City of Refuge Read Online Free PDF

attention with all the other regular features—the children starting school and needing help with their homework, the social aid and pleasure clubs planning their annual fall parades (getting outfits made, hiring cars and bands, arranging for police permits), the uptown Mardi Gras Krewes starting to plan their winter balls and debutante events, the Mardi Gras Indians resuming Sunday night practice at neighborhood bars all over the city.
    Other modern American cities have their holidays, their First Night celebrations and film festivals, but they are contained, and discrete. They happen, then they are over. In New Orleans, on the other hand, geography and time, food, music, holidays, modes of dress and ways of speaking, are part of an integrated fabric. People dress in certain ways for certain events, and certain foods are eaten on certain days, and neighborhood is connected to neighborhood by parades that traverse the length and breadth of the city, accompanied by music that everyone knows and, in most cases, dances to. On Labor Day the Black Men of Labor will start their parade at Sweet Lorraine’s on St. Claude Avenue and wind their way, dancing, through the streets, with their patterned umbrellas, followed and surrounded by hundreds of people from all over town. On Sunday Miss Johnson and her mother are dressing in white for services at the AME Zion church, and Lionel Batiste will go to Indian practice (on Mardi Gras his suit will be purple and this week he is sewing a beaded patch that Little Boo, who lost a leg in Vietnam, drew for him—an eagle with a rabbit in its claws), and Bill and Ellen are going to the Cajun dance at Tipitina’s up on Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas, and the Scene Boosters are having their parade, and that’s how you know it’s Sunday. Monday is red beans and rice, at home or at some neighborhood restaurant—the Camellia Grill or Mandina’s or Family Tree or Dunbar’s or Liuzza’s, maybe with smoked sausage on the side. On Thursday you go to zydeco night at Rock ’N Bowl, or Kermit Ruffins at Vaughan’s or Ellis Marsalis at Snug Harbor. Friday night is an end-of-the-week drink with friends at theNapoleon House or Junior’s or the Saturn Bar or Madigan’s or Finn McCool’s, and Saturday night is Saturday night all over the world. And if it’s any other night you could go to Brigtsen’s or Herbsaint if you have the money, or Upperline or Clancy’s or the St. Charles Tavern, or the Acme Oyster House or Henry’s Soul Spot or Crescent City Steaks or Frankie & Johnny’s or Casamento’s or Pascal’s Manale, and you know that street, or you don’t know the street but it has a smell and a rhythm and a personality, and getting there is part of the experience, and you form a map in your heart of all the places that make you so happy, and there are always other people there being happy, too. No matter what you may be dealing with in life, you can still enjoy a bowl of gumbo or some shrimp creole, can’t you? Of course you can.
    And Bobby stay by his mama house on Soniat Street down the other side of Magazine and we live up Back O’Town Gert Town Pigeon Town and every Sunday we go by Chantrell house after church and did you remember to pick up the chicken at Popeye’s? And Father purchased that house on State Street from Grandfather for one dollar; he attended Tulane, as did the three generations before him. Or he went to LSU, or Loyola, or Xavier, Jesuit or Newman or Holy Cross or Ben Franklin or St. Aug or Warren Easton, and he worked for Hibernia Bank or the Sewerage and Water Board, or Fidelity Homestead or the Post Office or Avondale or he washed dishes at some joint in the Quarter.
    And when Brother Joe or Ray or Cool Pop goes on to glory we can carry him through those same streets where he rambled and rolled, and we can have a little taste in his honor, as he so often did in others’ honor. And the band will play “Old Rugged Cross,” and everyone will follow the pallbearers as