Exactly What It Means to Miss New Orleans
/By Whitney Magendie
Durham, North Carolina
A regrettable trend seemed to peak in social media around 2015: people writing break-up letters to their cities of residence after they had decided to move away. “Dear New York” was the most popular model, with “Dear Los Angeles” in a predictable second place. Honorable mention goes to the person who wrote and published the break-up letter to Los Angeles Chipotle, specifically.
I rolled my eyes at treating residence as a monogamous relationship, although I begrudgingly recognized that feeling myself. I scrolled through catalogs of all the ways the concrete jungle had wronged a faithful partner, newsprint pages of lovers' laments at affairs turned sour, Dear John letters itemizing and justifying their reasons for leaving. They were, each of them, the most conscious of uncouplings.
New Orleans was not spared from this trend, and I read dozens of different “it’s not me, it’s you” screeds during my final few years living there. My primary takeaways were:
There are an awful lot of 20-something upper middle class white people from the Northeast who think their decision to leave New Orleans after 5.25 years of living there is worthy of publication, but hey, I read it and I’m still bitching about it so I guess the joke’s on me.
There was nothing in those letters that people who live in New Orleans don’t already know. You don’t need to tell us that you are breaking up with your temporary city of residence because municipal services don’t exist or, if they do exist, they don’t work; the people who live here already know. You don’t need to declare that the summers are getting hotter and the flooding is getting higher and we are no better prepared for the next Katrina than we were for the first one; we already know. You don’t need to proclaim your emancipation because the wages are too fucking low across the board, and jobs are scarce if you aren’t a lawyer, and healthcare in this city is a joke, and public transit doesn’t run on time, and the criminal justice system is conspiring to lock up every black man they can get their hands on, and we are sinking lower and lower and lower below sea level, and it is up to our necks already, and as we gasp for air, we elect people who turn on the hoses; we already know.
We. Already. Know.
People don’t live their lives oblivious to the danger lurking around the corner, one article in The Atlantic away from the realization of imminent doom. People definitely don’t live that way in New Orleans, where, for many folks, returning home after Katrina meant clawing their way upstream and clearing the rubble before starting from scratch, one more time.
Most people live where they live on purpose, but in New Orleans they live there because it’s home in their bones. They live there with a chip on their shoulder, burdened by the constant worry that they might have to leave again sometime soon.
My father was born and raised in New Orleans, and my paternal grandparents lived there until they died. I spent a chunk of my childhood on Interstate 10 in my Dad’s Honda Accord, driving from Baton Rouge, where I grew up, to visit my grandparents every other weekend or so. I remember snowballs from the neighborhood stand served in Chinese takeout boxes (loved them), McKenzie’s buttermilk pies on my grandmother’s table (hated them), and walking to the levee to feel both fear and awe as I looked at the unfathomable amount of water churning below, wondering what would happen if it ever came above those concrete flood walls on which we walked.
These childhood memories buy me barely any street cred in New Orleans, a city where “where did you go to school” refers not to your college but to your high school. New Orleans is as hidebound a place as I’ve ever seen. I get it: When your existence depends on flaying yourself so tourists and culture vultures can more authentically watch you bleed, it makes sense that you hold your secret history like a clenched fist. You make somebody prove they’re in it as deep as you are before you let them in.
I moved my now husband/then boyfriend to New Orleans on the second day of July. As we unloaded our belongings into our brand-new, 125-year-old, 500-square-foot shotgun apartment, the mercury at near 100 and the humidity as thick as attic insulation, I saw my gentle North Carolinian man seriously consider unloading only my things, so he could jump back in our Penske and retrace his last 1,400 miles. Fortunately, he stuck around, probably because we couldn’t afford to extend the truck rental, and we learned how to live together and live, together. That night, we ate crawfish bisque, stuffed heads and all, dropped off by my mother as a housewarming present, sitting on the floor of our new ancient kitchen. That night, we discovered you could reach the sink to brush your teeth while sitting on the toilet of our one bathroom, where the decor and structure might be optimistically described as "prison chic."
The next day, we started counting the holes in the floor, yawning straight down to the dark dirt below. The next week, Sam started work.
Whiling away the rest of my summer before grad school, I discovered the neighborhood vegetable vendor rattling our bedroom windows during peak afternoon heat, when it's too hot to do anything but nap in surrender. I discovered this when I woke up screaming after hearing the vendor’s voice over his truck loudspeaker, directly in my ear.
“I HAVE ONIONS I HAVE COOOOOOOORN. TOMAAAAAAATOES. GREEEEEEEEN PEPPAHS.”
Over the next few months we got to know our cockroaches and our slumlord. We learned United Cab would not dispatch a taxi to our address because we lived across the street from a semi-fossilized old crone named Clifford who was flagged in their system for getting drunk and repeatedly stiffing drivers out of their fares.
Over the next few years, we evacuated from threatening storms semi-frequently, dialed 911 a handful of times and got no answer, and once came outside to find someone trying to steal the (very used) tires off of my (very used) 1998 Jeep Cherokee. Once a year, we got a text from a friend or saw a post on Twitter and, panic stricken, raced to turn out all of our lights and stuff towels in the gaps around our doors and windows, sitting in still and silent darkness as the termite clouds descended and swarmed furiously around the streetlights outside. And that’s just the micro stuff, the everyday effluvia for people privileged enough to bitch about being inconvenienced, to say nothing of the poverty and racism and climate change and unrelenting political incompetence and malfeasance.
So yeah, we New Orleanians all already know about all of the crazy and infuriating and horrifying and broken shit that has inspired upwardly mobile extended term tourists to strike out for any and all points north, east, or west, scattering like palmetto bugs.
And yet.
I teared up just now thinking about Mr. Okra and his roving produce truck, a beloved neighborhood staple until he died in 2018. When I first ran outside at the sound of his song and bought a mango from him, it felt like a rite of passage, my first Real Deal New Orleans Local Girl Scout badge.
I cried as I moved out of that tiny, stifling, rent-inflated, piece-of-shit apartment, the first place Sam and I shared a home of much happiness. And I wept with my forehead pressed against the passenger-side window for two whole states after we loaded our bags and the front doormat and our grumpy cattle dog into our Honda and drove away for the last time, headed to our new/old home back in North Carolina.
Inside me, homesickness presented clinically as a near-constant physical ache after we moved away, the source of melodramatic sobbing jags in the shower and compulsive memorabilia purchases (I believe I own every T-shirt Dirty Coast has ever printed). The No. 1 export of New Orleans is nostalgia.
I miss the everyday life in New Orleans more than the events and spectacles. I miss the fervent shared religion of excellent food, the willingness to linger over lunch and debate what to have for dinner. I miss the neighborhood high school marching band practicing outside my window on Saturday mornings in January, preparing for their busy parade season. I miss the spectral site of a lone Mardi Gras Indian riding horseback through Uptown on our walk to dinner. Good God, do I miss open containers.
I can’t fully replicate these experiences by visiting, no matter how often I’m lucky enough to get back, because they’re all rooted in residency — a kind of citizenship, the normalization of magic because you get magic every day. It’s why you put up with the potholes and the greed and typical Tulane kids. Only when the bad starts to weigh you down more than the good buoys you up do you know it’s time to get out. But what they don’t tell you — what I’m telling you now — is that after you leave, you don’t remember the quotidian dysfunction or even the ever-present existential threats. You just miss the magic. No matter how permanent your departure supposedly is, despite tangible documentation of change, like the new driver's license in your wallet and the freshly painted walls in your new house, leaving New Orleans always feels like a temporary inconvenience. Like you're just taking a break, needing some space, spending some time focusing on you. Like you two might still end up together in the end.