I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight. I certainly haven’t experienced it myself. But the feeling I had as I walked the streets of New Orleans…I can imagine that maybe it feels a bit like that.

April 6 – April 12

Meeting my family and learning about Katrina

I knew my family was big on both sides — mum with eight siblings and dad with five siblings. But holy SHIT I have so many cousins on my dad’s side! We walked into Cousin Mary Alice’s house and her daughter’s three children were there. Then Mary Alice sends one of the boys to get his brother, but he returns with TWO. And I couldn’t believe my eyes when ANOTHER kid came walking in after that. 

(Quick little fact break: The Ancestry.com website told me this about cousins: “once removed” means a difference of one generation. A difference of one generation higher in the family tree is still considered once removed. Mary Alice is my dad’s first cousin, making her my first cousin once removed. Her daughter is my second cousin, but my dad’s first cousin once removed. So all those children that continued to pour into the house are my second cousins once removed. It took way too long for my brain to comprehend this system (and I’m STILL not sure I have it right)).

Sweetpea and Christy were the first to welcome us to Louisiana, and we spent the most time with them. Sweetpea (whose real name is Jonathan) is my dad’s first cousin, and he and his wife Christy were one of the best parts of this trip.

With every family member we visited, my dad would always ask them about Hurricane Katrina. And at first it drove me nuts — seriously man, you can’t come up with another topic of conversation?? — but as I listened to the stories, I started to care less about whether they were sick and tired of hearing the questions and I started to listen and notice how passionate they were when they answered.

Cousin Mary Alice has been running from storms since she was four. She remembers a time her and her family were returning home after evacuating for a flood, and cows and coffins were strewn across the road. A coffin even managed to make its way onto a roof.

One of Cousin Cynthia’s old neighbors had a kid that would bounce his basketball outside constantly, and everyone in the surrounding houses would complain. Well, when Katrina hit and flooded the community, that same kid took his basketball and swam over to his neighbors stranded on the levy and saved them one by one, using his basketball as a float. After that, they never complained about him again.

When my dad asked the typical question about why they continue to come back, Cynthia said, “You have your life, so you just take it and start all over again. It’s what you gotta do.”

Cousin Faith told us about another Ragas cousin that decided to stay in his RV during Katrina, thinking he would escape the damage. He was a stoner and he’d smoked to ride out the storm, and then a little while later it felt like his RV was moving. He figured he was just really high, but then he looked outside and water was up to his door. He had to open up a window and jump out, and he said he was “swimming with all of God’s creatures,” snakes included! But he said nothing mattered except that they were all just fighting to stay alive together. He was losing strength and his jeans were weighing him down; the whole time he was praying he could just make it to the supermarket and hold onto the building post. But then he saw a boat light, flailed his arms and shouted to catch their attention, and who is on that boat but his own brother, working with the police to rescue people.

When Katrina wiped everyone’s houses away, most people couldn’t afford to wait for a new house to be built — they had nowhere to go, or they just didn’t have the money for it. Manufactured homes were a quick way for the government to get people the shelter they needed. While we drove from Belle Chasse to Port Sulphur, manufactured homes were everywhere, interspersed between site-built Cape Cods and brick houses. There were also many houses on stilts.

There was a manufactured Subway placed pretty randomly on the side of the road. I made my dad turn around so I could get a picture of it.

As I go to get back in the car, Sophie is pointing to the also oddly-placed little graveyard at this corner we pulled off on. What are the freakin’ odds that etched into the stone are both Parkers (my grammy’s side and the origin of my middle name) and Ragases (my grampy’s side)?! It was absolutely crazy and felt like the weirdest moment of fate.

Cousin Aaron told us about how our great-great grandmother Pauline LaFrance is in the WWII museum, which I didn’t know existed in New Orleans and is massive! She had 3 sons that went off to the war, so she put three stars in her window, lit up. She didn’t celebrate any holidays while they were gone, and when one would come back, she would take a star down. They all made it home. We tried looking for the story while we were there, but there were so many buildings to go through and after three hours everyone was ready to be done.

After Aaron told us about her, though, I looked back at the genealogy research that a friend did for me, and I found her name!

Goin’ down the bayou

At our first visit with Sweetpea and Christy, Christy took us on the ATV and we drove down a long grassy mound with the swamp on either side of us. It’s when we caught our first glimpses of the alligators.

The next time we saw the alligators was on the swamp tour I scheduled for us. Christy wanted to come with us, so we booked two more tickets for her and Sweetpea. We purchased daiquiris at the bar while waiting to be called for our tour and took advantage of the refills before hopping on the boat.

I was in complete awe of the beauty of the bayou. Gorgeous trees, the water glittering in the sun, the breeze. Our tour guide was funny and had a deep accent, but he grew up on the bayou so he was full of knowledge and first-hand experiences.

Seeing the alligators was incredible. The way they can jump pretty damn high out of the water wasn’t exactly comforting, but according to our guide, they only have the capability of tunnel vision when it comes to a food source, and large groups of people (a food source, you could say) make that tunnel vision more difficult. But when he put the hotdog on the stick…

Ghosts, vampires, and voodoo (oh my!)

Knowing my ultra-religious father, I decided I wouldn’t include him on the spooky tours I booked. There was no way I wasn’t going to participate in the haunted side of NOLA. Both were night tours, and both were honestly something that my dad should have experienced, because there was a lot of interesting history and debunked myths.

The voodoo tour was incredibly insightful; there’s so much stigma surrounding the practice, but just like with any other religion or practice, it has a dark side. Or rather, it too has people who twisted it into something dark and unsavory. And unfortunately that has become the mainstream view of voodoo. But at its core, it’s used for healing and for positive things like abundance, luck, and happiness.

The ghost and vampire tour was a blend of reality and fiction and I absolutely loved it. Walking the dark streets of NOLA while being told of two murderous brothers who lived in the house ten steps away, or standing in front of a doorway that had blood pouring out of it back in the 1800s, was such a great spooky experience.

The scariest thing about these tours? The DRINKS. 2 for 1 hurricanes and the tour guide-recommended hand grenade, which according to the sign is New Orleans’ most powerful drink. Which I can now confirm.

Genuinely, though, the scariest, most disturbing part was Madame Delphine LaLaurie’s mansion and the story of the ghosts in that place. The tour guide pulled Sophie, my mom, and me aside during a bathroom break to warn us about this particular stop. Because Sophie and I are Black, she wanted to give us a trigger warning so she didn’t unwittingly exacerbate the trauma that our people have already experienced. Her awareness meant so much to us.

I won’t go into too much detail, but Madame Delphine owned slaves and treated them worse than poorly, if the stories are to be believed. If you do some research, apparently many of the grotesquely terrible stories are thought to be fabricated, but it truly was stomach-turning —emaciated people strung up in chains in the attic, a form of torture where feces are shoved down a person’s throat and then their mouth is sewn up, and other truly horrible things that for the sake of those slaves, I hope are not true.

A taste of Mardi Gras

When we weren’t traipsing the darkened streets of NOLA on the hunt for ghosts and the occult, we spent our time in some colorful places. 

Mardi Gras World is home to the past Mardi Gras floats, a massive warehouse filled with them. It’s also where they construct the new ones. It was hard not to stop for a picture in front of every single one, but of course the iconic characters and the creatively bizarre floats caught my attention the most.

We had the absolute pleasure of meeting Stephen, who happened to be working on a float as we walked past. He originally went to art school for painting, then became a record producer. I’m not sure what happened during his timeline but after that he began creating the floats.

This year was his third Mardi Gras, and in the last five days of the parade, he said they were all working 24-hour days, and sometimes 56 hours overtime. Stephen said they start from scratch and also use pieces from old floats that have been damaged or are ready to be retired.

We passed a robot at the very beginning that also creates the floats, but Stephen told us he doesn’t actually like that robot very much. He said what the robot can do in two weeks, he can do in four days, and a lot of the time he has to fix mistakes the robot made. Also, when a human carves the styrofoam, the scrap pieces can be used for other floats. The robot just shreds the styrofoam into useless snow.

So when we circled back to the beginning, I made sure to give the robot a piece of my mind.

FOOD

No trip is complete without trying as much of the local food as possible. And MAN did we eat good! Christy and Sweetpea took us to Perino’s for crawfish, alligator, and cooked oysters (which for some reason I didn’t realize was an option, but it’s a delicious option). I made a noble attempt to open two of my crawfish, but I couldn’t get the technique down when I could barely stand to touch their little legs and their ribbed bellies. So Christy, with her long, colorful nails, kept cracking them open for me like a pro and piling the meat onto my plate, and Sophie’s too. 

I ate a blackened chicken po’boy fully dressed, and duck and andouille sausage gumbo. The gumbo was good, but not as good as my Uncle Peter’s. We ate beignets dipped in coffee while a street performer serenaded the crowd with the sun shining and the breeze blowing the powdered sugar back into our faces.

I’m proud of Sophie for trying so many things on this trip —crawfish, shrimp, alligator, gumbo, a po’ boy. She enjoyed most of it too, aside from the bad bite of alligator that ended that particular food journey for her. I think we enjoyed Christy’s barbeque the most, though. Homemade mac and cheese, ribs coated in lip-smacking sauce, cheesy potatoes sliced up and baked in a pan, sausages…I dream about that food.

A lovely little Louisiana surprise was the drive-through daiquiri shops EVERYWHERE, including one a two-minute walk from our hotel! We made a few trips there, most of them at the bequest of my dad, surprisingly. But they were amazing, and there were so many flavors to choose from. You could get one as big as 56oz and could order extra shots. Not surprisingly, I ordered a 44oz daiquiri with an extra shot and a half. And proudly walked down the street with it, because it’s completely legal.

Home in a place I’d never been

Before this trip, I heard warnings from everyone I told about it, urging me to be careful, to stay safe, because NOLA was dangerous and riddled with violent crime and pickpockets. What’s funny is that I felt safer walking through those streets in the dead of night than I ever have walking through New York City in broad daylight. And I’ve taken multiple trips to NYC, with no such warnings preceding them.

Our ghost and vampire tour guide asked us if we had family in NOLA. I told her this city is where our family line came from, hundreds of years ago. She nodded as if she already knew, then said, “Can you feel the magic here? That’s the lingering presence of your ancestors, with you, all around us.” It was a moment of holy shit, I’m not being weird, I really am feeling something. Because I felt this exhilaration, this unexplainable energy and awareness, this comfort and safety. And her explanation was the validation I needed.

I felt the ghost of this feeling even on the plane ride there. Sophie and I sat next to each other and watched “The Princess and the Frog” on my phone (I’m about to spoil a scene so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, I’m sorry, but also go watch it!). It’s no surprise that every time I get to the scene where Ray dies, I bawl my eyes out. But it was a surprise when I looked over at Sophie to see tears running down her face. We both started laugh-crying, but I felt that magical connection then, too. 

And maybe it’s silly to feel that way after a fictional cartoon movie. But the seed of magic had been planted, and it only grew the more we walked down the living, breathing streets of New Orleans.