This review by Colleen Mondor brings our Voices blog to a new stage: We will sprinkle the blog entries with some lengthier feature stories and book reviews from now on. Next week, we'll tweak the design just a bit so that those features have a chance to hang around at the top of the front page for a couple of weeks. If you have ideas for stories or reviews, please pitch them to us. While this is still a labor of love, we are actively looking for new voices to be involved in future publishing projects.

Reviewed here: My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers
Edited by Rosemary James
Touchstone 2006
ISBN 0-7432-9312-6
174 pages

One of the things I have noticed in a lot of the conversations about post Katrina New Orleans is that on a national and personal level we seem to be focusing on a large scale. We talk about the city or the port or the region; we discuss the ramifications of the disaster on the economy and infrastructure. Most of us don’t know what places like St. Bernard’s Parish or the Ninth Ward look like — so it’s easy to pass them over in an article, to note only facts and figures and then move on. We talk about the fishing industry, but not fishermen; we discuss tourism in terms of dollars and not the people who used to cook for those visitors in countless legendary restaurants.

What about all of them?

We talk in a grand scale because that way we don’t have to think of names or faces; we don’t have to think much beyond cost and benefit. We think of the city because a city can be reduced to a monetary value quite easily, quite painlessly. What we do not do, what we seem to resist on every level, is the chance to talk about specifics, about individuals, about people.

We don’t talk about the people who lived there; the people who are living there right now. We don’t talk about how to a lot of people, New Orleans just means home, period. Nothing else but home.

When did we decide that this was the way to handle a tragedy? And why are we all still doing it now?

Over the past month or so I have been looking for books to remind us of what was lost in Katrina, of what New Orleans truly and completely is, on the smallest of scales. The first book I read, the first one I fell in love with, is the essay collection My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers. This is a book that positively sings the praises of home and reading it made me appreciate New Orleans, the idea of New Orleans, on a whole new level. It gave me faces and names, and more importantly, it showed me just who lives in the city that America forgot.

Editor Rosemary James put My New Orleans together very quickly, contacting potential contributors from a draft list of more than 200 within weeks of Katrina. The book’s initial idea came from Michael Murphy, a literary agent and former publisher of William Morrow. Murphy has a deep love for New Orleans, and in his words, “While I have never lived in New Orleans, the city is without a doubt my cultural home…almost a spiritual vortex. I feel better and more myself just stepping out of a cab from the airport or rental car and smelling the heavy musty air. I respond to her sagging balconies and cracked plaster walls the way some tourists are stirred by the skyscrapers of New York or the snow-capped Rockies in Colorado.�

In the days after Katrina struck, Murphy was frustrated beyond measure by scenes of the unfolding tragedy. With nothing he could directly do, his wife suggested the idea for a book, and as Murphy knew so many writers in the area, as well as members of the larger literary community, it seemed like a perfect idea. What he wanted to do was create a benefit book, a publication that would help the writers of New Orleans. As he tried to come up with a publisher who was interested and a plan for contributors, however, he learned very quickly that it would be a difficult project to accomplish.

“I wrote to Tom Piazza, Andrei Codrescu, Robert Olen Butler, Anne Rice, Julie Smith [and] Rick Bragg, among others and quickly realized the book would be a daunting task. Most messages flashed back as ‘undeliverable.’ Almost none received a response as everyone from the area was spread out over the country and had bigger issues than writing back to me.�

Murphy did find James (who ended up in Charleston, SC, her hometown), and she agreed to take on the role of outside editor and help track down writers. Simon & Schuster signed on as publishers, and the deal was set for 50% of all profits from the title to be donated to the Writers’ Relief Fund of the PEN American Center. Any writers who need assistance as a result of the 2005 hurricane disasters can apply directly to PEN for grants.

From that point on, James spent an enormous amount of time looking for potential contributors. While Murphy had originally envisioned the book as a collection of tributes by New Orleans writers, Simon and Schuster broadened the field to include some celebrity names associated in one way or the other with the city. Reaching them, however, proved to be both impossible and time-consuming for James. (Her experience with many of their publicists left her less than impressed as few of them seemed able to even say no or respond in any way at all to her very legitimate proposal.) She had an entirely different problem reaching writers from the city, even her friend Kenneth Holditch who was a co-founder with James and her husband of the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society. Holditch has conducted a great deal of scholarship on literary New Orleans, especially Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, but James could not locate him within her thirty day time frame. The same thing happened with other writers such as Christine Wiltz and Valerie Martin, and some writers, such as Nick Lemann and Nancy Lemann, were unable to participate by the necessary deadline. It was all a massive juggling act for James made that much more amazing when you consider that she and her husband had to abandon their historic home and bookstore ahead of the storm. While she was putting together a book for New Orleans, Rosemary James was trying to also find out just what was left of her life back in the city. She made arrangements to study for the South Carolina real estate exam in case her literary career and business were buried under mold and mud. And she kept working on the book that became, more than anything, a true project of faith for everyone involved.

It became something all of them could do, some tangible act of doing, as they waited to see just what had happened to their beloved city.

Ultimately, James managed to gather 29 contributors for the book, ranging from writers such as Bret Lott, Rick Bragg and Poppy Z. Brite to Chef Paul Prudhomme, musician Wynton Marsalis and local restaurant proprietor Leah Chase (owner of Dooky Chase Restaurant). The essays are amazing — they range from Brite’s meditation on learning to bird watch at Audubon Park to Mary Helen Lagasse’s loving memory of the Irish Channel. Jervey Tervalon writes about how small the word "family" seems when he goes back to New Orleans, and Rick Bragg tells us, with a certain amount of incredulity, just what his city is like:

“What a place, where in the poorest cemeteries the poorest men and women build tinfoil monuments to lost children in a potter’s field, while just a few blocks over the better-off lay out oyster po’boys and cold root beer and dine in the shade of the family crypt, doing lunch with their ancestors and the cement angels in cities of the dead.�

When I read essays like that, I can’t help but think of my grandparents and their sedate Florida graves that are visited once a year; just enough to be respectable. But my family doesn’t celebrate them — we don’t talk and laugh and sing. We do what we think is proper and leave a plastic flower or two so the other visitors will know someone has come by.

We don’t have our lunch there, we don’t tell them stories. And somehow, now, it seems like we are all missing something.

There were a dozen times while reading My New Orleans that I stopped for a moment to think and consider just what those images after the storm had looked like. I wanted to compare and contrast that horror with the magic that these writers were putting on the page. Ron Shelton gives us a wonderful portrait of the city in his essay, “Miracles of the Ordinary,� which includes his recollection of four white men, dressed as angels, walking past Lafitte’s bar one early Sunday morning. The men are joined on a corner by four young black girls, wearing satin dresses, “…each with orange shoes, short heels and four-inch-high bows of the same color in their hair. Singing, talking, working out harmonies from a long-practiced routine. Something about Jesus and the Cross and the blood shed for all of us. And the singing and the talk and the giggling all blurred together, going to church.�

And the angel-men in their silver dresses with their silver halos walk one way, and the singing girls walk another, and Shelton stares transfixed as neither group notices the other, neither pauses for a second to stare at the ones who walk by because, in this city, even on a Sunday morning, the men and the girls knew there is nothing to see.

They were just residents of the city, on their way to church, and there was nothing to see.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? To be so different and yet so much the same? To be so unique and not be forced to hide, or lie or pretend. That’s New Orleans, Shelton tells us, “forever my miracle of the ordinary for New Orleans.�

In its review of My New Orleans, Publishers Weekly felt the collection was lacking something because “barely heralded here are the darker things for which New Orleans is famous: corruption, voodoo and violence. By addressing these aspects, James might have given depth to this sentimental work, a charming but incomplete look at a beloved American city.�

Whoa.

I’m really surprised by that statement — by the suggestion that any collection is responsible for including all aspects of a city’s life. It seems to be a heavy responsibility especially since it was decided from the beginning that My New Orleans would not be political. To purposely include essays on voodoo or corruption seems out of place for what James and Murphy wanted to accomplish. James was surprised by this review as well, writing me recently, “Corruption and violence are not what make New Orleans special, are not what make men and women love her in an irrational, incomprehensible, irreversible way.�

It is almost as if her book was judged not by what it contained, but by what New Orleans contains, by what is wrong with the city. James could not put together a collection for its own sake and expect it to be judged on those merits; she also had to accept the judgments and misjudgments of the city itself. I have to wonder how much more depth a book needs though when it has Rick Bragg writing things like this:

“And we stare deep into the television screen, at the water that had always seemed like just one more witch, one more story to scare ourselves into a warmer, deeper sleep and we wonder if there is just too much water and too much death this time.�

Wasn’t Katrina violent enough? Do you have to discuss street gangs and guns as well in order to gain a distant reviewer’s respect?

I thought about a lot of things when I was done reading My New Orleans, but mostly I thought about the people who made this book happen. Rosemary James is donating royalties from the book to The Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society for projects on behalf of writers. She is determined to continue the important work for literature that she was part of before Katrina, before the whole world changed. And Michael Murphy will be back in the city for Jazz Fest, just as he always is, hoping to find many old friends among the people and the places. He and his wife are going to be there, he writes, "... come Hell or high water.� And I think that is pretty cool, that everyone who can is going back; I think that’s pretty cool.

I know that books need to be written about what went wrong in New Orleans, and I’m not just talking about Katrina. We all need to understand what happened in this place to cause so many people to be left behind, and why so many of them were poor and had black skin. But those books demand research and analysis that is not possible in 30 days, or three months. My New Orleans was a book written in a heartbeat, in a second’s flash of love and tears over what might have been. It is the answer a stranger gives you when you ask them about home. Don’t expect a balanced portrait in these pages; expect a message in a bottle tossed out to the world. “We are New Orleans,� is what these writers are all saying, “We are New Orleans�.

These are the people who live there, and when they were asked about home, this is what they said.