I am uneasy. I glance up nervously at the shuttered attic window. I am in the slate-paved and gas-lit Pirates Alley of New Orleans's French Quarter. Lacy asparagus ferns hang from delicate wrought-iron balconies on carriage houses painted mimosa, oxblood and moss. Nonetheless, I am right in the line of fire and there's not a nun in sight. But, hey…it's been 75 years since the budding-genius-cum- frat-boy William Faulkner fired his BB gun out of that window. I guess I'm safe. When Faulkner lived here in the 1920's with artist William Spratling, they amused themselves by competing for who could nick the most people, but decking a nun beat all comers.

Dr. Kenneth Holditch—twinkling eyes, graying goatee, and delectable New Orleans accent (think Truman Capote, not Jimmy Carter)—is responsible for my flight of fancy. He is charming me with his tales of the city's characters, past and present, real or imagined. Holditch, a retired University of New Orleans professor and a literary historian, conducts these literary tours as a sideline to his own writing.

The characters of New Orleans have been seducing me ever since high school when Stanley yelled "Stella!" in Tennessee Williams’ "Streetcar Named Desire." I’ve always agreed with Blanche that New Orleans was not like other cities. Certainly, the Midwest I grew up in had nothing so steamy and torrid. Wondering if the New Orleans responsible for such characters still existed, I turned to Professor Holditch.

Touring with Holditch is like gallivanting around the French Quarter—called Vieux Carré until recently—with one of its own characters. As we traipsed the cobbled streets, the professor unraveled the mysteries that have so inspired the literati of this Greenwich Village of the South; seducing the likes of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Percy Walker and, more recently, James Burke and Anne Rice.

Pirate's Alley is ground zero for running into New Orleans’ characters. Faulkner’s apartment is now the books-to-ceiling-wonderful Faulkner House Books. Sitting dreamily on their patio, we stared across the alley to a gated, lush and magnolia-strewn garden backed by the needle-sharp steeples of St. Louis Cathedral. The garden's sentry saunters by, an enigmatic white cat with no home but this garden. Perhaps, it is the ghost of a Creole gentlemen who died in one of the nineteenth-century duels fought here.

Not far from here, neon drive-in daiquiri bars and police sirens scream of another New Orleans. Herein, I am learning, lies the tale. It is this contrast of the beastly with the sublime, this melding of cultures, this overlay of history and the resulting confusion of myth and reality that has so spurred the creative juices.

Superficially, the Quarter is all booze and antique shops. A block and a half north of Pirate's Alley, Bourbon Street impersonates a frat bash every night. Morning finds it hung over with beer-sticky sidewalks. By midday it's spruced up and with the professor I glimpse both its rich history and the spirited neighborhood it is today. People honk, wave, and stop to warn me of Holditch's veracity. They fret about neighborhood matters and they do gossip.

"We call New Orleans The City that Care Forgot," Holditch says, "because we don't care what you do here as long as we can talk about it." In the ‘20s, people were talking about what those characters Faulkner and Spratling did to Sherwood Anderson's teenage son. Pestering them one time too many, they stripped him, painted his privates blue and locked him out in the alley. They also drank a lot. New Orleans, never a city to follow the federal lead, wasn't much fazed by prohibition and for the most part overlooked the sale of liquor in the Quarter.

Faulkner called New Orleans "the city where imagination takes precedence over fact." His did. Spinning tales of haunted houses, ghastly murders and scandalous affairs which were decidedly more imagination than fact got him sacked on his first day as a tour guide. Undeniably, his most important flights of fancy were on paper. Faulkner arrived in New Orleans as a fairly competent poet, Holditch explains, "and underwent an astounding transformation" returning to his home in Oxford, Mississippi having envisioned his greatest works of fiction.

The Vieux Carré of the ‘20s had fallen from its golden age, the wealthy French and Spanish Creoles had long since been replaced by poor Italian immigrants. Only an imagination like Faulkner's could evoke it like this: "Outside the window New Orleans, the Vieux Carré, brooded in a faintly tarnished languor like an aging yet still beautiful courtesan in a smoke-filled room, avid yet weary too of ardent ways."

By 1938, Tennessee Williams was describing his first Vieux Carré apartment as "…a poetic evocation of all the cheap rooming houses of the world." It’s a block and a half west of Pirates Alley at 722 Toulouse Street. Holditch says he had a mean and crazy landlady. One evening she poured boiling water through the floor boards onto her carousing tenants below. The police came and everyone ended up in night court. When questioned Tennessee dodged artfully: "I think it highly unlikely a lady would do such a thing." His landlady was found guilty and blamed Tennessee. "Well, any fool can look at me and tell I'm no lady," she hollered.

Today's restored 722 Toulouse has no cheap rooms. Its rose-colored stucco walls, blue jalousies and cast-iron gallery now house the paintings, artifacts and period rooms of The Historic New Orleans Collection.

It was at 623 St. Peters Street, a block closer to Pirate's Alley where Williams rewrote "Streetcar Named Desire." He said he could hear "that rattle trap streetcar named Desire running along Royal and the one named Cemeteries running along Canal and it seemed the perfect metaphor for the human condition."

There is no longer a streetcar named Desire, but the St. Charles Streetcar still clatters out to the Garden District with its socialites where Williams set "Suddenly, Last Summer." Holditch thinks this was William's revenge for their sometimes shoddy treatment of him. Tennessee explains in his memoirs that he had discovered "a certain flexible quality in my sexual nature" when he lost his virginity to a paratrooper on New Year's Eve. By 1946 he was living with a young male flamenco dancer up on 710 Orleans Street. Several Garden District debutantes and their beaus fled one of his parties "as if a storm were impending" upon discovering the men shared a bed. Afterwards, Williams writes, one of the debs' escorts returned—wearing only his raincoat—and they partied on.

New Orleans' Golden Age was before the Civil War and they had the first opera house in the new world. It was at the corner of Orleans and Bourbon Streets—where the oh-so-flashy Bourbon Orleans Hotel is now—and was the nexus of Creole society. Holditch shows me where the sidewalk was cut close to the building, so Creole carriages could deliver unsullied their elegantly dressed occupants to the opera. Creole, from the Spanish Criollo, refers to children born in the colonies, and not as it came to be used later, people of mixed blood. The Creoles, largely French with some Spanish blood, were the upper crust of New Orleans’ three-tiered caste system.

The second tier of both the caste system and the opera house was occupied by The Free People of Color. Known as gens de coleur libre. They spoke French; many were well-educated, often in Paris, and well-to-do, although Louisiana's Code Noir keeping them more coleur than libre. Rich planters commonly kept two families, one White and one Free People of Color. Anne Rice's novel "The Feast of All Saints" evocatively admitted me into this fascinating and tormented community.

Around the corner of St Louis and Royal Streets, tall iron columns announce the Hotel Omni New Orleans whose façade incorporates a portion of the Creole’s other nexus, the old Saint Louis Exchange Hotel. The slaves of the third tier were, in fact, exchanged here. Its large rotunda held the South's major slave auction, the "down river" so dreaded by slaves, including Tom of Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom’s Cabin." The War of Northern Aggression, as it was to the South but presumably not to the slaves, abruptly halted both the auction and the Golden Age. Lafciado Hearn writing during Reconstruction said, "I never beheld anything so beautiful and so sad."

This theme echoes even now. Walking by myself at daybreak the next morning, I catch the Vieux Carré that James Lee Burke describes in his 1994 "Dixie City Jam."

"Morning was always the best time to walk in the Quarter. The streets were still deep in shadow, and the water from the previous night's rain leaked from the wood shutters down the pastel sides of the buildings, and you could smell the coffee and fresh-baked bread in the small grocery stores and the dank, cool odor of the wild spearmint and old brick in the passageways…But it wasn't all a poem. There was another reality there, too: the smell of urine in doorways, left nightly by the homeless and the psychotic, and the broken fragments of tiny ten-dollar cocaine vials that glinted in the gutters like rats' teeth."

Yes, the New Orleans that impassioned her literati is still here. It is, perhaps as it always has been, veiled by its own myth—not to mention a t-shirt shop or ten and some rather Disney-ish Vieux Carré house rehabs. Her soul survives, inspiring (and egging on) all of her characters, but it’s best to have one of them for your guide.

                           Kate Crawford     February 2003

LINKS WITH ATTITUDE

Arrangements for Holditch's Heritage Literary Tours must be made in advance. The spirited, informative two-hour walking tour of the Quarter is $20 per person for a minimum of 3 people. Specialized single author or topic tours can be arranged. Phone: 504-949-9805.

The New Orleans tourist and information bureau's web site.