Nine Lives Read online

  ALSO BY DAN BAUM

  Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure

  Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty

  For the people of New Orleans

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  About this Book: Updated for the Paperback Edition

  Map

  Part I - Where Daddy Gets His Groove

  Ronald Lewis

  John Guidos

  Anthony Wells

  Ronald Lewis

  Joyce Montana

  Frank Minyard

  Billy Grace

  Frank Minyard

  Anthony Wells

  Billy Grace

  Frank Minyard

  John Guidos

  Ronald Lewis

  Frank Minyard

  Belinda Carr

  Ronald Lewis

  Frank Minyard

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Joyce Montana

  Anthony Wells

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Frank Minyard

  John Guidos

  Billy Grace

  Belinda Carr

  Frank Minyard

  Ronald Lewis

  Part II - Walking on Glass

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  John Guidos

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Belinda Carr

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Anthony Wells

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Joyce Montana

  Billy Grace

  Frank Minyard

  John Guidos

  Belinda Jenkins

  Frank Minyard

  Joyce Montana

  Billy Grace

  Ronald Lewis

  Joyce Montana

  Frank Minyard

  Ronald Lewis

  Frank Minyard

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  John Guidos

  Ronald Lewis

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Belinda Jenkins

  Joyce Montana

  Anthony Wells

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Belinda Smalls

  Tim Bruneau

  Billy Grace

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Belinda Smalls

  Tim Bruneau

  Belinda Smalls

  Ronald Lewis

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Anthony Wells

  John Guidos

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Frank Minyard

  Billy Grace

  Tim Bruneau

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Tim Bruneau

  Belinda Rawlins

  Tim Bruneau

  Billy Grace

  Joann Guidos

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Tim Bruneau

  Billy Grace

  Belinda Rawlins

  Joyce Montana

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Joyce Montana

  Tim Bruneau

  Anthony Wells

  Joyce Montana

  Ronald Lewis

  Joann Guidos

  Billy Grace

  Tim Bruneau

  Part III - A Thousand Whistles

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Anthony Wells

  Joyce Montana

  Billy Grace

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Belinda Rawlins

  Anthony Wells

  Frank Minyard

  Joann Guidos

  Tim Bruneau

  Ronald Lewis

  Belinda Rawlins

  Anthony Wells

  Ronald Lewis

  Tim Bruneau

  Billy Grace

  Tim Bruneau

  Anthony Wells

  Tim Bruneau

  Frank Minyard

  Tim Bruneau

  Joann Guidos

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Tim Bruneau

  Belinda Rawlins

  Frank Minyard

  Tim Bruneau

  Frank Minyard

  Tim Bruneau

  Ronald Lewis

  Anthony Wells

  Billy Grace

  Ronald Lewis

  Part IV - The Heebie-Jeebies

  Frank Minyard

  Joann Guidos

  Anthony Wells

  Frank Minyard

  Belinda Rawlins

  Frank Minyard

  Tim Bruneau

  Joyce Montana

  Frank Minyard

  Anthony Wells

  Belinda Rawlins

  Billy Grace

  Joann Guidos

  Frank Minyard

  Anthony Wells

  Frank Minyard

  Belinda Rawlins

  Ronald Lewis

  Frank Minyard

  Anthony Wells

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Frank Minyard

  Belinda Rawlins

  Tim Bruneau

  Ronald Lewis

  Joyce Montana

  Anthony Wells

  Frank Minyard

  Tim Bruneau

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Anthony Wells

  Ronald Lewis

  Tim Bruneau

  Anthony Wells

  Billy Grace

  Frank Minyard

  Joyce Montana

  Frank Minyard

  Joyce Montana

  Ronald Lewis

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

  Frank Minyard

  Ronald Lewis

  Billy Grace

  Frank Minyard

  Anthony Wells

  Billy Grace

  Belinda Rawlins

  Joann Guidos

  Frank Minyard

  Ronald Lewis

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Sources

  Interviews

  Bibliography

  A Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation With Dan Baum

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Oy! You ask someone in New Orleans a question, and they have to start so far back that they never get to telling you what you want to know!

  —MARGARET L. KNOX,

  FEBRUARY 24, 2007

  New Orleans is still full of brigands, freebooters, mercenaries, and slaves.

  —JACQUES MORIAL,

  FEBRUARY 23, 2006

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  UPDATED FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION

  Most visitors to New Orleans sooner or later start asking impolite questions: Why has the rebuilding since Katrina gone so slowly? Why do you put up with such corrupt and incompetent politicians? How can you waste so much money on Mardi Gras when you’re still living in trailers? Doesn’t anybody in this city ever show up on time?

  New Orleanians are hard to offend. Stop thinking of New Orleans as the worst-organized city in the United States, they often say. Start thinking of it as the best-organized city in the Caribbean.

  That New Orleans is like no place else in America goes way beyond the food, music, and architecture. New Orleanians don’t even understand such fundamentals as time and money the way other Americans do. The future, for example: While the rest of Americans famously dream and scheme and chase the horizon, New Orleanians are masters at the lost art of living in the moment. If we’re doing okay this minute, goes the logic—enjoying one another’s company, keeping cool, and maybe having something good to eat—of what earthly importance is tomorrow or next week? Given the fragility of life, why even count on getting there? New Orleanians are notoriously late showing up, if they show up at all, because by and large they don’t keep calendars. Calendars are tools for managing the future, and in New Orleans the future doesn’t exist.
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  As for money, New Orleanians like it well enough, but not so they’d bend their lives out of shape to get some. They have more time than money, and that’s how they like it. Ambition isn’t a virtue in the lowlands between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. New Orleanians tend to identify more with the welfare of their families, neighborhoods, wards, bands, krewes, second-line clubs, and Mardi Gras Indian tribes than with their own personal achievement, so are largely free of the insatiable desire for individual aggrandizement that afflicts the rest of us. To the extent Americans strive to make their tomorrows brighter than today, New Orleanians really want nothing more than for everything to stay the same.

  Long before the storm, New Orleans was by almost any metric the worst city in the United States—the deepest poverty, the most murders, the worst schools, the sickest economy, the most corrupt and brutal cops. 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. When Katrina made a “blank slate” of the city, several high-level commissions promoted plans to make New Orleans “bigger and better” than it was before. All of them failed completely. Some people rejected “bigger and better” as code for “whiter,” but even more, I suspect, heard “bigger and better” as a recipe for a city driven by the dollar and the clock. Who needs that?

  While covering Katrina and its aftermath for The New Yorker, I noticed that most of the coverage, my own included, was so focused on the disaster that it missed the essentially weird nature of the place where it happened. The nine intertwined life stories offered here are an attempt to convey what is unique and worth saving in New Orleans. None of these people is famous. Only one is a public official, and he but a minor one. The rest toil pretty much in obscurity. Their lives, though, would be unimaginable anyplace else, and it’s New Orleans itself—perpetually whistling past the graveyard—that is the real protagonist here.

  These nine people do not all end up sitting on the same flooded rooftop. Nothing in New Orleans is ever that tidy. Besides, no single rooftop would have harbored both a millionaire king of carnival from the Garden District and a retired streetcar-track repairman from the Lower Ninth Ward, a transsexual bar owner from St. Claude Avenue and the jazz-playing parish coroner, a white cop from Lakeview and a black jailbird from the Goose. But that’s not to say these lives don’t touch one another. New Orleans is a small city. Some of these stories do intersect. And even the ones that don’t come in physical contact share a common problem: how to live in a place that, by the go-go rules of modern America, has no right to exist. In the context of the techno-driven, profit-crazy, hyperefficient United States, New Orleans is a city-sized act of civil disobedience.

  These stories come to the reader through two filters. The sensibilities, emotions, and memories of the nine principal characters color them most of all. They all sat for many hours of interviews, unpacking their innermost moments for a stranger, with nothing to gain but the very New Orleanian pleasure of storytelling. Although I supplemented those interviews by talking to many of my characters’ friends, relatives, and associates, I chose to recount these nine people’s lives from their own points of view. They invited me into their heads and hearts, so that seemed the best place from which to tell their stories.

  It is certain that other people will remember the events described herein differently. And memory is a funny thing. Frank Minyard, for example, described to me in detail the epiphany that launched him in the direction of becoming Orleans Parish coroner. While he was sure it happened in 1967, he was equally sure the song that set it off was Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” which wasn’t recorded until 1969. But this was how Frank’s own story explained Frank’s world to Frank. So I left it as he told it.

  The second filter is my own. I have re-created scenes and dialogue out of remembered snippets, using what I knew about the people, the time, the immediate setting, and the city. I put words to thoughts and feelings that, during the months I spent working on this, were laid bare by these remarkably candid people. I changed the names of three peripheral characters to avoid hurting their feelings.

  It turns out that a book written from the reminiscences of nine people is a breathing, changing organism. After the hardcover was published in February 2009, some of my protagonists spoke up with changes they wanted to see in later editions. Most were small—names misspelled, clothing details bungled, and a reference to forsythia when any fool knows that forsythia doesn’t grow in New Orleans. One of the nine was appalled that a story intended to be off the record showed up in print, though upon reflection decided (in a very New Orleans way) what the hell, leave it as it stands. But another of the nine came back to say that a couple of anecdotes didn’t happen at all the way I’d told them, and that was a puzzler. My wife and I both remembered being told the stories, but our notes were ambiguous. Finally, we decided to make the requested changes for this edition of Nine Lives. The stories herein, after all, belong to these nine remarkable people. My goal all along was to tell them as accurately as possible.

  A final note to the paperback edition: Nine separate stories is a lot to keep straight. Don’t worry if, for the first fifty pages or so, you can’t remember who’s who. These chapters were written to be enjoyed as individual stories. Everybody will fall into place eventually. In other words, be a little bit New Orleanian about reading this book. Don’t stress over achieving anything. Just have a good time. It will all work out in the end.

  PART I

  WHERE DADDY GETS HIS GROOVE

  REP. F. EDWARD HÉBERT OF LOUISIANA:

  “So assuming that we would have another Hurricane Betsy tomorrow, next week, or next year, the sixteen-foot levee would protect that area?”

  COL. THOMAS J. BOWEN, U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS: “Right.”

  —Discussion of Hurricane Betsy’s flooding of the Lower Ninth Ward, during the hearing of the Committee on Public Works, U.S. House of Representatives, September 15, 1965

  RONALD LEWIS

  DESLONDE STREET

  1965

  Ronald Lewis walked past one ruined cottage after another. Miss Hattie Guste’s yellow bungalow with the gingerbread trim wore mildew like a three-day stubble on a drunk man’s chin. The Moseses’ place seemed to have been dredged in slime like a piece of useless garbage. Miss Odette’s immaculate cottage had become a spooky old hollowed-out skull. Miss Pie’s swaybacked shotgun was knocked clean off its bricks so that the porch seemed to be kneeling in the mud. These were Ronald’s sacred places, he now realized; he’d been in and out of these houses his whole life. Desecrated they were. Thoughtlessly trashed.

  Ronald had seen bad luck before. Houses caught fire, men lost their jobs, children drowned in the canal. Each time, neighbors had given the stricken a bed for the night or a few dollars’ help, offering strong backs and consolation. This time, though, bad luck had carried its bucket of bitterness through every house on every block, ladling an equal dose to all. How was anybody to rise out of it, with nobody left unhurt to lend a hand?

  Ronald Lewis was fourteen years old, and he’d finally encountered a force of nature more powerful than his mom.

  REBECCA WRIGHT was born on the Abbey Sugar Plantation in Thibodaux half a century after emancipation, but not so you’d know the difference. She came up in one of dozens of identical unpainted shacks alongside a cane field, carrying water on her head from a communal pump and listening to her uncles being beaten for the crime of being too sick to work. She had her first baby, Walter, at thirteen, put him on her hip, and lit out for New Orleans. There, she married a quiet man named Irvin Dickerson and had four more children.

  When Ronald was born to Rebecca’s troubled niece Stella Mae in 1951, Rebecca took him, swaddled in a Charity Hospital blanket, and folded him in with her own-born five, becoming the only mama he would ever know. She took him down to the tidy house Irvin had built her, across the canal in the L
ower Ninth Ward.

  Life across the canal was heaven for newcomers from the country. The lots were jungly—big enough for chickens, pigs, and even horses. The streets were made of rolled pea gravel and crushed oyster shell: easy on bare feet. Neighbors understood each other. You took care of your family, sat on your porch in the evening, and went to church. No need for all that parading in the street like the city people and the Creoles on the other side of the canal. None of that fancy dressing up and drinking until all hours. It was the best of both worlds for Rebecca—a quiet country life right there by the good waterfront jobs. Irvin worked close by in the sugar factory. When a banana boat was in, the whole neighborhood smelled sweet, and it was bananas in the bread pudding, banana cream pies, and fried bananas for breakfast all week long.

  By the time Ronald came, big brother Walter was off at sea with the merchant marine, but the compact house on Deslonde Street was still plenty crowded. Ronald shared a room with Irvin Junior and Larry; Dorothy and Stella shared one down the hall. When they got around the kitchen table every evening, it was all shoulders and elbows. They ate eggplants, corn, and tomatoes from the garden, and eggs from their chickens. Mama bought flour, rice, and grits by the twenty-five-pound bag and, for breakfast, baked biscuits this high before everybody got up; they’d sop them in cane syrup poured from big cans. Dorothy, thirteen years older than Ronald, had a good job by Lopinto’s Restaurant and brought home sacks of fishbacks that still had plenty meat on them. The family would crowd into the kitchen late at night, rolling the fishbacks in cornmeal, frying them crisp, and sucking off the flaky white meat, while Mahalia Jackson sang from the radio.

  Cousins showed up often from Thibodaux, looking for a better life in the city. Ronald knew times when five or ten might be packed into the house, covering the living room floor at night like dead soldiers, standing around the table at mealtimes, spooning up Mama’s rice and gravy, and talking in plantation accents that struck his ear like music. They’d tell of hog killings, alligators long as Cadillacs, and hot pones sticky with molasses. Everybody would be shouting and laughing until Rebecca, standing over the stove with her spatula, hushed them all by snapping, “When I die, do not bring me back to that place.”

  She created for Ronald a tiny, exquisitely textured world, like one of the snow globes that Walter brought home from sea. Ronald didn’t cross a street on his own until first grade, and even then the known universe extended but a few blocks. She would send him as far as the dago’s on Claiborne Avenue with a nickel for a stick of butter, but she’d spit on the floor and say, “That better not be dry when you get back.” There was laundry to stomp in the bathtub and run through the wringer, a garden to hoe, chickens to feed, and always plenty of dishes—Lord help Ronald if he left them in the draining board. If word came up the street that he’d failed to say good morning to Mr. Butler or Miss Pie, Mama would send him out back to cut her an alder switch “as long as you are” and wear him out with it.