Some Kind of Magic

Deja Groomes

photo credit: Deja Groomes

A few weeks ago, while trying to wind down and get my mind off my schoolwork, I decided to take out my laptop and re-watch Now You See It, that old Disney Channel Original Movie from 2005 about a contest for kid magicians. The movie was filmed, in part, at a mansion off of St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. I’d watched it on television growing up, but five-year-old me never realized that New Orleans was one of the film’s backdrops. Now that I’m older, it’s clearer to me that the iconic setting was used to amplify the film’s subject. 

New Orleans has always been used to invoke the supernatural.

I caught myself focusing on a shot of the streetcar as it rolled down St. Charles. I’d seen, heard, and used that streetcar more times than I can count over the last two years. Most recently during Mardi Gras, when I stood alone at my stop along the neutral ground, on my way to meet a friend to watch the Krewe of Bacchus parade. I watched the car approach, packed to the brim, overflowing, as the distinct hum of the car’s wheels cruising along the rails grew louder and filled my ears. I didn’t expect the car to stop, but it did. I was skeptical, but the streetcar operator knew something more about the car’s capacity than I did, and she told me I could squeeze in up front. I thanked her, showed her my mobile ticket, and off we went toward Napoleon Avenue.

That streetcar ride on Bacchus Sunday was bumpy. The sheer number of riders made it feel like the car might tip over every time we stopped. I held on tight to the pole at the very front, but that didn’t stop me from being jostled against the other passengers. The apologetic looks stopped after a while as we collectively grew desensitized to bodily contact. It was all just a part of the Mardi Gras experience—masses of bodies filling the streets, necks draped in the beads and throws of earlier parades, costumes combining the purples and greens and yellows of Mardi Gras, and tourists or first-timers with ample time on their hands dressed in outlandish hand-made costumes.

The bell chimed as the streetcar entered the intersection, ringing asynchronously with car horns and the frustrated exclamations from passengers whose stops had been skipped. As much of a cacophony as it was, there was a harmony to it all. 

I remembered that harmony as I watched my movie. The lingering aura of that last Mardi Gras reminded me why New Orleans has always been fictionalized as a place with its own mystique; somehow more authentic than other American cities. Those stories often paint the Crescent City as a place where Voodoo inherently courses through its veins, keeping everything running with a little help from a gris-gris bag hung around the mayor’s neck. But for me, the magic of New Orleans is something more pedestrian.  

I felt it when that packed streetcar stopped for me. I climbed up the steps and felt like I’d been embedded in some ethereal web so naturally I could only assume it was luck. But luck had little to do with it. The streetcar stop was only empty because the people who were there when I first arrived had all given up on waiting. But I stood there, waiting, making my own luck.

If there’s anything magical about New Orleans, it’s in that transfiguration—New Orleanians persist, they wait out the hard times, the hurricanes, the broken side streets. They embrace strife and learn to make do—they don’t erase it. And they conceive a system, from beneath the surface, outside the traditional systems of power, often by the most powerless, to keep it all in balance. That’s magic.

I think of the kind lady that stopped the streetcar for me, and the friendly employees at my favorite bookstore. I think of the independent movie theatre in Mid-City that somehow manages to survive the hard times, and my favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant. It’s that charmed quality tucked into this deep-south city that can only be understood once you’ve experienced it for yourself. 

Now You See It doesn’t show you that tangible magic. It offers a glimpse—the hundred-year-old streetcar, the live oak trees. I kept watching, keeping my eye out for some deeper sign, some tell, of the New Orleans I know, but it wasn’t there.

Deja Groomes is an English student originally from New Orleans before moving to north Texas post-Katrina. She can be found reading, blogging, taking photos of books, or re-watching Gossip Girl.