Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  ———, Too White to Be Black, Too Black to Be White: The New Orleans Creole

  O’Halloran, Colleen, and Jason Da Silva, From the Mouthpiece on Back Testimony of a Big Chief

  Snedeker, Rebecca, By Invitation Only

  NINE LIVES

  DAN BAUM

  A Reader’s Guide

  A CONVERSATION WITH DAN BAUM

  Question: Long before the storm, New Orleans’s infrastructure was decrepit; the schools were a shambles; poverty, corruption, and violence were rampant. But few who had tasted life there willingly gave it up. Right before Katrina, a Gallup poll found more than half of New Orleanians “extremely satisfied” with their lives, despite the city’s wretched state, a higher percentage than in any other city surveyed. What is it about New Orleans and its inhabitants that make them reluctant to change, and do you think they will be able to hold on to their way of life?

  Dan Baum: Life in New Orleans is all about making the present—this moment, right now—as pleasant as possible. So New Orleanians, by and large, aren’t tortured by the frenzy to achieve, acquire, and manage the unmanageable future. Their days are built around the things that other Americans have found pushed out of their lives by incessant work: art, music, elaborate cooking, and—most of all—plenty of relaxed time with family and friends. Their jobs are really just the things they do to earn a little money; they’re not the organizing principle of life. While this isn’t a worldview particularly conducive to getting things done, getting things done isn’t the most important thing in New Orleans. Living life is. Once you’ve tasted that, and especially if it’s how you grew up, life everywhere else feels thin indeed.

  Q: When the New Orleans levees collapsed after Hurricane Katrina, you were sent by The New Yorker to cover the disaster. What was it about New Orleans while you were there that made you want to move beyond the devastation from the storm and capture the actual essence of the city?

  DB: Covering a disaster like Katrina can give a reporter tunnel vision. It’s easy to get so caught up in the news—this commission, that commission, the governor this, FEMA that—that one’s eye can become clouded to what’s really interesting. A few months into covering Katrina and the recovery, I began to say to myself, “Wait a minute; there’s something a lot more interesting here than Hurricane Katrina.” New Orleans is so weird—so wildly outside the American mainstream, so thoroughly resistant to the go-go techno-capitalism that consumes American life elsewhere—that I realized it was the city itself, not the disaster that had befallen it, that I really wanted to write about.

  Q: Nine Lives is a wonderful kaleidoscope of characters. How did you get nine total strangers to so thoroughly unwrap their lives for you? Do you continue to keep in touch with them?

  DB: New Orleans makes it easy. It is a storytelling culture. And nothing is ever none of your business. It’s not unusual at all to have a perfect stranger walk up and say, “Hey, babe. I love them shoes. My auntee had shoes like that and she had this little dog …” and before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you have a new best friend. I also benefited, I’m sure, from a certain amount of post-Katrina trauma. I think everybody in the city was thinking it was a good time to get one’s life story told while you had the chance. Essentially, I asked this of nine perfect strangers: “I’d like to take up hours and hours of your time over the next five months with long, extremely intimate and sometimes painful interviews. Then I’d like to write all of that up into a book for the whole world to read. And you get nothing.” The amazing thing is that all nine agreed. I’d like to think that what they got out of it was a better understanding of their own lives. These were long and deep conversations—more like shrink appointments than traditional journalistic interviews. They were learning about themselves even as I was learning about them.

  Q: After spending hours interviewing your cast of characters, what is the one thing that truly tied them all together? How has their way of thinking affected your own life?

  DB: Although they are in many ways as different from one another as can be, what these nine share is that their lives could have been lived nowhere but New Orleans. Their participation in uniquely New Orleans traditions—Mardi Gras, the Indians, second lines—mark them as people of this particular place, as does the intensity of their personal relationships. All of them—rich and poor and in between, black and white and in between, male and female and in between—seem to live at a higher level of drama than, say, people in Indianapolis or St. Louis.

  Q: Among your characters, neither their race nor their gender seem to play out the way they would elsewhere in the United States. What were the surprises there for you? Did you choose your characters specifically to explore the complexities of race and gender in New Orleans?

  DB: Yes. Like the rest of America everything is viewed through a racial lens in New Orleans. But it refracts differently than it does elsewhere. New Orleans was settled first by the French and Spanish, who deliberately intermarried with their slaves to create a mixed-race buffer class they thought might protect them from slave rebellion. So few people in New Orleans are entirely one thing or the other; Huey Long used to say he could buy every white person in New Orleans lunch for a nickel. That isn’t to say New Orleans isn’t filled with people who call themselves white or black. But everybody knows how complicated race is, and that complication overlays everything and makes social interaction endlessly fascinating. Just when I thought I was starting to figure it out, something would snap me back to reality: Nobody has it figured out.

  Q: To the uninitiated, New Orleans can seem like a cauldron of vice and indolence. Why should the rest of America care so much about it? What can the rest of America learn from it?

  DB: New Orleans is the one corner of America where efficiency and maximization of profit are not the civic religion. It’s the capital of the resistance to the voracious brand of American capitalism that has the rest of us working so hard for so little. New Orleans simply doesn’t participate in all that, and I, for one, am grateful that there’s one corner of America not entirely ruled by the dollar.

  Q: What’s the best thing people can do to help New Orleans?

  DB: Visit. Stay in a nice hotel, walk around, eat the best meals of your life. Tip heavily. Put a twenty-dollar bill in the cup of every street musician whose playing you enjoy. Talk to everybody. Then go home and tell your friends what a great time you had. That’s pretty light work, and it’s important. Most of all, New Orleans needs friends.

  Q: How did the nine respond to seeing their lives in print? Are you still in touch?

  DB: It’s always hard to see oneself written about. It happened to me once; a friend wrote a memoir with a chapter about me in it, and though it was very complimentary—made me out to be a damned hero—it still made me squirm. I don’t talk like that, I said. I don’t dress like that. Well, it turns out I do talk like that and dress like that. We never see ourselves as others see us, and I’m sure the nine people profiled in Nine Lives saw something different in my portrayal of them than they see in themselves. A couple had a quibble or two; but nobody has broken off our friendship. Several were genuinely thrilled, and having their life story told has yielded tangible benefits. For a long time after the book was published I couldn’t find Anthony Wells; he’d vanished. But one day in June 2009 he called out of the blue. He’s fine. He sounded great. And I was able, finally, to send him a copy of the book.

  Q: Nine Lives does not offer a sanitized view of New Orleans, and many of the stories bring up controversial issues in New Orleans society. How did the city as a whole respond to the stories and the characterization of their hometown?

  DB: I’ve been very lucky; I haven’t had a stinker of a review yet, and the New Orleans papers—the daily Times-Picayune and the weekly Gambit—were particularly kind. More than two hundred people showed up for the book’s launch party, and I get e-mails almost every day from people in the city who tell me I “got it,” thank me for it. That’s been the most gratifying a
spect of this whole experience. Especially after Katrina, New Orleanians were touchy about how their city was portrayed. Outsiders like me were viewed with a particularly discerning eye.

  Q: Have you ever tried your hand at fiction? Would you like to in the future?

  DB: Fiction is the Holy Grail. I have three novels underway in my computer. The problem is, one has to finish a novel before it can be sold, and I can never assemble enough time to finish a novel. Nonfiction can be sold on the basis of a proposal, so that’s what I need to write to pay the mortgage.

  Q: What sort of book would you like to write next? Do you think this narrative structure is something you might like to duplicate?

  DB: As I write this, I have two proposals circulating for nonfiction books about odd little interludes in American history. One of them, I think, is perfectly suited to the Nine Lives treatment—that is, to tell the story entirely through the eyes of a small cast of disparate characters. I like going deep into people’s minds and hearts, and I love to interview.

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. In Nine Lives, Dan Baum used a complex, novelistic approach to telling the recent history of New Orleans and her residents. Was this device effective in conveying the rich cacophony of the city? How did the reading experience differ from a novel?

  2. Since its publication, Nine Lives has been generally embraced by the people of New Orleans—the New Orleans Times-Picayune called it “One of the most moving—and riveting—books ever written about the rich and complicated life we live here.” How do you think his status as an outsider helped or hurt Baum in his rendering of this complex city?

  3. Eight out of the nine stories are told in the close third-person, while one, Anthony Wells’s, is in the first person. Why did the author choose to tell Anthony’s story using a different narrative point-of-view? Was it effective?

  4. At some point most of the nine find themselves with ample rational reasons to pack up and leave New Orleans, and yet they all ultimately decide to stay. What is it about the city that held each of them in its thrall?

  5. In the introduction, Baum entreats his readers to “stop thinking of New Orleans as the worst-organized city in the United States” and to “start thinking of it as the best-organized city in the Caribbean.” Do you agree with his assertion? If so, what is it about New Orleans that enables it to resist the trend of other American cities toward rigid structure and uniformity?

  6. The kaleidoscopic effect of seeing New Orleans through nine perspectives is one of the keys to this book; the Los Angeles Times said, “Dan Baum’s extraordinary book … resembles a vast Victorian novel in its many-sided evocation of an entire world.” Would a book about nine people in some other American city—St. Louis, or New York, for example—be as interesting?

  7. Why do you think these nine people were willing to share their lives in such intimate detail with a reporter? What would it take for you to decide to do the same?

  8. Dan Baum has said that his goal in writing Nine Lives was to craft each of the stories in such a compelling way, that by the time Hurricane Katrina shows up, the reader will have forgotten that it’s coming. Do you think he succeeded? Would you have enjoyed the stories as thoroughly without the guaranteed crescendo of the storm?

  9. Is it possible that the constantly imperiled geographical location of New Orleans affects the sort of culture that arises and is embraced there? How does the geography of your home town affect your local culture and how you and your neighbors live their lives?

  10. Why do you think these nine people were chosen from the countless people Baum encountered in post-Katrina New Orleans? Do you think they’re a fair representation of the city’s population? If not, what parts of the city seem unrepresented?

  11. Dan Baum states that he had two principles in mind while writing Nine Lives: “No villains, and all happy endings.” Do you think he was successful in sticking to this resolution?

  12. While the stories in Nine Lives certainly highlight many of the drawbacks and complications of life in New Orleans, do you think it ultimately casts a positive light on the city? Did it make you want to visit—or even move there?

  DAN BAUM is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, and has written for numerous other magazines and newspapers. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

  2010 Spiegel & Grau Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2009 by Dan Baum

  Reading group guide copyright © 2010 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2009.

  “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Baum, Dan.

  Nine lives : death and life in New Orleans / Dan Baum.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-52960-0

  1. New Orleans (La.)—Biography. 2. New Orleans (La.)—Social conditions—Anecdotes. 3. New Orleans (La.)—Social life and customs—Anecdotes. 4. City and town life—Louisiana—New Orleans—Anecdotes. 5. Interviews—Louisiana—New Orleans. I. Title.

  F379.N553A212 2009

  976.3′350640922—dc22

  [B]

  2008031483

  www.spiegelandgrau.com

  v3.0