The Devil Never Sleeps by Andrei Codrescu Read Free Book Online

cholera. Some of the nobles perished young, and when their epitaphs contain the word honor , it usually means that they were killed in a duel. The scions of colonial nobility carried the manners of old Europe all the way to their graves, but the occasion for the duels belonged wholly to the New World. At St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery, for instance, there is one Louis Philogene Duclos, whose stone proclaims, “Ci gît Louis Duclos, ensigne dans les Troupes des États de l’Amérique, fils lêgitime de Rodolphe Joseph Duclos et de Marie Lucie de Reggi . Né le 18 Août 1791, décédé le 4 Juillet 1811.” Louis died before the War of 1812, so it isn’t quite clear to which United States troop he belonged, but one thing is very clear: the word légitime means that he was the result of a liaison between a French Creole and a quadroon mistress. We will never know if Louis was recognized before he died, but in the end he was brought into the bosom of the family. Creole men had quadroon and octoroon mistresses whose offspring were occasionally
admitted to the family tomb, though never to the family table. The neighborhood where these women lived, in pretty cottages smothered in jasmine and draped in weeping willows, still stands. Their graves are less easily found. Louis’s mother lies shrouded in anonymity, though one might easily imagine Louis’s father defending her honor in a duel. The complexities of love, lust, honor, and skin color swirl in a fine mist around the gravestones of New Orleans.
    Those mythic beginnings, still visible in the oldest cemeteries, like St. Louis No. 1, translated into yet more extravagant complexities later. At the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, New Orleans became North America’s pleasure dome. Out of its fleshpots rose jazz, America’s music. The institution of the mistress was reaffirmed and some of the later mistresses were not to be trifled with even in death. Josie Arlington was a notorious fille de joie who carefully designed her tomb at the Metairie Cemetery to tower over the more modest resting place of her married lover and his legitimate wife. Josie’s image struck two flambeaux on each side to project a rose light that made it seem as if she haunted the place. It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one’s story, as well as one’s soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear.
    The graves of New Orleans follow social standing, just like their residents had. I have not looked rigorously into the distribution of angels, but I assume that they were commissioned by the wealthy. Marching past St. Roch Cemetery one time around twilight, with a group of antifascist protesters, I was struck by the proliferation of angels massed in the sky. They were in flight, taking off toward each other, as animated as large winged creatures ever get. Their milky white flesh glowed, their robes came undone, the flowers they held glistened, their hair was on fire. David Duke, the racist against whom we were marching, was defeated the next day. Miracles are very much part of St. Roch: look at the prosthetic limbs left by the faithful in the St. Roch chapel. They were healed and made strong enough to march against racists. Well, maybe. Faith may have no politics, but it does seem to belong disproportionately to the poor. Which makes it all the more fair to employ the angels of the rich to the purposes of justice.
    The majority of the tombstones of New Orleans are sans anges: they resemble
baking ovens. They are called “burial ovens,” in fact, and one might easily imagine the dead, laid out like loaves of bread, baking quietly in the sun. Perhaps when