Photos by Brian Doben
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Dreamboats
By Jessica Maxwell, March & April 2007
Amid Southern-style luxury on the Mississippi—before and after Katrina—the author came face to face with family secrets and even a few ghosts
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Captain Harold Schultz spread fingers the size of jumbo shrimp across a book of river maps. “Look-a-heah,” he said, his Louisiana drawl dripping off his words like gumbo. “See this bow?” He pointed at a narrow blue corona hugging a head-shaped hub of land. “That part of the rivah is known as the New Madrid Bend. The Mississippi passes through three states heah. I read about a guy farmed heah in Kentucky, his chil’ren went to school heah in Tennessee, an’ he banked ovah heah in Missouri!”
The captain’s laugh rolled through the Chart Room of the American Queen steamboat. A planet of a man who looks eerily like Elvis, Schultz is a native of bayou country and has been a certified Mississippi River pilot since he was a teenager. Fifty years later the Big Muddy still has his full attention. It had ours, too. My husband, Tom Andersen, and I had flown to Memphis from our home in Oregon to meet Tom’s octogenarian parents, Mary and Hank Andersen, who had joined us from Minnesota for a midsummer cruise down the Mississippi. We had been watching the river’s gentle green back sliding alongside the flank of the big white paddle wheeler all morning.
“Gentle—hunh,” snorted the captain. “Maybe on top.” He smiled. “This rivah, what I like best is below New Orleans. Venice and Southwest Pass. Mah daddy grew up 35 miles below Venice—you can only get there by water.”
Soon water would be everywhere. A few weeks after our cruise, Hurricane Katrina would strike the Gulf.
The American Queen, a graceful 3,707-ton, 418-foot-long floating hotel, would be our home for five days as we made our way along 640 miles of the lower Mississippi. It’s a marvelous hybrid of fin-de-siècle detail and modern convenience. Christened in 1995 with a giant bottle of Tabasco sauce, the ship is the product of three years of historical research, as evidenced by its pressed-tin ceilings, crystal chandeliers, Victorian upholstery, and genuine antiques. The J.M. White Dining Room is an exact replica of the dining room on the original J.M. White steamboat, one of the “glory boats” of the late 1800s. And the wooden filigree work on the deck struts underscores Mark Twain’s enthusiastic description of steamboats as “floating palaces.” Our staterooms were just as fancy, with their marble-topped antique dressers, hand-laid honeycomb bathroom tile, and French doors that opened onto private verandas overlooking the river.
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We had boarded the American Queen in Memphis in the melting summer heat. To our Yankee constitutions, the air felt like the breath of some weather beast hired by the Dixie Heat Stroke Assurance League: two minutes of beast breath and we had to bolt back indoors. Our best outdoor-river-watching solution was to sit on our verandas in front of our air-conditioned rooms, their doors slightly ajar and sending delicious currents of cold air down our necks.
Evening meals aboard the American Queen are approached with a joie de vivre usually reserved for dinner parties. Passengers arrive at the vanilla-colored dining room well-dressed and smiling, waiting to be ushered to their table. Once seated, they are offered traditional libations—mint juleps, for instance.
“I’ve always heard of them,” Mary told our server for the week, Yvette. “Are they good?”
A saucy New Orleans native, Yvette flashed a smile lit up by a gold front tooth. “The real thing,” she assured us with a wink, and then she delivered a list of entrées that sounded like my Cajun grandma’s entire culinary repertoire: blackened redfish, shrimp gumbo, étouffée, jambalaya, even fried green tomatoes.
“Take all the sweet little time you need,” Yvette offered. “But leave room for your bread pudding with bourbon sauce.”
Oh, dear.
Hank smiled: “I think we’d better start taking the stairs.”
Our first stop was Vicksburg, Mississippi. Mary and Hank and I were looking forward to touring this antebellum town with Tom, an American-history buff of such passion that our home library includes 130 volumes on the Civil War alone. Personally, I would have preferred touring Civil War tearooms—battlefields holding no allure for me whatsoever, as I consider them places of lingering sorrow, mostly because of a secret talent of mine: I see ghosts. My mother and her sister did, too, as did many of their Louisiana ancestors, especially their great-aunts, raven-haired beauties known as the Artigeaux Belles, about whom I’d never been able to track down a single fact anywhere, a vexing mystery.
While the other passengers queued up to board a big tour bus, we took off in a minivan that the Delta Queen Steamboat Company’s remarkable public relations manager, Lucette Brehm, had helped us arrange so Tom could play tour guide.
Christened in 1995 with a bottle of Tabasco sauce, the American Queen is the product of three years of historical research.
“Two of the most crucial battles of the Civil War ended at about the same time,” Tom began as we approached Vicksburg National Military Park. “The last day of fighting at Gettysburg was on July 3, 1863. Also on July 3, 1863, General Pemberton, who was in charge of the Vicksburg Confederate forces, met with Ulysses S. Grant asking about the terms of surrender.”
Whoever controlled Vicksburg controlled the Mississippi. As Abraham Lincoln put it: “Vicksburg is the key, and the war can never be brought to a close until the key is in our pocket.”
Pemberton, a Northerner married to a Southern woman and, therefore, always suspect, surrendered on July 4. “And Vicksburg didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July again until World War II,” Tom added.
The military park was established in 1899 to preserve the site of the Siege of Vicksburg, but to me it had also preserved the grievous energies of war and loss that seemed to pulse from every direction in this hushed and haunting place. And yet I suddenly heard signs of hope: the unmistakable chip-chip-chip of the prothonotary warbler. Sure enough, a yellow meteor soon flew across the treetops. Could this 1,800-acre graveyard be a haven for migratory birds?
“The military park is one of the top birding spots in Mississippi,” confirmed Bruce Reid of the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi state office in downtown Vicksburg. More than a hundred bird species have been identified there, including tanagers, orioles, vireos, the exquisite painted bunting, and Swainson’s, Kentucky, hooded, and, yes, prothonotary warblers.
“We try to spread the birding word on the military park,” said Reid, “which should be as much about life as it is about death.”
Buoyed by this benediction, we made our way down the steep jetty back to the American Queen, its crown-topped black smokestacks and colossal red paddle wheel etched boldly against the gauzy riparian sky. That evening, after another blowout Southern supper, we skipped the curious movie choice—Fatal Flood—for one of the trip’s highlights: a posthumous performance by none other than Mark Twain.
“Clothes make the man,” Twain began, resplendent in a white suit with a crimson handkerchief flaring from a chest pocket. “Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
Classic Twain always brings down the house, but Lewis Hankins’s shuffling gait and distracted delivery had the crowd in the Grand Saloon roaring. The Delta Queen Company’s longtime Twain impersonator, Hankins has an encyclopedic knowledge of Twain’s literature. He surprised us all by opening the floor to questions and lobbing back answers, utterly unrehearsed. A woman asked him about his family. “I have been through some terrible things in my life,” he told her, “some of which actually happened.” Music? “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” Steamboating days? Hankins-qua-Twain turned his inscrutable gaze up to the balcony from which the question had come, then quoted chapter and verse from Life on the Mississippi: “I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold.... The surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal.... Over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it...with new marvels of coloring. I stood like one bewitched.”
And so did we.
We arrived at Dunleith Plantation, just outside Natchez, Mississippi. Built with a complex cage of 26 Tuscan columns, Dunleith is a most stately translation of the Greek Revival style. And the moment I stepped inside the home’s perfect white walls, I saw her: the spirit of a woman who, somehow, I knew had been strongly connected to this place. Clearly the ghost of a slave, she was handsome and broad-boned, and had the endearing habit of standing with her arms folded across her waist. Her silvered hair was parted down the center and pulled sideways into an elegant coiffure, and she wore a shawl fastened in front with a brooch. When I finally found a discreet moment to ask our guide about the ghost, her eyes lit up and she ushered me to a wall of black-and-white photos beneath a staircase.
“Do you recognize her?” she asked.
I see ghosts. My mother and sister did, too, as did many of their Louisiana ancestors.
“There!” I said, pointing to the spitting image of the apparition I’d seen.
“That’s Bessie!” our guide said. “She was the number one house slave here, which in those days was a very coveted position. Everybody loved Bessie.”
“And Bessie loved this house,” I thought, feeling acutely the painful irony that a home like this could never have been truly hers.
The last stop before New Orleans was a Creole estate called Laura Plantation. The word plantation usually evokes a sense of stately elegance, but the Laura Plantation’s house was low slung and painted bright yellow. It had a handcrafted, almost Caribbean look about it. We half-expected to hear dance music lilting from its green-shuttered windows.
“That’s the Creole style,” explained owner and tour guide Norman Marmillion. He and his wife, Sand, had bought Laura Plantation in 1993 and polished it into a shining remnant of the nearly extinct, aristocratic Creole culture that dominated southern Louisiana for 200 years. A mix of French Canadian, West African, Spanish, and native Indian influences, these wealthy landowning Creoles by the late 1700s were the kingmakers of Louisiana politics and economy. Their business transactions were done almost entirely through family connections, and the plantation houses served as corporate headquarters, with women as their CEOs.
“And were they mean!” Norman said.
“The women ran my Louisiana grandma’s family, and they were mean, too,” I said. “And kind of mystical. My great-great-aunt had a famous parfumerie in the French Quarter.”
“What was the name?” Norman asked.
“Aucoin, but she was born an Artigeaux. My great-great-great-grandfather had a sugar plantation somewhere in southern Louisiana.”
“You mean the Or-te-go,” he said, correcting my assumed pronunciation of Artigeaux. “They had plantations all around here. From the Canary Islands originally.”
“But they all spoke French.”
“Everybody did.”
“You mean I’m…part Spanish?”
“You’re Creole, honey. Best pedigree in all of Louisiana!”
Steaming into the lively, sweltering port of New Orleans was a mixed finale. The French Quarter sang its usual siren song, happily calling me back to my family’s most glamorous roots. But our Mississippi cruise was officially over. How sorry we all were to leave our river palace. Now we understood why the Delta Queen Company seemed to specialize in return guests, many of whom book a cruise a year.
The French Quarter sang its usual siren song, happily calling me back to my family's most glamorous roots.
At our insistence, Lucette joined us for dinner. She met us in the lobby of our hotel, the delightful Monteleone, a late-1800s Royal Street landmark located two blocks from Brennan’s Restaurant (the two have long been the preferred duo for the Delta Queen Company’s New Orleans Add-On Night).
Brennan’s air conditioning had failed for the first time anyone could remember. Thanks to Lucette, Delta Queen customers were soon shuttled into the one still-cool part of the restaurant: the Red Room. Instantly, I felt more than a chill.
“Ghosts?” Tom asked.
One in particular, and it was playing tricks with one of the portraits, whose expression seemed to change by the minute.
“Oh, that’s just Monsieur LeFleur,” explained our waiter. “Lots of people say his face morphs before their very eyes.”
From sweet to diabolical, I noted.
“No doubt because he hung himself from the chandelier there, after he murdered his wife and child.”
The Red Room was chilly indeed. But Brennan’s famous gumbo warmed us right up. It tasted so much like my grandma’s, I had to blink back tears.
“You got a bay leaf!” our waiter half-sang as he gathered up our empty bowls. “First one of the night—you gonna come into some money, girl!”
“I’d rather find my great-great-aunt’s parfumerie,” I replied. “Have you ever heard of Madam Aucoin?”
Our waiter grinned and nodded.
“Yes, ma’am. Her place used to be just down the block from here. I remember it from when I was a little boy.”
With that I slipped a small, very old bottle of Madam Aucoin’s parfum, a keepsake from my mother, out of my purse, and Lucette, Mary, and I dotted a precious drop on our wrists.
“This is wonderful perfume,” Lucette said. “What is it?”
I held the scratched, old, gold-foil label beneath a streetlight and was astonished to read the words: “Peau d’Espagne.”
When Hurricane Katrina drove New Orleans to its knees a month later, I frantically tried to check up on our new friends. After calling Lucette for weeks, I finally got through, only to learn she had lost her home. When the Delta Queen Company was sold after its boats had been out of commission for several months, she lost her job, too. Nobody knew what had happened to Yvette or to most of the other employees.
Being based in Kentucky, Captain Schultz was okay and had managed to find work running tugboats after the Delta Queen Company ships had been turned into mobile hotels for Katrina reconstruction workers.
“But I’ll be back on the Delta Queen this summah,” he said. “Why don’ch’all join us for the Great Steamboat Race from Baton Rouge to St. Louis on the Fourth of July?”
And so we returned to the river. It feels like getting back on the horse that threw you, Hank said after we had found our staterooms. We were as thrilled to be back on the Mississippi as we were distressed for Katrina’s victims, some of whom, at least, were finally working again. The smaller scale of the Delta Queen seemed to suit our bittersweet mood.
Built in 1927, the Delta Queen is older and smaller than her sister boats and has a more settled intimacy. Tom’s and my bed fit flush between the walls of our room, and I loved lying there, watching the tricky surface of that glassy pane of water. We had boarded the Delta Queen in Memphis as before, but this time we would head north, racing the American Queen and the Mississippi Queen to St. Louis, where we’d all arrive on the Fourth of July.
“It’s the most relaxing vacation you can take,” said a passenger from Virginia. “We’ve taken 30 trips and made great friends. But the crew...” she added, shaking her head. “It’s more than takin’ a whippin’ from the storm—it’s the whole situation.”
“Some of the most wonderful crew members aren’t back on the boat,” offered someone else. “They don’t feel they can leave their families.”
“My family has posttraumatic stress syndrome from Katrina,” confirmed a dining room crew member named Robert. “My grandmother was under a bridge for three days.”
“Our house was destroyed,” reported a steady-eyed man named Bernard, who has worked on the Delta Queen for 20 years. “I’m still fighting with my insurance company that appraised our house too low, but I thank God everyone is alive.”
The Delta Queen lost the Great Steamboat Race to the Mississippi Queen, much to Captain Schultz’s surprise. But with all due respect to the citizens of Vicksburg, no one looked more like a winner than he did, standing on deck beside the St. Louis Arch on July 4 while fireworks bloomed against the night sky above him and the Mississippi slipped quietly by down below. It had been a tough year. But he was back onboard the boat he loved, the big red paddle wheels were turning again, and the passengers and crew of the last working steamboats in America were, in their own way, finding the hard-won prize of the beloved old African American spiritual, peace like a river.
Jessica Maxwell’s fourth travel book, Roll Around Heaven: A Spiritual Adventure, will be published in 2008.
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