The Food Section is a bit tardy in paying tribute to Pableaux Johnson. To be honest, he was a friend, and my professional obligation in this regard didn’t register right away. I’m indebted to Wayne Curtis for accepting the impossible assignment to capture Pableaux in words.
Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn, New York is tonight hosting a celebration of Pableaux from 6 p.m.-10 p.m. Then, this Saturday, February 22, another celebration is scheduled at the Church at Hotel Peter & Paul in New Orleans. Doors open at 1:30 p.m., and the memorial service begins at 2 p.m., with red beans to follow later in the day.
“Hey, I’m Pableaux. Who are you? Tell me everything.”
Pableaux Johnson, who died on January 26 in New Orleans, would walk into a room like a human tsunami. He often stopped by gatherings I’d host in the alley outside my house, and the first thing he’d do upon arrival would be to introduce himself to anyone he didn’t know. This more often than not led to long discussions and a surprising number of lasting friendships.
“Hey, I’m Pableaux” was partly schtick—he often followed this with, “Start at the beginning, go to the end, don’t leave anything out in between”—but he was utterly guileless. He really wanted to know about your life. Over the decade and a half we were good friends, it dawned on me that “Tell me everything” was the building block from which he crafted his communities—the quark from which everything was built.
If, after a few moments of chatting with you, he concluded you were good people, there were decent odds that he’d invite you to his house the following Monday night for red beans and rice.
Pableaux Johnson died doing one of the things he loved most in the city that loved him back. He was photographing a Sunday second line—a weekly celebration in which members of neighborhood social clubs dress to the nines and parade and dance through the streets behind brass bands, as they have for more than a century. He was 59 and died of a cardiac arrest.
If you ever went to a neighborhood second line you may have seen him: he was the guy in dark jeans and black shirt and a black Kangol hat, moving backwards with an impressive agility ahead of the dancers, his Nikon D500 held to his eye, his finger rapidly working the shutter.
He didn’t just capture the extravagant outfits, which is the first thing you notice in his photos, but joy and pride and that ineffable defiance that’s baked in to many New Orleanians. His photographs were vortices of vibrant colors and chaotic energy. Don’t take my word for it; have a look here or scroll through his Instagram account here.
Over the past couple of years, he’d started documenting the city’s high school marching bands. And if he learned your family was in town for a visit, he’d show up unannounced with his camera to grab some family portraits to send to you later. “These are important,” he’d say.
Years ago, I noticed him at a second line reach into his camera bag and pull out a white envelope and hand it to someone passing by on the street. What was up with that, I asked? That’s how I learned that he often printed out pictures and gave them to his subjects when he ran into them at the next second line. And when someone in the community died, he’d print up a large portrait and bring it to the service for the family.
Photographing second lines and Black Masking Indians and other subcultures in the city is a fraught endeavor—there’s something extractive and exploitive about swooping in, capturing a moment of grace, and then selling framed prints at a gallery or shots to a travel magazine and pocketing the cash. Pableaux refused to do that. He split proceeds with subjects, whether from a gallery show or a corporate gig. He wasn’t just photographing a community; he was part of the community. He was an artist, and community was his medium.
To say Pableaux Johnson was an accomplished chef would be overstating matters. His kitchen repertoire was mostly limited to red beans and cornbread and gumbo. But to say that he was just a maker of red beans and cornbread and gumbo is to vastly understate matters.
Every Monday for several decades he invited people over to his house at 7 p.m. Eight to 12 people showed up — an assortment of folks from in town and out, a roster he claimed never was repeated exactly in all his Monday gatherings. Guests chatted then settled in around a long laminate table that once anchored his grandmother’s kitchen. “I’ve got to feed the table,” he said often.
“How do you know Pableaux?” was always a good way to start up a conversation with the stranger to your right. Sometimes they were friends from the time he lived in Austin or San Antonio (a giveaway: they called him “Paul,” his given name), or they’d say, “My cousin said I should call Pableaux when I was in town, and I did, and he invited me over.” A not uncommon answer was: “This guy randomly started talking to me on the street yesterday and he said I should come over to his house for red beans.”
People who had recently moved to New Orleans were especially welcome, since Pableaux loved to introduce them to others, to help them launch their own starter communities. When my niece and nephew, both in their 20s, moved to New Orleans two years ago, he had us over for red beans, and the night’s discussion was filled with suggestions on how to find jobs and be at home in the city. Also seated with us that night was the actress Toni Collette, who happened to be in town making a film. Yet the evening was less about Hollywood and more about what 20-years-olds had figured out about life, and what they hadn’t. It was a memorable night, although I fear my niece and nephew came away with a misguided idea of what daily life in New Orleans would be like.
Talk rose and fell in waves, sometimes tumultuously and table-wide and sometimes in quieter eddies of two or three. The subject ranged widely—recent travels, New Orleans infrastructure, riffs on names for fake bands. And there were arguments over facts. These were the sort of facts that could be answered in three or four seconds by consulting Google—like, “What year did George Carlin die?” But Pableaux strictly forbid phone use at the table for any reason. So instead, we’d argue for four or five minutes about the possible answer, trying to triangulate a date. The discussion was the point; the answer was secondary. Pointless arguing was not a flaw but a feature. It was the mortar for community.
Monday night meals were unvarying, and his fixed menu was a nod to the past—in New Orleans, red beans were traditionally served on Mondays, when a pot could be left to simmer on the stove while doing laundry. Making thousands of batches of red beans had resulted in a lapidary perfection; his red beans remain the best I’ve ever had. Dessert was whiskey, Weller if he had it, and lately this was augmented by a reverse Manhattan he loved making with Carpano Antica. In winter, he brought out his coquito, a Puerto Rican sort-of eggnog with coconut.
Food-as-community extended far beyond his table. During the pandemic, Pableaux made great vats of red beans and delivered quart deli containers to unemployed bartenders and servers and chefs. Every year leading up to Thanksgiving he bought turkeys—a dozen, two dozen, it all depended on the year. He then recruited friends with extra freezer space and stashed them around town like a squirrel hiding acorns. He kept a list of where they were on his phone, and over the next couple of months he’d gather them up two at a time, smoke them in his Weber smoker, then render these into stock and meat and make spectacular dark-roux turkey and andouille gumbo.
This he served around the table during non-Monday get-togethers in winter, and what remained went into quart containers and was delivered to friends. Someone called him Gumbo Claus, and it stuck. Each quart was more than a night’s meal; it was way of maintaining and tempering the links in his community.
One thing I noticed about Pableaux was that he went to a lot of memorial services. He seemed to always be driving or flying somewhere to attend a funeral or a celebration of life, in Texas or South Carolina or north Louisiana. He had a large extended family and going to services is part and parcel of that. But he also was flying off for friends and even friends of friends. The week he died he told me he was planning to drive to Austin for one memorial service, then to Pensacola a few days later for another. One could conclude that being a friend of Pableaux came with a certain risk.
I asked him who the Florida service was for, and he told me it was for the mother of a housemate he had more than two decades ago. This gave me pause. In part, because it made me wonder in what other ways I was failing as a human being. But mostly because I thought, who goes to a funeral of the mother of a roommate from 20 years ago?
The answer to that, of course, was Pableaux Johnson. It was another way he maintained and sustained his community. By always being there when needed.
I’m not much for attending functions where I don’t know many people. But sometimes these are necessary, and so when I walk up the steps, I often whisper to myself to “channel my inner Pableaux.” Instead of hovering near the potato chips and trying to gain invisibility, I’ll take a deep breath, cross the room and head right toward the first stranger standing alone.
“Hi,” I say. “I’m Wayne. Who are you? Tell me everything.”
Beautiful. Quite a human.
Beautifully captured, Wayne. I’ve been thinking about how I’ll continue to honor Pableaux, and it really is about building and maintaining our communities and pushing past the niceties to build real intimate connections. The potential is everywhere around us, and Pableaux showed us how over and over again. Ain’t we lucky, indeed. xo