A Points South essay from the 100th issue.
He used “Niggertown” to make the hearer reconcile the word with the man using it: Lolis Edward Elie, this civil rights lawyer, this man of letters, this collector of fine art and old jazz records, this gourmand, this voracious reader of smart books and drinker of cold Champagne. He could easily have erased the old neighborhood from his biography. But what would be the fun in that? For my father, life began, and would always begin, in Niggertown.
A story from our Fiction Issue.
Full disclosure up front: I am a gay black man, a proud New Orleanian, thirty years old, five out of the closet, a decade on the down-low before that; bi-dialectal as every educated brother in this city must be, a code-switcher as needed; a poet in my spare time, in my unspare time a poetry teacher devoted to dead French guys and live black ones.
A Points South essay from the 100th issue.
New Orleans loves to celebrate and romanticize its French and Spanish influences. But so much of the city’s culture—the food, the music, the dance, Mardi Gras itself—is indebted to the Caribbean. New Orleans has reaped the benefits of an exported culture, while leaving Haiti behind.
A Points South essay from the Fall 2019 issue
Once, in mixed company, another friend and I mentioned how pervasive lynching imagery was. A white friend admitted that she had never seen a single photo. I was shocked, but not surprised. A lynching was a warning. She didn’t need to be warned.
After Katrina, a New Orleans soccer team comes home.
In February 2006 we picked up the pieces of our season. Again we were a traveling band of groupies, following our sons.
A video conclusion to Osayi Endolyn’s column “Counter Service”
In 2019, Osayi Endolyn wrote “Counter Service,” a column examining how American dining culture is shaped by historic social practices that have often left out, or outright excluded, groups of people including women and African Americans. To conclude her series, she visits Willa Jean, Kelly Fields’s restaurant in New Orleans, to discuss the elements that make a dining experience successful.
A feature essay from the Spring 2020 issue.
I wasn’t sure how to explain to a rising high-school junior why I’d followed her and her classmates to Belize. I’d met Pierre-Floyd a few months before during a tour of Frederick A. Douglass High School, the Ninth Ward charter school where she works, and she’d told me, in passing, that she planned to take twenty-five kids to Belize. Pierre-Floyd said she’d been the first in her family to graduate from college and she thought a high school trip she’d taken to Ghana had helped her earn a degree. She wanted to give her students the same experience.
This was a real letter with real handwriting, but when I picked it up I felt a moment of confused dread. Next to my name and address was rubber-stamped DEATH ROW in black.
The pieces of Johnny Greene, an Omnivore essay from the Fall 2019 issue.
Johnny used place as a recurrent theme, along with displacement. As a journalist, he was fascinated by communities, by groups of people and the environments which shaped them. As a person, his roads always led back to Alabama.
