June 2024

When a scrappy teenager from the Desire Project landed a job as a janitor on a boat nearly half a century ago, no one could have imagined the epic voyage ahead.

– by Mark Orfila

photographs by Ellis Anderson

Captain Robert Mitchell eases down the narrow wheelhouse stairs and out onto the roof of the Steamboat Natchez. As the paddlewheeler moves up the river, the skyline of New Orleans comes into view, backlit by the setting sun. 

Four stories above the dark, churning water of the Mississippi River, the 66-year-old captain strides confidently across the narrow path between the wheelhouse and the edge of the roof. There are no railings, no handholds. But Mitchell’s not intimidated by the distance down, the fading light of day – or the fact that his own eyesight is dimmed by glaucoma. 

My photographer and I follow tentatively behind him, staying as close as we can to the wheelhouse wall. Mitchell stops and turns to point out an imposing pair of antlers mounted to the front of the wheelhouse, a trophy of one of the dozen or so races the Natchez has won.

“She is undefeated!” he boasts. 

A few minutes later, he is down in the engine room showing off his boat to curious guests. Shouting over the roar of the cast iron engines, which were originally built in 1925 for another steamboat, he says, “Her engines are still running as good today as they ran 99 years ago.” His pride is palpable.

Referring to the boat as she and her, he is, of course, following a familiar maritime convention. But there is something in his voice and his eyes that suggests that the Natchez is much more than just steel and steam to him. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the rainy July day when they first met. He was 17, and she was just three months past her maiden voyage. The story of their affair reads like an epic Hollywood script.

Mitchell has known other boats since then: the Cotton Blossom, where he first held the title of captain; the President, a sidewheeler, built in the 1920s; the John James Audubon, which became his home for several months after Katrina; the City of New Orleans; the Audubon Express, a jet-powered catamaran which could cruise at 36 knots (he was the only captain of the Express). But the Natchez (technically Natchez IX, as she’s the ninth boat to bear that name) was his first love – and, emphatically, still his favorite.

His first job aboard the Natchez – his first job period, in fact – was janitor. Then he moved to the kitchen to be a busboy. From there he rose slowly – waiter, then maitre d, then deckhand, followed by mate, first mate, chief mate, captain, and ultimately master captain. 

These days folks call him “Captain Robbie,” which conveys respect for his hard-earned status, as well as the genuine affection that he seems to evoke in everyone who knows him. Captain Robbie exudes gentleness and generosity. 

But he had to do a lot of fighting to get where he is. “I never let nobody push me over,” he says. “I didn’t start fights, but I didn’t run away from them, because I didn’t have to.” 

He grew up in the Desire Housing Project, which had a reputation as a place where even the police were scared to set foot. When law enforcement agencies were charged with evicting the Black Panthers from their base in Desire, they sent an army of 250 heavily-armed officers and a tank. Mitchell, who was 12 years old at the time, remembers his dad instructing him and his siblings to get under the bed. The incident is among his most vivid childhood memories. 

The rest of the world might have viewed Desire as a dark and dangerous place, but Mitchell says that it was his safe haven. He certainly wasn’t afraid of the Black Panthers. His whole community saw them as their protectors. He wasn’t scared of the police either. He describes his younger self as “a wild kid who would have gone up against anybody.” It turns out that “anybody” included the reigning heavyweight champion of the world and his 7-person posse of toughs. But more about that in a minute…

Early on, Mitchell’s most monumental fights were with his own destructive behaviors. Despite his parents’ struggles to protect him and his seven siblings from the dangers that surrounded them, Mitchell got mixed up in drugs and petty crime. 

On one occasion, he and his friends stole a car uptown, then promptly wrecked it. He attempted to flee on foot, but he had injured his leg in the crash, so he didn’t get far. Hiding under a nearby house, he watched the police combing the neighborhood, searching for him. He stayed there till dark then managed to catch a bus back home to Desire. 

Mitchell says that he looks back “every single day” with regret for the people who were harmed by his behavior back then.

His dad was a bricklayer, and the one person Mitchell says he was afraid of. “Dad was a man of honor, but dad didn’t play. I could deal with the cops. Dad, I couldn’t deal with.” 

However, it was neither fear of the police nor of his father that gave the impetus to turn his life around. It was fear of disappointing his mother. Rock bottom for him was the day he shuffled into a courtroom in shackles, looked up, and saw his mother sitting there. 

“My mom didn’t say nothing, but her eyes said to me, ‘I knew this was going to happen. You better make a change, son.’” He looks back on that moment as the turning point in his life.  

Apart from her stern but silent warning, his mom, who was an assistant chef at Galatoire’s, had been working hard behind the scenes to facilitate his redemption. With all the legal jams (“Should I say illegal jams?” he jokes) that Mitchell got himself into as a young man, he considers himself fortunate not to have ended up with a felony conviction, which would have prevented him from getting his captain’s license from the Coast Guard. 

His big career break came in 1975 in the middle of a friendly neighborhood football game which was interrupted when his best friend Rodney Richardson, who had recently gotten on as a deckhand aboard the Natchez, came running up to Mitchell with some good news: “Hey, I got a job for you if you want it. Come on! But you gotta come today.” 

Mitchell had just caught a touchdown pass. He dropped the ball right there, headed to the bus stop, and hopped on the first bus to the French Quarter to investigate this new opportunity.

“It was pouring down rain,” he recalls. “I’ll never forget. The Natchez was coming to the dock. We very rarely came out of the project. I was so naive that I did not know that the Mississippi River was right there!” Captain “Doc” Hawley hired Mitchell on the spot. 

The hardships of life in the projects turned out to be excellent preparation for his janitorial duties. At home he shared a two bedroom/one bath apartment with his parents, two brothers, and five sisters – ten people altogether. 

“Each of us had duties,” he recalls. “I had a week to clean the kitchen, a week to clean the bathroom. Everybody got their share. So I knew how to clean.” 

On board the Natchez he was getting paid for what he had always had to do, and he took pride in his work. After completing a chore he would call his supervisor over and say, “What do you think? Are the floors clean?” 

Every day after school he would jump on his bike and rush to his new job. He had been a member of the Carver High football team, and his coach, noticing that he was missing practice, demanded that he make up his mind: “Are you gonna play ball, or are you gonna go to work?”

Mitchell’s first paycheck settled the matter once and for all. “Seventy-five bucks! Wow, I was rich,” he says with a chuckle.“Because of what the family was going through at the time, I thought that bringing home a few dollars meant more,” he says. 

He pauses for a minute before allowing a wistful acknowledgement of what might have been. “I had great potential. Some of the guys who grew up with me, they just knew I was gonna go pro. I had the best hands they say.”

Mitchell might have missed his chance to be a famous athlete, but working aboard the Natchez and other vessels owned by the New Orleans Steamboat Company meant rubbing shoulders with a lot of stars – including the aforementioned confrontation with the boxing champion: Leon Spinks. Seven months previously Spinks had claimed the title by defeating Muhammad Ali. Now, in 1978, Spinks and Ali were set to face off for a rematch in the New Orleans Superdome. 

Spinks and his seven companions were guests on board the Natchez. Mitchell, 20 years old at the time, spent the day hauling plates up and down the stairs, doing his best to take good care of his VIP guests. (The dining room is on the middle deck of the boat, whereas food preparation takes place on the lower deck.) At the end of the day, Leon Spinks handed him a 50-cent tip. 

Feeling deeply disrespected, Mitchell threw the coins back in the boxer’s face, telling him he was “going to need it after Ali kicks your ass.” 

“I said it to his face,” Mitchell says. “I was gungho. I was a badass.” 

Spinks’ security guard leaped up and shoved him, an offense that Mitchell was not prepared to ignore. “Where I grew up, that was a no-no. You don’t put your hands on me.” The only thing that prevented an all-out brawl was the intervention of an older and wiser colleague who grabbed Mitchell to restrain him. 

Spinks complained about the incident to Mitchell’s boss, Captain Hawley: “Your waiter needs to learn some manners!” 

Hawley confronted Mitchell:  “What did you do to that man?” he asked.

Mitchell was cagy and defiant. “What did he tell you I did?” 

“He said you threw money in his face.”

“He’s lucky that’s all I threw in his face!” 

In an interesting twist to the story, it turns out Leon Spinks’ bodyguard – the burly brute with whom Mitchell barely escaped getting into a bloody altercation with – was Laurence Turead, better known today as Mr. T, the actor of “I pity the fool!” fame. 

Most of Mitchell’s celebrity encounters were much more pleasant. He readily reels off a list of the most memorable: Ricky Nelson; James Brown (“a pretty nice guy”); Fats Domino; Stevie Ray Vaughan; B.B. King (“Awesome!”) Etta James (“Just the sweetest woman you ever wanna meet!”); and his hands-down favorite – Tina Turner. 

He doesn’t even mention the three presidents (Gerald Ford and both Bushes) who were guests on the Natchez until he is prompted to do so. Evidently, the singers made a much bigger impression on him than the politicians. 

While Mitchell himself might not have been destined to become a household name, he did become French-Quarter-famous at least. When he got married at 22, the wedding was held in the Saint Louis Cathedral, because “that was the only place that could hold us,” Mitchell says. There were 54 people in the wedding party and 1,843 guests. 

Mitchell remembers that 1,834 number because it exceeded by 234 the legal capacity of the Natchez. The reception was supposed to have been an evening cruise. In the end, the party took place on board the boat as planned, but the boat remained tied to the dock. 

Mitchell took his new bride to Disney World for their honeymoon, but she had a rare disease and got sick on the trip. They returned to New Orleans where she was admitted to Tulane Hospital and went into a coma. 

For the next year Mitchell’s life was a cycle of nights in the hospital at his wife’s bedside and days at work on the boat. Finally one night he went to the hospital, and she opened her eyes and looked up at him. “Her eyes spoke to me and said, ‘I love you,’” he recalls. “And that was it.” 

She died not long later. 

Meanwhile, Mitchell had a friend named Linye, a waitress on the Natchez, who stepped forward to offer support and consolation. “She was there praying with me,” he says. “We never kissed, never had a relationship that whole time my wife was in that coma.” 

But their friendship deepened during that difficult time, and a couple of years after his first wife’s passing, Robbie and Linye got married. They have raised two children together will soon celebrate the 42nd anniversary of their wedding. 

One of his favorite parts of being the captain of the Natchez is getting to perform weddings for other people. He says that he has officiated at more than 500 such ceremonies. 

It was Bill Dow, the owner of the Natchez, who convinced a young Mitchell to pursue his captain’s license. Obtaining that license proved to be a bitter struggle, which with the passing of time, has become an inspirational story that Mitchell loves to share when he is called upon to speak for career days at schools. 

He says that he “studied [his] ass off” in preparation for the Coast Guard test, but in his nervousness, he missed a few too many questions and was informed that he would have to try again in 30 days.

As he was standing dejected in the hallway waiting on the only elevator, the only other candidate who had taken the test that day walked up and struck up a conversation. Mitchell learned that his fellow examinee had also failed on the first try, performing much worse than Mitchell in fact; but after being invited to go back in and correct his wrong answers, he had been given a passing grade.  

Naturally, Mitchell was furious. What had happened was wildly unfair. Given that the other guy was white and Mitchell was not, it was nearly impossible to interpret this as anything other than a blatant display of racism. He swore to himself that he would study even harder this time. But with anger added to his anxiety, he scored much worse.

He had to wait 90 days before his third try, during which time he “studied, studied, studied,” “prayed, prayed, prayed” – and also sought the counsel of his parish priest. 

Sitting down in the examination room for the third time, he took a look at the hundreds of questions in front of him and breathed a prayer before diving in: “Lord, you gonna answer these questions with me.” 

When it was over he had answered every single question correctly. The official who graded his test said that it was the first time he had ever seen anyone get a perfect score. 

When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Mitchell was well into his career as a captain, which meant that he bore responsibility for the well-being of his beloved boat and her crew.

With the storm approaching, he and the marine crew followed their usual hurricane procedure, taking the vessel upriver to a place called Bayou Goula near Baton Rouge. “Normally we come back the next day or two,” he explains. “Katrina was a different animal… I took one pair of pants and one pair of underwear because I know I’m coming back in a couple days.”  

On the day of the storm, Mitchell recalls leaving New Orleans about 1:30 in the afternoon. “We got near Bayou Goula. It turned pitch black like it was a total eclipse… The wind was blowing. We couldn’t see because it was raining so hard. We were looking at the radar. A lot of captains kind of laugh at me, but I could have sworn I saw the Virgin Mary.” 

The wind tossed the Natchez into the woods along the river’s edge. Mitchell and his colleagues managed to tie up to the trees to ride out the storm. “The river had come up almost 20 feet. When it was all over, the river went down, and the boat was beached, so we had to pull her off the bank. It was something!”

In the aftermath of the storm, the New Orleans Steamboat Company sent the Natchez on a relief tour, visiting various cities along the Mississippi River and the waterways that connect to it. 

When it was safe to do so, Mitchell took the John James Audubon back down to New Orleans along with Captain Steve Villiere, entrusting the Natchez to his colleagues who continued their fundraising efforts, pushing further and further up the Mississippi watershed, as far north as Cincinnati, Ohio. 

Apart from the marine crew who were still manning the boats, Mitchell’s 50 or so employees had been scattered to the winds. Back in New Orleans, he dedicated himself to tracking them down and directing donations their way to help them get back on their feet. 

Most of them had cell phones with a walkie-talkie function in those days. Phone lines were down, but the walkie talkies still worked, he discovered, which turned out to be the key to contacting pretty much anyone who was still present in the New Orleans area. For those who had fled further afield, he did the detective work locate them and offer them assistance.

Jeff Nicholas, who sold tickets for the Natchez Steamboat Company back then, had taken refuge in the tiny community of St. James, about an hour west of the city. He is still overcome with gratitude when he recalls how Captain Robbie somehow found his address and mailed him a $500 check from the company. “That was such a big help,” Nicholas says. “I will never forget. What a blessing.” 

Mitchell’s own home had flooded in the storm, and he had to live on board the boat for several months. Reflecting back on the exhilaration and the suffering of the whole experience he says, “It was awesome!” – then almost in the same breath, “It was a tough time!” 

His fighting days aren’t behind him yet. There are health issues. In addition to glaucoma, a seven-month battle with COVID has left him with lingering effects. 

Mitchell lost his mother on Mother’s Day in 2023.

In 2022, he lost both of his former bosses, mentors, and dear friends within a span of just a couple of months. Bill Dow died in September of 2022 and Doc Hawley in November that same year. 

It would be hard to overestimate the impact these men had on his life. “I was selling drugs and doing things I wasn’t supposed to do. These people saved my life from being a typical project life.” Mitchell composed poems to commemorate the passing of each of these two great men. 

In the poem dedicated to Hawley, he concludes it by imagining his mentor playing the calliope to welcome his crew into the pearly gates. (In addition to being the captain of the Natchez, Hawley had also been the calliope player at one time.) 

Mitchell remembers him as “a very smart, kind man… He was a teacher. He was a mentor. He was everything. He taught me everything I know, and he was like a dad to me.” 

Regarding Dow, in the poem dedicated to him, Mitchell described him as “one of earth’s kindest people.” The fact that Mitchell is still showing up for work – albeit only a couple of days a week these days – is a testament to his lingering respect for his now-deceased boss. 

When Dow was nearing his final moments, he called Mitchell to his bedside to make one last request. Knowing that Mitchell had been preparing for retirement, Dow asked him to stay on just a little while longer. “I just want you to do this for me,” he said. “Just look out and make sure these guys are ready. Cuz the Natchez is my baby.” 

To keep that deathbed promise, Mitchell has stayed on with the Natchez as a consultant and volunteer. He jokes that he’s about ready to fully devote himself to fixing his golf game. But it’s hard to imagine him ever totally relinquishing his connection to the Natchez.   

Despite all that he’s been through, Mitchell says that he doesn’t worry about the future. “I let it come to me.”  

A devout Catholic, he credits not only his parents, and his mentors Dow and Halwey, but also his faith in Jesus for helping him to get where he is. Reflecting back on all he’s been through, he sees evidence that God has been guiding and protecting him the whole time. 

The older he gets, the stronger his sense that his own struggles are part of an epic generations-long drama. He pauses now and then to reflect on the fact that slave ships used to dock near the Toulouse Street Wharf. Perhaps some of his ancestors disembarked in chains just a stone’s throw from where he now commands the Natchez.

 “At one time it used to make me sad, angry,” he says. “But now I’m rejoicing in it because I see that they went through a lot to make what’s happening today. And God knows what he’s doing. Regardless of what people think, we’re all one. We’re all here together.”