The second line for Tuba Fats arrives at the Cabildo and St. Louis Cathedral. Jazz funeral, Jackson Square, New Orleans, Louisiana, January 18, 2004/ STEVE MOGA
January 22, 2006 * It's been two years since I took this photograph, nearly to the day, and I am on my way back to New Orleans. Those final moments two years ago, just before Karra and I got in the cab to go to the airport to return to Los Angeles, standing in Jackson Square in the setting sun, remain seared in my mind. Tomorrow I'll be back for the first time since the flood.
I fell in love with New Orleans thirteen years ago. Shanti and I drove through the night and the next day, twenty-seven hours from Minneapolis, stopping only for the World Catfish Festival in Belzoni, Mississippi. Arriving in the Marigny in the early evening, we had no idea what we were in for. In my memory, all of the sites and sounds are swirled together now- the girl in the parsley headress surrounded by thousands of tea lights, Monday's red beans and rice and live jazz in the Treme, the sound of plastic beads jangling against bicycle handlebars bouncing over potholes, visiting punks upriver squatting in a shack on the wrong side of the levee, watching Jamie juggling, walking to the Saturn Bar, the sound of Rodney's voice saying "Would anyone care to have a cocktail?" I was hooked.
Later I'd read about the city and its food and traditions, hear the music, and I'd visit again- learning about slavery and Storyville and cemeteries and okra and cast iron and housing projects and parades and what color a roux should be and shotguns and camelbacks and all things New Orleans. I studied city planning and urban design and historic preservation and poverty and social justice and gastronomy and jazz music and cultural history. And New Orleans continues its hold on me.
This time, though, I return with a heavy heart, thoughts and images of physical destruction and human suffering foremost in my mind.