The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (30 page)

Once upon a time, men in New Orleans carried charts that classified the product of every conceivable coupling:

1. black + white = mulatto
   
2. mulatto + white = quadroon
   
3. quadroon + white = octoroon
   
4. octoroon + white = quinteroon
   
5. mulatto + black = griffe
   
6. Indian + white = mestizo
   

And so on . . .

By the mid-1800s, the city was known for its quadroon balls, opulent affairs where local dandies went stag to dance halls on Saint Philip Street and watched through opera glasses as young women of mixed race, the offspring, usually, of a white father and a half-black mother, were marched across the floor in extravagant gowns. When the moment was right, a man selected a quadroon. Dolled her up. Established her in luxury in a house in a section of the city set aside for the purpose. Loved her. Impregnated her. A duke from Saxe-Weimar, Germany, who attended a ball described the quadroons as “almost entirely white: from their skin no one would detect their origin; nay many of them have as fair a complexion as many of the haughty creole females.” A quadroon, once established, was referred to as a
placée
. She took her man’s name, as did her children. In this way, the wealthy men of New Orleans could lead a double life, one above ground with a white wife and white children, the other subterranean with a quadroon
placée
and octoroon children. The practice continued till the Civil War, in the wake of which racial distinctions hardened. No more balls. No more secret families. Most of the quadroons (who, after generations of intermarriage, were more white than most white people in the city) went north, where they vanished into the fabric of America.

The city owed its importance to the river. The Mississippi was the first American superhighway,
Huckleberry Finn
the first American road novel. The wealth of the farms and forests, the factories and mills, everything west of the Alleghenies—all of it floated down the river. New Orleans was the city at the end of the run, where the produce was counted, tagged, stacked, and shipped. The life of the city was the waterfront, the docks, the boats. The first were pirogues, or canoes, fashioned, Indian-style, from tree trunks. These were followed by keelboats, mackinaws, flatboats, scows, the grandest of them 300 feet long and as tall as a house. There were barges known as arks; broadhorns, or Kentucky flats; and ferries, called sleds, with roofs and passenger cabins. Before steam power, the challenge was getting back upriver—to Cairo, to Saint Louis. After the flatboats were unloaded in New Orleans, they were broken into pieces and sold as scrap wood. For years, the sidewalks of the French Quarter were made from the debris of the riverboats. The crews then walked home—a trip through wild country that took months. When he was young, Abraham Lincoln made the trip from Illinois to New Orleans by raft. It was in the course of this journey that he first saw slaves, sold in the French Quarter markets.

It was a rough life on the river, a story by Robert Louis Stevenson or Jack London. The crews slept on the decks of the boats, months in the open, watching the shore—punishing in its sameness—drift by at two or three miles an hour. The men were unshaven and dirty; they washed in the river but were never clean. They were bare-chested all summer or donned brogans studded with spikes. In the winter, when the temperature dropped below freezing, they wore fur so fresh it had claws. There was always a card game going, men hunched over a deck, betting by firelight: faro, poker, blackjack, seven-up. They subsisted on bread and meat set before them in communal pans twice a day. They were drunk all the time. They referred to their whiskey as “good old Nongela,” as it was distilled on the banks of the Monongahela River. These men were tall and short, fat and thin, fair-skinned and swarthy, the same sorts who once filled the galleys of Roman ships. It was a male society, where the rivermen constantly fought to establish position. Each boat had a champion, a man who bloodied all the others. He wore a red turkey feather in his hat, which told the world,
I’m the baddest motherfucker on the Mississippi
. At night, when the ships tied up at the landings, crews intermingled. When the holder of a red feather came across another red-feather holder, a circle formed and a battle commenced. The names of the great fighters live on: Mike Fink, the toughest man on the Ohio; Bill Sedley, who whipped everyone on the Mississippi then went mad in New Orleans, killing two people in a dive bar before fleeing into the Indian Territory.

It’s a culture lampooned in
Huckleberry Finn
when two flatboat toughs circle each other while sharing their bona fides. In this passage you have, in nascent form, the best of the blues and hip-hop, as well as the trash talk of Muhammad Ali:

Whoo-oop! I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood’s my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!—and lay low and hold your breath, for I’m bout to turn myself loose!

For men on the river, every trip ended in New Orleans. That is where they were paid and spent what they were paid. It was the goal, the place they would finally drive out the boredom of all those weeks on the water. It was the adventures accumulated in the course of all those sprees that turned New Orleans into a party town. All those tchotchkes (the nipple-shaped shot glass), T-shirts (
What drinking problem? I get drunk and fall down. No problem
), and stories (“and the funny thing is, I don’t even remember driving home, but there was the car, in the middle of the lawn”) started on the keelboats, where the deck hands shouted as the spires came into view. Even in the 1800s, rivermen referred to New Orleans as the City of Sin. The culture of the docks spilled into the streets and became one aspect of the town. The violent mood in the dives, the Mardi Gras of stoned outsiders filling the squares and driving the locals indoors, the way the town can seem like two towns—the one seen by the drunken conventioneer who gets in a fight on Bourbon Street; the other seen by the native, secret and protected—was established during the first river boom, when the keelboats crowded the water bank to bank, and the deck hands took their restless ennui as a cause to raise hell in the Vieux Carré.

Any river city whose wealth is concentrated and dispersed on ships is going to be lousy with pirates. New Orleans attracted them from its earliest days. The geography invites it. A dozen miles outside of town, the land gives way to swamp, bayou, bay. Lake Pontchartrain, north of the French Quarter, dumps into Lake Borgne, which dumps into the Mississippi Sound, which is protected from the Gulf of Mexico by barrier islands. If you designed a seascape for piracy, this would be it. There were big islands—Grand Terre, Grand Island—in the sound, but also lonely outcroppings where the seagrass waved and the earth vanished if you stepped on it. There were islands covered with dwarf oaks and Spanish moss, a screen from outsiders. There were groves in the water, trunks rising from the waves. There were low-lying islands that disappeared in flood tide. There were inlets and swamps and landmarks that served as rendezvous points for pirates, the most notorious being the temple, a mountain of clamshells that had dominated a barrier outcrop as long as even the oldest Indian could remember. There were channels between islands, some deep enough to float a ship, some so shallow only a raft could get through. If being chased by a British man-of-war, a pirogue-riding pirate could vanish into a narrow, weed-bedecked channel, then emerge into a lost bay. The entire area was a tangle: reefs, storms, sea surges, tides, roots, alligators, shells, catfish, and turtles as old as the world. Turn around twice and you’re lost forever.

Old Spanish maps identify it as Barataria. The origins of the name are mysterious. Some say it comes from part two of
Don Quixote
, in which Sancho Panza is appointed governor of an island called Barataria, a name that rings mock heroic in the original. It echoes the Spanish word
barato
, which means “cheap.” In other words, Barataria is Bargainland, a Filene’s Basement for the pirate set, where all items have just fallen off the back of a truck. The bayous were a smuggler’s paradise, where good deals could always be found. Over time, Barataria became the subconscious of the city, New Orleans reflected in a dark mirror, a refuge for all those who’d been driven out or had chosen to live beyond the law. Thieves hid stolen goods there; fugitives vanished into the weeds. There was a permanent population of runaway slaves. It was a warehouse where the criminal inventory was stored. (Blackbeard took refuge in Barataria in 1718, drifted and dreamed as bounty hunters searched in vain.) It grew alongside the city. The bigger the warehouses on Tchoupitoulas, the better the business in the bay.

By the 1800s, Barataria was attracting buccaneers. It was everything a pirate wanted: far away yet close at hand, convenient, within reach of shipping lanes that carried the wealth of the New World. The men who lived there were not pirates in the traditional sense—they were privateers. In strongboxes they carried letters of marquesses, documents that deputized them into foreign navies, giving them the right to prey on ships flagged by enemy nations. In the age of Napoleon, everyone was at war with someone, making these letters easy to come by. The most notorious privateers were Frenchmen chased out of Santo Domingo or Cuba, sailors who preyed on Spanish galleons. Such men—many burned with hatred for Spain—could secure letters from a half dozen countries, but most sailed under the flag of Colombia, where Simón Bolívar was in revolt.

Barataria boomed in 1808 when the American Congress banned the importation of African slaves. From then on, all slaves would be bred (terrible verb) domestically. This was done partly to curb the nation’s addiction to slavery and partly to protect America from foreign ideologies, the notions of freedom and revolt that might, accidentally, in the way of cholera, be imported from a state like Haiti. But there were many in the South who preferred African-raised slaves for reasons that strike us as obscene: because they were more docile, stronger, darker; because, uncorrupted by America, they worked harder.

It’s not unlike what happened in America during Prohibition. Here was a group of criminals—gangsters in one case, buccaneers in the other—who were disorganized, smalltime, in it for a quick score. And here was a business, legitimate and thriving one minute, then, with the stroke of a pen, turned over to crooks. Anyone who partook in the African slave trade was now an outlaw. In this way, an aboveboard business became the province of pirates. Men who might have otherwise reformed or faded away—many of the gangsters of New York were on their way out, too, before Prohibition—now had a big-time industry to run. Soon after the law’s passage, privateers began preying on slow, fat-bellied ships heading for Cuba. They attacked, then carried the human cargo back to Bargainland. This meant serious money: sable coats, silk eye patches, a diamond stud for each ear. The result was more pirates, more pirate ships, more pirate guns, more pirate violence. It was a gang war like the gang war between Al Capone and Bugs Moran. Who will control the North Side? Who will control Barataria? It was hurting business. Planters and merchants were afraid to go to the bayous to make a purchase. This was a moment that demanded a leader, a strongman who could bring order to the pirate islands.

The origins of Jean Lafitte are difficult to pin down. Like a hero in a folk song, he seemed to arise from nowhere, fully formed, with teeth and claws, his mind buzzing with ideas. Some believed him the son of a sailor who stowed away to see the watery places when he was 15; some believed him the son of a nobleman whose parents were rounded up in the terror of the French Revolution; he went to the Caribbean because it was as far away as he could go. Some said he was raised in the Pyrenees. Some said he was raised in a French town on the Spanish border. According to William Davis, who wrote a book on the subject, Lafitte was born in 1782 in a fishing village on the Atlantic. As a young man, he traveled with his older brother, Pierre—they were as close as brothers get—to the colonies as part of the migration of French who fled the Revolution. In one story, they alight in Santo Domingo, where they thrive in business until the slaves revolt. The houses burn; smoke rises from the outskirts. Everything is on fire. The slave armies march through the fields, the standard-bearer carrying a pike topped with an impaled white baby—the flag of the rebellion.
The brothers were separated in the chaos. Pierre was on the last ship out—the helicopter that rises slowly from the rooftop as the Vietcong come over the wall.

Jean was waiting for his ship on the wharf in New Orleans, the great city spreading away like a stain, narrow streets, iron balconies, boulevards and taverns, a French city where the Lafittes were at home. Jean and Pierre made a name with the social set. Jean especially, who turns up in articles: a phrase, a bit of dialogue, accompanied by a physical description, a mention of his good looks. A shade over six feet tall, slender as a string, with dark hair, side-whiskers, and eyes that shade of blue known as robin’s egg. He had delicate hands and long fingers. His fingernails were clean, unusual for a pirate. Dandyish in dress, he preferred silk shirts, velvet tailcoats, ankle boots with brass clasps, a ruby ring on his pinky. He loved all women but had a weakness for those of mixed parentage, mulattoes and quadroons, and was often seen late at night wandering in the worst part of town. There is only one known likeness of Jean Lafitte, a quick sketch done by a man named Lacassinier, who worked for the Lafittes in Galveston. It shows a pirate with mournful eyes, his hair swept across his forehead. It could be Rimbaud or some other poet gone to seed in the bohemian taverns.