone, and they returned to a space under the main building during the hottest parts of the day.
After leaving New Orleans, we visited Destrehan Plantation, an indigo and later cotton farm that has changed hands many times and was abandoned and looted in the ‘50s; what you see now has been restored, sometimes rebuilt, and some furnishings are reproductions, and cabins and other outbuildings were moved from other plantations. The tour features an archive room with documents originally signed by Thomas Jefferson, and a weaving and spinning demonstration (hand spinning was a chore that was commonly done by slaves, even small children, and the plantation made cloth for sale beyond what the residents used). As slave labor went it was better than most, since the plantation was under the Code Noir of 1721, in which treatment of slaves was regulated; beating was forbidden and days off were dictated. Slaves were allowed to work on the side to make money for their own use, or they could save it and sometimes buy their freedom. Still it was also involved in the slave revolt of 1811 which came to a violent end. Some slaves from the Destrehan plantation were among those executed. Inspired by the Haitian slave revolt, it was the largest slave revolt in US history, and though it ultimately did not succeed, it raised the awareness of slavery throughout the U.S.
