by Ned Sublette(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2008)
Hardcover, 360 Pages, Nonfiction
“There is more gold to be gotten from men than from rivers.” —Bertolt Brecht, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
“We honor our crooks in Louisiana” —National Park Service, Jean Lafitte Historical Park and Preserve
From the Cover: New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires—France, Spain, and England—and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural heritage. The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans’ first century—a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel atrocities of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana’s statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp—especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, “rock the city.” The book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette’s previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.
My Review: Like a lot of the books that I have reviewed lately, this was a last-minute pick-up off of the NEW BOOKS display at my local library. I was intrigued by the title and since I have always loved the mystique of New Orleans (Naw’lens?), I checked it out and started reading.
I am divided over how I feel about Sublette’s book. On the one hand, this is a wonderful look at one of America’s most important cities and all the history and heritage and character that was lost there in August and September 2005 due to the incompetence of the federal government. On the other hand, The World That Made New Orleans seems to lack focus and often rambles off on subjects that are only tangentially connected to the history of New Orleans. This makes New Orleans a difficult book to read and follow.
The history of New Orleans or, at least, the history that Sublette presents (as he is mostly interested in the African and music histories of the city), is absolutely fascinating. One can hardly wonder that such a city existed or can ever exist again in America. Changing hands between world powers on a number of occasions as well as revolutionizing New World attitudes towards slaves and Africans, New Orleans is a city that has shaped the history of this nation, whether we realize it or not. From its very beginnings, New Orleans was a city that was famous for what it has always been famous for: parties, crime, music and debauchery. It was in fact, originally the “home of pirates, drunks, and whores” (to quote The Simpsons), since the French used the Louisiana Territory as a sort of Australia for French undesirables through the forced migration of criminals and prostitutes.
Music was an integral part of slave life in Louisiana and New Orleans (where African slaves, under the French and then the Spanish, actually had a connection to their past, unlike slaves under Anglo-American mastery) and, since there were more slaves and free people of color in New Orleans than whites (it was, until 2005, the most-integrated and racial diverse city in America), their music became the rhythm of the city. The word “rock” as it relates to music was first used, according to Sublette, in New Orleans in 1819. As a musician himself, Sublette focuses mainly on the history of the music of New Orleans, and this makes for an interesting approach to the city’s history as he is able to trace the roots of jazz and rock through the musical movements and changes that were made as slaves were brought from Africa and made their way to New Orleans via Saint-Domingue, Cuba and the Chesapeake Bay states. Sublette brings this musical history full circle to the rebuilding and resurrection of the post-Katrina New Orleans by showing how music, specifically as employed by the Mardi Gras Indian tribes, is helping to recreate the soul of the city that was lost by the diaspora that occurred in the hurricane’s wake.
While all of this history, both musical and otherwise is fascinating, Sublette loses focus (or seems to) in a number of locations throughout the book. Most notably, during his discussion of the Louisiana Purchase, Sublette expends pages discussing Thomas Jefferson’s alleged affair with his slave Sally Hemings, only to conclude, and I paraphrase, “that while history is inconclusive on the matter of whether or not Jefferson actually slept with Hemings, it did happen between slaves and their masters frequently, and therefore Jefferson did much to contribute to the condition of the slaves in the Louisiana Territory after its purchase from France.” Now, I am no prude. I also like to think that I am not starry-eyed when it comes to American history, and that what you get in your eighth grade American history class is far from the whole picture … but … I am hard-pressed to see what, exactly, Jefferson’s sex life has to do with the history of New Orleans as Sublette presents it. It was unnecessary to bring it up and had no connection to the eventual point that Sublette was making about Jefferson’s connection to slavery and the Louisiana Territory. Were this an isolated occurrence I might be tempted to let it go, but it is not. Sublette takes a number of other seemingly pointless diversions throughout the book when trying to make his point, and while a handful have to do with music (which is forgivable, since Sublette is a musician and musical historian himself) they are distracting when they occur, and even more so when, like the Jefferson Tangent, they have nothing to do with the point at hand.
However, tangents aside, The World That Made New Orleans is a thoroughly engrossing and extremely important book. What Sublette has done is chronicled not just the history of New Orleans, but her soul. He has managed to capture what makes New Orleans tick, and that is all the more important in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. When New Orleans flooded and her citizens had to scatter, much of what made New Orleans as a city was lost, quite possibly forever. Sublette’s book stands as a testament to what made New Orleans New Orleans and ends with the note of hope that New Orleans does not have to be past tense.
This review can also be found at Bryan’s Book Blog
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