Letters From New Orleans: An Interview with Rob Walker
By James Norton

Fiction or non-fiction, the vast majority of books are ultimately about people interacting with people. Books about people interacting with places are harder to find, but are often far more interesting.

"Letters From New Orleans," by New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker, is a love letter to Crescent City, and it stands within the most robust tradition of geography-centered writing. It's a complicated tribute. In its willingness to pursue topics as far-flung as musicology, urban decay and the cultural history of Carnival season, it recalls writers such as V.S. Naipaul, who approach cities and countries with a hungry interest in demolishing false expectations.

	A POST-KATRINA UPDATE After Katrina's landfall in late August, we followed up with Rob Walker. "As someone who loves New Orleans more than any other city, I beg everyone to understand that the people there need your help now, and will need it for a while to come," he said, via e-mail. "What is unfolding there now is the realization of the worst fears of anyone who knows the place. It is a catastrophe; it is tragic." Please contact the Red Cross and make a donation by clicking here.

Walker balks at the suggestion that "Letters From New Orleans" might qualify as travel literature. "Somebody else asked me this and I was caught totally flat-footed," he says. "I wasn't thinking of it as travel writing as all."

Walker, who moved from New York to New Orleans with his girlfriend in late 1999, says his stay in the city was open-ended.

"I wasn't a traveler in New Orleans, I was a resident of New Orleans, I had moved there," he says. "It wasn't like we moved there and were like: 'Well, here's a three-year plan, and I'll write a book, and whatever.' It was more like we were changing our lives and were going to do something different, and we didn't know how it would turn out."

While living in New Orleans (he moved back to the New York area in 2003), Walker started using e-mail and his website to distribute — in serial form — a journal of his time in the city. Walker tapped the intrigue and humor of living in one of America's weirdest cities with his dispatches, tempering them with the sharp and suspicious eye of a professional journalist.

"'Masks' is a theme that comes up in various ways," he says. "You can sort of say the whole book is about masks in the sense that everything is trying to get beyond the surface of how things appear."

In an essay called "Golden Arrow," Walker explores the "gangs" of African-American Carnival "Indians," whose elaborate costumes and intricate pecking order help define the city's character. The essay is told in reverse chronological order; it starts at 3 p.m. as a gang called the Golden Arrows parades through the streets. He then moves backward in time to when the gang musters and prepares to march.

Big Chief Peppy stands with his arms spread wide. He is surrounded by admirers. Almost everyone here seems to have a camera, a video recorder, or both. Old footage of Indians is rare, but there must be enough contemporary documentation to fill a museum. The circle around Peppy, shaking a pair of tambourines, tightens like paparazzi. His orange-feathered spyboy (the lookout, when the Indians meander through neighborhoods) begins to bellow: "Big chief! Waaaay Uptown! Biiig Chief! Waaaaaaaay Uptown!"

They begin their chanting song, "Oohm-ba-day!" alternated with phrases tossed out by Peppy in a pleasantly commanding voice: "Sing it with me! (Oohm-ba-day!) Mm, Golden Arrows! (Oohm-ba-day!)" And so on. I suppose he's improvising. I try to note the phrases I can catch — "I've got religion / On my mind." "This little baby / Look so pretty." "I run through the river / I don't get wet / I walked through hell / Didn't break a sweat."

The essay then moves backward again, to when Chief Peppy begins his transformation from ordinary guy to city celebrity. Walker's attention focuses on the act of putting on the mask.

"There's a person behind that costume and mask who's often a cab driver, or a factory worker, or just some regular workaday person," he says. "I got really interested in the idea of: 'Who's the real person? Is the real person that day when he's the center of attention, is that the real him? Or is it the day when he's anonymously driving a cab through New Orleans, is that the real him?'"

The gap between perception and the "true" nature of something is a notion that Walker carries over into his analysis of the city at large. Because tourism makes up such a large part of its economy, the image of New Orleans is heavily colored by the preconceptions of travelers.

"The identity of New Orleans is kind of defined by people who are coming in with their minds made up in advance as to what they're going to find, or what they want to find," says Walker. "And yet, it ain't Disneyland. It's not set up to fulfill fantasies, it's a real place."

Particularly glaring, he suggests, is the local contrast between luxury and poverty.

"The gap between the college students partying on Bourbon Street and the reality of some of the poverty and so forth in New Orleans is particularly extreme," he says. "Some of what I'm saying might be true of certain Caribbean destinations like Jamaica, or whatever — I don't know enough about it. But I think among United States cities, that gap is unique in New Orleans."

"Letters From New Orleans" has a way of prying up manhole covers and looking at the city's guts. In one particularly unusual chapter, Walker goes in search of a song long associated with the city, "St. James Infirmary." These are the lyrics that catch and hold his attention:

I went down to St. James Infirmary
Saw my baby there.
She was stretched out on a long white table, so sweet,
so cold, so bare.

Let her go, let her go, God bless her.
Wherever she may be,
She can search this whole wide world over,
She ain't never gonna find another man like me.

So I'd heard the lyrics before, but now I was thinking about them. Sad song about a man going to see the corpse of his lover... And will she go to heaven or will she go to hell... And whatever the answer, she "ain't never gonna find another man like me." Wow. That's something. That's beautiful and wrong at the same time.

Walker's quest to unravel the story behind the song takes him through the song's official author (J. Primrose), the real man behind the Primrose pseudonym, the "Unfortunate Rake" ballad of Ireland (the song's direct ancestor), the Western version ("The Cowboy's Lament"), a "negro version" from Texas called "St. James Hospital," echoes of the song within Bob Dylan's music and so forth.

And it's a tribute to his doggedness — or insatiable curiosity — that he puts a call out in the book for more information on the story behind the song.

"A number of strands have been suggested to me by readers of the book who have recommended that I look into certain connections to the song in the Caribbean, connections to itinerant musician traditions in the United States and so forth," says Walker. "I have some intriguing things that I hope to find the time to look into more later."

Walker dives into society (high, low and undefinable) with a similar gusto, providing anthropological analysis of the Carnival ball circuit and the teeming social hub that is Galatoire's for lunch on a Friday. But he also writes about the almost total collapse and abandonment of the housing projects on the defunct Desire streetcar line, and snaps photos of Martin Luther King Boulevard.

The latter project is something he hopes to take to the Web as a kind of collaborative effort to document MLK streets in cities across the United States.

"For years, I've been interested in this," he says. "When I first started to travel to other cities, I would notice that there's often a Martin Luther King boulevard. You would also often realize that it was maybe not the most prestigious real estate in town... Some of them run through places that were devastated by riots in the '60s, and there was something sort of interesting to me about that."

Walker's interest in MLK streets continued into his time in New Orleans. "I started taking pictures of the Martin Luther King Boulevard in New Orleans," he says. "Some of those pictures are in the book. I've always had this idea that I would love to do something where you'd sort of throw it open and — particularly for journalism students — it might be an interesting project for people in different places to take pictures or whatever of the Martin Luther Kings wherever they are." Walker recently set up a website for the MLK pictures.

Part of the book's appeal is its many media and modes of expression. The writing doesn't stay within well-defined categories, either. It's a perfect fit for New Orleans; the city of masks can't be easily explained, and Walker willingly jumps the fences that isolate disparate topics and styles.

And from legendary locals such as Ernie K-Doe, to Carnival culture, to tourist traps such as The Gennifer Flowers Kelsto Club, "Letters From New Orleans" catalogues New Orleans culture without turning it into something cute or delicate.

The depth of the city's culture, Walker says, gives it strength. "People [in New Orleans] have a different tempo, and they're proud of it. The people who end up living there live there because of it in many cases. And I see it as being a fairly durable culture. The New Orleans culture isn't something that was invented for the benefit of tourists. I think it will remain a unique place.

"Until it's destroyed by a hurricane."

E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.