Pableaux Johnson (1966-2025)
He was my friend, and I was lucky to be one of his people.
My wife Emily and I met Pableaux Johnson at a food writers’ conference sometime in the early 2000s, and while the dates and details have faded, the important part remains sharp: By the end of the weekend we’d made a new friend, one we hoped to see again.
That kind of thing happens a lot at creative get-togethers, but what happened next is rare: We actually stayed in touch. Or rather, Pableaux did. He’d email, or call, or text when that became an option, saying he was checking on his people — a category that came to include us. The phone would ring and I’d hear his voice crow “Brotherman!” Or a cheerful “yoyo” would arrive via text. And off we’d go.
Pableaux was so many things of note — chef, photographer, writer, cultural historian, designer, entrepreneur — that I had trouble keeping up with them all. But most of all he was my friend.
When I looked at our last text exchange (more on that in a bit), I scrolled up. And up, and up, and up. There were years’ worth of texts — it would take yards of paper to print them out. Thoughts on writing and the web, schemes getting sharpened into plans, connections juggled and dropped and picked back up, political griping, “you’ll never believe this” tomfoolery that had to be shared, and so much more. We lived far apart and there were gaps, but it never felt that way: Pableaux was always there or had just been there or would be there soon.
Our last exchange came in mid-December, when my phone did the nnn-nnn-nnn thing against my leg that told me I’d missed a call. I listened to the voicemail and it made me smile immediately: “It is I, Pableaux! Giving you a call! Hoping you’re well!” Slow and mock-formal, then warm and motormouthed, and on from there: greetings for my lovely family, a bit of news to be explored later, his number (Pableaux! The phone just works!), and a “gimme a holler.”
(I can’t bring myself to delete that voicemail, or imagine I ever will.)
At the time Emily and I were in a tiki bar in Florida with an old friend, so I shot back a quick text and got a reply:
I didn’t call back the next night — life got in the way, as it does. Oh how I wish I had, but at the moment that was a little thing. We’d catch up soon enough, as we always did. And I was looking forward to it for so many reasons. Like the oldest Tiki bar in Florida turned out to be original Tiki and not campy Tiki, a distinction I hadn’t known existed and was curious if Pableaux was aware of. (Almost certainly, and in the unlikely event he wasn’t, he would have been delighted by it.) Emily and I had kayaked in the Everglades with actual alligators and emerged neither chewed on nor divorced, which hadn’t been an entirely sure thing, which I knew would make him laugh. And we’d been in Florida because I’d decided to visit every county in the U.S., a lunatic notion Pableaux was guaranteed to have an opinion or three about.
All that would be good for a long phone call, and another half-yard or so of texts, and then we’d be on to the next adventure, with this one resurfacing years later at Pableaux’s grandmother’s table on Daneel Street over whiskey for dessert, or sitting on our couch in Brooklyn or during some new adventure yet ahead.
Turn that account into a Mad Lib, with blanks for the specifics, and it could just as easily have been written by any of Pableaux’s many, many other friends. But I never resented being one among many, and there was never any hierarchy I could see in being Pableaux’s people. He collected people from all places and walks of life and he delighted in them all. And his embrace was big enough to take in their people, too — parents and children and friends of friends. (How many hundreds of honorary uncleships did this man hold?)
He’d capture many of those people with his omnipresent camera and his lightning-quick, in-before-the-self-consciousness technique, which never failed to seem like a magic trick even after I knew to expect it. The best photos of me and my family were all taken by Pableaux — another thing that so many of his people could say.
Pableaux’s love for his people was so big and warm that it took me a while to sense a sadness within it. I think he gathered in others so eagerly because he didn’t do well alone, seeking out other people’s company because he too often found his own lacking. I hope he knew how much we all loved him, but I worry that some part of him didn’t, or didn’t trust it. I wish I’d been a little braver there — I wish I’d tried to offer counsel, or least a kind ear.
(I wish, I wish, I wish. Is there a benediction more heartfelt or useless than that one, given when it’s too late?)
Certainly Pableaux could be self-defeating: Whenever a gig or a business opportunity came along I feared he’d once again make the perfect into the enemy of the good. The exception was his work photographing New Orleans’ social aid and pleasure clubs and the Mardi Gras Indians, but I think that exception proved the rule.
The people on the other side of his lens at a second line trusted him because he’d shown himself worthy of that trust, putting in the work to understand the traditions, respecting and championing them, and splitting the proceeds of any pictures he sold with their subjects. The principles he brought to his photography were iron-clad, and if he could make them work, why couldn’t the rest of the world?
But while I think that’s more or less right, it misses something a lot simpler. The club members and Mardi Gras Indians trusted Pableaux because he knew them. He knew their stories and asked after grandmothers and children and had them over for red beans and rice at his own grandmother’s table. Because they were his people.
A few years ago, Emily and I asked Pableaux if we could buy a few of his Mardi Gras Indians photos. We sifted through hundreds of wonderful candidates and after some marital combat settled on six, which we had printed poster-sized, framed and positioned on a long wall that had resisted every previous attempt at decoration.
The next time Pableaux came to Brooklyn, we showed him the pictures and I waited nervously for his verdict. He looked for a moment and then started talking about the people in the pictures, telling us their names and how they knew each other and then about their own families.
They were Pableaux’s people. We were all Pableaux’s people. That’s what keeps coming back to me, amid the sheer heartbroken impossibility of all this, the wind-knocked-out-of-you realization that the phone will never again offer up a chipper “Brotherman!” when we all thought there’d be so many more.
We all have our people, whom we love and worry about and feud with and all the other messy lovely things that make us human. We lose touch with them, because we get busy and we forget and we fall prey to our own doubts and go silent. All of which makes us human too.
But we don’t have to. We can check in.
We can call from the car instead of listening to songs we’ve heard before, or take a moment for a “where y’at?” text instead of doom-scrolling, or even invite our people over for red beans on a Monday night. Sometimes the call will go to voicemail or the text will get missed or the calendar won’t cooperate, but other times it will, and if we try often enough, the numbers will work in our favor.
Probably none of us will be as good at it as Pableaux was, but that’s not the test. If we work at checking in, connections that might atrophy will instead grow stronger and lead to new connections, sources of laughter and comfort and joy, to lift us up for however long we’re given with our people.