Red beans and memories: New Orleans honors a beloved cook, lost too soon

Washington Post

01-03-2025

NEW ORLEANS — Unless you were a FOP — a Friend of Pableaux, a universe far more expansive than many realized — you might not understand why hundreds from across the country crammed into a former church on Feb. 22 to celebrate the life of Paul 'Pableaux' Johnson, a photographer and cook whose legacy includes his extraordinary ability to build community.
Even in death.
Chefs. Family. Food writers. Musicians. Historians. Photographers. Second-line dancers. Social aid and pleasure club members. The breadth of Johnson's community came into sharp focus underneath the weathered nave of a deconsecrated church, built in the mid-1800s to minister to Irish Catholics in a city known for its fair share of sin. The grieving packed into seats so close they couldn't help but touch the people around them. They stood along walls, under tall windows, the afternoon light pouring through the savior and saints re-created in stained glass.
They came together to celebrate Johnson, 59, who died Jan. 26 after he suffered cardiac arrest while darting among the dancers and musicians of the Ladies and Men of Unity second-line parade, looking for the right moments to snap a photo. They came to honor a man who, seemingly in violation of the laws of time and thermodynamics, always found the hours and the energy to stay connected to a vast network of friends, colleagues and loved ones whom he alone nurtured.
He was born Paul Johnson but had transformed himself in early adulthood into Pableaux Johnson, complete with his own superpower, said Galen Dixon, a former college roommate who spoke at the memorial.
'So who is Paul and who is Pableaux?' asked Dixon as he stood at what was once the altar in the events space at the Hotel Peter and Paul in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood.
'You all know that there was nothing fake about Paul: No artifice, no suit of armor or mask. Pableaux just gave Paul permission to put himself out there as the vulnerable, open, loving person that he was born to be,' Dixon said. 'It was his superhero identity.'
Born in New Jersey in 1966 but raised mostly in New Iberia, Louisiana, Johnson was something of a polymath, always pushing himself to learn new skills. For years, he was known as a food writer — 'and an excellent one,' noted Brett Anderson, a food writer with the New York Times based in New Orleans. Johnson was also a superb home cook, named one of the nation's 100 best ever by Epicurious in 2017. He was an artist and photographer whose images of second-line parades and Black Masking Indians would hang in museums or appear in documentaries. But his real occupation, many say, was building community through his red beans and rice dinners, served per tradition on Monday nights, and through his tireless outreach.
'He seemed to approach maintaining a friend network as almost a full-time job,' Wayne Curtis, a friend and cocktail writer, said in an interview two days before the memorial. 'He just seemed to do it constantly. I know when he was on the road, he would call me two, three times a day sometimes. … If I missed a call, I'd call him back a minute later, and it would go right to voicemail. He was just rolling right through his contact list.'
Johnson's community was so large, in fact, that friends felt a kind of betrayal after his death, as social media channels flooded with tributes, memories and pictures that he had shot and sent to countless people around the country. Sue Crespo, a close friend of Johnson's, is credited with finding the words to express this sinking feeling, but her sentiment was echoed by others, including Anderson, who repeated Crespo's succinct line at the memorial:
'I feel like I'm finding out that he was cheating on me.'
Johnson learned the art and power of community building from his mother, the late Carmelite Hebert Blanco, said his half brother, Tony Blanco. The brothers were not close for a long stretch, Blanco said at the memorial, but about 15 years ago, the two sat down to repair their relationship. What would it take? Blanco asked his brother. Regular and meaningful conversations, Johnson replied, and lots of hanging out.
'He wasn't perfect. He didn't like holidays, except for Mardi Gras and New Year's. He was guarded. He was superstitious. He was willful. He didn't want to be told what to do. He could be really, really prickly. He was ambivalent towards animals,' Blanco recalled.
'What was most important was that he just loved people,' the brother added. 'He loved families, and when you met him, he just shined his light on you and made you float on air. He was funny and he was kind, and he gave of himself relentlessly.'
The stories of Johnson's altruism came, one after another, from speakers at the altar: When newcomers arrived in town, alone and in need of friends, Johnson would invite them to his red beans dinner. When a loved one was dying in the hospital, he would make a special trip to provide comfort for those at the side of the death bed. When the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina inundated the streets of New Orleans, he turned his church in St. Martinville into a refuge for displaced friends and families.
'He created a safe space for all of his people to mourn and be collectively messed up,' remembered Ariana French, who was married to Johnson until their divorce in 2006.
But the nerve center of Johnson's community was the wooden table that he inherited from his grandmother. It wasn't her formal dining room table, Johnson once told the Splendid Table, but her everyday one. 'The fancy dining room table didn't get used every day, but this one did,' he told Francis Lam in 2017. 'This was where all the power was. This was in my grandmother's kitchen so this was also the center of community.'
Jessica Harris, the author and historian who documents the foodways of the African diaspora, singled out the table in her remarks.
This 'ordinary, inanimate object became the vehicle that connected Pableaux with the world,' Harris said. ''The table needs feedin',' he'd say, personifying the table and rendering it master — or should I perhaps say 'mistress'? — of his life. For it was through the table that Pableaux created his world.'
The table was an equal-opportunity feeding station, Harris noted. It broke down the racial barriers that still exist in New Orleans.
'Black and White joined at Pableaux's table,' she said. 'Uptown, downtown, Backatown met at Pableaux's table. All could and did meet at Pableaux's table as equals, with only two caveats: Cellphone use was prohibited, and you had to bring what you were drinking.'
The table made a special appearance after the memorial service: It was transported from Johnson's home and tucked into a corner of Press Street Station, an events space where servers ladled out portions of red beans and rice, prepared with Johnson's preferred Camellia brand red kidney beans. A pew, taken from Johnson's church before he sold it, provided seating for the meal, just as it had done for years at his weekly red beans dinners. To reach Press Street, the memorial crowd marched or danced in a second-line parade, led by the Yung Dex Brass Band, the boundary between sadness and celebration all but impossible to trace.
The second-line procession was just one of several that celebrated Johnson's life. This fact stuck with Lam, the Splendid Table host, who attended the memorial. Lam saw a photo online from an earlier parade; it featured a Black woman wearing a hoodie with Johnson's image on it.
'Of course we've all seen these kinds of 'in memoriam' shirts,' Lam wrote in an email, 'but I'd never before seen one on a Black person with a White man's face on it.'
As if to honor Johnson's daily philosophy — whenever meeting someone, he often extended an invitation to 'tell me everything, and don't leave anything out' — memorial speakers spared few details about his life, good, bad or otherwise. Tyrone Casby, big chief of the Mohawk Hunters, a Black Masking Indian tribe, mentioned that Johnson had recently been named documentary photographer of the year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, in part due to the recommendation letter Casby wrote. (Disclosure: This author and his wife, M. Carrie Allan, also wrote letters of recommendation.)
'Pableaux has been extremely valuable because of his interpersonal skills and personality which enhanced his ability to interact with the culture and maintaining a great respect for the secrecy and rituals of the Mardi Gras Indians,' Casby wrote in the letter.
At the same time, longtime friend Dave Claunch said that just weeks before Johnson's death, they had received devastating news about the passing of mutual friend Larry Romberg. They had planned to attend Romberg's service, which fell, as fate would have it, on the same day as Johnson's memorial. (Like Claunch, many of the nation's food writers also had to choose between attending Johnson's memorial or one for Nathalie Dupree, scheduled for the same day, in Social Circle, Georgia.)
Anderson, the Times writer, said he and others were fretting about Johnson's future in the days and weeks before his death. It was common knowledge among his friends that Ann Cashion, the D.C. chef who rented her New Orleans home to Johnson, was planning to return to her house. Johnson was searching for another place to live, one that he could afford with the money he cobbled together from his various endeavors.
Some days, Anderson said, he'd suggest that Johnson redirect the energy he spent maintaining friendships into other projects, like, for example, making money. But as Anderson looked over the estimated 500 people crammed inside the church — and reflected on the online tributes and official obituaries — he found it nearly impossible to conclude that Johnson had lived life recklessly.
In fact, Anderson noted, Johnson had one last thing to do: help his many friends get through his death. Anderson said a simple thought might help.
'We'll never stop missing him. But it will be just a little bit easier remembering what I know, what you know, what we all know that's a certainty, which is this,' Anderson said, his words catching in his throat: 'He misses us, too.'