This oral history of of nine New Orleans residents, bracketed by hurricanes Betsy, in 1965, and Katrina, in 2005 is a solidly entertaining, (Big) easy read. Baum was reporting on Katrina for the New Yorker when he met and interviewed these folks, so it's a fairly eclectic bunch, from a rich white uptown guy to the city coroner to the wife of Mardi Gras Indian royalty to a transgender bar owner, and a few more. But he seems faithful to the voices, and patches together enough from other sources to keep it hopping. A good slice of time and place. ( )

Nine Lives

Once upon a time there was a young assistant editor living in New York City. The editor that this assistant editor assisted left the company just a week before the editor was to have gone on a trip to New Orleans to attend a conference where she would recruit authors. With the hotel booked and the conference entrance fee paid for, someone had to go. And lo, the lowly assistant editor found herself on a surprise trip to New Orleans, where she had wanted to go ever since heard the “they used an alligator as a cannon” song about the War of 1812 when she was little. But that’s not relevant to the book.

The part relevant to the book features me hustling over to the French Quarter at 5 PM on the dot to fit in as much sightseeing as I can, picking random side streets to wander down in search of shops and galleries that hadn’t closed yet, and stumbling upon The Kitchen Witch bookshop. This charming store is what my house would look like if I didn’t have a roommate: books everywhere, knickknacks both antique and just plain silly scattered among the shelves and piles. The shop, it turned out, featured cookbooks, but it also had a selection of books about NOLA and by NOLA residents.

Nine Lives jumped out because that’s the book that Jack Varjak writes in the Breakfast at Tiffany’s movie (don’t even start…). To my delight, this book turned out to be just what I was looking for, a perfect souvenir for someone who didn’t really get time to see New Orleans.

When I bought the book, the shop owner and I chatted a bit, and she told me that she’d been amazed to find out how much in the book was true—that after she’d read it, she started hearing about the nine people whose lives are explored in depth in this book. I owe her an email to tell that, well, I absolutely loved this book!

The best part is that you can read it however you want. Me, I’m a beginning-to-end kind of person. My roommate and my grandma picked up the book and flipped to any old section, since the lives are broken up into short vignettes of anywhere from a paragraph to several pages. The author warns that you might have trouble keeping track of everyone, which is entirely possible—though I only had to flip back twice to remember who someone was. (I consider any story’s “it’s okay if you’re confused” to be a personal offense and as soon as I see it, I’m determined not to be.)

Thing is, this is exactly my kind of book: dozens of characters, from the nine main characters to the people in their lives; a variety of cultures in close contact with each other; complicated socioeconomic and political interactions; and covering decades. And the best part? It’s all true (even if not always factually accurate).

Folks, this is the kind of book I would aspire to write if I wasn’t so lazy. When I write at all these days, I stick with fantasy so I can avoid research wherever possible.

Quote Roundup
I’m probably going to run out of room here, which I haven’t done since Paradise Lost.If that’s the case, I’ll add a link to the tumblr post at the bottom.

x) Author: Long before [Hurricane Katrina], New Orleans was by almost any metric the worst city in the United States … Yet a poll conducted a few weeks before the storm found that more New Orleanians—regardless of age, race, or wealth—were “extremely satisfied” with their lives than residents of any other American city.
Pretty impressive. I wish more people (myself included) could be so happy in their metrically better circumstances.

13) How a young black man got revenge on a racist white store owner who thought he was shoplifting.
Anthony: I got my little sister’s friends to go in there with their little backpacks after school. Then I go in, making myself the shiftless nigger, and damned if that white man didn’t take the bait and follow two steps behind me everywhere I went. Meanwhile, the girls are stuffing everything they could get their hands on into their little backpacks, stealing that white man’s ass off. Teach him a lesson for stereotyping us.
“But he proved that white guy right!” you say. “That’s not the point,” I whisper.

30) Frank: “Who are they” Frank said, gesturing at the young black men dressed for combat, hustling about with pots of coffee or mops or holding crying children on their laps. “Why, the Black Panthers,” she said, as though any fool would know. “They look scary, but this is what they do—feed breakfast to poor children all over the country.”
Well you certainly don’t learn that in school! Or, well, you don’t if you grow up in predominantly white areas, I shouldn’t speak for everywhere.

35) Billy: He realized he’d never been ignored by a Negro before. Usually, they were either focused on him…or studiously making themselves invisible. … The poor things, he’d said to himself more than once, squirming under the forced cheerfulness of a porter’s greeting or noting the cringing, averted eyes of a busboy. Yet these four men, waiting for their pot to boil, were unembarrassed. Undiminished.
Just so you know, this little white boy was thinking this while he was working in a predominantly black neighborhood where these men live. It’d be interesting to know whether the rich kid in 1969 thought this, or if it was a lesson filtered through memory—rosy retrospection creating a life lesson out of what may have just been an awkward or interesting situation.

I really like the way this book’s style allows readers to encounter different facets of racism. You get the people who are racist jerks pretty much overtly. You get the people railing against white privilege. You get people with the privilege to not really even notice racism. You get the people who just deal with it every day. You get multiple sides of the dice, which is not something you usually see, even when an attempt is being made to represent multiple sides (see, for example, the movie Crash).

38) Frank: “So you won’t let me bring methadone into the jail.”
“No, sir.” They looked at each other.
“Who’s your boss?” Frank asked.
Rabin smiled. “I don’t have a boss. I’m elected.”
Frank leaned across Rabin’s desk. “You motherfucker,” Frank heard himself saying. “I’m going to run against you and take your job.”
Loved this!

105) John: Little by little, his reflection in the mirror became more naturally feminine. They worked with his size instead of against it, changing his look from that of a husky guy trying to to look like a flouncy sexpot to that of a big thirty-nine-year-old woman. They were taking him more seriously as a woman than he’d ever taken himself. He’d been forcing himself into a cartoon caricature. They were applying a woman’s finesse.
I don’t cry for many stories, but my heart did feel a little melty for this scene. The women—part-time and full-time—were so immediately accepting of and welcoming to John, giving him tips and working with his level of comfort to help him figure himself (herself) out. It’s hard to find people so open to strangers, and here John went from having no one to having a whole group of supporters and potential friends in a single evening that’s going to change his life forever. How often do we get to look back on those moments? How many of us have moments as big as this one must have been for John?

132) John: I was delighted to learn that John spent time as a trucker—made me think of a story I wrote a while back about a woman trucker. The snippet of him listening to an instructional tape on how to speak like a woman was another heart-melty moment of happiness for John.

134) Ronald meets a white doctoral student studying the second line parades in NOLA:
She launched into an explanation of what she was about that set Ronald’s head to spinning—something about “contested urban space” and “the commodification of culture.” Ronald settled back and took it in; he liked hearing white people talk. It was like learning another language. Then she was contrasting second lines with “minstrelsy,” and Ronald perked up. He’d had enough of minstrel men.
“What you mean by that?” he asked
“Minstrelsy being exaggerated blackness, cartoon blackness, for the entertainment of whites,” she said. “The second line strikes me as the exact opposite.”
She got it.
Actual proof that two people with wildly different backgrounds can meet and understand each other. The locals’ reactions to the researcher in their midst (what the hey?) made the little cultural anthropologist in me sigh happily.

137) Belinda: “Every guy you find is either married or has a girlfriend.”
“How do you know?”
“When they give you a phone number and it’s one of those cell phones, you know. You find me a guy that gives me his home number, I’ll listen.”
This was in 1996, and it’s practically hilarious now. Almost none of the people I know in New York have landlines, they just rely on their cell phones. Good thing Belinda found love before that cultural shift!

156) I really admire how seriously Belinda treats her young relationship with Wil Rawlins. She’s been through so many bad relationships and so much struggle in her life, she’s not just going to lie back and take punches anymore. She calls his school to confirm his employment and orders a full background check. She sounds like an amazing person—I’d love to meet her.

177) Another milestone in Belinda and Wil’s relationship: a classic missed anniversary. I really loved getting to see their relationship from both sides. They’re two such different people but they work so well together—even when they don’t, even when things fall apart, they still respect each other. It’s good to know there are good people in the world…especially when we have to read Tim’s less-than-polite perspective on, well, anything.

206) Ronald finds out that scholarships are being offered in light of the demolition of an entire lower-income neighborhood—only no one’s advertising the scholarships. He enacts the perfect revenge.
[He] began patrolling the streets of the Lower Nine. Three young men stood on the corner … Ronald W. Lewis pulled up and stepped out. … “Listen. They trying to put one over, offering scholarships without really telling nobody, hoping nobody apply. What we doing here is like snatching two thousand dollars from the city. We got to pick the fruit. They won’t like it, but it’s ours.” Michael stepped forward and picked up a pen. “What do I do?”
Ronald kept it up all week.
Ronald is a wonderful human being. I hope I’m that cool when I’m his age.

231) Tim [thinking for Marie]: That man at the hospital is right. I’m trash. But what else could I be?
I read this whole book and this was honestly the one part that strained credulity for me. This racist cop drives around with the corpse of a black woman in his backseat after Katrina, unable to find a hospital that will take her, and starts to actually think of her as a human being instead of a stupid dead possible criminal. People are rarely so neat. And, ultimately, Time isn’t. He may come to an understanding, he may tell the story of himself coming to an understanding, or this may be fabricated by the author. Who knows? But it’s important that he starts seeing it only to let it go. Because that’s the trap of white privilege that’s so easy to fall into. It’s not a light-switch-flip fix-it.

246-247) Ronald: An hour later, Ronald’s upper arm was sore and swollen. A three-inch tall skull and crossbones, with the legend “RWL 65-05,” glowed against his raw skin. “It’s beautiful,” said the skinny Confederate with the humming needle at Randy’s Fine Line Tattoos.
“These are the bookends of my life. Forty years apart. Betsy and Katrina.”
“What’s the little crown above the R?”
“That means I am king of the plan.” Ronald palpated his achy upper arm. Katrina and Betsy were part of him; he’d wear them like he wore his own black skin. But hurricanes came and went; men planned and built.

265) Billy: “This is my idea. The collective wealth around this table must be in the billions. Why don’t we each of us, personally, pledge a million dollars cash to the recovery. We can go out of this room and announce that we have sixty million dollars cash on hand: the business community’s stake in the recovery. Today.” He leaned on his forearms and looked around the room expectantly.
Nobody spoke, and Scott went on with the meeting.
Oh, this made me FURIOUS! It’s one thing for a bunch of old guys in Washington, so far away, to deny sufficient aid. For a bunch of NOLA business men, though, to hear that and not agree to something—even half a million each would have been a tremendous amount to devote to rebuilding. I hope these cowards are ashamed of themselves at least annually.

266) Frank
It’s awful how much of the Katrina recovery (or lack thereof) news reached/stuck with me when I was a teenager up in Massachusetts, in my happy little haven. I knew NOLA was horrendously neglected, but in this case the government almost seems to have gone out of their way to be extra awful. This isn’t just withholding resources: this is withholding resources to make a deal. Reading this was like a punch in the gut.

267) Frank is another amazing human being.
Buried deep in each [body’s pathologist] report was a line for cause of death, and on each someone had written, “drowning.” …
“Connie, listen to me. A lot of these people died from heat exhaustion, dehydration, stress, and from being without their medication—from neglect, basically. They were abandoned out there. So it’s political, what killed them. … I want all the bodies autopsied.”
“Every one?”
“Every one. These people were left to die like rats.”
Frank needs a hug and a Congressional Medal of Honor.

276) Anthony: [The people in Knoxville, Tennessee] called us looters and refugees. Refugees is from another country. Refugees is from a war zone. I got a Social Security number.
I remember wondering what happened to the people from New Orleans who were scattered across the country after the storm. Now I found out what happened.

293) Billy: The city was cleaving along racial lines in a way he wouldn’t have thought possible. It was as though integration had never happened. The hurt that had welled up with the flood had caught him completely off guard.
Sigh. Of course it did. I wonder if this was an actual new division or just one that was being not just vocalized but broadcasted for the first time. I don’t know, is it better to hope that somehow New Orleans was a little patch of slightly less racism and that Katrina wrecked that as well, or better to think that it was always there and the national attention following Katrina was just the first opportunity those who suffered from racism had to make it known?

298) Joyce: [She paused] before the giant rusted cross made of welded anchor chain, hung with manacles. Father LeDoux had installed it years before: the Tomb of the Unknown Slave. No wonder the archdiocese hated him so much.
Every former Confederate state with a tomb honoring their soldiers at Gettysburg should be required to have a Tomb of the Unknown Slave of equal size and proportion installed in front of their capital building.

Also, how have I not had a quote from Joyce yet? I loved her story because it was her perspective on her larger-than-life husband. The author wrote somewhere that it was refreshing to get her perspective when her husband had held the spotlight for so long, and I like that it adds an extra angle to the book: in and among the third-person stories, we get Anthony’s first-person and Joyce’s third-person with an external focus.

305) Ronald: He couldn’t understand the people who weren’t striving to come back. It was so different from the time after Betsy, when there was no question. Everybody came back and started right in. Forty years after our liberation movement, Ronald thought, and we’re further back than ever.
It was good to have this reminder of Betsy at this point in the book. It was so easy to forget in the awful wake of Katrina that there’d been a hurricane before—maybe not one as big, but still.

321) Author: Chris so thoroughly worked the copy that when the manuscript came back to me I went through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief—angry that he’d masticated my flawless prose, denial that I’d really have to make such extensive changes, confident I could bargain my way out of most of them, despair that Chris believed so much alternation was necessary, and finally acceptance that he had been right all along. This led to a sixth stage: gratitude.
Can any editor dream of a better description of their hard work? ( )

I liked this a lot. It reminded me, oddly, of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, in the way that the author uses various shifting perspectives to describe the culture and mores of modern-day New Orleans. As with Martin's books, the technique can be confusing at first, and I was probably halfway through the book before I felt totally comfortable with who everyone was. The book was riveting, and the many short chapters made it hard to put down; you always think there is time to read just one more.

My only quibble is that I wish more women had been included: only three women (one of them transgendered) among the nine perspectives. That was a little disappointing to me, and I wish Baum had found a way to incorporate more female voices. ( )

This nonfiction book was slow going at first, but after a while I was completely pulled in. It tells the story of nine different people in New Orleans over the course of many decades and it culminates with Hurricane Katrina. Their stories are wildly different, a cop, young black girl, and Indian, a transgender person, a local politician, but all of them are part of the city in one way or another. It reminds me so much of Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil. I loved the detailed descriptions of their worlds and the writing brought the city of New Orleans alive for me. Each of them sees their city in a different way. Those points of view painted a fuller picture of the iconic location. It's a perfect book to read before visiting!

The Nine: Ronald Lewis, Billy Grace, Belinda Jenkins, Wilbert Rawlins Jr., Frank Minyard, Joyce Montana, John / Joann Guidos, Anthony Wells , and Tim Bruneau ( )

I liked this a lot. It reminded me, oddly, of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, in the way that the author uses various shifting perspectives to describe the culture and mores of modern-day New Orleans. As with Martin's books, the technique can be confusing at first, and I was probably halfway through the book before I felt totally comfortable with who everyone was. The book was riveting, and the many short chapters made it hard to put down; you always think there is time to read just one more.

My only quibble is that I wish more women had been included: only three women (one of them transgendered) among the nine perspectives. That was a little disappointing to me, and I wish Baum had found a way to incorporate more female voices. ( )