The only person I ever knew to use the phrase “communal infrastructure” in the context of friendship was Pableaux Johnson.
By communal infrastructure he meant everything that a friend might need over time. Skills, tools, food, knowledge, a listening ear, a place to sleep. He gave of them generously, neither counting the cost nor expecting repayment.
All of this was community property for those of us blessed enough to have been part of his expansive community.
On Sunday, at the Ladies and Men of Unity parade, an immense pillar of our city’s communal infrastructure collapsed, when Pableaux fell to the ground. Efforts at the scene and later at the hospital couldn’t revive him.
He was 59.
I met Pableaux in the late 1990s. Though we both lived in New Orleans, we met at a Southern Foodways symposium in Oxford, Ms. He was a food writer then and a few years later he would publish his book, Eating New Orleans: From French Quarter Creole Dining to the Perfect Poboy. It was published in the summer of 2005. He would joke that when Hurricane Katrina struck two months later his book became an instant relic, filled with stories of places that didn’t survive the levee failures. But for the two of us and our circle of friends, the aftermath of that storm created and strengthened bonds that might otherwise never have been nurtured.
Pableaux was born in New Jersey and raised in Texas and Louisiana, spending much of his childhood in New Iberia. About a decade before Katrina, he bought a church nearby, in St. Martinville, that looked every inch the humble small-town, wood-frame house of worship that it had once been. He renovated it into living space and after Katrina, it became a refuge for those of us exiled from New Orleans storm waters to places like Baton Rouge or Maringouin or Lafayette. We swapped stories of devastation and loss and return and resilience. And we provided support for each other without ever troubling to call ourselves a support group.
Communal infrastructure.
Pableaux sold the church to another food writer, Rien Fertel, but he retained a wooden pew as well as his grandmother’s dining table, where his large, blended family had once gathered.
He said that the table itself demanded to have feet under it, much as it did in his grandmother’s day. And that, I believe, was the origin of one of the things that made Pableaux a New Orleans icon. Every Monday he was in town, he would host a gathering of friends old and new for a dinner of red beans and rice.
He said that the guest list was never the same twice since his catholic assortment of friends meant a rotating cast of characters in contrast to the menu that seldom varied from red beans and rice, cornbread and whiskey for dessert. He might not have described himself as nostalgic or sentimental, but there was that strong strand in him. Cell phones were banned at the table, and not even allowed to confirm or refute facts at issue in the discussion. The point was to be present with red beans and friends and the dying art of unmediated conversation.
If you had a friend visiting from out of town and you wanted to show them something of New Orleans and its people and traditions, you could hardly do better than to ask Pableaux to invite them into the red beans community.
Communal infrastructure.
Pableaux grew up in Cajun Country, where I conclude from his behavior that the purpose of Thanksgiving was to prepare a turkey to be used the next day in turkey bone gumbo. Indeed, for a couple of years Pableaux would ask his friends to save their Thanksgiving turkey carcasses. A few days later, “Gumbo Claus” would begin distributing turkey gumbo to friends. It was as if he thought New Orleans winters were so harsh as to require him to fill his friends’ freezers with the Cajun elixir.
I imagine that the clinically inclined might think of Pableaux’s behavior in this regard as a bit obsessive. But if begging turkey carcasses was evidence of a mental condition, Pableaux was able to cure himself. Once he’d deciphered the mysteries of the turkey sale calendar, he would load up on the birds before Thanksgiving when they are at their cheapest. Then he would smoke and freeze many dozens of them each year until it was time to put them in the gumbo pot. His small freezer could hardly accommodate turkeys and gumbo along with all the other things that more normal people might keep in their freezer. At first, he kept turkeys in other people’s freezer until several of his friends bought him an extra freezer to accommodate his excess.
Communal Infrastructure.
On the morning of Christmas 2023, I got a call from Pableaux saying that he would be going from house to house taking Christmas family photos of his friends. Carnival and Super Sunday, the parade of Black masking Indians, were the only holy days on Pableaux’s calendar. He kept even his own birthday as quiet as he could (January 8).
So he made plans on Christmas Day, to basically make house calls with his camera. This was Pableaux’s idea of Christmas giving. That photo of me, my wife, my sons, my mother and my sister sits in my living room as I type this. It is a far better representation of the joy of that day than my own phone camera managed to capture.
Communal infrastructure.
One mystery haunts me: When Pableaux left after photographing families like mine, where did he eat Christmas dinner? He would have been welcomed at dozens of tables, but he seemed more at home taking photographs and moving among his friends.
Pableaux or “Uncle Pableaux” had a special way with the very old and the very young. We live in what Robert Bly called “The Sibling Society,” in which honorific titles and respect for gray hairs are things of the past. Yet Pableaux never failed to call his elders “miss” or “mister” and never failed to capture children at their youthful best in his photographs. He never wanted kids of his own, but he would dote on yours as if they had sprung from his own loins. He took some of my favorite pictures of my kids.
Communal Infrastructure.
Pableaux was the community “genius bar.” He saved his friends the trouble of driving all the way out to the Apple Store by solving many of our computer problems at his dining room table. I am typing these words on Pableaux’s old laptop. My own had outgrown its hard drive and its usefulness. Rather than try to fix it, as he had done so many times before, he sold me his.
During the pandemic, as freelancing budgets were adjusted, money became tight for him. Of course, he continued to be generous with all of us, with food and photographs.
At some point, our friend Matt de Schutter had had enough of the one-way street of Pableaux’s giving. He called a bunch of friends of Pableaux’s and asked us to donate to an anonymous gift we’d give to our benefactor right before Christmas. More than $1,000 was left in an envelope in Pableaux’s mailbox. Then, fearing a possible theft, Matt tried to text and email Pableaux anonymously so that he’d get to his mailbox before any porch pirates found the gift.
Pableaux didn’t accept gifts easily. In his mind, the universe had assigned him the role of giver, not of receiver. He had to know who had turned the tables on him, who had upset the celestial order of things. He was able to figure out that Matt had sent the email. He then grilled Matt until he got the names of all of us, who had hoped merely to quietly return some of the kindness he had shown us.
New Orleans people are special people, divinely required to spread the good news of red beans and gumbo, good times and good music to the various peoples and places beyond the borders of the Holy City. Embracing this mission, Pableaux joined forces with the Camellia brand to create the Red Bean Road Show, traveling to restaurants around the country, cooking red beans and recreating the feeling of his Daneel Street table in Los Angeles, Birmingham, Dallas, Richmond and beyond. Those road shows were among the precious few causes that could keep Pableaux from his one true love: New Orleans street parades.
Every Sunday that the Lord sent a second line, Pableaux was on the streets among the dancers and onlookers taking pictures. It was important to him to give copies of his photos to the people they featured. It was important to him that, if he sold a photo, the person in the photo also received some compensation. Some other photographers have taken more than they gave and were scorned by those within the culture. But to him, it was important that the dancers and the Indians and the brass bands be respected as the artists they are.
There is a rhythm to street parade photography. You have to be able to move between the dancers and musicians and onlookers, ever mindful not to bump into someone yet ever focused on getting the best shots. Pableaux belonged to a small fellowship of “every Sunday” photographers who documented our city’s contemporary culture with the thoroughness that early decades of street parades never enjoyed. Dressed in all black, he moved through the crowds with efficiency and purpose, crushing no toes, missing few moments.
Pableaux was a big fan of Marc Maron. On his Netflix special “Too Real” the comedian muses on death. “I don’t think I’m afraid to die. I’d prefer it happens quickly,” he says. “I’d like my last words to be something like, “Wait, what?”
Pableaux loved that joke as much in the telling as in the retelling.
I imagine that last Sunday, out on the street, in the city he loved, doing what he so loved to do, among one of the many tribes he called “my people” Pableaux felt a sudden pain or discomfort.
And in an instant, he said to himself, “Wait, what?”