Our Mother of Perpetual Help.

This was in the lawn of one of the garden district mansions we toured, owned by families rich enough to get extra protection from God. Our favorite? The one just a few blocks away from our apartment owned by Pittsburgh native Trent Reznor, the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails. It was the only house that felt lived in and featured some gorgeous Turkish rugs and a nice collection of Asian art. On his coffee table were two books by Noam Chomsky, including "9/11." On the wall was a drawing with "I hate Americans" written across the top. "That was one of Trent's album covers," the docent, a prim middle-aged woman, told us. She seemed oddly proud to say it.

The house where Jefferson Davis died is owned by one of New Orleans' more prominent families, according to the docent. They've been in the courts of numerous krewes over the generations; most recently, their youngest, a senior at LSU, was a page in Rex. The house was drowning in history. On the walls were portraits of the family matriarchs, some six feet high or larger. The owner, who'd grown up in the house and is now middle-aged, has recently put the house on sale for $4 million. I imagine she wants to escape all that history. It must weigh heavy on her shoulders.

Some of the houses were grotesque in their gaudiness. Gold ballrooms, silk brocade curtains, ornate French antiques. A little bit of Louis XIV right here in NOLA. Let them eat cake!

Here's a view from inside the renovated slave house on Laura Plantation. There was one plantation mansion and 69 of these, which looked like double shotguns from the outside but actually had only one and a half rooms on each side. One family per room, the guide told us. The houses were five miles from the mansion. They've moved several of them up near the house for the convenience of us tourists. Some of the shacks were inhabited up until the mid-seventies by sharecroppers and others.

The only picture I took of the plantation house. As it was a Creole mansion, it was not austentatious, particularly, nor grandiose. They beliieved that you kept your workplace modest, and though they lived in this house, they worked in it too. They kept their grand residences in New Orleans. This family had seven townhouses in or near the Quarter.

Somehow a room in ruin seemed appropriate. It's the only room on the tour that hasn't been renovated. Like Lear's face, wrinkled and sunken in from a lifetime of meanness, this room, too, shows its history. The facade's been stripped away and all that's left is this, the dank underside, the layer upon layer of rot.

In a cabinet to the left of this window was a jewelry box owned by Laura's grandmother, a woman who ran the plantation ruthlessly for a number of years (she branded the cheek of a runaway slave, not more than ten years old, with the plantation's initials). Inside was a bird's foot and a voodoo "gris gris" note to protect her jewelry. The tour guide said this was evidence of the Creoles' mix of African, Native American, and European cultures, and that though they were 100% French, they believed in the same voodoo their slaves believed in. It struck me, though, as more evidence of their greed and conservatism. The gris gris wasn't for them, it seemed to me, but rather for the slaves who might have been tempted to take a necklace or two. If she couldn't scare them away with the threat of physical harm, perhaps the threat of a curse would work.

When the plantation was sold, it was worth more than $6 million. The family kept their seven New Orleans homes, I suppose. Perhaps one of the houses will be a part of the next garden district tour. I imagine we'd see lovely portraits of Laura's grandmother, her hot iron brand glowing in the corner of the paintings.

The grades are in, the check has finally come (they make you wait and wait for that measly thing...). Tomorrow we start packing up for our whirlwind Christmas tour of New Jersey, Chicago, and LA. Crazy. Tonight, though, is my time to write and post. Cool!

First, the food.

We took my mom to a couple of old standbys and tried a couple of new places, too, with mixed results. After I picked her up at the airport, we headed to Crabby Jack's for gumbo and an oyster po'boy. Both were outstanding.

That night we went to our favorite restaurant, Mat & Naddie's. It's a cute little cottage at Freret and the river with innovative food, friendly atmosphere, and typical NOLA prices (which means we've only eaten there a few times -- can't afford much on an adjunct salary), between $40 and $50 per person depending on how much wine you down. The food was incredible, truly. The only disappointment was the absence of gumbo on the menu. We like theirs the best of all the gumbo in NOLA. Afterwards, we headed to Snug Harbor for Ellis' final performance of the year, a "Christmas New Orleans Style" audio feast. What a blast!

The next night we went to Brigsten's, a place I'd read about on Chowhound numerous times. Hate to say it, but the food was atrocious, as was the service, and the prices were sky high. My salad was doused in Kraft parmesan (honest) and the bread was straight from Winn Dixie. We were served our entrees five minutes apart, which didn't help much, and after they arrived, we were all disappointed. My mom had a seafood platter that was no better than Red Lobster. My duck was so dull I had to sprinkle it with salt just to get some sort of flavor out of it. And the prices!! It was our most expensive meal of the weekend, and we didn't even order dessert. It was a complete disappointment.

In fact, the meal was so bad we almost cancelled our other reservations for the weekend to stay home and cook. Who wants to pay $50+ per person for icky food? Seriously.

But we got over it. We kept our hard-to-get reservations at Bayona, a lovely restaurant in a creole cottage in the Quarter known for its mediterranean-style New Orleans food. It was utterly charming. I'd recommend it to anyone. The prices were less than Brigtsen's, about the same as Mat & Naddie's, and certainly worth every penny. I had their famous garlic soup (better than in Spain, honest), the hangar steak (a cut of meat I'd never heard of) with spinach and au gratin (made with stilton! Wow!!), and for dessert, the house hot chocolate, similar to the spanish version but with a hint of orange zest and topped with homemade marshmallows. Mmm mmm.

We also had a cup of mediocre gumbo at a roadside place "deep in the parish" yesterday afternoon after touring Laura plantation, a "Creole" sugar cane plantation about an hour outside of New Orleans. There's something inherently disturbing about visiting an old plantation. Laura, owned by a for-profit partnership, is known as the most evenly presented of the plantations nearby (including Oak Alley), because it is not owned by the original family. S was studying for exams so he couldn't join us. I thought of him during the tour, however. Just as at most archaeological sites, the common people are ignored in favor of the ruling class. We heard all about the crazy family that ran the place and very VERY little about the hundreds of African-Americans who worked the fields as slaves and made the family rich. I suppose as a nation we don't want to address slavery because we might actually think seriously about reparations if we did. All of that hardship and horror suffered by so many, and all of that wealth still in the hands of the ancestors of plantation owners...

I will write more about this when I post a few photos of the place. We went on a tour of seven garden district mansions this weekend too (the preservation society's annual event), which adds to this discussion, of course. Jefferson Davis died in one of the houses we toured (there's a statue outside stating that fact. It also says he was a "great American."). One of the socialite women in front of me asked the docent, who happened to be African-American, about Davis' death. He described a broken man who was sick with pneumonia. I couldn't help myself. "Making war on the United States can really take a lot out of a man," I said outloud. The socialite looked at me rather harshly and walked out of the room. The docent, however, chuckled. "Some say the south is the only part of the United States that's been occupied by a foreign power," he told me. "Yeah, the Confederate Army," I said. We laughed rather heartily at that one.