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So we headed off to a party in mid-city, where many of New Orleans’ civil rights lawyers and activists would be gathered. I had woken up that morning in a swamp, hadn’t showered since leaving Venice two days ago, and now was talking to people who had tried cases before the Supreme Court. Conversation was mostly cocktail-party style, on topics of interest to lawyers – dealing with Louisiana’s legal system (based on the Napoleonic Code and not on English law, and hence utterly unlike the law in all other 49 states); the death penalty in Louisiana; Louisiana’s insane maximum-security prison, the old plantation known as Angola; funding for public defenders. Many of the members of this admirable little subculture came from other states and were young; I suspected that many would burn out, too. But there were a number of veterans who had stayed with it their whole lives, and they had about them the kind of contented dignity you find in all people whose lives are leavened with purpose: it is a kind of happy sadness, or perhaps a sad happiness, which I think of whenever I think of the Beatitudes. I remember hearing in church the word makarios in the Beatitudes translated as “happy” (the work, I believe of the New American Bible translation, now revised (thank goodness), a translation so spiritually false it could only have been approved by a group of modern Catholic bishops). “Happy are those who weep.” But I think the word is referring to this mixture of happiness and sadness that good people experience when they live with full knowledge of both their own goodness and badness. “Blessed” ends up being the only translation for it.

And this was especially true of a gentle black man I met at the party there, somewhere about fifty years of age, who seemed contented and happy but also deeply sad. I am always stopped in my tracks when I meet people like this – in a society so focused on material well-being, so convinced that there is no suffering but material privation, and so ashamed of unhappiness when in conditions of material prosperity, the people who have suffered and known and accepted their suffering as suffering stand out in every crowd. And his story was so unique that I had already heard it, and had heard that he would be at the party. So it did not come as any surprise to me when I found out that he had spent twenty-seven years in prison, twenty of them on death row, for a murder he almost certainly did not commit.

His name was Ndume Olatushani. He was very gentle and kind, and I had met people like that in prison before; but you do not need a particularly violent disposition to wind up in prison. Being young and stupid and keeping the company of firearms is often enough. He was already serving one sentence for attempted murder in a gunfight when he was extradited to Memphis to stand trial for a murder which had occurred shortly before he had gone to jail; he had never been in Memphis, however. The most salient of the key pieces of exonerating evidence is that the one person who directly accused him of the crime was a good friend of the person who probably did commit the murder. (A long profile, including details of the legal case, is here; Mr. Olatushani is also a successful artist).

I can’t say that he said anything terribly profound, and the situation was not suited to profundities: he had a young child running around the party that he had an eye on the whole time, and there were other people there he wanted to speak with more than me. But his presence greatly affected me.

The death penalty went into abeyance briefly in the 1970s (six men were executed by the state from 1976 to 1982), then peaked in 1999 at ninety-eight executions nationally, and has fallen off somewhat, averaging around fifty a year in the past decade. But almost three thousand men in this country await execution on what is called “death row.” Almost all of the executions in the country occur in the South: since 1976, four men have been executed in the Northeast; eighty-four in the West; one hundred sixty five in the Midwest; and one thousand one hundred twenty six in the South.

Each one of those deaths represents a state-sanctioned, deliberate, cold-blooded murder of a person who had no power to resist, even if guilty; and we may say that some of those people were assuredly innocent. As a lawyer told me, rather offhandedly (this was elsewhere, not at this party), “Do miscarriages of justice occur? Of course.” It is no light thing to imprison a man for twenty-seven years if he is innocent; but at least he may go free, and marry, and have children (as Ndume has). But you cannot breathe the life back into a corpse. If we know that we cannot judge without error, then we should also commit ourselves to a process that acknowledges this truth: that we might be wrong and we might need to rectify our mistake later. The death penalty is not consistent with such a system.

I know that there are many people, and life is in some sense cheap; I know that we may die from silly mistakes that we make, and nature itself does not seem to value our lives very much.  And I know that the lives of men, and black men in particular, have always been held particularly cheap; but still, standing in that room with that man who had been condemned to death, and seeing his beautiful child who would have died in his body when they killed him, I burned with shame, to think that we, as a people, see fit to judge on whether such a man will live or die, and judge so terribly wrongly.

The old River Road, entering into New Orleans, takes on the distinctive qualities of the roads of that great city: it becomes a six-lane divided boulevard, with the extreme lanes reserved for parking, the sort of streets that form the neighborhood boundaries throughout the city; and it takes on the name of St. Claude Avenue. Black men sat on the stoops of the shotgun shacks lining the road; cat’s claw (Macfadyena unguis-cati) crawled over the rotting filigree of abandoned houses askew on their mud-planted foundations; aging white men with long hair and jeans got into their pickup trucks shouting parting jests at shopkeepers; young hipsters on old bicycles, sporting plastic-rimmed glasses and broad-striped shirts or summer dresses, pedaled awkwardly in the right lane; groups of shirtless black teenagers with the shorts pulled down around their thighs stood by the doors of corner bodegas. Temperature is defined as the movement of particles in a given area. All throughout St. Bernard Parish, as you approach New Orleans, you can feel the human temperature of the streets increasing: more and more people interacting, bouncing off each other, all moving within the field of vision. Now inside the borders of New Orleans it was beginning to boil. New Orleans has half the population it once had, but no matter: you still see more people than in any other American city besides New York, because in New Orleans they live their lives outdoors.

The street names were weird and amazing; all over America, streets have names like Oak and Chestnut and Washington and Main and Third; coming along St. Claude Avenue I found Lamanche, Tricou, Delery, Alabo, Caffin, Lizardi, Forstall, Egania, Piety. Even the names were unlike any other place. Some of the combinations seemed irresistibly poetic. Meet me at the intersection of St. Claude and Desire.

I had contacted my host from the Chalmette Battlefield, and was heading straight to his place at Louisiana and Lasalle. St. Claude Avenue grew increasingly familiar as I approached the French Quarter; it then became Rampart Street, and I saw the grand old oaks of Esplanade Street; remembered by seeing again how empty and desolate the north part of the Business District was; rode into the Garden District, where Tara still sat cheek-by-jowl with Port-au-Prince: mansion was the tentmate of crackhouse, and weedy vacancies the neighbor of aralia and tree fern. I saw the neighborhoods grow nicer and nicer as I headed uptown, while the roads stayed just as cracked and dismal and uneven (no city in America has worse pavements, due in part to poverty and in part to the subsiding mud the city is built on).

I rang the doorbell and was received with the warmest hospitality. And then, there I was, at a friendly house, the first stage of my trip done, Gulf to New Orleans; my odometer read 110 miles. I had done it in three days, seeing what I wanted to see, and in good health. I needed to average 40 miles a day to complete the river in two months; but this was close enough. I knew my body needed to start slowly: I hadn’t cycled 110 miles in the previous three years, and now I had done so much in three days. My back was starting to feel better, but my legs did hurt; I would take at least the next day off from my bike entirely.

“I don’t know if you’re tired,” my host said, “but I have a crawfish boil to go to right now, and then there’s a party right after that I’d like to go to as well. But if you want to sleep or just rest or whatever, you’ve got my cell number, you can meet me at the party later, or just stay here, take a bath, however you’d like.”

“Hell no!” I said. “Let’s go to that crawfish boil right now!”

Taking aim at Chalmette.

A general atmosphere of dereliction seems to be the Chalmette Battlefield’s way of confessing that it merits only a cursory visit; and I did not give it more. A cracked pavement circles an irregularly mowed field, with faded placards indicating the positions and movements of troops during the battle; atop a rampart sat a few cannons pointed at the refineries of Chalmette. I was the only visitor, and I went from placard to placard on my bicycle.

The victory, in 1815, excited a dispirited populace eager for some kind of national triumph over foe which had marched on Washington and burned the Capitol and White House; and enthusiasm lasted as long as America had few other victories over foreign foes; but today we mostly see the Battle of New Orleans as a slender and purposeless success. A peace treaty had already been signed ending the war, but since it was signed in Ghent, it took months for word to reach the Americas. The victory is said to have been caused by British braggadocio more than American virtue; the legend – and for all I know the truth of the matter – is that British officers contemned the ragtag army of their former colony, and executed their battle plan with an absolute minimum of generalship. The commanding officer did not attack the American army as it arrived, but rather waited until it had built entrenchments; ladders for crossing the trenches were acquired but not brought to the actual battle by the officer responsible for them; British officers ordered their men to charge the trench, in the teeth of cannons and muskets, to no evident purpose. By the end of the day the British had 2,000 casualties and the Americans 70.

Dumb charges are one of the themes of British military history, and the British seem very nearly to take pride in them; I suppose this mental peculiarity helped keep the British rich from the scaffold and guillotine. This particular dumb charge may have served some purpose, to curb British imperial designs for a week or so, or help convince the British to stick to the treaty they had signed; but sometimes it is hard not to think of how sad it is that human lives are thus squandered by the stupidity of their so-called superiors.

Some Americans also regret this battle because they say it gave us one of our worst presidents, Andrew Jackson. I spoke with someone recently who said that there were two presidents he really hated, admiration for whom always irked him: Woodrow Wilson, and Andrew Jackson. Jackson certainly gained great popularity from his victory in this battle. I am personally more inclined to think that he would have found some other way to become president. The country was not just a seaboard of thoughtful farmers and tradesmen anymore: the backwoods pioneers had become a major element of the nation, and it was time for one of them to become president. And the main accusation leveled against Jackson is not that he was a boor, but that he ordered America’s “final solution” for the Native Americans, deporting almost all to the West via the Trail of Tears. What Jackson did at a stroke the nation seemed bent on doing slowly anyway.

So I confess I do not know if the course of history would have been any different had that battle turned out otherwise; I am inclined to think that the place’s current desolation seems to indicate that we do not feel any special significance in the place. I think Jackson himself has similarly lost his significance in our national consciousness; he sits there in Jackson Square in New Orleans but I do not know if anyone really cares that he does; I think if a concerted effort to unseat him from the twenty dollar bill were attempted, say by Native American groups, I think they would succeed. I would not mind such a thing, only I would return to our old custom of putting the bust of Freedom on our money, rather than swamp Jackson’s imago with another of our Caesars.

I was curious to see Chalmette.  I remember one time I was speaking with a woman in New York who said she was from New Orleans.  “New Orleans!”  I said.  “What part?”  She paused a bit and then said, “Just outside New Orleans, actually.  You probably wouldn’t know it.”  “I might,” I said.  “I know more than I seem to.”  She said, “I’m from Chalmette.”  “CHALMETTE!” I said.  “YOU’RE A CHALMATIAN!”  She blushed, and I guess it wasn’t too nice of me to push her; if she wanted to be from New Orleans, she could just be from New Orleans.  But honesty is one of the indispensable things, and accuracy with it; I’m from Queens, which is only the same as being from New York City if you are talking to someone who has spent less than a week there.  I don’t shy away from the fact and I think it’s important I don’t.

Embarrassment is one of the great indicators of personality, and I was pretty interested to find out what about Chalmette could make someone not want to be from there.  I liked it because its people were so forceful and interesting; but I had to admit that visually it was ugly.  Many of the things people think of as being New Jersey, or Staten Island – suburban wasteland with toxic waste dump in the background – was closer to true in Chalmette than anyplace I had seen.  There were big oil tanks sitting behind suburban homes; a refinery spitting out dirty air; you could see massive ocean vessels moving up the river in the background along the main drag.  The industrial scale was entirely out of proportion with the simple suburban life there.  I think this fact would make me feel powerless – what difference does it make if I don’t smoke if I have to breathe fumes from the refinery anyway?  What difference if I clean up the sidewalk in front of my house if there is going to be a gravelyard at the foot of the road anyway?

Big boats on the river at Chalmette. Look at how low the road surface is.

I believe this is one of the psychological effects of American industrial life generally: personal life seems to vanish like a drop into the ocean of the vast forces of our society.  What difference do our personal decisions make against this backdrop?  I try to be environmentally conscious; but the real damage is done by industry anyway.  I try to be ethical; but the real problems are in vast corporations.  I believe in freedom and letting people live; but my government has its hand in the governments of two hundred other countries around the world.  And yet all of these larger forces are made up of, and in many ways serve, the small personal decisions we make.

Other things though, are quite simply out of our control.  The area east of New Orleans contains much low ground; the Lower Ninth Ward is near Chalmette.  There were abandoned houses and churches and businesses, and the big boats going by made it painfully clear just how much higher the water in the river was than the land it flowed by.  But there is always some element of human responsibility: Chalmette is an old town, built on a small bit of reasonably high ground.  What it cannot afford – as New Orleans too cannot afford it – is to spread itself out like a suburb from border to border.  Instead it probably could have been – and probably should be – heavily and densely developed on the high ground, and low ground left to uses that can flood without great loss.

St. Bernard Parish blackberries. Ripe in April!

I wasn’t eaten that night by an alligator, as it turns out; I woke up entire, and immediately hopped on my bike to do a little morning tour of the park. There were all kinds of wading birds everywhere; they flew off as soon as I was within a hundred feet or so.  I found ripe blackberries and ate a great deal of them, and then found ripe wild strawberries as well. These last were larger than, and equally insipid as, any wild ones I had seen. I have heard it said that this species of strawberry, which invades lawns, is a European introduction, though I do not know that. As delicacies they are worthless, but I imagine that like most wild foods they do have some kind of nutritional value.

When the sun got over the treetops, I spread out my goods, which had taken on some dew in the night, and then read and mulled while they dried. I checked my maps, and by the time I had packed up it was after ten.

Coming into town was a shock, after a night in the swamp with the wild animals. St. Bernard State Park is eighteen miles from the French Quarter, and the gates of the park mark the beginning of the conurbation known as New Orleans. My maps told me I was in Poydras; the people told me I was in Violet; it made no difference, really. I would be surrounded by people and buildings for the next five days, from one end of New Orleans to the other.

Wild strawberries.

The inhabitants of this East End of New Orleans are known to be loud and brash; those from Chalmette are called “Chalmatians,” those from Violet, by analogy, “Violations.” All told the area is known as “the Parish.” All counties in Louisiana are called parishes; but this one is special, the way Long Island, in a city full of islands, is the island. My first experience confirmed the stereotype. A car in front of me veered suddenly to the right, blocking my path; as there was traffic, I stopped. The driver, a beautiful but somewhat used-up woman – half the women I saw looked like they either had done drugs or dated someone who had – leaned over the six-year-old girl in her passenger seat to speak with someone walking by. “WHY DIDN’T YOU ASK ME I WAS RIGHT THERE!” she yelled at him. “NO I LIVE DOWN THE BLOCK WITH JOHNNY NOW! YEAH! COME OVER ANYTIME YOU NEED SOMETHING! FOR REAL!” Then she veered back into traffic. Young people looked too skinny, too tattooed, too tanned and leathery or too pale; everything seemed off and weird. Black men with weird red and yellow eyes walked each one alone down the road. The shoulder of the road seemed to have been paved with broken glass and garbage.  Nothing in particular was photogenic.

I wanted to check my email to get the phone number of my host for the night – a friend of a friend – and I stopped off at a bakery. They had internet and I got a donut and took a seat. I barely got anything done, of course, because the woman who worked there – a woman in her sixties wearing much makeup – kept coming right over to my table to speak to me.

“Wheah you from honey? New Yawk! I was in New Yawk once. Oh God, like forty yeeuhs ago. I hated it. Too much. Too many people. I mean – I loved the Broadway shows, I want to take my dawtuh-in-law to the Broadway shows. But othuhwise, no.” Then off she went, going out of the shop, into the shop, doing various things. Not long after she came back to my table. “You know the one thing about New Yawk I liked – this one thing kind of saved it for me. On every block, you’ve got those guys selling like icees in a little papuh cup! Every block! I think I lived on those things. Now that was pretty coo, I thought.” I didn’t want to tell her I hadn’t seen anyone selling Italian ices like that in twenty years.

She came back to show me a picture of her as Queen of the Mardi Gras Parade in Violet. “Oh yeah, that was me, honey.” I would not have recognized her, to be honest. She had been, indeed, quite beautiful. “I was a pretty hot bitch! I had some good times. I made that costume, it took me like five weeks and it cost, I mean today it would be thousands of dollars.” It looked like a Vegas showgirl outfit – very large, with a lot of feathers and sequins. “That was 1982. I had been working for yeeuhs around heah and so I was something of a community figyuh, let’s say. I had that outfit in my closet, lost it in the stome. We had fifteen feet of watuh heah. Lost all that stuff – all my furnicha, all my pickchas, my close, all the memories. So sad. So sad what that stome did.”

She went off and spoke with a neighbor who came in. Apparently Jodi had just gotten a restraining order against her boyfriend. “Relationships should be about babies,” she declared to her neighbor. “Am I right? That’s what it’s about. So make sure it’s someone who would be a good fathuh. Because nowadays you just don’t know about people othuhwise. But you can tell if someone will be a good fathuh. That’s instinct.”

She went off to the back room, then back to my table. She put her fingers on the table as she looked down at my seated self. “And you want something to tell people in New Yawk about honey, how bout this. Aftuh the stome Habitat for Humanity – you know, Jimmy Cahtuh, all that bullshit – they came around heah and they offered to build people houses for fawty thousand. So people were like, ‘Okay, great!’ So they paid them to build houses. But they would staht and then run out of money – I mean, you can’t build a house for fawty thousand dollahs honey. I’m not tawkin about a FEMA trailuh, I mean a house. So people said, ‘You said you weh buildin us houses, now you want mo money?’ But if they didn’t pay up the Parish would come around and take theah propuhty away, because it was an eyesore. I tell you, it was all one big scam, Habitat for Humanity, look it up. Nobody tawks about this stuff.” [I can find nothing to confirm any of this.]

Later she was back. “You people from New Yawk always love to heah about alligatuhs. I just had one, it was sad, I had to call the cops, he was in my back yahd all the time. I love them, but not in my back yahd, you know?”

“So the cops come and kill them?”

“Right, if it’s a nuisance. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff around heah. My son, he said even if he wuddn’t bawn and raised heah, he’d still wanna live heah. Because of the coachuh. Heah you can sing and dance down the street. Anyplace else they lock you up.”