New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta

Today is New Orleans’ 300th birthday. Or, perhaps it is better to say that today is the 300th anniversary of Bienville’s decision to establish a French presence at the bend in the Mississippi River where for centuries prior, indigenous people had met to fish, to trade, and to exchange news and stories. The truth is that New Orleans was New Orleans long before there was a New Orleans. New Orleans never lost its identity as an indigenous space even if indigenous people have changed, and even as indigenous spaces became American spaces to the extent that they have become, and are able to become, American spaces.

New Orleans has been an American city for twice as long as it had been a French and Spanish city. Nevertheless, my grandparents generation was the first to truly immerse themselves in an American identity. They were the first generation in my family to speak English natively (most of them, anyway). I knew my great-grandmother: she was Creole, not American. There are very few Creoles left in New Orleans who speak Creole (i.e. Kouri-Vini) natively and most who do were raised in the surrounding countryside in places like Edgard, and Vacherie, and Lafayette, and New Iberia.

Thirteen years after New Orleans experienced its most dire hours, large swaths of the city remain uninhabited, and uninhabitable. Air-BnB has priced out modest tenants from the rental market and many who fled the city as refugees after Hurricane Katrina, and the disastrous levee failure that followed the storm, could not come back to New Orleans even if they wanted to.

In the last few years, boil water warnings and the threat of brain-eating amoebas have become normalized in New Orleans. The city’s public education system is among the worst in the nation. The city’s economy still reels from deindustrialization, suburbanization and white flight. Editorials in the New York Times proclaim Louisiana a failed state, and New Orleans is the largest metropolitan area of that failed state.

Louisiana had the highest per-capita murder rate in the US for 28 years until 2016. New Orleans was, and is still, the most murderous city in Louisiana. In 2017, New Orleans experienced a decrease in homicides, though there were still 157 people murdered in the city that year. The longest period of peace during 2017 was a five day stretch in late August when no one was killed. The youngest victim of 2017 was barely a month old.

To be certain, the cultural impact of New Orleans will echo throughout eternity. Our music is eternal. Our dance is eternal. Our drama, our art, is eternal. Our city’s characters, our personalities, are eternal. Our soul is eternal; our city is not.

Our land is disappearing into the gulf. As global climate change ravages our coastlines, and punishes us with more, and more severe, tempests, we can anticipate the fact of our end even if the specific circumstances of that end remain beyond our sight. After 300 years, New Orleans’ best days have past; rising ocean levels promise that there will be no more New Orleans 300 years from now. If there was ever a way for us to avoid this fate, it is almost certainly too late, now. We are Atlantis. We are Numenor.

In years to come, should people look back to reflect on the meaning of it all, all I have to offer by way of explanation is this: it certainly was fun while it lasted.

–Darryl Barthé