New Orleans Noir

violent, confusing, difficult, inconvenient, frustrating post-Katrina world.
    In “Muddy Pond,” Maureen Tan wades into a part of the city most of its black and white citizens are only vaguely aware of, and almost never visit—Village de l’Est in New Orleans East, where the church called Mary Queen of Vietnam is the dominant social organization. Unless you count the gangs.
    The Masson boys in Thomas Adcock’s “Lawyers’ Tongues” are pure New Orleans—one a prosecutor, the other a petty thief. They’re Gentilly folks who moved up from the nearby St. Bernard project under the watchful eyes of certain Aunt-tees only too eager to see them stumble.
    Jeri Cain Rossi’s haunting tale of frustration, despair, and desperation—and heat!—in the very bohemian Bywater will make you long for a refreshing dip. Preferably not in the river.
    A little known fact: Lakeview, just the other side of the now-famous 17th Street Canal and once the home of well-off white folks, took on just as much water as the Ninth Ward. But since the houses were newer and stronger and mostly brick, it fared better. So unlike the Lower Ninth, it now looks more like a Western ghost town than a field where the gods played pick-up sticks. “Night Taxi,” Christine Wiltz’s angry, gritty portrayal of latter-day carpetbagging mines those spooky ruins for nasty truths.
    Several years ago, the Utne Reader named the Lower Garden District “the hippest neighborhood in America.” So naturally plenty of gay people live there and some, just as naturally, have lovers’ quarrels. Let’s hope most are resolved more peacefully than the one in Greg Herren’s “Annunciation Shotgun,” a classic noir nightmare in which stepping just over the line opens the narrator’s personal Pandora’s box.
    My own story of looting in the Garden District proper (several feet and a planet away from the Lower Garden District) seeks to remind us that we New Orleanians have no monopoly on taking advantage of our fellow humans.
    No fewer than six of our intrepid contributors (including our cover photographer) rode out the storm here—Christine Wiltz, who finally left when the looting got nasty; Jeri Cain Rossi, who got out by commandeering a van (along with five other people, five dogs, and a cat); James Nolan, who escaped with musician Allen Toussaint in a stolen schoolbus; Patty Friedmann, who got trapped in her Uptown home, hitched a rowboat ride to her sister’s also flooded house, and had to wait four more days for a second rescue; Olympia Vernon, who was marooned for days in Hammond, Louisiana with no gas, food, or electricity; and photographer David Spielman, who took shelter in a convent with a group of cloistered nuns.
    But one of us actually came here voluntarily that week. Ace Atkins blew in from Mississippi on a magazine assignment, and saw things that … well, that he injected into his powerful story, “Angola South,” along with the raw emotion of one who’s seen things nobody should have to see.
    Last, Eric Overmyer looks through the jaundiced eyes of an Eighth District homicide cop to sing a sort of love song to the noir side of the city. Or maybe it’s more like a love-hate song. The first paragraph alone will take the top of your head off—and the funny thing is, it really happened, as did most of the narrator’s memories. He reminds us just how violent our history has been, how much of our culture was already lost even before the bitch blew through.
    Since the recovery process is more or less a holy cause with most of us, a percentage of the profits from this book will go toward rebuilding the New Orleans Public Library, which is mounting a brave and massive campaign to get the funds it needs to reinvent its broken self.
    In addition, the authors were given an opportunity to help their colleagues by waiving their fees and donating the money directly to Katrina K.A.R.E.S. (Katrina Arts Relief and Emergency Support), an arm of the New Orleans Literary Institute that makes small grants to individual authors affected by the storm. We’re proud to say we raised money for eleven such grants.
    Julie Smith
New Orleans, Louisiana
February 2007

WHAT’S THE SCORE?
    BY T ED O’B RIEN
    Mid-City
    T he door swings open, in walks Reggie. Paul, on the stool next to me, gives him the once-over, shakes his head. “Man,” Paul whispers, “they say being black in the South is like being black twice. Being a dwarf, too? Man, what’s that