Free The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story by Julia Reed

throughout the century; as late as 1914 there was an outbreak of bubonic plague. Graves lie above ground in gleaming white “cities of the dead” because the water table is so high that bodies buried below ground would simply pop back up.
    The coroner, Frank Minyard, who is also a jazz trumpeter, attributes our abysmal life expectancy rates to our “killer lifestyle,” and it’s true that we are home to the fattest people in the country, we’ve had highest cancer rates since the 1930s, and we drink—a lot. Legendary restaurateur Ella Brennan says we drink so much because we start so early: “Drinking a Ramos Fizz or a Sazerac with breakfast is considered normal behavior.” Not only is liquor available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in barrooms (pre-Katrina there were 1,500), restaurants, grocery stores, and pharmacies, it is also conveniently obtained from drive-through daiquiri shop windows, thanks to an exemption in the state open container law that makes it okay to drink and drive as long as the alcoholic beverage is frozen. I take Minyard’s point—there’s no question that sucking down a 32-ounce White Russian daiquiri while barreling down I-10 can be construed as a killer lifestyle choice—but we are also cursed with killers of a more straightforward kind, the ones who carry guns. And, unlike other cities, where violent crime and gang activity goes on out of sight of much of the populace, New Orleans is fluid in more ways than one—“nice” neighborhoods abut “bad” ones throughout the city, so that even the occupants of the grandest of houses are not immune to the sounds of gunshots in the night, or indeed, to the sight of a dead body dumped on the curb.
    All this has contributed to something of a survivor’s mentality. When the city fathers printed up a batch of bumper stickers bearing the message “New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home,” another batch appeared within days: “New Orleans: Proud to Call It Hell.” There is a sort of perverse pride the natives take in living in a place that “the big one” may well hit one day, as well as an ingrained rebel defiance. (When the occupying Union troops of General Benjamin “Beast” Butler arrived in New Orleans in 1862, the ladies of the city responded by spitting on them and dousing passing soldiers with buckets of sewage from their balconies.) Seven years before Katrina, when the likelihood of Georges led the mayor to open up the Superdome as a shelter for the first time, the paper carried photographs of patrons in Magazine Street bars wearing hardhats, and the first commodity to run out at my neighborhood grocery store was not water or even batteries, but vermouth. McGee, who had holed up in her French Quarter apartment with a stranded Australian sailor and a case of bourbon, kept calling me in New York to tell me I was missing all the fun. By the time Katrina reared her monstrous head, John was fifty-six years old and had lived in New Orleans for most of his life, but he had never once evacuated for a storm. During Betsy, a powerful Category 3 hurricane that killed 58 New Orleanians in 1965, his uncle held him by his feet out a third-story window so he could unclog the gutters that were pouring water into their house.
    So it was that on the Saturday before Katrina I was busy making a grocery list, not for hurricane supplies or evacuation needs, but for our first dinner party on First Street. Our friends Byron and Cameron Seward, who live in Yazoo City, Mississippi, and have a house in the Faubourg Marigny, just below the French Quarter, were in town with their daughter Egan, a former summer assistant of mine who works as a decorator in New York. Byron farms cotton and soybeans and corn for a living, but he is also a serious wine nut, and all summer long he had been assembling a collection of rosés in hopes that we might actually be able to sample them—in our house—before the summer was over. I love cooking for Byron because he