I lost my Mac guru. I mean, he died. A sudden heart attack while doing one of the things Pableaux Johnson loved best: taking photographs at a Second Line parade in New Orleans. To begin to gauge my sense of loss, consider that the day after his memorial service, my 1password app, which he had installed, stopped working. Kind of like losing your bitcoin password, without all the zeros.

But a better gauge, perhaps, is that his memorial service was attended by 500 people, standing room only, who arrived from all over the country. Or the obits that appeared in The Economist and The New York Times. “Pableaux Johnson, the Heart of New Orleans Hospitality, Dies at 59” was the Times headline. The outpouring of grief first found vent on an Ever Loved email thread that included dozens of voices who contributed photos and stories and Pableaux-isms. Many red bean dinners in his memory by those who couldn’t fly in were reported across the land.

Or this: that the Second Line community who parade every Sunday, made up almost entirely of African Americans, held three parades in his honor. For a white man. A brass band in the lead, the second-liners buckjumping for blocks. Doctor John—who made “Sugar Boy” Crawford’s and the Dixie Cups’ “Iko Iko” famous again, won six Grammys, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—was honored in 2019 by two.

Pableaux earned this trust and adoration by his constant Sunday attendance, by asking permission before snapping each fabulous feathered and beaded Mardi Gras Indian suit or Second Liner’s costume, and by bringing glossy prints to hand out to those subjected to his in-your-face big lens. In this way, Pableaux earned everyone’s trust.

In New Orleans, there is culture—the oldest opera house in America, the New Orleans Ballet, Southern Rep (now no more), Terence Blanchard’s cutting-edge jazz, and, I guess I should add, all those Rex and Comus balls—and then there is The Culture: where jazz came from and where it lives on in funk and bounce and the streets. The thing that people spend $8 billion annually to experience. Along with Mardi Gras Indians, Second Lines—annual events for each of the city’s historic social aid and pleasure clubs’ Black benevolent societies created to cover health care and funerals—are The Culture’s most unique and finest flowers. A month before Pableaux’s death, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities announced that he would receive the 2025 Documentary Photographer of the Year at the Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge. That is sure to be another tear-drenched event.

So, no, this was no ordinary guru. Not that he was the whiz with a Mac as he was with his Nikon. He’d spend hours at my desk Googling: cher, what do I do, if … I mentioned that to several at the memorial, including his cousin Betsy Hebert: He was my Mac guru, but not that he was great at it … No offense was taken. Knowing and bemused smiles were all I got. We all knew that this side gig was how Pableaux afforded his true vocation: people, the culture of the kitchen and the table, and The Culture. People at Second Line parades, and people at his red beans dinners every Monday, and pictures of you and your family growing up, each in their own way a Cartier-Bresson decisive moment. 

Pableaux Johnson was beloved. I wish here to add my voice to the chorus of those who tried on the Ever Loved thread, the memorial service, and the obits, to make sense of him, a man who was so much more than Hamlet’s “quintessence of dust.” 

Pableaux? First the name. Pableaux Johnson was born Paul Johnson, a rather innocuous handle to carry around in South Louisiana, Cajun country. He came from a large family in New Iberia, Louisiana. Despite the innocuous name that came from an estranged father, his roots were Cajun. His mother, Carmelite, was an Hebert. No, there is no “R” in “A-bear.”

So when he made his way to Trinity University in San Antonio, he decided that Paul had to become Pablo. But being from New Iberia, Pablo had to be spelled in French Louisiana fashion: Pableaux. His self-appointed moniker begins to tell you the playfulness of PableauxSpeak. Here’s a short thread from our DMs:

Pableaux: Join us for red beans this fine night?

Randy: Just got home. How’d you know? Would love to come. May be a little late.

Pableaux: I got me that new FertelTrak app for my phone. It works pretty good. What time you thinking? Also: WELCOME HOME!

Randy: Jeez, if I got one a dem, I could know where the fuck I am. 8:30 at latest. What time y’all gather? 

Pableaux: 7:30 Mais, I’ll sen you dat link.

Randy: The good ting is, using the FertelTrak, you’ll know where to send it.

Pableaux: Mais, I KNOW! Dis libin in the future has its good advantages…

This fine night is PableauxSpeak. It mighta been raining, but no matter. Because, ain’t we lucky? The WELCOME HOME! afterthought, too, is characteristic. The exchange wasn’t about making sure there was no empty seat at his table. The invitation wasn’t about him. It was about you.

The Cajun accent, I should note, was just for fun, just like the moniker. But though I don’t remember hearing it called that, PableauxSpeak was definitely a thing. As we filed into the memorial service at the deconsecrated St. Peter and Paul Church, now the events space at the hip hotel by that name, along with the ceremony’s agenda, we were given a tiny scroll in heavy stock, carefully tied with a string. Inside was something of a Rosetta Stone titled What Would Pableaux Say? Longer by far than my scanning bed, there were dozens and dozens of quips. My title, Be Where Your Feet Are, number 8, was worthy of a Zen master. Pableaux was a Cajun Dalai Lama.

Be where your feet are. Be present, be attentive. In this attention economy, Pablo was buying, not selling. I hadn’t realized until hearing the nine—nine!—eulogies how informed by such vision and philosophy and thoughtfulness was the guy who would fix my Mac whenever I needed him.

Flying once to Austin for the MOLLY National Journalism Prizes that honor Molly Ivins, I sat next to a handsome gentleman with a Cajun lilt. This was before iPads and earbuds, so we fell into conversation. Within minutes, we realized we had Pableaux in common, and suddenly we were in PableauxWorld. This was his beloved Uncle Michael, who, when Pableaux was at sixes and sevens, thinking maybe he wouldn’t go to college, showed up at his door. No, cher, he said, you’re gonna go to Trinity University. That was his Damascus moment. Saul became Paul. Paul became Pableaux.

The eulogies that went on for two hours—and no one wished them any shorter—drove it home. I’d loved Pableaux, but it was clear I had never taken his measure. Surely no one anticipated the outpouring of national and even international grief. Sure, he’d won awards, published in the Times and Saveur. A handful of books, two documentaries. A James Beard Foundation Award nomination. In 2017, Epicurious placed him among the “100 Best Home Cooks of All Time.” But, still, we in PableauxWorld were stunned by the tsunami of grief that crashed on our shore.

A constant theme of the eulogies: Ever present, Pableaux never met a stranger. Working the Second Line parades every Sunday, religiously he held his Monday night red beans dinners around his grandmother’s kitchen table. Every Monday there was someone that Pableaux had met in his travels, local or national or further afield, doctors, lawyers, academics, musicians, Indian chiefs (literally). The conversation, every life’s original improvisation, each call and response unforeseen, was always world-class. 

There was one rule, a corollary of be where your feet are: no phones were to be seen at the table. Breaking the rule, a good friend, Wayne Curtis, an accomplished writer, saw his iPhone flying through the air and making its way to a surface harder than itself. Pableaux was forgiven for this expensive gesture. After all, Wayne knew the rule. More important: who, for the mere cost of a new iPhone, would give up future red bean soirées?

One of my first thoughts when I heard the terrible news that Sunday was that surely the most grief-ridden citizens of PableauxWorld that day would be the six or eight lucky/unlucky people who held the golden ticket to the next night’s red beans dinner. A trickster at heart, Pableaux was the Willie Wonka of New Orleans.

Pableaux’s red beans were so good that for years he conducted road shows around the country. The popups were sponsored by Camelia Brand, of which, in New Orleans there is no other. Blue Runner? Ha! Whatcha tinkin? He’d sweep through the South or California or the Northeast and hit four or five cities, always welcomed by restaurants that offered him kitchen privileges and space at their tables. I attended one in New York City, 75 happy people in attendance. Pableaux was a one-man ambassador for New Orleans culture.

Dinner around his grandmother’s Formica table was always red beans and rice and cornbread. Nothing but. Self-served in the kitchen into simple bowls from his rice cooker and two pots on the stove, one vegetarian. On the table you found spoons that could have come from your school cafeteria, along with a few knives to slather butter on the cornbread, made with no sugar. On the table, a small bottle of Poirier Cane Syrup invited a carefully measured indulgence that the roll of paper towels on the table helped you, inevitably, wipe off your fingers. Pableaux had a green-glass water pitcher that had a certain country elegance. It had a metal cap that opened when you poured yourself a cup, whichever way you picked it up, as if by magic. Someone probably got a patent on that spigot in 1930. It broke—the self-opening cap stopped working— and we were all, shoot, that’s a shame. Somehow, Pableaux got it fixed.

Another Pableauxism: Bring what you’re drinking. I brought red wine from my cellar. Often from the Rhone with some bottle age. Most people brought beer. We drank from plastic cups. Around us, two TVs scrolled Pableaux’s beautiful pics of Mardi Gras Indians, Second Lines, and portraits of lucky friends. Some of the best, including one of Uncle Michael, were pinned to the walls behind and around Grandmother’s table.

When people were done, dessert was Bourbon. Hands for whiskey? he’d ask when he brought out a bottle and a handful of glasses—now real glass in honor of the Southern nectar—a Ganymede plunking our mead cups on the table.

I once asked him about that rice cooker: Is that allowed? Not skipping a beat, he said, Randy, there isn’t a matron in South Louisiana who doesn’t have one and another at the duck or fishing camp. I’ve been using mine ever since. Great rice, always perfect, and the rice holds forever without getting mushy. Thank you, Pableaux.

I think Pableaux’s only vanity was his beard, always perfectly trimmed like a Dutch merchant in a Frans Hals. Yes, Hals. Pableaux had that joie de vivre.

Here’s a thing I regret. Though Pableaux’s red beans deserve their renown, I always felt mine were a bit better. (Call it a family pride thing.) I used smoked sausage from Bourgeois, in Thibodeaux, a 100-mile drive across the Cajun prairie that I gladly made. One taste and you understood their slogan: Miracles in Meat Since 1891. I once brought one of their ball caps with that slogan to Calvin Trillin, the great food writer. Bud was known to wear it. Pableaux got his sausage from Jacob’s World Famous Andouille, in Laplace, a mere 20-mile drive. (Clearly, Cajuns aren’t shy about their names or slogans.) I used ham bones from Langenstein’s in New Orleans, carved out of John Morell bone-in hams. (Pableaux’s beans went sans ham bone.) Here’s my boast: Calvin Trillin never turned down an invitation to grace my red beans and rice table. But, then, I never turned down Pableaux’s, either.

I often promised to invite Pableaux to one of my baby Lima beans soirées, which I’d grown to prefer. (Camellia Brand, of course, in the green cellophane wrapper.) But I feared my competitive edge would peek from beneath my apron, which would have been so wrong. There was no competition in him. So Pableaux never tasted my supposed masterpiece, while I gladly ate his on many Mondays.

Besides his Monday-night red beans, there was also his famed smoked turkey gumbo when you didn’t feel like cooking but longed for a burst of flavor. A frozen quart would have arrived—Ho, Ho, it’s Gumbo Claus—during “Gumbo season,” fall or winter. Defrosted and quickly heated up, its dark, smoky roux brought the country and family into your kitchen. Why had I not reciprocated with a quart of baby limas? Because, alas, I’m not always where my feet are.

The eulogies at his memorial evoked other regrets. Pableaux’s great gift of always being where his feet were was so complete that it didn’t invite reflection. You didn’t realize he offered that gift of presence day in and day out to everyone he met. That it was his way in the world. However much you loved him, the eulogies made you feel you’d taken him for granted. Or that he’d been cheating on you, offering the ambrosia of his presence to others.

When my mother died after a long illness, I thought I had pre-grieved her. Then, suddenly, I was confronted by a big, dark hole. She just wouldn’t be there. With no thought that someday Pableaux would suddenly not be there, the hole in New Orleans feels even larger, almost post-Katrina large.

Pableaux’s sudden death coincided with the death of my refrigerator. Taking down the chaos of photographs and cards and newspaper articles, I was somewhat stunned to see a photograph Pableaux had taken of me at one Mardi Gras. In 2012, I had reigned as king of krewedelusion, one of the satiric walking parades, as King Guerilla Gorilla in honor of my father, having just written a memoir about my two iconic New Orleans parents, one famous, one infamous. In 1969, Dad ran for mayor on the platform that the zoo needed a gorilla, the Get the Gorilla campaign. So I wore something of a royal robe, Mardi Gras beads graced with silly monkeys peeking out, and a crown. His camera was up in my face, as always, close enough to make me squirm. But Pableaux was there to make me grin. The snap was pure Pableaux. Thank you, Pableaux, for that joyful memory—and especially for the joy you made happen.

Pableaux’s Presence. What was the engine of that commitment to presence and to people? Many from the Saint Peter and Paul podium wondered where he got the energy and the time. In PableauxWorld, were there extra hours in a day? Brett Anderson, one of our finest writers, ventured that there was a dark piece to be where your feet are, some trauma, a child of divorce, who knows what else? The paradox of Pableaux was that presence went hand in hand with absence. The thought makes me sad. There was a black hole in Pableaux, too.

Surely, few realized they lived in PableauxWorld. The key now, after he has left behind this post-Katrina sized hole, is that we keep PableauxWorld alive. The first step is to be where your feet are. The second is to remember, whatever our loss, Ain’t we lucky!

Such Pableaux-isms grab our attention by their element of surprise. Each one has a special edge. Most moments, are you feeling lucky, or the tug of worry or doubt? Are you where your feet are, or do you resemble James Joyce’s Mr. Duffy, “who lived a short distance from his body”? 

Improvisers call these surprises gifts. The less obvious, the more outrageous, the better. That a green alien on your shoulder? Lovely chap. Our attention grabbed, we must respond with a “Yes, and …” Perhaps Pableaux’s black hole was his gift. From that gift, his alchemy, PableauxWorld. 

Suddenly we are where our feet are. Or at least know where we’re supposed to be, and have a hint how to get there, by riding the edge, by being present. 

Hidden in plain sight, Pableaux was not only a Cajun Zen master, but a walking improv machine. Studying improv for 50 years, I had never gotten it. At last, standing there with my feet, I thank you, Pableaux.

In the aftermath, my nephew Rien Fertel, who emceed the memorial, had been asked by the family to take care of a few things, the now-priceless photographs and the mail. He learned that Pableaux preferred a mail drop to a mailman. Rien discovered this: Calvin Trillin might eat my baby lima beans, but the Parcels Family, knowing they would miss the light and bounce Pableaux brought every day to their mailroom, celebrated his passing. Who could ask for more?

Imagine committing yourself not to the grand gesture—building an Empire State Building to inspire the world—but instead to measure your impact by little, constant doses. That was Pableaux and the world he built by baby steps, by always being where his own feet were.

Featured image: Photo by Pableaux Johnson. Unless otherwise noted, all photos courtesy of the family of Paul “Pableaux” Johnson.  See his photographs of New Orleans life here. Watch the Celebration of Life for Paul “Pableaux” Johnson here.