In the past 20 years that I had been coming to New Orleans - usually to visit my brother, Jeff, who made his home there in 1983 - I had known what to expect. The pounding heat that conjured an oddly pleasant smell of deep-fried chicken, spilt gasoline and rising damp from the sidewalks; the food, varying between the best I'd ever tasted and the not-so-good; the music at Tipitina's, the House of Blues and the myriad clubs uptown; the tipsy, tawdry chaos of Bourbon Street, the Mardi Gras beads strung out in gutters months after Fat Tuesday; the Jazz Festival at the racetrack. There would be mint juleps for the tourists and Abita beer and crawfish boils for the neighbours, and phalanxes of immense white Southerners dressed in tight shorts, baseball caps and carnival ephemera, charging through the French Quarter like a herd of rhinos. But above all there would be people, many poor and dispossessed, spread along the crescent of the city, feeding the spirit of New Orleans - passionate about their heritage, self-aggrandising and sentimental, but proud of something real and yet impossible to define. That spirit could best be summed up as a love of life, a reckless exuberance in the face of a wider American culture that tended towards the buttoned-down and restrained, the polite and controlled.
This time as I touched down at Louis Armstrong airport, though, for the first time I did not know what to expect. I remember speaking to my brother that day in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina struck. He had evacuated days before the storm - and sounded broken. "It's gone," he said, close to tears. "It's finished. It's not there anymore." This was my first visit since that heart-rending day. My brother had fled to New Mexico, but he has since returned to New Orleans to work and plans to move back next year - despite the devastation, the impossibility of getting insurance, the likelihood of another Katrina, the inadequate patching of the levees. He just loves the city too much to say goodbye.
As I drove in from the airport, I saw little of the devastation I had expected. Much of New Orleans has always looked run-down, and to my eyes it didn't look much different. There were trailers for the homeless dotted about and, on many doors, the painted crosses that in search times had been daubed on to indicate whether there was a dead body inside remained untouched. But all seemed oddly normal.
I checked into the International House Hotel in the Business District, a European-style boutique hotel - very contemporary and chic, all low lights and high design - and awoke next morning looking forward to breakfast. But there was no restaurant - like everywhere else, it had been damaged in the flood, and to a greater or lesser extent the locals were still dealing with the consequences. Labour shortages meant that there were signs up everywhere saying, "now hiring". As I walked round the corner from the hotel to Mother's Restaurant - one of the landmark diners that I always visit here - on Poydras and Tchoupitoulas, I sniffed the air. It was the same as ever - the fat, the oil, the heat - but maybe cleaner somehow. Mother's, I was reassured to discover, was entirely unchanged: the baked ham po' boy; the unadorned raw interior; the sassy, wisecracking servers.
I decided to take a walk through the French Quarter, the historic square mile at the heart of New Orleans around which tourist activity revolves. There are two things I always do on arrival here - get a half muffuletta (provolone cheese, salami and olive) sandwich at the Central Grocery on Decatur and gorge on the beignets (hot fried doughnuts) and chicory coffee at the Café du Monde on Jackson Square. I expected to find a place that, if superficially unchanged - the Quarter was left relatively untouched by the storm - would feel run-down, depressed and in some way mauled and scarred. In actual fact, nothing felt different. This was surprising. A whole half of the city had been evacuated and not returned. It was a stub of what it once was. Yet down on the Quarter, I ate my sandwich and beignet in the midst of a hullabaloo and bustle that seemed unaffected. The calliope sounded from the paddle steamers on the Mississippi, the horn-playing buskers hammed it up for the tourists, middle-aged white women in sneakers and pressed pants did a little two-step as they tried to shake off a life of button-downs and golf.
