.png){kind=icon}
I am in the Heart of Darkness. Not only have I returned to my adopted Stateside home, but this weekend I have, unlike the long sunburnt arms of the British empire, crossed the Mississippi into Louisiana.
A stranger in a strange land. I stumble into daylight, rueing the previous night's last bourbon concoction. The street's facades belie their heritage, a ragtag medley of Spanish and French colonial arches with a grand, somewhat old American charm. As I sip my coffee and squint past the palm trees into the Southern morning sun, it rapidly dawns on me that I'm going to need something stronger. I'm going to need breakfast.
As I contemplate my options, I start to sweat a little. It's unseasonably warm, but more importantly, while the sun never sets on the British Empire, I am most certainly in the Twilight Zone. New Orleans has been many things to many people - ancestral lands of the Natchez nation, Le Vieux Carré to the French colonists, The Big Easy to the Creole and free people of colour, and Nueva Orleans to the Spanish who seem to have been universally disliked (plus ça change...) But alas, the Crescent City has never been touched by the pasty hand of Albion, making the Full English that I so desperately need a bourbon-fuelled mirage.
My travelling companions have made a brunch reservation. We wind through potholed alleys, through the Elysian Fields which today are my hangover purgatory. My hand starts to shake. As I scan the horizon and its Quality Street assortment of colourful colonial houses, the smell of Creole spices wafts over the city, and there is not even a hint of mock Tudor or Georgian brickwork. There probably isn't even an Irish pub. The seriousness of my situation starts to dawn on me.
The theory of parallel evolution holds that, given similar environmental pressures, species without a common ancestor will evolve in similar ways, as they adapt to gain an advantage. Besides providing a convenient explanation for why all of the Star Trek aliens seem to have two legs, two arms, two eyes and a plummy Hollywood accent, parallel evolution has produced strikingly similar species on different continents: for example both the Old and New World have flying frogs, using webbing between their feet and legs to glide between treetops.
As I'm ushered into our brunch reservation at Willa Jean, I feel further than ever from home. The counter advertises t-shirts with earnest slogans like "frosé y'all" and "in biscuits we trust." It's going to be a long morning.
But as we order, nature puts its invisible hand on my shoulder. My eyes dart immediately to the first item on the menu, like a wolf's to the calf trailing behind the pack, focusing out every distraction and granola bowl with ruthless tunnel vision. The words come into focus: WJ breakfast. Eggs. Bacon. Sausage. Biscuit. Grits. The wolf licks its lips.
My plate arrives, delivered with more of the odd customs of our distant American cousins. Our server smiles earnestly and offers refills. My dining companions receive their strange concoctions: chicken and waffles, shrimp and grits. A brick of cornbread. Something called a grain bowl. I feel utterly lost.
First contact. I start to feel my way around the alien creature on the table in front of me. Two eggs over easy, like sunglassed eyes shielding their runny yolks from the daylight. Two sausages, with some crisp on the outside, and plenty of fat on the inside. Bacon - the crispy American kind, charred and leathery recalling a lifetime in the Louisiana sun. A splash of Grits. A biscuit the size of a doughnut. You're not in Lambeth any more, son.
As I tuck in, nature starts to reveal its secrets. I pierce an egg and it gives up the goods, oozing into the precious little white space on my very full plate. I cut into a sausage, satisfyingly greasy within, and stack a slice of bacon. My hangover starts to recede. I mop the egg yolk with a piece of biscuit - its name just one more slap in the abusive relationship between America and the English language - but I am too hungry to care, and it's no time for hobnobs. Immediately the grits start to ooze into the biscuit's place and I sense that I am witnessing something as old as time, watching the delicate ecosystem repair itself. Having married a Georgia girl many years ago I am no stranger to grits, that strange Southern gloop that never seems to be able to decide whether it's polenta or porridge, but as I scoop them up I'm struck by an epiphany: to this wilderness, grits are baked beans.
