About

When we at NOLAFugees.com released Year Zero, the first collection of writing from our website devoted to covering life in post-Katrina New Orleans, we ended with a story about the grisly murder-suicide involving French Quarter service industry workers Addie Hall and Zachary Bowen. By then, the city’s rate of murder had returned to nearly its pre-Katrina levels, to say nothing of the rash of armed robberies of individuals and businesses. It seemed appropriate to conclude a story of “recovery” on such a bitterly ironic note.

A reader of Year Zero might conclude that the books’ conclusion portends coming doom, a sense that conditions in New Orleans stood to get appreciably worse.

And that they did.

Year Zero sought to tell a decidedly post-Katrina story. Soul Is Bulletproof, we think you’ll discover, moves beyond the mere hurricane-related problems to focus on the anguish of a city seeking to change but burdened by issues that have existed in New Orleans for nearly all its history.
The most prominent theme of this book, as it must be, is murder. Soul Is Bulletproof opens at the beginning of 2007 in the wake of two high-profile murders that sparked thousands of citizens to march on City Hall. Anyone who was there that day at the march had a right to think that New Orleans had, after a generation of epic violence, hit its rock bottom and was finally on its way to better things. Cynics might have condemned the march as a hollow gesture that would soon be ignored by city officials and forgotten by the city’s residents. Judging from the way the rest of 2007 played out (209 murders recorded in a city of less than 300,000 residents), the cynics would have been correct.

Another prominent theme in Soul Is Bulletproof is race. The shifting demographics of New Orleans has changed the political calculus, and one need only tune into City Council meetings on public access television to understand that while the ground we stand on seems steady (albeit below sea level), there are tectonic shifts taking place below the surface, and the question of whose shit is going to shake off the mantle and shatter on the floor is still unanswered. The concerns immediately following Katrina about a gentrification plan that seeks to permanently displace the city’s underclass have not gone away. Indeed, every claim of progress in the city is countered by the notion that one person’s gain is another person’s loss.

The last major theme of this book is image. New Orleans long ago put itself in the position where its survival is dependent on its ability to sell itself to outsiders. It is assumed that we all stand to gain from pushing a shiny image of the city on the rest of the world. It is assumed that we need only attract the best and brightest from other parts of the country to come and be a part of what we will soon label a Renaissance period for the city.  It is also assumed that New Orleans will prosper when it “reinvents” itself, as the name of a potential major riverfront development project promises. In the face of these assumptions, we have to ask a question that pops up throughout Soul Is Bulletproof. It is a question that was likely asked by clusters of skeptical citizens in 1884 when New Orleans pinned its hopes on the money-losing World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition. It is a question that was likely asked a century later, when New Orleans bet heavy on the 1984 World’s Fair.

The question is, Qui Bono? Who benefits?

This is not a question with a simple answer, and Soul Is Bulletproof will not provide you with one. We can only say with certainty that what we write is not for anyone’s economic benefit. Our portrait of the city that will emerge from these pages will never be used in a tourism brochure. Our writers come with varying points-of-view, and as a result there is no clearly defined ideology. You should feel, reading this book, as if you’re getting mixed messages.
What our writers provide, however, is a clear-eyed assessment of a city in graceless transition, and whatever New Orleans becomes at the end of that transition, Soul Is Bulletproof will prove to be an instructive document of how we got there.

A Note on Our Style:
Soul is Bulletproof, like all of the writing that comes from NOLAFugees.com, mixes first-person writing and straightforward journalism with satirical reporting. Stories without bylines are made up news items reflecting current events. Some of these items are not for the feint-hearted, but it has always been our position that our satirical tone has to be equal to the horrors to which we seek to bring your attention.