It's been customary to write about New Orleans as a foreign city. The tropics are often mentioned, particularly if the writer has had the bad luck to arrive in August: steamy, sensuous, tempting, vaguely dangerous. Some have dwelt on New Orleans' French origins, some on its Latin flair for celebration. It has been described as Mediterranean and Levantine. In 1960, when I first started writing about New Orleans, I told a man I knew there -- a wise man, who had spent his whole life in New Orleans, taking in the show -- that some of the goings-on connected with the desegregation of the schools struck me as, to put it politely, bizarre. "What you have to remember to keep it all in perspective," he said, "is that this is not the southern United States. This is northern Costa Rica."
There are, of course, enclaves in a lot of American cities that feel foreign because one group or another clings to a way of life that originated in some other country. In New Orleans the mainstream can have foreign ways. No one who ever took a close look at Mardi Gras could come away with the impression that it's merely a straightforward American spectacle in the tradition of, say, the Indianapolis 500 or the Pasadena Tournament of Roses. In 1964 I was in New Orleans to do a piece on the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, a black burial society whose members traditionally paraded on Mardi Gras in blackface, wearing grass skirts and tossing coconuts to the crowd. A week before Mardi Gras, I watched cheerfully drunk white longshoremen boogie down the street for hours in women's clothing behind a black jazz band, in what they called a practice parade of their Carnival marching society -- as if any of that took any practice. I talked to light-complected, Catholic, French-named blacks who said that the Zulu Parade was what you might expect of the darker, Protestant blacks they still occasionally referred to then as "American Negroes." I interviewed prominent business leaders whose Carnival "krewes" -- the organizations whose floats parade through the streets during the Carnival season on the way to elaborate balls -- were at the center of their lives. If lengthy and solemn discussions about which debutante should be queen of Rex or Comus are carried out every year by the business leaders of a city -- not the wives of the business leaders, the business leaders -- could it be an American city?
New Orleans has traditionally nurtured some distinctly non-American attributes, like indolence. There have always been a good number of people who are not eager to get ahead. Even its businessmen have had a reputation for being only mildly industrious and distinctly non-entrepreneurial. New Orleans has been known as a place content to make do with its natural endowments -- a great port on the Mississippi River, and a share of the state oil money, and a reputation for wickedness and charm that drew a steady stream of tourists for decades. For most of this century, New Orleans hasn't done much more than make do. It has never made a fetish out of equipping schools or paving streets. It has always had a lot of poor people; its rich people have never been seriously rich.