Diary Of A Blues Goddess. Erica Orloff

the Georgia who was buried beneath wild hair, hateful adolescence, and all that eyeliner. In Nan, I had a kindred spirit. She saw something in me—a spark of life she called it. I don’t think she ever forgave my mother for living an ordinary life, for being a homemaker and not burning her bra and changing the world.

      Nan was the first person to encourage me to sing. My mother said I had a pretty voice as a child, before my father left, but she was the kind of person who didn’t believe in showing off or attracting attention. I remember once being invited to a birthday party when I was a little girl. More than anything, I wanted to wear my new pink dress with the ruffles and crinoline—okay, so what did I know about fashion then? What I didn’t realize, until years later, was that the birthday girl was poor. If I wore my new party dress, I would outshine her at her own party. So my mother made me wear something old and, to my eyes, ugly. This was another of a thousand misunderstandings that only made sense after she had died.

      With the wisdom of hindsight, now I see that she couldn’t risk me leaving New Orleans to follow my fortunes as a musician or a singer. I needed to do something “steady”; I had to have “something to fall back on” when I failed, as she was certain I would. The odds of succeeding as a jazz singer or musician are a million to one. For every Harry Connick Jr., every Wynton Marsalis, every Diana Krall, there are ten thousand men like my father, broken down and tormented by their music just as much as they desire it. Some blues singers, like Billie Holiday, embodied both success and destruction. Strung out on heroin, she was a poster child for how the music business can destroy you. My mother wasn’t about to let me risk anything. Least of all my life.

      Now, Nan is a different story. I’m not sure how the two of them were even related. My mother occasionally used to sigh at her own mother and mutter something about “baby-switching” at the hospital. Nan was a rebel and risk-taker all her life. She was the kind of woman who wore flaming-red lipstick and kept her hair short, in the latest “Parisian” styles, as a young woman. She had a sense of self that stares back at you in the black-and-white photos in her albums, her high cheekbones and dark eyes commanding attention. She rode in a motorcycle sidecar across the United States with one of her boyfriends, and she danced on a bar with Ernest Hemingway in Key West. She ran the brothel until Sadie died, and even after she married my grandfather, a professional gambler and whiskey importer, she threw parties that made the newspapers. She also never let her racial heritage define her, even down here where sometimes you step off the St. Charles streetcar and swear it’s another era.

      Nan was the one to sneak me off to R-rated movies before I was even thirteen. She bought me Junior Mints and filled my head with talk of love affairs and Paris, and the way a man loves a woman with a “bosom.” My mother couldn’t even say the word bra to me. She couldn’t look me in the eyes when I told her I got my first period. Everything about womanhood embarrassed my mother, while Nan encouraged me to embrace it all. Nan was velvet and lipstick. Mom was a buttoned-up oxford shirt and Ivory soap.

      Nan pushed me into voice lessons in high school, and then in college she was always there behind me nudging me into the spotlight, telling me that’s where I belonged, “Out where people can see and hear you, for God’s sake, Georgie. Anybody can stand in the shadows. It takes courage to shine.”

      Yes, Nan is a character all her own. And I knew on the pressing issue of Casanova Jones her advice would be quite simple. Nan believes approaching summer drives all of us in New Orleans mad. It has its roots in Mardi Gras, whose long finger extends madness throughout the year. But deeper than that, it has its roots in the bayou and the mist.

      When summer comes, she believes we all need romance, because, as she puts it, “Georgia, there’s nothing to do in the Crescent City heat but drink mint juleps, make passionate love, lay naked afterward underneath the ceiling fan and listen to the blues.”

      chapter

       7

      A rriving home, I stood in front of our house, its ancient brick weathered and elegant. The house did seem to be alive. Some nights, Nan and I would hear a woman walking upstairs, her heels clicking across old floorboards. Occasionally, I smelled perfume in my room, a complex mix of jasmine and lily of the valley. Not my perfume, yet an intoxicatingly familiar scent. The way I could smell it just in one spot in the room as I crossed my floor made me feel as if I was being watched by someone. I wanted to whisper to Sadie’s ghost, What is it you want from me? But I think I was afraid of the answer.

      I stepped inside the house and found Nan in the kitchen preparing a feast. All the members of Georgia’s Saints would be attending Sunday Saints Supper, along with Dominique, Gary’s wife, Annie, Maggie—and Red.

      “Smells good, Nan. What’re you making?”

      “Georgia, for goodness’ sake, you’ve lived in New Orleans since the day you were born. Can’t you smell it?”

      “Jambalaya?”

      “Mmm, hmm. Mighty spicy, too.”

      “Red’s coming. I hope that’s all right.”

      She looked genuinely pleased—as she did every Sunday we went through this little charade. “Of course that’s fine, Georgia. You set another place at the dining-room table.”

      Thank God my grandfather left Nan “loaded,” as they say, because she likes to entertain with style. Every Sunday bottles of good red wine are uncorked to breathe, champagne chills in the refrigerator, and delicious smells emanate from brewing pots and pans. Our dining-room table could fit twenty, its cherry-wood surface polished to a brilliant sheen. The house recalls the grandeur of New Orleans, and the antiques give it character. At any moment, you half expect a Southern belle with a hoop skirt, or a flapper from the 1920s, to walk down the stairs…or Sadie to return to life.

      I pulled another plate out of the china cabinet. The plates had been imported from France at the turn of the twentieth century by my great-great-grandmother. It made me nervous serving on them. Each of them, hand-painted with a pattern of tea roses, was probably worth more than the band pulled in on a Friday night, but my grandmother doesn’t believe in saving the good china for fancy occasions. Her motto is: “Having your friends gathered around your table is occasion enough.” We’d lost a plate and a saucer or two, as well as several teacups—three when we opened our house to a Christmastime historic-homes tour—but we still had most of the pieces, and the table did look spectacular each Sunday, with ivory-colored linen napkins and stemware sparkling beneath a chandelier dangling with Austrian crystals.