Reviewed here: Between Piety and Desire by Arlet and Sam Wylie
Soft Skull Press 2005
ISBN 1-933368-29-2
111 pages

For several weeks last September, the most well-known area in the United States was the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. We heard over and over every day that flooding was in the Ninth Ward; the situation was dire in the Lower Ninth Ward; houses were destroyed in the Upper Ninth Ward. It was our background music as we ate our evening meals even though most of us could not tell each other what a “ward� is (a neighborhood, a suburb, a city block?). The clearest thing that came out of Hurricane Katrina, though, was the destruction of the Ninth Ward and the desperation of the people who lived there. What it was like before — and who those people were — was something rarely considered, however, in all the news reports. Fortunately, sister and brother writing team Arlet and Sam Wylie wrote about the Ninth before the storm in a revealing book that pulls no punches and forces readers to consider just how truly complex the place that we call home can be.

The Wylies grew up on St. Claude Avenue, the main street of the Ninth Ward, on the second floor of a building that was owned by their father. Downstairs was a grocery store and in front of their balcony was everything bad about the neighborhood. Arlet and Sam grew up “inside,� to prevent them and their siblings from getting into trouble with drug dealers or "hustlers.� While this made sense to them when they were younger, over time they began to see the view from their balcony differently.

“I went outside to clear my head,� writes Arlet, “but as I spent more time on my balcony, I also started to get to know the guys that I had always seen growing up but never knew personally.

"As I learned more about them, I started to realize that the stereotypes were not all true. They are more complex than that. Over time, I became more curious to know what’s the word on the street. I liked to listen to their conversations. I knew if I sat outside, I was going to laugh.

"Sometimes when I’m having a really good time talking to some of the guys, it’s hard to remember that they are caught up in a lifestyle that’s dangerous. One day they could be clowning and the next day they could be killed.�

This desire to understand more about the young men who frequented St. Claude and were part of its bad reputation drove the Wylies to interview as many people as they could on the block. They wanted to know why some people made bad decisions and didn’t try to change their lives, while others moved onto St. Claude with a desire to renovate and upgrade the neighborhood. There were drastically different forces at work in the Ninth Ward when Arlet and Sam set out to document what was happening on their street. And to make things more confusing, the entire time they were doing this they were faced with a family that was rapidly falling apart.

The first thing that was nonnegotiable about St. Claude was the violence. “Whether it’s day or night, it’s always a bad idea to hang around my block,� writes Sam. “There have been a lot of times when there’s been violence and people have been hurt or even killed.� A main source of the violence is all the hustling that took place in the neighborhood. It wasn’t just drugs that people were selling; it was everything imaginable. “We make money the best way we can,� writes Sam. “We have a lot of different ways to make money. We have it all: doctors, teachers, store owners, repair shops, carpenters and then there are the drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, bootleggers and people selling stuff they stole.�

What’s interesting is that people are known by what they do, not as individuals. You are a drug dealer; you are a thief; you are a pimp. How you came to do this, why you do it and if you will ever change are unknowns; they aren’t even questions anyone considers asking. That’s what makes the interview with a 15-year old “Avon seller� so revealing. One minute the teenager discusses beating someone up because he was bored or selling his product at a day-care center (“I’ll sell to little children, it don’t matter�), and in the next he talks about wanting to buy a Playstation 2 so he could stay inside and play games all day. It’s a very surreal exchange because it never occurs to the seller to do anything else, to even want to do anything else.

It never occurs to him to want better dreams.

Part of the easy acceptance of daily violence is due to the way people look at drugs.

“Most people think it’s just another way of life,� writes Arlet, “another job, or just another thing to do. It’s taken lightly by people of all ages, but I think it makes or breaks you. When you begin selling drugs, it helps you make fast money and you can keep up with the latest fashions and buy other material things. Most of the drug selling is for more of our wants than needs. A lot of people say they sell drugs until they get enough money to get away, move out of town, or help their family but how do you know when it’s enough? They get caught up."

The vicious cycle on St. Claude led many young people to find success the only way they knew how, the easiest way they could (and don’t blame them for looking for an easy success; much of our society is built on easy success). The fact that it didn’t work out in the long run for most of them was never a consideration. The kids on St. Claude were looking for clothes and jewelry, for stereos and cars. They weren’t thinking about buying a nice house someday; they couldn’t see that distant future. They were thinking about Playstation games and willing to sell their products to any buyer so they could have some fun.

It is interesting to read that while so much violence surrounded St. Claude, there were still people interested in moving into the neighborhood. One couple that was interviewed was the “circus punks� who recently moved into the house next door to the Wylies. They were from New York and worked in a traveling circus and while they admittedly “would not have preferred to live on St. Claude because it’s so crazy…� they could not resist the price on the rundown shotgun and purchased it. In many ways the Wylies seem just as mystified by the newcomers as the circus punks are about the neighborhood. Whether or not the experiment would have worked out for everyone is an unknown now, of course. But there were signs that St. Claude was changing a little before Katrina; that fear was not keeping everyone out.

As Arlet and Sam investigated the people they saw from their balcony for their book, the situation in their own home became more and more uncertain. After years of fighting and physical violence, their mother finally decided she had enough and took most of the children with her to a new house on Gladiolus Street. Sam elected to stay behind with their father above the store. The breakup forced all of them to take a look at just what living on St. Claude had meant, and while the new neighborhood was easier for Arlet, it also meant no more conversations with friends downstairs or “random interactions on the Avenue…� with people passing by. It’s a much quieter place than St. Claude, and that took a lot of getting used to.

The move became more serious when Arlet learned that one close friend, Twine, was murdered shortly before the book was finished. His death is a startling reminder of just how serious the games are on St. Claude, how someone who “wanted everyone to get along and stop the hate� could still be dead at the age of 20. And while readers are surprised to see his picture on the book’s final page and read what happened to him after his earlier interview, it is not his face that has stayed with me, not his tragedy that seems so emblematic of the problems in the Ninth Ward. For me, the significance of Between Piety and Desire was crystallized in an earlier page-long essay from Sam, where he writes about “Swimming in the Sea�:

I think if I had been raised in a better neighborhood or around more positive people I wouldn’t have so many problems. Not that my parents didn’t do a good job of raising me, it’s just the sea I’m swimming in. From the Avenue to my school, the police are casting their nets — looking for people to fill up the jails. It is easy for me to be caught. I have already started to deal with the courts and paying money for people to stay out of jail.

See, the whole system is like a big net, and the Ninth Ward is where they do a lot of fishing. The net is not concerned whether they catch a good or bad fish. And me, I am just in the water. It’s where I was raised, so a lot of the time I can’t help or avoid being caught up. Just riding up the street is taking a chance for me; A young black man driving a car. The police have pulled me over and acted as though I had stolen the car. Sometimes I have this sinking feeling that no matter how much I struggle to get free, I’ll never be able to get free as long as I’m living where I’m living.

Getting out is much harder than staying in. I feel like I’m in a river, trying to swim upstream, trying my best and hardest to avoid problems.

I couldn’t help but wonder after reading this book if it was the neighborhood itself that was sick. Would the destruction of the Ninth Ward mean that everyone who was trapped in its “net� would suddenly be free to choose something else; would have to choose something else? Or does the life you have always known just stay with you wherever you go — do you have to change at home first if you are going to change at all?

In other words, will all the violence of the Ninth Ward move to different places but still live and breathe, regardless of what happens to St. Claude Avenue?

Of course none of these questions should be the ones that matter; none of them should even be asked. Because really, I’m stuck back with that 15-year old boy who said he would deal his product to children if they asked him and could only mention a video game as something he wanted in life. What the hell happened to that kid is what I really want to know — what happened to him long before Katrina to make dealing on St. Claude Avenue the best thing he could do with his life? How did that become his American dream? How could something so sad be the stuff that dreams are made of in this country today?

Can anyone explain that to me?