The mayor had made her point. The lockdown was for real.
By mid-April, Sophie Lee was on a roller coaster. She had good days and bad. A jazz vocalist married to a jazz guitarist, she co-owns Three Muses, one of several clubs and restaurants that, before the virus struck, had made Frenchmen Street, in the Marigny, a nexus of New Orleans nightlife. She had enough in the till to feed their two daughters and cover insurance and rent on the shuttered club for a couple of months. But then what? Lee had applied for a small business loan offered through the federal bailout package, and was livid to discover that the kitty—temporarily depleted before she got a dime—had been picked clean by chain restaurants. “How does Ruth’s Chris qualify as a small business?” she demands to know, referring to the national steakhouse chain started decades ago with a lone restaurant in New Orleans.
Lee was voicing an anxiety widespread in New Orleans as spring weather arrived— and President Trump’s miraculous panacea did not. She was already schooled in disaster. Just ahead of Katrina, Lee and her husband had fled the city, taking part in what was, for all its flaws, the largest evacuation in American history. The city’s infrastructure was savaged; parts of New Orleans to this day are scarred. Now, with COVID, there was no evacuation at all, or, put it this way: New Orleanians like Lee retreated indoors and found refuge in their homes. The buildings would still be there when the lockdown eased and it came time to step back outside, reopen shops and restaurants and hotels and colleges. But would a musical city still be alive in anything like its familiar form?
Not a great many New Orleanians were saddened when former Illinois congressman Dennis Hastert was jailed a few years ago in connection with the sexual molestation of young boys. When Katrina hit, Hastert, a Republican, had been Speaker of the House. With New Orleans on its knees, trying to recover, Hastert went public with the view that maybe the City that Care Forgot was itself forgettable. Maybe New Orleans wasn’t worth rebuilding. Oh, sure, the country would still need some vestige of a port near the mouth of the nation’s mightiest river system. But otherwise? Meh. Half of New Orleans is at or below sea level; people were foolish to live there, Hastert opined. What he didn’t need to say publicly was that most of those people were Black and voted Democratic.
The breezy philistinism—Hastert later apologized for it—had a way of concentrating the mind. What reasons were there, really, to save New Orleans?