Fine Dining: Encountering New Orleans’s Racial Undertones One Meal at a Time

It’s a cool fall night, and Iam at my alma mater’s law-review banquet. Our setting, the Audubon Tea Room, is every bit as posh as it sounds. Tropical centerpieces erupt from tables like floral fountains. Silk curtains tease hardwood floors. The swooping, vaulted ceiling, with its internal buttresses, reminds me somewhat of the beastly ribs that prop up the east wing of Notre Dame Cathedral. After a few speeches, our entrées arrive: succulent beef tournedos for some, trout for others, fresh root vegetables, and a dollop of buttery mashed potatoes. And as has become commonplace for me at celebratory events such as these, I feel a subtle, but substantial, lump in my stomach: indigestion brought on by my old companions, anger and shame.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m aware that I’m sitting on my own shoulder again. That I should just slip myself into the moment like the others seated at my table. Call it navel-gazing. Call it whining. Call it what you will. But that’s the problem of double consciousness.

The annual event honors my former-school’s best. If you made it onto law review, then you’ve been granted admission into the upper reaches of the legal community. In this grand room, there are perhaps 280 of us, representatives from as far back as the Class of ’57 to the baby-faced graduates of ’10, ’11, and ’12. But that’s not what causes the flare-up.

I’m proud of the school, proud of my comrades in education, and proud of myself for having done well. Yet the voices are talking to me again. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Amiri Baraka, my undergraduate professor Niyi Osundare, even Tupac Shakur and Kanye West. They’re a giddy, Greek chorus, or rather a ghostly, Pan-African one, trying to get my attention from the orchestra pit of my mind. My gut tells me to ignore them. But they’re insistent.

I find myself counting, against my will. There are four of us. Four African Americans out of 280. One from a class of the early eighties. Two from the nineties. And me representing the 2000s. In a city that has been majority black since at least the seventies, the chorus sings, How is this possible? But then I see the other half of the equation, the variable that explains all. I can’t tell how many servers are on duty, but they are legion. And almost every one of them looks like one of my aunts, uncles, cousins, me.

My table’s server stands over my shoulder, pouring Riesling. She is elderly, but not decrepit. Yet, in another context, this woman could be a deaconess at my church. No one else at the table tells her thank-you or even acknowledges her existence. Her face, her body, her life are erased by my tablemates’ failure to see. Although I often let the moment pass, tonight, apropos of nothing, I speak.

“Thank you,” I say. “How making out?” I’ve gone too far, I realize immediately. I’ve committed a faux pas by thanking her, inquiring about her feelings—and doing so in light Ebonic vernacular. But it’s only a faux pas in this place. Elsewhere, I would simply be conveying respect and acknowledging the dignity of this human in the way that I was taught by my elders.

RADCLIFFE BAILEY, FOUR AND ONE CORNER-NORTH, 2005. (COURTESY OF ARTHUR ROGER GALLERY)

When I say thanks, her face twitches with surprise. Not only do most people fail to see her, but she’s likely become accustomed to this erasure. And I’ve just destroyed her invisibility by bringing her into my reality. I’m a man in a several-hundred-dollar suit at a table with people in several-thousand-dollar suits. I’m supposed to ignore her. As smart as I supposedly am, I should have long ago developed a way to maintain distance without supporting the...