In New Orleans, time refuses to unravel in the hours and days that most of the world marks off on the Gregorian calendar. The city sashays from one festival to the next. All the while, Mardi Gras – the day that demands depravity before the priest smears ashes on your forehead and you hold your breath through forty days of Lent – looms like a spectre at the back of the psyche. Sin, repent, repeat, is one of the city's mantras.

Pirates Alley. The yellow building on the left is the house where William Faulkner wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926) (photograph by Kevin Rabalais)

The French named her in 1718. Seventy years later, the Spanish rebuilt her after a fire devastated eighty per cent of the Quarter. Early twentieth-century migration gave her an Italian temperament. If Marseilles marks the northernmost port in Africa, New Orleans holds the same position in the Caribbean. These are among the reasons it welcomes any opportunity to dress up as someone or something else for a day. Occasionally, New Orleanians do so to forget that economies elsewhere move forward and that you should be able to count on the simple things, like a functional local government or streets that don't flood after an afternoon shower. At other times, they dress up to mock themselves and to enter the embrace of the city's charitable yet lackadaisical soul.

'In New Orleans, time refuses to unravel in the hours and days that most of the world marks off on the Gregorian calendar'

Everything here takes longer than you expect. While Paris requires that you look your best when taking out the rubbish, these streets are a stage where strangers (in hair rollers or costumes or wrinkled remnants of last night's wardrobe or twinsets with pearls) stop to talk about anything from the humidity to the woes of the New Orleans Saints football team or the carousing and criminal activities of local politicians who would have been at home among the Caesars. In New Orleans – 'a great whore of a city in her glory', as Charles Johnson describes it in his novel Middle Passage – everything is public. People sit on front porches, eager to talk to anyone who passes by. When you need company, easy, just step outside.

'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,' says Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a play Tennessee Williams wrote while living in the Quarter. A bone-certain expectation of generosity, as well as a longing for company of all masks, courses through the city's lifeblood. A fatalistic mentality also pervades this cultural capital of Louisiana. The state ranks forty-ninth in poverty and the same in education (thank you, Mississippi, for always making us feel better about ourselves). It loses one acre of land every twenty-four minutes due to coastal erosion. Most scientists believe that New Orleanians will open their back doors to the Gulf of Mexico by 2050.

'We're still here', read the signs directed to the federal government in the wake of the 2005 flood that inundated eighty per cent of the city as a result of failures in the federally built and managed levee system. Alter the stress of those words, and hear the frequency of another Crescent City motto, as in, 'Since we're all still here, we might as well laissez les bons temps rouler.'

A second-line parade (photograph by Kevin Rabalais)

In New Orleans, where talking is an art form, the French legacy lingers in more ways than bewildering pronunciation. At some ATMs, the credit card image on the screen contains a Francophile-Cajun version of that common placeholder, here amended to John Deaux. As Allan Metcalf writes in How We Talk: American Regional English Today, 'With the exception of Hawaii and Alaska, no state is as rich in distinctive vocabulary as Louisiana.'  The blend of French, Native American languages, African, and Spanish create the clichéd gumbo in a city that spans the spectrum of skin tones and accents. The latter contain no variation of the stereotypical Southern drawl. They can also change from block to block. One of them, the Yat, derives from the phrase 'Where y'at?' – a question about mental health rather than geography. When the cobbler fixes your shoe without charge or the waitress gives you a free croissant before you leave, well, 'That's lagniappe, baby.' It's no surprise that this port city of 'All races, all breeds', as Cormac McCarthy describes it in Blood Meridian, would collect one of its favourite words from, of all things, the Quechua term ñapa. 'It's a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get', writes Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi. 'When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans – and you say, "What, again? – no, I've had enough;" the other party says, "But just this one time more – this is for lagniappe."'

You can learn volumes about a city by the way it talks and through its place names. Consider three New Orleans streets that form the title of John Chase's 1949 book about that subject: Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children. Drive downriver along Annunciation, and after a few turns you will find yourself in the Bywater between two streets whose denotations form rival polls of the city's character: Piety and Desire. Along the way, you hear the poetry in the voice of the African American kid on the corner of Bourbon and Bienville. At age ten, he already knows that to live in New Orleans you have to have two jobs and a hustle, and so he tap dances through his weekends in front of some of the most unique architecture in North America – the very places his ancestors might have built, some of them former slave auction houses where tourists now dine.

Street performer in the French Quarter (photograph by Kevin Rabalais)

Someone – there's always someone studying something you would never expect – recently showed that people in the South shake hands more often than other places in America. France permits one set of bises a day per acquaintance, but see a friend for the third time in a single afternoon in Louisiana and it would be strange if you didn't shake hands again. This may explain another statistic: in the 2014 rankings of 'happiest places' in America, six Louisiana cities appear in the top ten. The state itself received the top position. To be happy here, however, you have to come to terms with two factors – elegance and decadence. You can't love one without accepting, or at least respecting, the other.

There's the elegance of wrought iron balconies and amber sunlight seeping like lace through live oaks. There's the lushness of courtyard gardens with blooming banana plants and the eerie splendour of cypresses that rise from the swamp. There's the way that mailman you've never seen before stops his delivery to exchange a few words and smile. There's the way you can hold a meaningful conversation with a homeless person even after admitting that your pockets are empty. There's the way you leave these encounters convinced that you've unearthed the essence of life.

Some of the above may drive another person crazy. Other aspects of the city might seem nightmarish for anyone who expects First World comforts in a supposedly First World place. One state slogan says it all: 'Louisiana, Third World and Proud of It.' Allow yourself to be astonished, on the other hand, when a bus arrives on time (forget the streetcar, which has no posted schedule) and relax your grip on the wheel when you drive down a street in a salubrious neighbourhood, an experience akin to a safari or reconnaissance patrol in Baghdad, and you just might make it here.

October 25, 2015. Four days into my month-long journey, the dissipated remnants of Hurricane Patrice unleashed its rainfall upon New Orleans. Twenty-four hours later, stoplights at major thoroughfares remained dark. The city that averages 162.56 cm of annual rainfall collected 22.02 in one day. It caused a levee breech to the south, in Plaquemines Parish. I headed 'south of South', as Eudora Welty calls it in her short story 'No Place for You, My Love', in search of the breech and of the state's final outpost – the aptly named Venice.

There's the way you leave these encounters convinced that you've unearthed the essence of life'

One road cuts down the centre of Plaquemines Parish, a narrow isthmus in the toe of Louisiana, much of it below sea level. Levees on either side, sometimes only half a mile apart, hold back the Mississippi to the east and Barataria Bay to the west. 'Plaquemines' comes from the Attakapas word for persimmon. The citrus trees the French found here in 1807 continue to thrive. Robert Becnel, whose surname is synonymous with local citrus, led me through his orchard. He used a pocketknife to cut into a navel, releasing ounces of juice and grinning with pride in his fruit that – thanks to the rich alluvial soil of the region – is among the country's finest. His lush trees, now coming into harvest, threaten to splinter under the weight of satsumas, tangelos, and sunburst tangerines.

You have two choices in Plaquemines Parish: up the road or down. The latter leads to the region's other industries, oil and fishing. Driving south, you pass car lots the size of football fields. Next to them are helicopters that ferry workers to oilrigs spattered across the Gulf. They work seven days on, seven days off, and buy their citrus and seafood from stands on the side of the road that leads them home to New Orleans or the Cajun parishes beyond the city. One of them, Avoyelles, forms the peak in the Cajun pyramid whose base stretches across south Louisiana, with the Red River as its northern boundary. Solomon Northup endured his Twelve Years a Slave in Avoyelles. On November 3, two marshals in the capital of Marksville (pop. 5,500) – 'for reasons that still haven't been explained,' reported The New York Times three weeks later – chased a driver into a dead end that abuts a Native American burial ground. Then they opened fire, ultimately killing the passenger, the man's six-year-old autistic son. In the courthouse, metal detectors now prevent anyone from carrying out a version of threats from callers across the country: you're a bunch of baby killers down there, and now we're going to come and kill you.

A cast net shrimper near the end of the road in Venice, Louisiana (photograph by Kevin Rabalais)

This gets us back to the decadence. The word rarely has negative connotations in New Orleans, even though the city registers nearly one murder per day. Crime reached an unbearable level on November 22 after a second-line parade ended in a Ninth Ward park, where two rival gangs converged. Seventeen people were injured in gunfire, eleven of them under the age of twenty-one. Two days earlier, a gunman (caught on CCTV) shot a medical student when he tried to stop an apparent abduction. The only surprise in New Orleans comes when events like these make the national news.

Discussions about crime and race, aspects as essential to the city as food, family, and religion, mingle in most conversations. Several of the latter signal themselves in the title of Marcelle Bienvenu's classic Creole and Cajun cookbook, Who's Your Mama, Are you Catholic and Can You Make a Roux? One night before dinner, my host requests help chopping 'The Holy Trinity': onion, bell pepper, and celery. Once we're done, he calls for 'The Pope', or what most would recognise as garlic.

'Discussions about crime and race, aspects as essential to the city as food, family, and religion, mingle in most conversations'

Family and religion, food, but everything eventually comes back to race and crime. The 2010 New Orleans census shows an African American population of more than sixty per cent. More than twenty-seven per cent of all New Orleanians live below the poverty line. A study conducted three years after the 2005 floods following Hurricane Katrina reveals that forty per cent of the city's adults lack literacy skills to comprehend basic government forms. A 2015 report shows that murder rates remain triple the average for comparably sized US cities.

'Times are not good here,' writes Lafcadio Hearn, a New Orleans resident in the 1870s and 1880s. 'The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministration so that it has become a study for archaeologists ... but it is better to live here in sack-cloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.'

Such ecstasy exudes itself even in death, as when the celebrated New Orleans songwriter, musician, and producer Allen Toussaint died, aged seventy-seven, on 10 November. The city celebrated the only way it knows how – through music and parades. New Orleans compartmentalises its troubles. It never needs an excuse to find a reason to pass a good time, despite or because of the statistics. It's a place Welty describes where 'Beauty and vice and every delight possible to the soul and body stood hospitably, and usually together, in every doorway and beneath every palmetto by day and lighted torch by night.' If you learn to live with those complementary opposites, you will have only one answer to that question generations of singers want to hear when they ask if you know what it means to miss this City that Care Forgot. It's as much a mental state as an actual location.