Sublette’s newest book may be a bit of a letdown foranyone expecting more of the same. TheYear Before theFlood: A Story of New Orleans (LawrenceHill Books) is a far more personal account. Ostensibly a chronicle of a yearspent in the city of his dreams on a fellowship at Tulane, The Year Before the Flood is also a digressive story of his lifeand troubles, a fist-pounding diatribe against an Americamired in Republicanism, and a sometimes loving, sometimes recriminatoryclose-up of the Crescent City.
Much of what he recorded as a resident of thecrime-ridden district called the Irish Channel won’t endear him to mindlessboosters pimping a Big Easy image of drunken, bead-bedecked frat boys at MardiGras. In Sublette’s experience the authorities are corrupt, the police usuallyunhelpful and often belligerent, even breaking up a Mardi Gras Indian parade onSt. Joseph’sDay.
The racial divide in New Orleans is severe, but criminals areequal-opportunity offenders. The crumbling streets are unsafe after dark,especially where the crowds thin out. People are robbed at gunpoint on theirdoorsteps and break-ins end in murder. “New Orleanswas the number-one city for murder per capita,” he writes, with a rate 7.3times higher than New York City and worse than Colombia, acountry wracked by narco-civil war. Sublette dislikes New Orleans’ legendary artery-cloggingcuisine, but living in the city only increased his love for its music. Even thelocal rappers, when their rhythms are scrutinized, carry the DNA of Jelly RollMorton and Buddy Bolden in their low-riding genes.
As the book’s title suggests, Sublette lived in New Orleans the yearbefore Katrina, but experienced Hurricane Ivan, for which there was noevacuation plan and little will to evacuate in a population that feared lootingmore than flooding. The catastrophe that overtook New Orleans when Katrina struck should havebeen no surprise. Louisiana’s governor and New Orleans’ mayor were bunglers to Sublette, but hethought the real criminals lived in Washington, D.C. He hurls a bristling bill ofparticulars at the Bush administration, whose worship of the free market andaversion to public good encouraged oil companies to continue chipping away atthe wetlands surrounding New Orleans,which had for centuries absorbed some of the shock of ocean storms. The onlysatisfaction was karmic: The sight of the president gazing dimly from Air ForceOne at the flooded city below finally turned America against him.
But too much of TheYear Before the Flood is devoted to an angry polemic on the state of theworld and the author’s own vulnerable position as an artist without healthinsurance or economic security. Many of us will sympathize with him and relateto his concerns, yet his key points have been made more eloquently andpersuasively in any given column by Paul Krugman or any number of otherwriters. Sublette is at his best when he turns attention to the rich andcomplicated culture of New Orleans, discoveringan early chronicler who described how the slaves “rock the city with theirCongo-dances,” and that the garb of the Ku Klux Klan bears relation to thecostumed “krewes” of New Orleans’parades.
