One night in New Orleans, about 10 years ago, I was unexpectedly called to the hospital downtown. A man named Dan Bright had been shot seven times at close range and was drifting in and out of consciousness. In a waking moment my name had come up, apparently he wanted to speak with me, and two men were soon on their way to pick me up. It was Dan Bright who lay dying, but as I stepped into the street that night to wait for my ride I was struck with a powerful sensation that it was my life that would end.
Living in New Orleans after a certain length of time makes you increasingly aware of how easily you can die here. That maybe the city even wants your death, desires it, will grow stronger by it, more colorful, more New Orleans. Because death out of the blue, be it murder by gunshot, or a hit-and-run by a drunk driver, or an unexplained stroke, aneurism, or strange accident, seems to happen freakishly often in New Orleans, and like the river silt that underlies the city, a colorful and fine new layer of death has been added. People meet friends at cafes and on stoops and in line at the Post Office and they may well talk about the weather, but they will also likely talk about the latest crime, which is to talk about the latest shooting, which is to talk about the latest death. And weather in New Orleans, I need not remind you, can also invite death.
In 2010, I was sent by Audubon Magazine to New Orleans to cover an offshore oil explosion that killed 11 men. I lived in a Westbank Travelodge and every day went down to the coast. Weeks went by until one evening I finally entered the city and wandered the misty streets of the Marigny. I had never seen homes like that, or mist like that, a city where the mood becomes the architecture, and the architecture returns the mood. In Treme, I rented a room—a landing actually—in a home a block from Saint Augustine Catholic Church, where in the garden the shackles and chains memorialize “the nameless, faceless, turfless Africans who met an untimely death in Faubourg Treme.” At the Backstreet Cultural Museum, a unique map of America attempts to name all the tribes that lived here before, with notes on which imported disease or U.S. military maneuver killed them…