Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [86]
Six
THE MOST ABSORBING STORY IN THE WORLD
Sheep-Head and Croakers, from New Orleans
WHEN TWAIN LEFT NEW ORLEANS in 1857 at the age of twenty-one, he left as an apprentice Mississippi River steamboat pilot. But he’d come looking for cocaine.
Brazilian cocaine. While working as a printer’s apprentice in Keokuk, Iowa, Twain had read a book about Amazonian expeditions, which along with wild stories of alligators and monkeys “told an astonishing tale of coca, a vegetable product of miraculous powers . . . so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up-hill and down all day on a pinch of powdered coca and require no other sustenance.” Believing it to be “the concentrated bread & meat of the tribes . . . about the headwaters of the Amazon,” Twain was inspired “to open up a trade in coca with all the world.”
Upon arriving in New Orleans, though, he asked when a ship might be leaving for Brazil and “discovered that there weren’t any and learned that there probably wouldn’t be any during that century.” What was more, the nine or ten dollars he had left in his pocket “would not suffice for so imposing an expedition as [he] had planned.” The disappointed Twain found himself unable to score coke in New Orleans.
Still, he was there, and that was saying a great deal. It was his first visit to New Orleans, then the great metropolis of the South: cross-roads between river and ocean, between the Caribbean and the Lower Midwest—America’s one West Indian city. The French Market, in particular, bustled with an incredible array of nationalities wandering through “pretty pyramids of fresh fruit” and other delicacies. “I thought I had seen all kinds of markets before,” Twain wrote home, “but this was a grave mistake—this being a place such as I had never dreamed of before”:
Oranges, lemons, pineapples, bananas, figs, plantains, watermelons, blackberries, raspberries, plums, and various other fruits were to be seen on one table, while the next one bore a load of radishes, onions, squashes, peas, beans, sweet potatoes—well, everything imaginable in the vegetable line—and still further on were lobsters, oysters, clams—then milk, cheese, cakes, coffee, tea, nuts, apples, hot rolls, butter, etc.—then the various kinds of meat and poultry.
New Orleans’s famous cuisine relied on this kind of bounty. But it owed just as much to the market’s crowd of “men, women, and children of every age, color and nation.” There were Natchez, Houma, and Chitimacha Indians, French and Spanish Creole planters, blacks from the West Indies and the American South, Germans, Italians, and Chinese, along with rural Cajuns come to the city from the bayou. In the market, black women fried hot calas—rice cakes—while Choctaw Indians sold filé made from powdered sassafras. Twain might have seen Croatian oystermen, Cajun butchers, even Isleños—the Castilian-speaking descendants of Canary Islanders—come to town to sell fish. But of all the people he saw cooking and buying and selling and eating, the ones he admired most were the steamboat pilots.
As a young child, the fact that another boy had merely ridden on a steamboat to St. Louis left Sammy dying with jealousy. Now, begging, pleading—Lord knows how—he persuaded the pilot Horace Bixby to take him on as an apprentice. For years after, New Orleans would be a polestar for Twain: the final destination of the paddle wheelers racing currents or braving shallows down all the winding, treacherous lower river south of Cairo, Illinois.
It was the golden age of steamboating. When Twain was born in 1835, there had been some two hundred steamers on the river; when he began his apprenticeship in 1857 there were close to a thousand. With their churning wheels, towering Texas decks, and howling whistles, the ships were hugely impressive. Far more impressive, in fact,