In mid-November tour guides were added to the National Occupational Shortage list for the first time, encouraging skilled overseas workers to undertake the task. It can work both ways. Back in 1972 I did a stint as a tourist guide in New Orleans, starting within days of being dropped off in the heart of the city on a Sunday morning while hitchhiking through the southern states.
The streets of the French Quarters were deserted after the revelries of the previous night. An open air jeep pulled up alongside. The driver Tony, his partner Fran, and four-year-old daughter Aries, in their hippie hair does, looked alike. They invited me to stay in their home, a converted bus parked in a vacant lot.
New Orleans was their most recent way-stop on a cross-country journey across the United States. Their anthem was Johnny Denver’s ‘Take me home, country roads’. They played it over and again, and sang along with the tape while out driving in the jeep.
Tony had a job driving a bus modelled after the trolley car featured in playwright Tennessee William’s Streetcar Named Desire. The bus was hired for city tours and party nights. Tony introduced me to the tourist scene. I needed cash to fund my onward travels and hired a trishaw for five dollars a day. The money I earned ferrying people around town was mine.
On the eve of my first day on the job, I read up on the history of New Orleans and devised three alternative routes: the jazz trip, the market trip, and the voodoo trip.
Route one took my passengers to the jazz joints of Frenchmen and Bourbon Streets. I spun tales of New Orleans’ jazz legends ranging from pianist, composer Jelly Roll Morton, and pioneering bandleader King Oliver, to much-loved trumpeter-vocalist Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong who took the artform to popular heights. It helped that I was a long-time fan.
This route was easy money. I parked the trishaw and waited outside the venues as passengers made their way in. The tour concluded at Preservation Hall on Saint Peter Street where old time jazz musicians and integrated bands plied their trade exercising their hard-won civil rights.
'I needed cash to fund my onward travels and hired a trishaw for five dollars a day. The money I earned ferrying people around town was mine.'
Route two offered my passengers a tour of the fish markets and stand-up oyster bars in the French Quarter and down by the port. ‘Best raw oysters in the world,’ was the local boast. ‘We’re talking heaven on the half shell’ the shuckers would say. Fresh from the Gulf of Mexico. Served plump, salty and on ice.
The third option offered passengers a tour of voodoo bars selling charms, amulets and spells, claimed to have the power to protect those who bought them from evil and to bring them good luck. Voodoo was transported to new Orleans by African slaves in the 1700s by way of West Africa and the Dominican Republic. It evolved into a fusion of traditional African beliefs, Catholicism and a range of other Christian faiths.
The trip culminated at the tomb of Marie Laveau, the legendary voodoo Queen of New Orleans, who is believed to be buried in the St. Louis Cemetery number one on Basin Street, the oldest graveyard in town. Laveau died, approaching eighty, in1881. She is said to be interred in a crypt located in a warren of above-ground vaults. Since her death, pilgrims have been making their way to the crypt with offerings of cooked food, flowers and fruit, and to inscribe crosses and other symbols with charcoal, rocks and sharp-edged bricks.
I became obsessed with finding out more about this resourceful, free-spirited woman descended from French colonists and African slaves. As my knowledge of Marie Laveau, her contested history and extraordinary life grew, so did the stories I conveyed to my passengers by her burial place.
Apart from the three tours, the tricycle was hired for rides around town. My most memorable fare consisted of three middle-aged sisters from Austin Texas on family leave. They were having the time of their lives. They squeezed in side-by-side into the passenger seat. I had to avoid hilly streets, or catch the traffic lights on the decline so that I had enough momentum for the ascent ahead.
I was also flagged down by teenagers, desperate to find a place free of their parents, where they could have a quiet smoke. I left them in a secluded space down by the Mississippi riverfront. As I drew away the smell of their cannabis joints wafted in my wake.
I made extra money when Tony took me on as an assistant on the Streetcar Named Desire bus which had been hired for the night by a party of tourists headed for a Roman themed fancy-dress ball. They filed onto the bus at twilight wearing togas, sandals, and headpiece wreaths made up of faux-gold leaves.
We dropped them off at the ball, returned at midnight, and took them on a tour that followed the route of the old Desire Streetcar line. Tennessee Williams lived in New Orleans while he wrote the play. The streetcar ran on the Desire line from 1920 till 1948, the year that the play premiered in New York.
The partygoers stepped onto the bus clutching bottles of drink and bunches of grapes. Their wreaths were lop-sided and their Roman gear in disarray. They sang bawdy songs and scattered the grapes through the windows over the Saturday night crowd.
Aries spent the days playing with the kids who lived in the neighbourhood where the bus was parked. She was streetwise and tough. On nights off, Tony drove us in the jeep down to the oyster bars for a snack. Aries stood on the seat, her eyes riveted by the passing sights.
‘There goes the Queen of New Orleans’ the locals said as we drove by. The memory has returned over the years — Aires standing tall, enraptured, taking it all in. It helps keep me sane and in touch with the angels in these confronting times.
Arnold Zable is a Melbourne author and recipient of the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
Main image: Arnold Zable taking a tourist down Bourbon Street, New Orleans. (Photo: supplied)