On January 26, veteran writer, photographer, and regular Imbibe contributor Pableaux Johnson collapsed while photographing the Ladies and Men of Unity second-line parade in New Orleans, and later died at a hospital. He was 59 years old.
“Writer and photographer” barely scratches the surface of what Pableaux Johnson was, or what he meant to his home city of New Orleans or the vast diaspora of friends and acquaintances he collected over the years. In many ways, Pableaux embodied New Orleans, and was the chief ambassador of the city’s spirit of joy, celebration, and generosity.
Pableaux embodied New Orleans, and was the chief ambassador of the city’s spirit of joy, celebration, and generosity.
His weekly Monday night dinners were legendary, with the menu seldom varying from red beans and rice (or turkey gumbo, mostly during the winter months) and cornbread, with whiskey for dessert. The focus wasn’t the food, really—the important thing was what happened in his cramped living room, where his grandmother’s long wooden table occupied much of the floor space, with guests crammed into the repurposed church pew along one wall, drinking beer and passing around the vintage green water bottle with the wonky pour spout and getting very cozy and familiar with each other very quickly.
I saw many friends and familiar faces at Pableaux’s table over the years, but I also heard him say that he’d never assembled exactly the same group of people together more than once. That made each dinner at Pableaux’s place sort of like a special snowflake (a snowflake that somehow thrives in the steamy heat of New Orleans), and meant that the jokes and the stories and the exchanges would never grow stale, or be replicated in exactly the same way ever again. Pableaux prepared the meal, of course, but his biggest role was as ringmaster for the evolving circus in his living room, peppering guests with hollered questions and observations, interlaced with friendly insults and outbursts of laughter and profanity. He may have had a pew at his dinner table, but Pableaux Johnson ran a very different kind of church.
Pableaux’s table extended to the rest of the world. Every so often, he’d orchestrate a roving Red Beans Road Show, popping up at restaurants across the country where he’d re-create, as best he could, his living room experience for friends and for crowds of total strangers about to become friends. He was a fixture at New Orleans bars and restaurants, and at every type of celebration the city has to offer. As a photographer, he was unafraid to get right up in the face of his subjects at Mardi Gras or second-line parades, prompting and capturing genuine reactions, and documenting the distinctive exuberance he saw on the streets.
The many, many people who came into Pableaux’s close orbit all share similar stories. Pableaux was your best friend, passing along playlists and randomly calling you to check in; he was your brother, alternating between teasing you and telling you how much he loved you; he was your mom, making sure you were fed and that all was right in your world. The fact that he had so many friends and “siblings” and “children” he’d assembled in this way, all across the country, was reassuring, too. Because not only was his joy infectious, but his sense of love was, too. These long, interconnected networks of joy and love he stitched together over many years also made all of us, everywhere, friends and siblings on some level.
Pableaux Johnson wrote a number of pieces for Imbibe over the years, and I’ll close this out by sharing one of my favorites. He was renowned for his dinners built around red beans and rice. But as everyone at the table knew, the evening really kicked into gear when the bowls were cleared and the glasses came out. “Hands for whiskey,” he’d call. It was time for dessert with the adopted family.
