Julia Reed: Her New Orleans Story
This profile of Julia Reed, the southern writer, is the first in a new series that looks at the topography of a single book, writer, and place. The House on First Street about life in New Orleans, the renovation of her Garden District house, hurricane Katrina, and the city's resurrection is my favourite of all her writings.
The French Quarter, New Orleans. Briny, fleshy oysters and the sweet earthiness of crab. The slipperiness of gumbo. Powdered sugar on the lips. Stale beer. That last, inadvisable herb saint-soaked cocktail. On a walk of shame or glory through dark streets, the air is turgid with the reek of fratboy urine, bins filled with crawfish shells, dank fern-filled planters and damp brick. The fleshpot scent of jasmine and tuberose wafts from hidden courtyards then, at dawn, the rising fug of disinfectant from hosed-down pavements follows you all the way home. All of these reek of sex. It's an unholy, decadent olfactory cocktail. “If it smells of sex, it grows here,” wrote Julia Reed about a city possessed of an endless wellspring of richness, deep sorrow, decay, and beauty. Built on a crescent of higher ground surrounded by bayous, its marsh-edged foundations are a graveyard for dead things whose rot and bubble continue a cycle of death and rebirth whilst the city has to bury its dead above ground. You leave New Orleans with the strong impression that if everybody else left too, this city would ferment down to bayou in a matter of weeks.
Wealth and poverty live side by side in New Orleans, and it is essential to understand that. The Garden District is a wealthy area whose origins can be traced back to the construction of the Faubourg Livaudais (itself created itself from the Livaudais plantation in 1832), but it is also home to many small, extremely modest dwellings. On my last trip to the city, I visited Reed’s former house in the Garden District and saw the two sides of First Street. Luxurious, covetable houses line sidewalks where the paving cleaves upwards as if an earthquake had struck; live oak roots twist the paving stones, making it perilous to walk without attention. Despite the gaiety of the city, this was not a road you could skip down without stumbling. A few paces more, and there was a single-story shack whose awning protected a few scruffy chickens. I saw human faeces on a sidewalk just feet away from Old Line restaurants. Young, shoeless homeless people bore visible signs of congestive heart failure as they sat by iron fences protecting estates whose owners had yet to return from their summer away from the city. An old man lay on his side with a sacral decubitus ulcer large enough to fit a fist into. Reed herself wrote about a covered body in the next street days after Katrina abated, bearing a sign inscribed with “Here lies Vera. God help us.”
Reed skewers the politesse of the ‘old south’ with her characteristic wit; the southern social reality she depicts is her own. She deploys images of domestic disasters to represent events that are too huge to comprehend. Her navigation- or not- of the relative safety her wealth and privilege afford her is an integral part of her story. This is the woman whose account of Hurricane Katrina and her response to the devastation and political mess caused Anna Wintour (her editor at Vogue) to cut some paragraphs telling Reed that they made her sound like Marie Antoinette. However, as Reed remarks in The House on First Street, “ unless you and the people you loved just flat-out drowned, almost everything is a Marie Antoinette moment.” But it is also typical of a city whose residents’ attitudes towards the natural disasters that bedevil it blend pragmatism, merriment, and defiance. Her words cannot and must not be separated from this. “We are bragging on our luck,” she wrote after clearing out stinking fridges left to broil in the sub-tropical heat. “Boasting of our stamina, commiserating, laughing, drinking, talking. We are still alive, we are saying to one another, and more than that, we are still here, in New Orleans, because we choose to be.” You might say it is easy for Reed to adopt this attitude with her one damaged window, a few downed trees, and a gorgeous house in the Garden District, and yes, it is. She acknowledges this, although passages in the book still make me cringe.
Southerners have been placed, as Camus said, “Halfway between the sun and misery’ and Reed’s memoir about renovating a house in New Orlean’s Garden District before and after hurricane Katrina embodies this. Katrina made land just four weeks after she and her then-husband had moved in. Reed’s touch is light and insouciant, which contrasts with Louisiana's torpid heat-soaked summers, which can make people act a little crazy. It’s what you’d expect from a woman whose last Instagram photo, taken just before she died of cancer that she didn’t discover until it was well-advanced, is of her and Henry, her precious beagle, flying in a private jet.
The House on First Street is a love letter to a difficult and charming city and a house – the Greek revival home she made in the Garden District after decades of unsettled roaming from place to place- before it segues into a dramatic and affecting account of Katrina, its aftermath and what happens when one of the most hospitable cities in the world becomes inhospitable. After a last-minute evacuation to her parent’s house in Greenville, Mississippi, Reed drove back to New Orleans and managed to evade the National Guard, re-entering the closed-off city to rescue her friends’ pets, empty their stinking fridges and feed the hungry young men and women sent to enforce curfew and rescue citizens. She couldn’t bear to think of emergency workers subsisting on MREs in a city known for its fine food. Watching their plight on television, Reed got to work alongside her mother, peeling tomatoes, prepping vegetables, and ordering, then transporting, pounds of fried chicken back to New Orleans. It is a remarkable story, obviously born of privilege (not everyone can afford to buy out a restaurant’s entire stock of chicken), but she did it. And running all the way through is an absolute obsession with food which is a natural state of being for anyone born in the south. It’s one heck of a juxtaposition with her position as a long-time contributor to American Vogue- a place not known for the hearty espousal of eating but “cooking was of paramount importance,” she wrote in a previous book. “We give food away as presents and peace offerings, and sometimes because it is just so incredibly good, we have to share it. We tote it to people in times of grief (when my grandparents were killed in a car wreck, the first thing my mother told me to do as she ran out the door was to empty the refrigerator); we use it to say bon voyage or welcome back.”
Not a woman not to be underestimated, then. Nor should we disregard the background and upbringing that helps grease the wheels of a career in journalism. Yet Reed’s throaty despatches were fuelled by fierce intelligence and a keen eye for ridiculousness. Contributing editor at Newsweek, Vogue and The New York Times Magazine, among others, she had worked as a political correspondent, returning to New Orleans to cover the three-times Governor of New Orleans Edwin Edwards’s final comeback. Reed managed to sound as if she gaily thrived on a diet of Galatoires oysters, chicory coffee, and the fumes of chicanery when it was a gruelling tour around the political stumps in a plane full of southern men. She survived three weeks with a politician known for telling people, “To fall out of favour with the voters of Louisiana, I’d have to be found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.”
I loved Reed best when she wrote about the South. Her fondness for her home region shone out, although she was not blind to its deeply-scored underbelly. It is this that afforded her the strong stomach needed to cope with the harshness of life there and to report, with deft strokes, every person she met, from crack-addicted handymen, fiancés left at the altar, and highborn sellers of bibelots to corrupt politicians and a long cast of restaurateurs, cooks, and chefs. She has always been a figure skater of a writer, etching a light and deft path through stories whose weighty nature would have sent other writers crashing through the ice. She is also not for everyone, a woman described by Jay McInerney as “Mississippi’s answer to Dorothy Parker.” He wasn’t wrong.
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Further reading:
Julia Reed’s archives in Garden & Gun.
NYT obituary