"The Secret Drawer: Meaning & Memory in New Orleans," an essay, by Emily Cosper
Emily Cosper lives and writes in New Orleans, a city she has called home for over 30 years. She is a Professor of English and an academic dean at a large community college in the city. Originally from the American West, she hopes someday to split her time between New Orleans and Taos. Her first collection of poetry, Witness Before the Fall, will be published July 2026 by Finishing Line Press.
The Secret Drawer: Meaning & Memory in New Orleans
When I came back to the front porch with a rag and a can of Pledge my husband asked, “Did you look in here?” He pointed to a drawer deep set in the middle of the dusty, ring-stained drop-leaf table we’d just picked up at 50% off at the estate sale of my former graduate school professors. Dr. Holditch. We didn’t have any kind of enduring relationship, but I always remembered him because of what he said to me during a mandatory one-on-one conference to get approval for the semester's writing project. After I told him my grand plans, he looked up from his fidgety, folded hands and in slow Southern drawl, “Mizzzz Cos-pa, can you not be mo’ oh-riginal in y’ah thinkin? Boo-kow-ski?” All that was missing was an “I-dee-clare”. He added a catty, “Can'tcha do betta with yo mis-creants?” before sending me on my way.
Of course, in retrospect, he was right—my topic was lame, but on that day, I was crestfallen. I did as he suggested, chose a different topic, and never took another class with him, though he was always cordial when I passed him in the halls of the Liberal Arts building.
Long after our Boo-kow-ski exchange, I’d occasionally take some of my English students to one of his walking tours in the French Quarter during the Tennessee Williams Festival, a spring fiesta for those who love Southern writing and New Orleans magic. His Tennessee stories were well-practiced by then after regaling his graduate students semester after semester. Over time, fact and fiction fused into memory, that fine line between participation and things gleaned, seen, or studied in books or heard second, third, or fourth hand blurred. What is the truth, really? It was relative to this loquacious dandy giving tours in spring seersucker, inserting his personal closeness to the story with a wink of the eye or an impish grin, implying a tete a tete or secret joke between Tennessee and him while pointing out landmarks with his walking stick.
His post-academic gig as the teller of truths, half-truths, and tall tales about a literary French Quarter long gone had made him somewhat of an only in New Orleans character, just as you might imagine him to be if you were conjuring the proto-type southern scholar of a certain persuasion with a literary bent, picked from central casting and draped in a white linen suit and a honey-thick drawl. He really could have been a character in one of his idol’s plays, a vestige of a different time and place that never really existed except in a Southern Gothic tragedy or in a headspace easily intoxicated by the beauty of a fog shrouded French Quarter night, one as seduced by the place as Blanche DuBois on a long rainy afternoon.
He didn’t remember me from Adam, but for some reason, his essence always stuck with me; he became a layer of the deep and complex collage that is My New Orleans. Everyone who lives and loves here has one. It is composed of contradictions and clichés, magic and misery, cool cats and characters hanging out with the ghosts and eccentrics under oppressive heat on magnificent oak-lined streets. My New Orleans is a surrealist collection of oddities and incongruities unapologetically layered thick like muck after a flood, bulbous and warped like a tropical garden in June.
There he sits in seersucker among the flambeaux and the broken blinking streetlights after a storm, my first St. Ann’s parade, and a game of pick-up basketball at Tipitina’s following a May flood that left the city in slop and showed me what it means to live in a sinking town where the water has nowhere to go.
Above the dance floor hangs a basketball hoop, perfect for a game of two-on-one with a bartender and a friend while doing tequila shots under the shaded, watchful eyes of Professor Longhair, a cosmic altarpiece's cool cat beneficence beaming down on the people having a ball below. Music is always playing. He is ringed in this scene by the bulging green surround of philodendron the size of giants and sludgy floodwater filling family homes, where the jasmine twines thick through wrought iron, its perfume cloistering the place in sticky spring sweet so thick it smells of a Storyville whorehouse. Its glitter and glimmers sparkle like stars on a moonless night and stick to you like August. The termites swarm flickering streetlights, and palmetto bugs with the wingspan of nightmares divebomb the décolletage of unsuspecting maidens, the endtimes insects a sure sign of things to come.
Like New Orleans, his memory and he are of a different time and place, from a wild plane not visible to all but one I can see beyond the tourist traps and the make- believe. He is an avatar and an archetype in a rumpled suit, here to remind me of who I set out to be but have yet to become, like Willy Lowman's ghostly brother, Ben. His living quarters were rooms carved from a colonnaded mansion overlooking the bucolic, oak-filled Washington Square Park in the Marigny, the mansion’s grandeur truncated by time and diminishing wealth into apartments. His was right off the large veranda, one from which if you squint through the continuum, Creole society still promenades through the Square in finery as peddlers’ cries fill the air: Flores por los muertos and pecan candy for sale. From his kitchen window you could see Elysian Fields. Maybe it is here that Tennessee sat in wicker getting tippled on a Sunday afternoon connecting the dots between the broken and the brethren, between sorrow and song, long before he choked on a bottle cap high on barbiturates in a New York City hotel.
Estate sales are melancholy on half-priced days, the remnants of a life bundled for cheap before last call, soon to be in a dumpster or donated to a charity shop, a harbinger for those picking through the dead’s remains. The fleet feet of time often leave behind chintz curtains hanging in tatters and an odd collection of grandmother's cut glass chipped and mostly useless but still passed from generation to generation until there isn’t one, its last dusty stand in a dead man's pantry filled with corn-bread mix and canned beans well past the sell by date stamped on the bottom. This one was no different, save the curtains were toile and the glass, a hoard of peach opalescent carnival stacked haphazardly in an oddly carved-out wannabe butler's pantry lined with sticky paper from another century.
I noticed the table immediately, its drink rings like a tree's, concentric snapshots of its chronology. I was certain when he read my not Boo-kow-ski paper, the Sazerac he sipped left one of those rings for me but turned off the other bargain hunters picking through this dead man's detritus on a Sunday morning. It was meant to be, the table a perfect fit for the room of one’s own I was creating at home, a private space to follow my flights of fancies on the page and to connect the dots like Tennessee.
The place felt like a mausoleum or Miss Havisham’s. All the rooms were dark and musty and seemed as if they had only recently been opened after his death a few years prior. Stacks of old books and papers covered most flat surfaces and stood in the corners like totems.
Men with pen lights and headlamps scoured the titles and flipped the pages looking for a bibliophile's dream, some first edition or a note from Tennessee. Piles of tattered Tennessee Williams Festival posters fanned across an antique bed, a strange yellowing collage covering a chenille bed cloth eaten by moths.
As we winded our way through the rooms, I grabbed a beat up copy of The Wasteland and Other Poems to cut up and use in collages, a notions tin filled with strange scraps of mourning fabric and a string of alabaster buttons, a handful of yellow, blue, and pink plastic gerbera daisies that I turned into a crown for Toth Sunday, and a stained sepia toned toile tablecloth in better shape than those tattered curtains in the kitchen. It was shabby chic in that romantic state of decay way, certainly something Blanche DuBois would toss across a tabletop to spruce up the place regardless of the stains, for the lights would be shaded in silk scarves, the stains hidden in the shadows like a deep family secret. On it, a maiden holds a ring of posies over her lover's aquiline profile; she is draped in floral garland under fat trees and by her dainty feet, a tambourine and an artist with sketchbook capturing the chaste scene. Of course, the drink ringed table also came home with me.
~~~~~~~~~~
After I wiped the cobwebs from the spindly legs, we carried the table in and pulled out what seemed a long-forgotten treasure trove of oddly intimate, strangely exciting, and weirdly comforting mementos, paperwork, and other important things. For the record, I am highly aroused by things, and as of late, I feel some kind of woowoo connection to certain of them, whether they be a priceless heirloom or some rando scalloped trinket bowl I pick up at a French Quarter estate sale. The energy, the mojo, the juju, the ghosts, the potentiality, I see it around the edges where a strange auric energy glows.
I am in the swirl, the vibe, the chi, that continuum where the ancestors—yours, mine, and all—kick it in the ether. There, my dearly departed Dad and Dr. John float around with someone's MeeMaw from Gretna, she whose mid-century plastic flowers I bought at an estate sale though covered in grime with grand plans to turn them into an epic headpiece, keeping those toxic mid-mod flowers out of the landfill and from leeching forever plastics into the water table like the mounds of tires dumped along Almonaster Boulevard in New Orleans East do. Perhaps it will be her grandson strolling down Royal Street who hands me some Pete Fountain Half-Fast Walking Club beads one Mardi Gras Day. He will stare at me weirdly, not sure of what he sees—is it the booze or his long gone granny whispering, "Can I have some beads, please?”
Thus, you can imagine my delight as I pulled from the drawer a gold stopwatch sans crystal that hangs from a fob with an enormous spring ring clasp. It reminds me of something Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof might reach for dramatically when talking with Brick, he an important man in a race with the clock. Ticktock Ticktock Ticktock. Its hands are stuck at 4:52. I wonder what happened the afternoon it took its last tock. It now sits on a shelf in my room, reminding me that time moves fast and ends too soon. Just yesterday, I sat in Dr. Holditch’s office being told what to do; he sat behind stacks of books, including a copy of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Deep in the hidden drawer there was a somewhat rusted Band-Aid tin stuffed with $150 cash, probably stashed about the same time the handful of Susan B. Anthony coins at the bottom were minted. Deeper still, there was a warped plastic portfolio stamped with the word Passport and embossed with the United States seal of eagle and lyre, in it, a rag bag of ephemera: a “Season’s Greetings from the staff of The Bombay Club” calling card, two expired passports stamped Gatwick a few times, several expired credit cards from department stores Ain’t Der No More, a smattering of French francs and British pounds, and a letter from an Uptown doctor that for doctor-patient confidentiality sake, I will only say Dr. Holditch likely got an aisle seat on those flights to and from Gatwick based on a diagnosed disorder of the medical kind.
On the left inside pocket, a hoity-toity golden crest reads, “The Bombay Club” in a swirl of heraldic swag with a lion and a unicorn in rearing profile, framing its locally iconic TBC logo. The word TICKETS is stamped above in caps, and on the opposite pocket, PASSPORT. It seems designed for a time when travel documents were tangible and not stored on a phone. Though warped, the case is nice, the kind of schwag probably highly prized by the French Quarter denizens who drank at the bar in seersucker and reminisced about the times that Tennessee sat among them sipping a Sazerac and shooting the breeze.
On the TICKETS side of the case, there were several $2 bills and a silver certificate, protected by an envelope handmade with scotch tape, scissors, and a clear plastic book cover.
Holding it, I have vague memories of my paternal family in a kerfuffle about Confederate silver certificates that turned up in a family box, all certain their value would change the trajectory of our familial wealth. He must have thought the same about the certificate, probably a generational thing.
I keep this ephemera bundled like letters from an important man. Occasionally, I untie the neon green ribbon around the parcel and rifle through it, looking for some cosmic clue, like the note written in shaky hand on the back of a Whitney Bank money envelope: Always grate-Ful! Thanks. The bank's slogan: A Great Bank for a GREAT City, fans in italics across the bottom. Both sentiments resound—always grateful, a GREAT City, words for me to keep around, a mantra for when the day-to-day grinds, and I forget that magic and mystery abound. I just need to look around. It can be found in the strangest of places.
In the very back of the drawer was a small navy-blue box with a Beretta trident logo on it and a box of Winchester Western 50 count center fire pistol-revolver cartridges. For the record, I have always been anti-gun on principle, but when I opened the box and found a sleek black pistol, I was strangely thrilled. It was sexy in that black beret revolutionary way. I thought to myself, armed for the revolution just in the knick of time. I had never held a real gun until that moment, and I have certainly never shot one. Dr. Holditch likely did, as half the ammo was missing from the box. I cannot help but wonder who, what, where, when, and why, fundamental questions that inspire the mind. Folded neatly in the box was a receipt from Puglia’s Sporting Goods in Metairie, dated June 1983, just a few months after we lost Tennessee.
My husband and I sat in disbelief with the contents of the drawer spread across that table now so dear to me. That the estate sale folks forgot to check the drawer opened a portal that reminds me the past is prologue, present, and make-believe. My laptop sits atop that toile tablecloth as I contemplate this thread that connects the living to the dead, a thread easy to see in this sinking town where I find myself two degrees from Tennessee and who I used to be. Professor Holditch lives on in my memory.