BY REV. “GOLIGHTLY” MORRILL
Pastor of People’s Church, Minneapolis, Minn.
If you want to take a course of study in the liberal sciences of gayety and godlessness, go to New Orleans, the Crescent City of climate, Creole, carnival, cotton, conventions, cane-sugar, cafes and cemeteries. Though there are more than thirty grave-yards, it is not a dead town. I found week-day races and prize fights on Sunday, as well as other religious services. It has been called the great winter resort of the United States, and there are enough “resorts” by day and night for all the good and bad who care to patronize them.
Pleasure is the big word in the dictionary of New Orleans life. Her morals, as well as her markets, are French. She is the commercial gateway to the Panama Canal. Her citizens have improved the city sewage and water supply, paved the streets, erected fine hotels and public buildings, and enlarged her port facilities. If she mends her ways as much morally, she will be a safe place for pious as well as political and carnival celebrations.
One night after I had taken in three dozen oysters and washed them down with French drip coffee, I took in a night-court where people of black skin were sentenced for cracking and breaking some of the laws; a gambling-hell where money was stacked up and pulled down on the turn of a card; a cafe and cabaret where the colored man was outshining his white brother elsewhere; and then strolled through a shady district of all shades of color and character. The denizens of the vice dens started a street fight. They threw stones and shoes which I dodged, and hurled hard, vile names which deeply impressed me. Girls, not cursed with an incorruptible chastity, in tempting dishabille, tripped along the street and ogled me. The doors of some of these places of contraband amusement were wide open to welcome the visitor, while others were shut and bore a placard with some such reassuring information that “MABEL IS ENGAGED—CALL LATER.” During the war this Broadway to Baal, Avenue to Avernus, Hell’s Highway, and Promenade to Perdition was temporarily closed for moral repairs and sanitary improvements. Degradation slope was graded, and a curb set up for evil-doers. But far be it from me to injure the reputation of New Orleans for wantonness and frivolity. The fact that these places were officially closed for a while need not deter those who journey here today for these simple pleasures, and from easily finding them. No war order can change the leopard spots of the city. The Epicurean motto, “Let us eat, drink and be merry,” prevails according to time-honored custom. I attended a theatre which offered a bill that would not be tolerated in any other city of the United States. Jokes and clothes were “pulled off” in a way to make the blase blush.
The Crescent City is cosmopolitan and has all the races, but the most flourishing is the horse-race. Betting was the main thing. The horses were fast, but the women at the track were faster. A petite Parisian petticoat invited me to take her out here every day to bet on the races—but I thought I better not. During the Mardi Gras Waterloo’s “revelry by night” was outdone. Streets were a riot of rogues and rampant ribaldry a mad pageant of music, masks and merriment, a mob of men and maidens. Whatever the parade seemed to be outside, it was plain the Devil’s spirit was inside. If one is afflicted with naughty propensities, this is a fine place to get rid of them. I attended a Bal Masque. The manager lamented the passing of the good old times when drinks were allowed to be sold and dancers got stewed, yet said his real estate ventures in maisons de joie were flourishing. The dancers, jumping to the accompaniment of the jazz, acted no more like dancers than the blare, blow and crash of the jazz seemed like music. They jerked about like automatons and marionettes, “hesitated” like victims of locomotor-ataxia, hopped like grasshoppers, and moved with a stop, spring and shuffle, a squirm, a swerve, a swirl, a slide and a slip. It was enough to make Terpsichore sick. The players made hard work of it and the dancers should have received good wages for such strenuous labor, for it was simply a dance “haul.”
In New Orleans, earthly gastronomy and not heavenly astronomy is the science most studied in its “courses.” Many are the toothsome taverns in this Lotus-eating town. I remember one time-eaten cafe where there was a di-“stink”-tive garlic atmosphere, and where the soup was seasoned by falling plaster. Over the tattered table-cloth, evidently changed for every hundredth guest, French drip coffee had dripped. Antique china and silver service had served their day and long since should have decorated the windows of a curio shop. It was old with cracks, nicks and dents. What jokes were cracked over them? What sweet stories had the ears of the sugar-bowl listened to? With what wide astonishment had the mouth of the pitcher gasped at off-color stories? What hands had caressed the neck of vinegar and oil bottle? What cutting remarks and thrusts the knives and forks suggested! What spooning of callow couples the spoons had witnessed! The table was superannuated, shaky on its pins, and subject to ague-fits, while the chairs had felt so many rounds of pleasure that they were nearly all in with broken backs, twisted feet and elliptical legs. The old lamps had looked down on eyes of beauty whose light had been shut out by death, and the weather-stained walls echoed to steps that led down to the grave.
Passing through the French Market, with its dingy stalls, dogs, dirt, cobwebs, spiders and poverty, I came to the old Absinthe House, the refuge rendezvous of the picturesque Bordeaux blacksmith, pirate, smuggler and slave-trader, Jean Lafitte, the bold, bad buccaneer who loved beauty, booze, and blood, and had barrels of money to spend for them. Standing at the little old marble bar, I drank a befitting toast to his memory in absinthe. “Look not upon the absinthe when it is green,” yet I tasted it here and in Paris, though never sufficiently to get the full benefit of excitation, hallucination, terrifying dreams, delirium and idiocy. I left these spirits to call on those of the Haunted House nearby where of yore colored slaves were found mutilated, held in sharp, spiked iron bands, and chained to the wall.
The old time Southerners are gone. They did not have five-reel thriller movies, horse races, prize fights and carnivals, but they did have some innocent pastimes with which their simple natures were satisfied—pleasures that beguiled the worn and weary hours. Public executions and hangings were quite the rage then; pirates were hung on the square for decoration; the heads of negroes were stuck on spikes at the city gates. At the Calabozo there were whipping posts and hot irons with which the fleur de lis was burned on culprit’s breaking some of the laws; a gambling-hell where money was staked up and pulled down shoulders. The only hangings I saw were of idlers hanging around the corners. Then the old Plaza was the center of social and commercial life, military fete and the fate of criminals who were shot, nailed alive in their coffins, or slowly sawed in half. The attractions were sometimes varied by hanging women on the gallows and breaking men on the wheel.
In those days there were no Sunday jazz bands or vaudeville circuits, but in Congo Square in the open air there were dancing carnivals with half-naked girls, and real Voodoo dancers at Ponchartrain, of the old tom-tom fiddle and gourd drum variety, who danced themselves crazy and fell into a frothy fit.