Authors: Jonathan Raban
I started to follow a woman. She had come out from a shack across the street wearing a long blood-crimson robe and a dirty white wimple. She had the build of a Russian lady discus thrower. Mounted on precarious stiletto heels, she wobbled up the sidewalk. No one else seemed to think her appearance was at all odd. Small boys in three-piece Sunday suits zapped past her on roller skates without giving her a second glance. At the corner, she was met by another woman who was wrapped in a sheet of spangled gilt lamé and had covered her hair with a lace cap. Keeping my distance, I trailed the women to the door of an ugly concrete building at the edge of a railroad embankment: the Israelite Spiritual Church.
After a minute or two of shuffling uncertainly in the dirt road outside, I pushed the door open and was met by a man in ordinary clothes.
“You a minister, brother?”
“No, I’m just … a seeker.”
“Okay, come on in. I thought you was a minister. You come to testify?”
“No. Is that okay?”
“Sure. You go right in.”
The church was almost dark. Shabby red curtains had been pulled across the windows, and what light there was came from a small forest of colored candles planted around the altar. The room was stuffy with the smell of incense. The names of the tribes of Israel were painted on the walls, and the candles made a kind of bright theater of the altar, where three plaster figurines had been placed one in front of another. The Virgin Mary, slightly chipped, stood at the back; Jesus Christ just
ahead of her; then, much the biggest and best-painted of the three, an Indian chief in a feather headdress. The candlelight picked out the sharp points of his nose and chin and made dark caves of his eyes.
I guessed who he must be. Chief Black Hawk was the leader of a lost tribe of Israel; in New Orleans he had been taken up as a patron figurehead by an eccentric sect of black Israelites.
Even in this small church, the congregation was sparse. The women had their heads covered and wore what I took to be old Mardi Gras costumes. There were only four men, and none of them had a hint about him of the women’s wild finery—their Lurex, feathers, bangles and lace.
The ceremony itself was a ragged, improvised assembly of bits and pieces. Nothing happened in any particular order. It was as if these people had come together to try to reconstruct a religion which they had all forgotten. There were fragments of Catholic ritual stirred up with Baptism; a touch of television’s
700 Club;
a peppering of black magic and astrology.
The organist kept on drifting out of time with the opening gospel song. Then there was a garbled version of the Nicene Creed. The woman in the red robe and the wimple stood in front of the altar and recommended the 91st Psalm as a surefire specific against disasters.
“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day …”
“That’s right—”
“Sure ’nough!”
“Now, you just say the words of this psalm! They is good for auto accidents …”
“Right!”
“You don’t want no trouble with
guns
… that’s all down here. You don’t want no
knifings.
”
“No, I don’t, Lord!”
“No snakes and dragons! That’s what I read here. All you got to do, you got to say the words, and you got protection. You got the Lord’s protection. You got the protection of His wings!”
“Yes, Lord!”
“A-men!”
Yet there was something faint and lackadaisical even in these answering calls from the congregation in the dark. They, too, were echoes from another, barely remembered kind of Christianity. The service lurched into long silences, as if no one knew what to do now. Haltingly, the testimonies began. A woman stood up at the back of the church.
“I want to give thanks to the Lord and Chief for many re-wards both material and spiritual.”
“Oh, yes, and so I do!”
“Last Tuesday morning, my daughter and son-in-law, they didn’t have no furniture in their home. Didn’t have no table. Didn’t have no chairs. Didn’t have no tee-vee. They didn’t have nothing. Friday in the evening, by the grace of the Lord …”
“Oh, yeah!”
“Oh, praise my Lord!”
“Friday in the evening, they done have a TV, dining table, four good chairs … They didn’t want for nothing, praise the Lord!”
“Unh-hunh—”
“A-men!”
Another woman rose.
“I want to give my thanks to Jesus!”
“That’s right!”
“For many rewards both material and spiritual—”
“Oh, Jesus, yes!”
“He done lead us in peace all the way from January first—”
“Sure he has!”
“To December nine!”
“That’s right!”
Even the operation of the calendar had become a miracle. In the flickery red gloom, the world outside seemed a very sad place indeed. There was nothing in it to rely on, no reasons to account for its workings. One was left with only magic spells and charms, the last rags and tatters of religious tradition. Like the fortune-teller and the bartender, these women were squatters in the ruined house of Christian belief. I slid from my seat. The dreary pathos of the voices and the suffocating smell of incense had caused a sudden nausea in my gut. Later, someone said, “Oh, you must have found a
voodoo
church!”—as if I had hit on one of New Orleans’ most exotic tourist attractions. It was not like that at all.
I was awakened by the insistent scratch of the maid’s broom on the pine boards outside my door. Diagonal bars of sunlight were falling through the shutters and formed a bright palisade across the posts at the foot of the bed. They were pretty, New Orleans bars, but they still made me feel that I was being held in detention here. I took my charts of the Intracoastal Waterway down to breakfast, packed my bags and took a cab to the wharf.
Tourists were standing in line for joyrides on the restored steamboats, and the river was clogged with tows, tugs and cargo ships. I wriggled my own boat out between the high hulls overhead and forced it up against the powerful grain of the current. Slopping about on the tail ends of steep wakes, I waited for the traffic to quiet down and cut across the channel to the far shore, where I searched for the hidden door in the levee that would let me into the Harvey Canal Lock.
The steel gates hissed shut behind me and blacked out the Mississippi; or rather, they blacked out its official, regimented course. Two hundred years of dredging and levee building had squashed the river into a tight man-made conduit; nowadays it emptied into the Gulf through a mile-wide open drainpipe. The Mississippi itself had held quite different notions of how things should be. At times of high water, it had come bursting apart, breaking its banks and fanning over a thousand square miles of southern Louisiana, scoring the country with seasonal rivers, creeks and ditches. These old floodways had turned into an unmappable jigsaw of alluvium and water: part swamp, part lake, part bayou. For a hundred miles south and west of New Orleans, one could lose oneself in the maze the river had left behind. The charts showed the area as a worms’ nest intersected by the broad turnpike of the Intracoastal Waterway, with long thin villages lining the biggest of the bayous. I had a one-dollar Woolworth’s compass; I wanted to get just lost enough to know that I’d found an ending.
The Harvey Canal was a city street of shipyards which suddenly petered out into a wooded swamp. One moment there were dry docks, cranes and men driving forklift trucks along the wharf beside me; the next, there was the dense December green of mangroves and cypresses; a jagged pane of water; a pelican hauling in the unwieldy stalk of its neck in preparation for takeoff; a family of turtles lolloping off a log; another country.
I crept into it as slowly and as quietly as I could, trying to let the boat do no more than stroke the water as it went. It was strange water, too. Ahead, lit by misty sunshine, it was a milky, streaky green like polished soapstone. There was no wind and no current. It looked so stable an element that one might have carved ashtrays and telephone stands out of it. Behind the boat, though, where the motor was stirring it, it was thick and peaty like black syrup.
Riding the river had never been like this. I lit a pipe, set a mug of coffee on the seat in front of me and decided to give up being a worried captain and start becoming an idle passenger. At last I could afford to lean over my own rail and let my eyes wander.
The surface of the bayou was littered with clusters of bulbous water hyacinths which kept on tangling with my propeller. Looking back, I saw something else bobbing in the wake … a sort of gourd, the color of moldy cheese. I turned the boat around to see what it was.
It was a dead armadillo, floating modestly face down. Its grubby-yellow shell was jointed like a rack of lamb. Its lizardy tail dangled limply behind it and its head was sunk too deep for me to see.
Poor, dim, dogged armadillo. It was one of hundreds of thousands who had set out on a great trek, and nearly all had died like this one. Until not long ago, the armadillos hadn’t been able to get out of Mexico. They were nearsighted and no good at swimming. Their ambition to reach the United States was blocked by the Rio Grande. They snuffled up to its south bank at night, missed their footing on the edge, and drowned. They were comically unfitted to be long-distance travelers, but dead set on making the trip. Then an armadillo discovered a highway bridge, and the animals began to sneak past the customs-and-immigration posts in the small hours. A sensible armadillo would have been content to have reached Texas. He might have settled down and lived comfortably for years, like other wetbacks, on a forged Social Security card. By this time, though, the habit of making long journeys had become second nature to the armadillos. They turned east along the Gulf coast. Most of them drowned in the swamps and bayous of Louisiana; a few lucky and intrepid ones made it to the west bank of the Mississippi and drowned there.
Just recently, people had begun to see armadillos in their gardens in New Orleans. They were coming in across the road bridges in ones and twos. In twenty, thirty, forty years, perhaps, the first exhausted armadillo would stagger through the Holland Tunnel and sniff the air of Manhattan. I was with the armadillos. It was impossible not to feel a certain kinship with these purblind foreigners as they hoboed their way along the huge and dangerous length of the United States.
I turned from the Bayou Barataria into the Intracoastal Waterway. It wasn’t the dull canal I’d feared; it was just a buoyed clearing of open water through the swamp. The marsh was broken with rafts of forest. The mangroves were poised high on their arched, clawlike roots, while the cypresses were surrounded with black woody stumps that grew out of the water, presumably to take the air. Almost every branch supported a thick parasitic colony of Spanish moss. The romantic associations of this stuff baffled me. It was always said to “drape” or “festoon” the trees on which it grew, as if it were a valuable ornament; yet it looked
exactly like the matted dirt which collects inside the bags of vacuum cleaners, a purply-gray mess of carpet sweepings. It didn’t festoon trees. It soiled them, as if someone had tipped the contents of a giant Hoover over the forest. The real moss, though, was as brilliant as malachite. Tempted to stop and picnic, I tested it with an oar: the green crust broke; the oar came back coated in black slime.
The surface of the swamp was as fragile as the moss. The wake of an eastbound tow, heading across the neck of Lake Salvador, suddenly smashed its level glaze. All its colors came apart. The water darkened, spread and drowned the marsh grass. Mangroves shivered on their stilts. Flights of small cheeping waders came up like puffs of gunsmoke, and a disturbed eagle flapped from the top of a tall cypress tree. For a minute, the tow drained the land behind it, dragging the water away to reveal shallow valleys of putrescent mud. As the swamp settled back, one could smell the rottenness of the place; it had a dead reptilian stink. Before, the air had been salty and fresh; now it was thick with silage, oil, skunk fetor, alligator guts.
For somewhere that looked so inhospitably wild at close quarters, the swamp was oddly full of signs of human busyness. Long marches of power pylons crossed it, going purposefully off to nowhere. The horizon was marked by a line of irregularly typed A’s and I’s, where rigs and drills were burrowing in the sludge. In the little bayous that turned left and right from the main channel, I’d seen fishermen in jonboats and wooden pirogues. Their nets hung beneath neat circles of plastic detergent bottles. The bayou towns themselves were hidden behind trees, but their water towers showed as the tallest objects in the landscape: great aluminum mushrooms on slender stalks, with the town names painted on them to be read as mariners’ landmarks.
LAROSE. CUT OFF. LOCKPORT. VALENTINE
.
I reached a crossroads where the Bayou Lafourche went north and south off the Intracoastal Waterway, tossed a quarter to decide which way to go, and turned right, toward the distant water tower of Lock-port. The bayou was a crowded street of brackish water. The towns, such as they were, ran one block deep along its bank, their houses built out on poles and jetties and leaning over moored skiffs and fish traps. I stopped at a bar where the bartender was sitting on his front step, baiting a crab basket with chicken necks. He rinsed his hands in the bayou and followed me in.
“Where have all the alligators gone?” I asked.
“Alligators? Oh, t’ey is mostly asleep for t’e winter now. You go furt’er down, into t’e salt marshes, maybe you see t’em t’ere still.” His
voice was Cajun; a quick, liquid, front-of-the-mouth chirrup.
Biba-biba-biba-bib
.
“But in the summer …?”
“Oh, yeah, we got ’em all along. Down the bayou, there’s a big hole you have to watch if you go fishing. They say they’s not man-eaters round here. But they’ll get in the boat with you. Tat’s when tey got teir little ones wit tem.”
I joined him out on his step and nursed my beer. Another cheesy-looking armadillo was floating in the scum.
“They can’t see too good. They fall in,” the bartender said.