In it you can read how people rigged up generators, cooked food and rewired a community that had had the equivalent of a massive stroke. It became the gathering place even though there was no power, because people needed some where to go. He talks about the local bar, Finn McCool’s, which is one of the cornerstones of the neighbourhood. Ultimately he tells what it was actually like to be in New Orleans at a time when very few other people were there. Ian’s book chronicles the resilience and resourcefulness of the people in the neighbourhood. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. In New Orleans, as elsewhere, there is every shade of black, brown, and beige.įive Books interviews are expensive to produce. So it is too simplistic to make it a black/white thing. The city government has been largely black for the last 30 years or so.

At the same time, though, some of the worst crimes that have been committed by police in New Orleans have been committed by black officers. Well, the book explores the city’s racial tensions and the disparity of power among white citizens and black citizens. There is a lot in the newspapers right now about the police and what they did during Hurricane Katrina – how does Sothern address the role of the police? Sothern gets close to an important truth about New Orleans when he writes: ‘For those of us who live here, even the wealthy and the privileged, it is impossible to ignore race and poverty regardless of one’s politics or beliefs about the causes of poverty and its link to race, these factors are central in our civic discourse and define daily life in the city.’ His book is a window into the darker side of how power works on a governmental and civic level in New Orleans, and how policy affects the lives of the less privileged in the city. Down in New Orleans offers an invaluable perspective, one that might not be available in books that look at things through a strictly cultural lens. He is an extremely bright and observant writer who has made it his business to look at New Orleans through the lens of social justice. This is Down in New Orleans by Billy Sothern.īilly Sothern is a lawyer in New Orleans he does a lot of work with death penalty cases. Your next choice is a more contemporary book which was written post Hurricane Katrina. Yes he was he was a kind of freelance anthropologist. He sounds a bit like an anthropologist in his own city. He didn’t just photograph the churches, the Mardi Gras Indians and the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, although he did that brilliantly he also interviewed people and contributed crucial information to our understanding of those traditions. Smith was from a blue-blood uptown family in New Orleans, so it was in no way automatic that he would have had an interest in these traditions of black New Orleans. He referred to these traditions as ‘cultural wetlands’ – places that hadn’t yet been ruined by commercial exploitation.Īll these different elements of New Orleans culture have a kind of umbilical relationship, one to another. He was a photographer who made a pioneering effort to understand the traditions of the Mardi Gras Indians, the spiritualist churches of New Orleans and the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs – in other words, the tap roots of African-American and Creole culture in New Orleans.

Smith was a very important figure in New Orleans he died in 2009. Let’s move on to Spirit World by Michael P Smith.

Hurricane Katrina has, I think, only intensified people’s awareness of how unusual and precious these cultural expressions are. In the 1990s there began to be a revival of interest in some of those old-time rituals, I’m not sure why. It’s a big thing again now but for a while people didn’t mask as Skeletons or Baby Dolls. They travelled around Louisiana in the 1930s, gathering every conceivable kind of folklore about cooking, ghosts, families, the landscape and all the different Mardi Gras traditions, including the Mardi Gras Indians, the men who mask as Skeletons, and the Baby Dolls, women who dress up every year in fanciful childish costumes. Tallant and Saxon knew New Orleans very well. So the book is a gathering of many voices. The phrase ‘gumbo ya-ya’ is from the Creole and means ‘everyone talking at once’. The word ‘gumbo’ is of African origin and it means, roughly, ‘mixed together’. This is a collection of Louisiana folklore, assembled in the 1930s to my knowledge it has been in print ever since. Tell me about your first choice, Gumbo Ya-Ya by Robert Tallant and Lyle Saxon. Foreign Policy & International Relations.

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