The Country Club is a pale yellow, classic nineteenth-century Creole mansion with a grand front porch. Inside are fifteen-foot ceilings, polished hardwood floors, and palms in pots. People dine in the house’s rooms, and there’s a bar in the back near the pool where Anne, on her way to the bathroom, saw a naked woman ordering a drink.
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.
We sat cross-legged on the cement floor of a warehouse in the Upper Ninth Ward, not far from the train tracks. In the center was a small wooden house with singing pipes built into its walls. This was Chateau Poulet, a musical shanty about to perform for all of us.
New Orleans has a mercurial sensibility that allows it to simultaneously resemble only itself and any number of other places. The flow of the streets and speech, the cuisine and the history—it’s all distinctly of New Orleans, yet testament to the fact that this city was built on trade and traders (and the traded). What better place for EN MAS’, an exhibition stretched between here and there.
What was the year? 1986? 2008? Does it matter? What was the great offense? Same as last time, more or less. Some white shit. What was the reaction? One Negro leader or another—fill in the blank—stood in front of the cameras and declared we would do such things he knew not what! This said with a walls will come tumbling down certainty, same as last time, more or less.
Louisiana's coastline is shrinking, rapidly. As Anne Gisleson reports, "the United States Geological Survey claims oil and gas companies are responsible for roughly a third of the state’s wetlands degradation." To try and claim reparations for this destruction, writer John Barry recently led the people of Louisiana through a lawsuit that aimed to make these companies "comply with the contracts and permits they themselves signed." This is John Barry's story—his work to save Louisiana.
“You just have to see” is always good advice in New Orleans, which is how I ended up at the 2007 premiere of Trixie and the Treetrunks, a ten-part puppet telenovela in which Trixie and her pal Marsha try to make sense of a post-apocalyptic world by starting a band to send secret messages from the center of the earth.