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Terry Odell
Author, Terry Odell, writes romance with a twist of mystery. Recently her brother, Mark Carter, took a trip to New Orleans with CulinaryCorps. Below is the story about his trip and an update on whats happening in the "Big Easy". It also gives you more reasons to return to the city and return again.
Every year we are helping New Orleans to grow a little stronger, a little better, and we have a great time while we help out. Please come and join Heather for her Writers for New Orleans Workshop. September 4-6, 2009. For more info contact Connie Perry (337) 319-5783.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Doors: A Culinary Visit to New Orleans
Today, I'm pleased to be turning the place over to someone near and dear to me--my brother. As a young kid, he'd get up early Sunday mornings and cook breakfast. Pancakes, waffles, coffee cake, you name it. (He confessed later that he did it because he didn't like fried eggs, which is what our mother always made on Sundays.) His love of cooking, and of food, continued, and he became a chef. He's left that life ... or has he? And I'm proud to see the volunteer gene is evident in him, too. Welcome, Mark Carter.
What you notice first are the doors. Everywhere, in all parts of the city. Bleached and flaking paint. Open and exposed grain. Rotting and
delaminating wood. Holes and gaps. I thought that people had simply sealed the
entrances to abandoned stores for security; temporary with no thought of posterity. When I saw them in most every neighborhood I thought that they remained from the early warnings of the approaching hurricane; storm windows of a sort waiting for the all-clear. But why had they been painted and continue to remain in place, weathering?
I’ve recently returned from a week in New Orleans and Ocean Springs, Mississippi with an organization called CulinaryCorps. Twelve of us, cooks and chefs at various stages, and from numerous cities and countries, volunteering to cook and more.
Thoughts that we might be ‘late to the party’ were quickly dispelled. One can limit oneself to indulging in the Quarter and have the familiar boisterous, tasty and tawdry New Orleans experience. That has been and will no doubt be the city’s saving grace. The cash cow of tourism was mostly spared and continues to provide visitors most of what they have come to experience and expect. It remains crazy, loud and over-amped; a city like no others. But its dirty little not-so-secret remains just a short drive, or even a walk, away. You can easily select your New Orleans experience. All fun? Stay around the Quarter. Despair? The Lower 9th Ward is just for you.
But those doors seemed ever present. They were stoic portals to vacant storefronts in the Warehouse and Garden districts. Sad but steadfast entrances to homes giving them a “Do Not Enter” look. Saddest of all were the ones just barely intact into a very revived elementary school where vibrant and optimistic teachers maintained their composure amidst hyper-energetic kids. Somehow, the city mustered its enthusiasm and love of itself, powered on and decided that the doors can wait. It has recognized its priorities. There are businesses, homes and lives to rebuild. Everyone will figure out how to get in.
The people we encountered exhibit a remarkable resilience. Perhaps it is the upside of laissez-faire, with nothing lazy about it. The government realizes that it has an impossible task ahead and the locals know that it probably won’t do much of anything, anyway.
More than once we were told of the silver lining of Katrina. A horribly dysfunctional city broken to bits is filled with people organizing to create a new New Orleans, this time done right(er). Schools have started gardens so the children can see how food grows and help turn it into lunches. Charter schools pop up in formerly abandoned locations to help raise the level of education from what they admit were sorry levels.
We helped cater a fund raising event for the opening of Liberty’s Kitchen, a non-profit that hopes to provide at-risk youth with work skills and responsibilities in a formerly flooded building. They know that it’s one thing to teach someone some employable skills, but that won’t be enough. They’ve wisely included a guidance, literacy and counseling component as well as annual follow-up to move the students into jobs and careers.
Throughout, the city is the look of a work in process. Like venturing through a construction site, there are still a layers of dried mud, broken pavement and cracked concrete. I always felt unclear: was this unfinished construction or remains of destruction? It’s probably a little of both.
And expect to get lost, or at least not know where you are. Mayor Nagin decided that it was going to be the big projects that got the first attention. Street signs blown down in the hurricane are low on his list. You can drive for blocks not knowing what street you’re on or what you have crossed. Unless again, you are in the Quarter.
But it’s definitely not a city shrouded in a veil of gloom. While the consensus is that many of those who left are most likely gone for good, the remaining population is still filled with a deep love of their home and a desire to share it with visitors. The heat of the South had not yet arrived but the area’s warmth has clearly never left. Our group ate at Dooky Chase, a landmark restaurant a little outside of the Quarter. It is run by Dooky’s eighty-plus year old wife who is thrilled just to have been able to reopen it years after Katrina. Her grandson, recently graduated from the Cordon Bleu has joined her kitchen. She’s grateful and eager to teach him some Cordon Noir.
But in spite of the restaurant’s legendary status and clientele, she’s sad to admit that there still are not enough employable residents to open for more than lunch. She, in her pink chef’s coat, entertained us with stories of her favorite breakfast (quail cooked in fruit jelly) and Obama’s blunder (asking for hot sauce to put on her gumbo). That evening best distills my reason for wanting to volunteer there.
I have a fondness for food. I’ve visited New Orleans three times prior to this trip and have always found the city to be one of the most atypical American cities. Not because of its maintenance of the French Quarter but how the diverse groups and circumstances came together and both melded and upheld their identities. American culture tends to steamroller itself over nuance and removes many of the vestiges of an area’s origins. Somehow New Orleans partially escaped this process or was too mighty to succumb.
I love that it managed to do that, its individual parts and the final results. I suspect that many feared that in the ensuing restoration much of what built and preserved the culture might disappear. I worried that it required a certain critical mass of each group to both preserved what they had contributed and to ensure that the fruit of that mixture, what makes New Orleans a live and not a static culture, may not be able to endure with such a population loss. It’s my hope that the area’s renewal keeps those qualities; that the displaced families would find what they always loved about the place and hopefully to see it improved. That’s certainly no easy task and certainly not in a city mired in its government’s past behavior.
How do you bring the thousands back to the devastated Lower 9th? It’s easy to write the area off as geographically compromised. It’s adjacent to an industrial canal. Many of the residents were retired, disabled and unable to work. In spite of this, more of the area’s residents owned their own homes than any other part of the city. Many families had lived in the same homes for generations, some tracing their history there to when the area was first developed post-plantations. Numerous New Orleans musicians called the Lower 9th home.
After Katrina, “home” was mostly metaphoric. Today, perhaps ten percent of the homes have been either rebuilt or restored, the district being mired in a circular impasse. In order to rebuild their homes, property owners must prove ownership by producing a title. Residents are often several generations removed from an original owner as Louisiana follows a modified civil law and paperwork may never have existed. And if it did, it as well as most other possessions were lost. An owner may not be able to prove his claim. And, they may be living in Houston or Baton Rouge or anywhere because of displacement and not sufficiently inclined to return to rebuild their homes since they may be unable to produce the required documentation. You need a job to qualify for a loan and there are fewer of them. And the schools are still in the process of being rebuilt. And if you rented, your landlord is probably having the same difficulty in trying to rebuild. Lots of ands.
The city stated that they would repossess property if it appeared that it was abandoned by their owners. Groups of volunteers and neighbors regularly mow empty lots and remove debris, often for people they never knew just to maintain the appearance of their presence. No one knows how many will or intend to return. The area has the look of a newly begun housing development. Houses are scattered about, some new and some restored.
Make it Right has designed and built almost one hundred energy efficient homes using green materials so that they are both economic to live in and also safe. Novel designs stand out in the area but prove that simple housing doesn’t have to be boring and redundant. Owners who have moved into one of these homes exhibited tremendous pride for having returned and qualified for someplace new with a capital ‘N’.
Habitat for Humanity is probably the best known rebuilding organization there and their Musicians’ Village is their most cited. However, they and their volunteers are also actively rebuilding in St. Bernard’s parish southeast of the Lower 9th Ward, a neighborhood that suffered significant structural damage to 100 percent of its residential and commercial buildings.
Our group of volunteers had the distinct pleasure of visiting their “Camp Hope” facility where they feed and house the hundreds of volunteers cycling in and out of their program. Using food that has been donated to them, we ‘crafted’ a menu heavy on frozen and packaged ingredients by breaking into several groups and produced salads, entrees or desserts for the hundred-plus volunteers expected to file through the reclaimed school cafeteria. As the first tired workers began coming through the line, phone calls and text messages to other volunteers quickly swelled the size of the group to well over two hundred.
While our “Evening in Italy” menu may not have been anyone’s idea of gourmet (I’ve never cooked for so many people without using a knife), it was a meal unlike any they had while staying at the camp. When, at the end, our group was introduced to them, we were greeted with a standing ovation. Trust me, they are the ones doing the heavy lifting and deserve all of the thanks we could offer.
I remain the same cynical skeptic of things in general. But I’ve discovered over time that it is just that outlook that enables me to truly appreciate those things that can make it through my filters. I went because my greatest fear is that what it took to become New Orleans and to continue to be New Orleans might falter from a lack of bodies, lost diversity, grandfathered inefficiency and time out of the spotlight. It’s a trite saying to tell of the appreciation that everyone we met and encountered had for not only the work that we were doing but for just showing up. It’s impossible to grasp their request that we remind everyone that the city is still there, still cooking and being New Orleans, as being necessary.
Please -- take some time to visit Culinarycorp and Liberty's Kitchen to learn more about these programs.
Culinary Corp
Liberty Kitchen
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