Feet on the Street Read Online Free

Johnson said it. “Come next door and say it to my neighbor,” Fats said. Phil Johnson didn’t want to, but he did. “Now my other neighbor,” said Fats. Phil Johnson didn’t want to, but he did. “Now one more neighbor, over here, they’d love it, it would mean so much to them,” Fats said. So Phil Johnson did. Fats had him all up and down the street saying “Good evening” to everybody. Finally, Phil Johnson asked was Fats ready to do the interview now. “I don’t do interviews,” Fats said.
    In
OffBeat
in 1997, the director of WWOZ (a wonderful roots-music radio station that is always on the verge of folding) spoke of being privileged to eat Fats Domino’s cooking: “It was the first and only time I’ll ever eat barbecued pickled pig lips. If Fats is cooking in his backyard, you got to eat it. They weren’t as tough as you’d think. At least the grill burned off the hairs. Fats has a funny diet.”
    J EFFERSON D AVIS
    In the Confederate Museum on Camp Street, with portico and tower in the style of Louisiana native H. H. Richardson, the first truly American architect, is displayed a crown of thorns that Pope Pius IX made and sent to Davis when he was in prison after the war. A card next to it says: “Davis was deeply touched and he had a special need of cheer at this time, ‘when,’ as he said, ‘the invention of malignants was taxed to the utmost to fabricate defamations to degrade me in the estimation of mankind.’ ”
    B OTH M ARIE L AVEAUS
    Mother and daughter, they are remembered as one: the Voodoo Queen, who led rites that may have involved naked dancing (and sometimes, it is said, respectable citizens), and who are said to have exerted political power over a considerable stretch of the nineteenth century. People still chalk X-marks on their tombs in St. Louis Cemeteries No. 1 and No. 2. Some fifteen percent of the city’s population still practices voodoo, it is said, but the reason you are advised not to visit these graves alone is the percentage of the population that unquestionably practices mugging.
    G ERTRUDE S TEIN
    She came in 1934 to lecture and to visit Sherwood Anderson. She wrote that she and Alice B. Toklas were shown “the social register of the bawdy houses and a charming little blue book with the simple advertisements of the ladies by themselves and we have eaten oysters a la Rockefeller and innumerable shrimps made in every way and all delicious and we are taken to visit the last of the Creoles in her original house unchanged for 100 years . . . all very lovely and lively.”

R AMBLE O NE : O RIENTATION
    Mitch: I thought you were straight.

Blanche: What’s straight? A road or a line can be straight. But the human heart?
    â€”A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
    S INCE THE M ISSISSIPPI FLOWS GENERALLY SOUTH FROM ITS origin in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, you expect a town on the river to be on the east bank or the west. But at New Orleans the river flows eastwardly, sort of, so New Orleans is on the north bank, sort of. On the other side of the river is an area known, to be sure, as West Bank, but most of it lies either south or east of the river. On a map you can see: if the river were straight, New Orleans would be almost horizontal, right to left, east to west, between the river to the south and Lake Pontchartrain (as big as Rhode Island) to the north. But the river is crooked. The best known parts of New Orleans form a sort of tipped-forward
S
along bends in the river, from Uptown and the Garden District through Downtown, the French Quarter, and on around eastward into Fauxborg Marigny and the Bywater. Within this
S,
Uptown is south (upriver) and Downtown north (downriver), because the river takes a northerly hitch. However, the part of the Quarter that is farthest downtown is referred to as the upper Quarter, though I have heard it called the lower.
    So when I tell you that I am pretty