Last Christmas Day New Orleans, it started to snow. We were eating Creole spiced turkey with all the trimmings at Tujagues restaurant in the French Quarter, when the waiter, his eyes wide with wonder, announced: “It’s snowing in New Orleans on Christmas Day. Ain’t never seen that before. This sure is the darndest weather.” A single saxophone was playing a jazzed-up ‘Silent Night’ outside, and we all piled out to stare at the sky as the children danced on the pavement and fat flakes drifted down over the wrought-iron balustrades.My sister, who has lived in New Orleans for a decade, got out of town on Sunday before the hurricane struck. She loaded her young son and some belongings into the station wagon and didn’t stop until they reached Huntsville, Alabama. Behind her, the darndest weather was laying waste to the city: a great tide of filthy water washing down Bourbon Street, on the day the music died. Wars and Prohibition and the Great Depression and moral disapproval couldn’t stop the party in New Orleans, but Hurricane Katrina could.New Orleans holds a unique place in the American imagination because, in truth, it is a place apart from America. In a country inclined to puritanism, the Big Easy is the almost Mediterranean enclave where America came to drink and eat too much, to stay up late and behave badly. No American city, with the exception of New York, has such a vivid mythology; no city, including New York, is more conscious of its own romance. The normal rules do not apply here. New Orleans is famed for its jazz and blues, but it also has what so many American cities lack: soul. Corrupt, voluptuous and profoundly literate, New Orleans marches to the beat of a different drummer, and if it wants to defy convention by snowing on Christmas Day for the first time in living memory, then that is what it does.I first fell in love with New Orleans as a student when I travelled down from New York for Mardi Gras: a lost weekend that still tastes, 15 years later, of a cocktail called (I shudder) a Hurricane. Even the street names beckoned huskily: Amour, Abundance, Treasure. The city is a spicy human gumbo : a mixture of Creole and Cajun, white and black, French, English, Spanish Irish, German and African, the kitsch and the cool. Congo Square in New Orleans was the first place where slaves could freely sing and dance and practise voodoo while African culture was outlawed across the South. The city became a haven of African spirituality, from which jazz, the blues and Louis Armstrong would emerge. People who don’t fit with the rest of America gravitate here..Excerpted from The Times
