Wicked Good Living : Lessons from the Dead

Dispatches from the Crescent City: Lessons from the Dead

I woke up January 1 in New Orleans and I wasn’t even hungover! I took a cold shower, which is something I never do. There was no hot water, but I wanted to get wet. Maybe to wash 2025 off. I could only tolerate it for a minute or two. Then I got dressed and started walking towards the French Market.

The sun was shining and 2026 felt like a blessing. I wasn’t sure where I was going. I just wandered around. I walked through Jackson Square and saw massive lines at Cafe du Monde, so I definitely wasn’t getting beignets. I walked through the whole French Market. Most food places were still closed. The market was opening slowly this morning it seemed.

The French Market has always opened this way. Not ceremonially. Not all at once. It exists because someone decided it should. In 1784, under Spanish rule, the city formally designated this stretch by the river as the place where trade would happen. People were already buying and selling here. The decision did not create commerce. It just made it official.

Over the years the buildings of the market were destroyed, rebuilt, and shifted around. None of that mattered much. The point was never the structure. The point was the trade. The exchange.

Markets survive because they are honest about what’s exchanged. You know why you are there. You know what you are giving. You know what you are getting. Relationships fail for the opposite reason. We act as if they exist outside of terms. We assume understanding instead of checking it. Time, attention, trust, and effort are always being exchanged, but we rarely say it out loud. When those terms change, as they always do, we hope things will somehow hold without being renegotiated. Markets do not do that. They adjust openly. They last because the terms are clear and the exchange is honest.

I walked back down Decatur Street. The line for chicory coffee and beignets was even longer. There was literally not a single person at the Market Cafe, which is thirty seconds away from Cafe du Monde. A guy working there hollered. “Want breakfast?” That was exactly what I wanted, so I sat outside by the railing in the closest seat to the golden Joan of Arc statue.

Shrimp and grits

Joan of Arc was a peasant teenager from Domrémy who appeared in French history at a moment of collapse. In the early fifteenth century, France was losing the Hundred Years’ War. The British controlled large portions of the country. The French crown was weak and divided. In 1429, Joan claimed she was instructed by divine voices to support Charles VII and drive the British from France.

For a brief moment, Joan was protected because what she did was working. In 1429, she convinced French commanders to let her accompany the army during the siege of Orléans, where she urged an aggressive assault rather than continued delay. The siege was lifted. Over the following weeks, French forces won a series of battles along the Loire River, reopening territory that had been lost to the British. Joan then insisted that Charles VII travel to Reims, deep in contested land, where he was crowned king. She did not command armies, but she gave direction, confidence, and urgency at a moment when all three were missing. As long as her presence coincided with progress and legitimacy for the crown, she was protected.

That protection did not last. In 1430, Joan was captured by Burgundian forces, a rival French faction that had allied itself with the British during the Hundred Years’ War. They handed her over to British authorities, who put her on trial in a church court. The trial was not really about religion. It was about discrediting Joan and weakening the French king she had helped put on the throne. Over months of interrogation, she was pressured to deny the voices she said guided her and to abandon the men’s clothing she wore, which church officials treated as disobedience and used against her. She understood the stakes clearly. If she recanted, she would live. If she stood by what she believed was true, she would die. Joan briefly signed a confession to save herself, then withdrew it, refusing to live a lie. In 1431, at the age of nineteen, she was executed by being burned at the stake in the city of Rouen.

What I admire about Joan is not her faith, but her clarity. She refused to live a life she knew was false. Sitting looking at Joan’s statue and only steps away from the French Market, the contrast is hard to ignore. The market survives because it is honest. When the terms no longer work, they are adjusted openly. Joan lived that same honesty as a person. She told the truth and would not bend it to survive. The market endures because it faces the truth. Joan was executed because living honestly left her standing alone in the fire.

After breakfast, I walked back to the hotel, but stopped in at Erin Rose for frozen Irish coffee. I stayed for two because that place vibes in the late morning.

I made a brief visit to my hotel before going to St. Louis Cemetery no. 1. You have to enter the adjacent building to get the tickets. Inside there was a really interesting map. It showed in red the areas of New Orleans that had at least 12 inches of water after Hurricane Katrina.

The tour guide was very energetic and entertaining, and used the cemetery itself to explain how New Orleans has always had to negotiate with water, death, and history at the same time. Because of the high water table and frequent flooding, the dead are buried above ground in tombs and wall vaults, otherwise coffins would eventually float back to the surface.

Bodies are sealed inside the tombs until they naturally decompose. After a year and a day, the tomb is reopened, the remaining dust swept into the corner, and space is made for the next family member. As we walked, we passed the pyramid shaped tomb purchased by Nicolas Cage and nearby memorials honoring soldiers who manned the cannons during the Battle of New Orleans under Andrew Jackson, reminders of how the city folds national myth-making directly into its burial grounds.

We stopped at the tomb of Homer Plessy, the man whose arrest for sitting in a whites-only railroad car led to Plessy v. Ferguson and the Supreme Court’s disastrous endorsement of “separate but equal.” That ruling legalized racial segregation for more than half a century, shaping everyday life in the United States until it was finally overturned in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. Standing there made it clear this wasn’t abstract legal history, it was a real person, buried here, whose quiet act of resistance helped define an entire era of American injustice.

The most intriguing story belonged to Marie Laveau. The tour guide showed us a fake tomb and a real tomb, explaining that the famous site most visitors see is a decoy, and that someone once broke into the cemetery, climbed the walls at night, and spray painted the real tomb pink.

Her legacy has been reduced to superstition, but she was deeply involved in herbal and holistic medicine among people excluded from the medical establishment, and the effort to shut her down reflected a broader power grab by medical and social elites. Even the often mocked voodoo dolls began as practical health charts. I in an oral healing tradition, figures marked with pins to show where a patient had been treated, allowing practitioners to remember who had been treated for what and where in a system that relied on memory rather than written records. Her story makes clear that what gets labeled superstition is often just knowledge practiced outside the approval of those in charge.

Standing in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, surrounded by tombs, crypts, sand the quiet certainty of endings, it became clear that understanding death sharpens the urgency of living. Accepting that nothing lasts is not morbid here, it is clarifying, a reminder to live with intention, curiosity, and purpose while we still can.