THERE were rules at Pableaux Johnson’s Monday dinners. No phones: pay attention to the people around you. Don’t sit next to someone you know. Bring something to drink if you must, but Mr Johnson provided the food, and the menu never changed. He served red beans and rice, which is traditionally a Monday dish in New Orleans, because the ham bones from Sunday dinner could lazily simmer away in a pot of red kidney beans while the city’s cooks and matrons did laundry for the week. The only other dishes were cornbread with butter, or on lucky occasions, sweet, earthy sorghum syrup, and bourbon for dessert.
The formica-topped oval table came from his grandmother, and he was quick to point out that it was not the formal dining-room table. It sat in the kitchen, where Mr Johnson and the 23 other grandchildren crowded around for meals, as did his mother and her generation. Tables have souls, after a fashion; they retain the traces of all those who have gathered, and this one, he said, “needs to be fed at least twice a week”. And so every Monday, between eight and 12 people showed up, and though there were regulars, he never fed the same group of people twice.
Guests included friends, friends of friends and friends of theirs, neighbours and out-of-towners, musicians and lawyers, journalists and chefs, doctors and teachers, young and old, a mix of races and backgrounds and social classes, all gathered around bowls of rice topped with Mr Johnson’s creamy, smoky beans studded with half-moons of spicy andouille sausage. First-timers felt instantly welcome; Mr Johnson was warm, disarming and impish, with twinkling brown eyes and a ready smile (he often called himself a “Cajun grandma with a beard”).
The meal, he said, was “just supper”: an unfussy, serve-yourself sort of meal, with spoons and a roll of paper towels at the centre of the table, designed to put people at ease and get them talking to each other. But in New Orleans, supper is never just a meal. Nomenclature aside, nowhere do Louisiana’s French roots show as deeply as in the centrality of food to its social life.
New Orleans has a reputation for sybaritism, but that is a judgment imposed by people who come from elsewhere. Locals take a more sensible view: if you’re going to go to the trouble to cook, you might as well make something delicious; and if you’re going to make something delicious, you might as well eat it in good company. Recipes tend to feed a lot of people because families were large and good food attracts crowds: bars often prepare red beans and rice on Mondays to attract patrons on otherwise slow evenings. John Thorne, a food writer from New England, fell in love with this aspect of the city: “People [in New Orleans] like to hang out—talk and dance and eat and drink—and do it in a way that suggests that this isn’t something they’re going to regret or swear off or think better of the next morning…The next morning they may even be right where they are now.”
Sometimes it takes an outsider to fully appreciate a place’s ethos, and like Mr Thorne, Mr Johnson was not native to the city. He was born in New Jersey and moved as a child to New Iberia, which is deep in Cajun country, around 200km west of New Orleans. He then attended university in San Antonio, Texas, where he changed his first name from Paul to Pableaux, symbolising the connection he felt to that city’s Latinos, and honouring his Cajun heritage with the ersatz French spelling (Cajuns being the French-speakers who populate Louisiana’s bayous). He moved to New Orleans in 2001, but really it was impossible to imagine him anywhere else. He cooked gumbo for crowds while living in Texas, and eventually wrote four books, all of which are about food and/or New Orleans.
The qualities that made him a peerless host—curiosity, attentiveness, the ability to put others at ease—served him well in his career as a photographer. He specialised in Black Masking Indians, which are societies of African-American New Orleanians who parade in colourful, intricate, handmade costumes to honour the Native American tribes that in the 19th century sheltered runaway slaves; and also in second lines: brass-band processions most common at weddings and funerals.
He was a familiar figure around the city, flitting at the edge of a scene, dressed in black with cameras slung over his shoulder. Parades centre around movement, yet at the heart of many of his pictures sit a pensive stillness and dignity, revealing the person behind the costume. His portrait work has a similar intimacy. He often took pictures from just inches away, the better to capture the joy, wariness or playfulness in his subjects’ eyes as they reacted to him: a reminder that photographers often say they “make” rather than “take” pictures.
Masking Indians and second-line clubs can be suspicious of outsiders with cameras who show up to take pictures of the colourful proceedings that they then publish and sell, without sharing the money with the people in the photographs. And indeed, Mr Johnson struggled for years with the question of how to ethically commercialise his work. But when someone he’d photographed died, Mr Johnson invariably showed up at the funeral bearing an immense, framed image of the deceased as a gift for the family. And when he sold one of his pictures, the subject got half the proceeds.
Mr Johnson collapsed after going into cardiac arrest while photographing a second line; after he died, some paraded in a celebration of his life, which is a rare honour for an outsider. And in the days that followed his death, people around the world who had been lucky enough to be his guests in New Orleans made red beans and rice themselves, and invited friends and strangers alike to partake. They may even have raised a glass or two with one of Mr Johnson’s favourite phrases, that came, like his table, from his grandmother: “Ain’t we lucky.” ■