by Rachel Edelman
Marcela was born in New Orleans and grew up in Florida. We met freshman year at Amherst College. Six months after Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans, we traveled to Louisiana on a spring break service trip. One afternoon, Marcela invited me to join her for dinner with her godmother, Caroline. We waited for Caroline to pick us up at the gate of our FEMA volunteer camp, which housed around 2,000 college students and was patrolled around the clock by four National Guard members. “Y’all going into the French Quarter for some bourbon and beignets?” they asked.
“Yum,” I said. “Not tonight.”
Just then, a blue minivan pulled up and Caroline jumped out with her arms open, squealing, “Oh, Marcela!” At five foot nine or so, she towered over both of us. Her blue eyes were wide behind big round glasses that seemed to fog for a moment before she squeezed us both and whisked us away.
As I rode through the outskirts of New Orleans, her stories flowed like the sticky breeze across the Delta. Down each bend in the road, she’d point out a city block where a barge floated, or a swath of the city inundated by twenty feet of water for nearly three months. She drove us from poor white St. Bernard Parish to diverse middle-class Metairie on the east side of the canal, spared from the worst of the devastation. We picked up Caroline’s mother, Marie, who had recently moved in with Caroline, and headed out to a neighborhood seafood joint, the kind of place my father always sought out when we went to the beach. I could smell the clarified butter from the parking lot.
We sat at a table draped with a red checkered cloth. The windows were wide enough to invite a hint of the salty breeze. Marie sat down to my left, her glasses and gaze mirroring her daughter’s across the table.
“If you girls want a beer, order the Abita. It’s bitter, and it’s the best thing to drink with the seafood,” suggested Caroline.
The menu was a series of lists, no descriptions. Po’ boys, gumbos, all kinds of nautical creatures to eat boiled, fried, or steamed.
“It’s softshell crab season,” she told us. “We weren’t sure if we’d get any this year, but some of the boats are fixed up enough to go out again, thank goodness.”
Caroline could hardly stop smiling when she looked at Marcela, but whenever she glanced away or looked to her mother, I caught a glimpse of weariness around her eyes. Our beers arrived in cold dark bottles. When I put mine to my lips, its bitterness burst all over my tongue and then, all at once, was gone; a perfect palate cleanser for the rich sweetness of shellfish on the way.
“This was one of the first places to open up again after the storm. It was open a week before we found the house in Metairie.” Caroline’s house in the city proper had been flooded, drywall soaked. Even the studs were moldy. Her description of her ravaged home reminded me of the drywall I’d torn out earlier that day and the water-logged carpets I’d wrenched up with a crowbar the day before.
I grew up in Memphis, another food-loving Mississippi Delta city. Long before my time, traders used to travel south on the river with cash crops to sell at the port of New Orleans. They’d come home on steamboats, smelling of chicory, bourbon, and gumbo filé. I imagine them returning, telling their wives of the glorious bowls of gumbo and jambalaya.
Differences in regional cuisine notwithstanding, these Delta cities share an undying love of gumbo. In Memphis, it’s something that folks cook at home; you don’t see it so much in restaurants. It’s the food I crave when I’m homesick, the dish my Grandma makes when I visit. When our bowls of gumbo arrived, I began to feel right at home in this wrecked city, at ease with this family that was not mine. At the restaurant, the bowl before me contained Gulf shrimp and Andouille sausage instead of the chicken falling-off-the-bone I grew up with, yet the sauce was bound by the same rich brown roux that I learned to stir, perched on a stool in my grandma’s kitchen.
We sipped our soups and beers. As Caroline and Marcela shared recent stories about their families, I wondered how to ask Caroline about leaving and having her home destroyed, and then coming back to try to rebuild when all kinds of government officials had already hinted that the city wasn’t worth saving. The disaster had already created the largest Diaspora in U.S. history; was it really worth it to uproot all those people again to bring them back? Marcela and Caroline continued their exchange in English peppered with French. I talked with Caroline’s mother.
“I hadn’t planned on moving in with Caroline,” she said. “I liked my independence.”
“What do you think now?” I asked.
She sighed, looking down at her pale, wrinkled hands as she delicately peeled her shrimp. “I’m glad to have a roof over my head. It’d be hard to live alone right now. I don’t want to drive at night by myself; the National Guard’s still everywhere. You see your neighborhood on the news. It makes the place feel like a war zone.”
I nodded. She smiled and said, “But we’ve got seafood again.”
Soon enough, I saw two servers walk toward us in a billow of steam. One dished out the main courses: boiled shrimp for Marie, fried softshell crab for Caroline, shrimp po’ boy for Marcela, and oyster po’ boy for me. The po’ boys were overwhelming: six-inch-long cocoons of fresh French bread spread with butter and mayo, then scattered with lettuce and stuffed with fried seafood. I wondered if I’d even be able to taste the oysters through all the fixings, but with my first bite, every ingredient revealed its purpose: each was a foil for the fish itself. In one bite, you could taste every nuance of the salty-sweet, cornmeal-battered oysters played out through each component of the dish. It was so bold, so tangy, so bright.
For a few bites, none of us spoke. Then, Caroline divided up lumps of her crabmeat and passed around a shared plate to which the rest of us added bites for sampling. As we tasted spicy boiled shrimp and crispy crab, she told us about her son’s new school, and his frustration over closed soccer fields. He missed his friends who were still holed up in Houston or Birmingham.
“My son and I left for Baton Rouge with Mama the day before the evacuation order,” she told us. “My husband wasn’t even going to leave;” he was a cameraman for a local news station. “But then there was the mandatory order and even the news crews moved north. They hardly had time, really. He was headed out of the city, and—you know, I can’t even believe it—he went back for the cat. I’m just so grateful; we would’ve lost her. It would’ve been even harder to come home.”
“Why did you come back?” I asked. Caroline sighed. Marie looked down into the tablecloth. The aftertaste of my words was insensitive and stale. It was as though I was a creature of the land, crawling into the sea and asking where all the water came from. And how was it that one breathed there?
“We never imagined it would be so bad.” Caroline said. “But we couldn’t abandon this place. It’s too special. My husband’s from Ohio, but I grew up here. It’s not so often any more that you get a feeling of a place like you do here.”
“We were some of the lucky ones,” Caroline continued. “Our jobs are still here. Our family survived. But we still don’t know who else will come back.”
I took a sip of my beer and felt its bitterness soothe my nerves. I looked at the bottle: Abita Extra Bitter, brewed in New Orleans. Bottling date: 1/13/06, Expiration date: 6/5/06.
Well, I thought to myself, I guess the brewers must be back.
When we left the restaurant, it was dark. There were few working streetlights, and some neighborhoods were so dark I wondered if I was staring into Lake Pontchartrain. We drove back by Caroline’s house to drop off Marie. Caroline’s twelve year-old son, Ben, was home. He hugged Marcela and presented us each with Mardi Gras beads and candies from just a few weeks before. Then, Caroline drove us back to the FEMA camp in St. Bernard. I thanked her for her stories. She gave Marcela a long hug. And then she slipped her hand under her glasses to wipe her eyes. “Just don’t forget us here,” she said quietly, then waved and drove away.
Rachel Edelman is a writer and environmental advocate living in Boulder, Colorado. She enjoys helping others connect with the earth, especially through delicious food.
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