Different down there: in America, but not entirely.

EVERY 20 years or so, America reintroduces itself to the Deep South. The details of the encounter shift with each era--in the Twenties, it was the great Mississippi flood; in the Fifties and Sixties, lynchings and murders and civil-rights sit-ins--but the effect is always the same: Pictures and news accounts of a strange, backward place come flashing over the wires, and America is once again united with its colorful, impoverished, and possibly crazy old aunt.

It's redundant, I know, to point out that the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the resulting breakdown of civic order in New Orleans had a baroque, over-thetop, Tennessee Williams quality to it. Of course it did. Williams didn't invent New Orleans's sleepy, corrupt languor or its violent dark side--he observed those things all around him. And for literary echoes, how about the sheer improbability of a city built, somehow, below sea level, with a giant lake hovering above it like some Sword--no, Bathtub--of Damocles? That's a bit of fatalistic doom right out of Faulkner.

So as the pictures of flooded shanties flicker by on cable news, uptight neatnik midwestern Lutherans and sensitive northeastern urban sophisticates and pompous media grandees on both coasts express shock at the unexpected squalor of the poverty and bafflement over the slovenly corruption of the civic institutions. They cluck-cluck their dismay that the federal government didn't step in sooner, didn't realize earlier that, well, these people can't organize themselves. We should have known that the city had no workable plan to contend with a major hurricane. We should have known that Louisiana wasn't the kind of place that crosses the t's, disaster-preparedness-wise. We should have known. I mean, come on. We've read All the King's Men, right? And Streetcar and A Confederacy of Dunces and all of the rest of the New-Orleans-is-a-splendid-ruin canon?

"I can't believe this is happening in America," people said as the lurid news of looting and rapes and bodies in the streets came spilling out. "This is America?" But as anyone who's ever been to New Orleans will tell you, the people there were proud of declaring that they were their own special thing, their own special place. "This isn't America," someone told me when I was there two months ago, "this is New Orleans." He meant it, too.

The key to the civil-rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. used to say, wasn't to change the bedrock racial attitudes of the Deep South. That, he knew, was a glacial undertaking. The South, like New Orleans, thought of itself as not quite America. The trick, then, was to remind people in the North and West that the South was America, and still a dysfunctional place in need of federal (read: northern) intervention. It was a brilliant piece of political flattery. The smug North, preening with moral vanity, lorded it over the Deep South for years, until racial tensions erupted in such advanced, progressive cities as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles--and suddenly the South didn't seem so weird and backward anymore. Even today, cities and neighborhoods in the North and West seem much more segregated than, say, Birmingham or Jackson.

Just so, I think, with natural disasters. I live in Los Angeles, by the beach. So I don't worry about the yearly fires that rage through the parched canyons, sweeping away houses and schools and whole families, and I don't worry about hillsides turning to mud as they do after the January rains, avalanching down on entire neighborhoods. But I do worry about the earth suddenly shaking with violence in a place where it hasn't really shaken before--a new fault line, perhaps, or an old one long dormant--underneath something big and dangerous, or maybe just suddenly shaking everywhere at once, like it did in 1994, only just a bit worse and for just a little longer, until power lines and sewer pipes and freeways are a tangle of rubble and metal and bodies. Then, the images of wooden shacks floating away on Lake Pontchartrain won't seem so remote or exotic, and the stories of unprepared thousands searching for food and water will be grimly familiar. I'll be glad for my disaster supplies--water and canned food for 72 hours at least, matches, disinfectant, flashlights and batteries, blankets, rain ponchos, an emergency radio, a first-aid kit, I'm still thinking about the gun issue--but I'll still be wondering when the feds are going to dig me out. Because one of the promises we make to each other--to Americans, all of us, crazy old aunts and all--is that when disaster strikes, we'll do what we can to take care of each other. And the counter-promise is: First, we'll do what we can to take care of ourselves.

I was in New Orleans in July, during Hurricane Dennis and Tropical Storm Cindy, for a conference put on by the Southern Foodways Alliance. It's an organization based out of the University of Mississippi and dedicated to the preservation and continuation of southern food culture. That's the long version. The short version is, we're about biscuits and grits and heirloom peaches and all of the rest of the delicious things that southerners eat, allowing them to suffer snobbish Yankee condescension with a gracious, satisfied smile.

We're a loose collection of gluttons from all over the country, and we gather twice a year: once for a serious-ish symposium in Oxford, Miss., on the campus of the university, and once in various towns throughout the South, for what we call a "field trip." It's a field trip only in the sense that locusts or gypsy moths make a field trip. Honestly, what we do is pick a town in the South, descend on it, devour everything that is now or ever was considered food, argue about lard and hominy and the different ways to cook greens, and then lumber home, bellies full and armed with that gracious, satisfied smile so necessary to the southerner away from home.

Part of the mission of the organization--aside from ushering its membership to a collective, massive coronary occlusion--is to document, through film and oral history, the food and folkways of the American South. That's the long version. The short version is, I spent a sultry New Orleans afternoon sitting in the cool of the bar at the Rib Room, one of New Orleans's most venerable drinking spots, listening to Martin Sawyer, the 84-year-old master barman, reminisce about his half-century serving--and inventing--drinks for his grateful customers. The red light on the video camera blinked while he talked about his craft, his style, his art. As he served up frosty, ice-crusted juleps and sweet licorice Sazeracs, each garnished with memory and anecdote, it suddenly occurred to us that, even in a serious drinking town like New Orleans, no one had taken the time to ask its most experienced and respected bartender to share some thoughts for posterity. Except, of course, for the Southern Foodways Alliance. The endless stream of free juleps and Sazeracs was just icing on the cake.

Later that day, after a long nap, about 200 of us assembled at Restaurant August, a smashing place run by the immensely talented John Besh. It was our final dinner of the trip, and time to fulfill the second part of the Southern Foodways mission: to honor and commemorate the people and products that make the South and southern food so exceptional.

I was sitting at a table with Anthony and Gail Uglesich, owners of the late, lamented lunch spot Uglesich's, on Baronne Street, just steps away from the Central Business District. I had enjoyed many, many delicious lunches at Uglesich's over the years--oyster po'boys and bowls of gumbo--and so for me, even after years of Hollywood award shows and celebrity-infested restaurants, it was a big, big deal. It was, to put it simply, an "A" table.

The Uglesichs decided to retire and close the restaurant last spring, suddenly, with little fanfare, and this was the first time since its closing that they had appeared to meet their happy, though wistful, public. As they stood to thunderous applause, tears welled up in Anthony Uglesich's eyes. His wife held his trembling hands in hers, and the two of them, both in their late sixties, acknowledged for the first time the love and devotion they had inspired by 40 years of serving delicious lunches to the hungriest city in the world. We were all a little misty-eyed, to tell you the truth.

"That's what we're all about," the enthusiastic, evangelizing leader of the Southern Foodways Alliance, John T. Edge, whispered in my ear as the applause roared on. "Nobody ever thanks the sandwich-makers and the fry cooks and the guys who get up at four in the morning to make sure everybody gets a hot, delicious lunch. Except us."

I nodded, wiped my eyes with my napkin, and then tucked into Chef Besh's demonically wonderful dessert. Hurricane Cindy had blown way to the east. The weather was hot and humid. The sky was clear.