E-mail a friendDan Baum
airdate March 16, 2009
Dan Baum has written numerous articles for various national magazines and been a staff writer and a reporter for several newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He's also the author of Citizen Coors and Smoke and Mirrors, a history of the war on drugs. The Boulder, Colorado-based journalist moved to New Orleans to write about the city's response to Hurricane Katrina for The New Yorker. His research resulted in his latest book, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans.
Nine Lives author explains how the people of Louisiana live in the moment. (1:20)
Full interview. (9:31)
Dan Baum
Tavis: Dan Baum was a former staff writer for "The New Yorker" magazine and a former reporter for a number of news outlets, including "The Wall Street Journal." His much-acclaimed new book is called "Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans." He joins us tonight from Boulder. Dan Baum - oh, my God. Dan, nice outfit.
Dan Baum: Thank you.
Tavis: Nice to have you on. How are you, sir?
Baum: I am well, thank you.
Tavis: That outfit works in New Orleans. What do they say about you walking down the streets of Boulder?
Baum: Oh, this works in Boulder, too. (Laughter) This works. I'm a very good-looking man, so it works.
Tavis: I'm glad to have - (laughs) glad to have you on, Dan.
Baum: Thank you.
Tavis: Before I get into these nine lives, you went down to New Orleans to cover this story for "The New Yorker." You got to meet everyday people and you realized you were really covering the wrong story, you wanted to go at this a different way.
And so hence we see, obviously some years later now, the book "Nine Lives." Before I get into some of these nine lives - we won't give the whole text away - but before I get into some of these lives, tell me what you found that makes New Orleaneans so uniquely different than anybody else on the planet.
Baum: I think if I had to pick one thing I would say they've got the essential American equation exactly reversed. Most of us, even those of us who don't have much money, most of us have more money than time, whereas in New Orleans, people have more time than money, and that's how they organize their lives. So they see their friends all the time, they got time to sit on the porch; they got time to have a drink with their friends, boil crawfish.
Life is built around the stuff that has meaning, the time with your friends and your family, not around your job and getting things done. So they're not racing around trying to achieve stuff the way we are, to the extent that we are. They're more about living in the moment and enjoying every day as it comes, and that's what makes life there so pleasant and makes it so hard to leave.
Tavis: For one who went down to cover a story and got a chance to be exposed to this, shall we say, alternative way of living in America, what did you make of that?
Baum: Well, when I was covering the crisis - and I got there two days after the levees broke, I was in all of that, and then I was there for that year after while they were trying to recover, and I got very frustrated because I came to realize that big as it was, Hurricane Katrina is not the most interesting thing about New Orleans.
These people are so extraordinary, and all these subcultures of New Orleans - the Mardi Gras Indians and the Mardi Gras krewes and the second-line clubs that don't exist anywhere else, that's what I wanted to write about. And it was very frustrating because by the time I got finished writing all my column inches about the mayor this and the National Guard that and the governor this and the commission that, I didn't have room left in the magazine to write about the stuff that really interested me. That's why we wanted to do the book.
Tavis: Let me start, though, by saying it's fair to say that this is not a book about Katrina.
Baum: Thank you, sir. I did not want to write a book about Katrina, and it is not a book about Katrina.
Tavis: Let's talk, then -
Baum: It starts in 1965.
Tavis: Before I get into some of these characters, tell me why the book starts in 1965.
Baum: Well, it starts right after Hurricane Betsy, which is the last time the city flooded, or a big portion of the city flooded. And what I want to say with that is it's not like they've talked about nothing but Hurricane Betsy for the last 45 years. Hurricane Betsy was painful, the recovery was difficult, people died, it was extraordinary, but the city went on.
And what I'm trying to say by beginning my book there is the city's going to go on after Katrina as well.
Tavis: What do you think we learned, what do we take from a book written about a city and its people that allows us to connect to the humanity in these people? Generally speaking, if you do a movie, if you're telling a story, if you can get folk to connect to the humanity of the characters, then people can better and more properly situate themselves in the story.
Talk to me about why it was important for you to get us to connect to the humanity of some of these lives that we're about to talk about. Does that make sense?
Baum: Yeah, it does. Well, mostly I want to do it because as a writer you want your readers to be emotionally invested in the people you're writing about. I want people to read this book for the same reason they read "The Kite Runner" or "The Bridges of Madison County" or "The Right Stuff," to use a nonfiction example, because they care - because they care about these people, they want to see how they come out.
So that's kind of a selfish reason why I'm invested in their humanity. But also, as I say, I think what was happening in late 2006 when I started this book was there was a little bit of a backlash happening against New Orleans. There had been this virgin or the whore narrative about New Orleans - either it's this delicate, innocent victim of Bush administration uncaring, which was true, or it's this den of inequity, and oh, those people down there, they don't know how to use the money, and why should we rebuild this city?
There was a little bit of a backlash starting and I wanted to show, look, this is a city not only of real people but extraordinary people, with a culture that is manifestly worth saving.
Tavis: Let's talk about, briefly here, some of these real and extraordinary people - again, nine lives. We're not going to cover all of them but I've picked out three or four that I hope you'll be happy to talk about. In no particular order, Wilbert Rawlins.
Baum: Oh, Wilbert Rawlins. We talk a lot about the lack of fathers in the Black community. Well, Wilbert Rawlins is the most thoroughly fathered Black man in the history of the United States. He had a giant of a dad. Physical giant - moved coffee sacks around on the New Orleans waterfront for years; also a moral giant. He was Irma Thomas' drummer, for many years he was a jazz musician, but just a moral giant of a man.
And he's dead now, but Wilbert, who is a high school band director in a very stressed high school - it's a high school that I must say is doing very well since Katrina - Wilbert is trying to be a dad to a whole city of children with no dads, and he's trying to stuff as many kids as he can into his band because he is convinced band can save kids. I tear up thinking about Wilbert. Wilbert is an amazing man.
Tavis: Belinda Carr.
Baum: Belinda's an interesting case. She is a Black woman born in the Lower Ninth Ward, and I often say that Belinda's soul was on its way to a woman in Minneapolis when it got lost and diverted to New Orleans, because Belinda in many ways doesn't play this whole New Orleans thing.
She is very straight-ahead, very much about getting ahead, doesn't like spicy food, doesn't like crawfish, very motivated and very goal-oriented in a non-New Orleans way, but also very much of that city. So, she kind of serves as a Greek chorus on the city. She's of it and not of it, and she's a very good observer of that culture.
Tavis: How do you do that in a place like New Orleans, where culture is everything?
Baum: Culture is everything. I often tell people I live in Boulder, Colorado and I'm a writer, and you live here and you're a lawyer or a doctor or a bond trader, and you live in a place and you do what you do. In New Orleans, it seems like living in New Orleans is what people do, and their jobs is really just kind of what they do to keep bread on the table and pay the rent. But living in New Orleans is kind of your full-time occupation.
Tavis: Frank Minyard.
Baum: Frank Minyard may be the longest-serving elected official in the history of Louisiana. He has been parish coroner there since the '70s. And he was a very wealthy man, very wealthy doctor who had a depressive crisis in 1967 and decided he really needed to devote his life to serving the poor of New Orleans. And it is through - he's an extraordinary guy.
He's a musician, he's kind of a wild man, was a womanizer, drank a lot, got him - he's made some mistakes but he's just such a great public servant of New Orleans. And what we see through Frank is the emergency morgue after Katrina that FEMA set up, and something quite scandalous happens there regarding the dead of New Orleans, and Frank is our conduit to that.
Tavis: There are nine lives told in this story - the story of nine lives shared in the text. I've picked four. The last of the four, Timothy Bruneau.
Baum: Tim Bruneau is a - was a New Orleans police officer, a White guy from Texas, kind of a conservative Republican, a little bit of a hardass, and the day of the crisis he picks up a dead woman off the street and drives her around in his car all day because there's no place to take her.
The morgue is shut down, the hospitals are shut down, and he ends up having to put her back on the street, which for a police officer is just unbearably torturous. And this woman, this poor Black woman that he picked up, he kind of has this internal dialogue with her all day while she's riding around in his back seat, and she teaches him a lot about what it means to be poor and Black, and why she is a victim, really, not perpetrator.
And it changes him tremendously. He's no longer a police officer.
Tavis: Did being exposed, Dan, to all this love in any way change Dan Baum?
Baum: Well, life now is all about getting back to New Orleans, so it's changed me in that way.
Tavis: You mean getting back permanently or getting back to visit as often as you can?
Baum: Oh, we think about going back permanently.
Tavis: Wow.
Baum: Yeah. Once it gets in you, it's hard to get it out.
Tavis: Well, you got your wardrobe ready.
Baum: Yes, that I do.
Tavis: And I'm glad to have you on.
Baum: Thank you so much.
Tavis: The new book from Dan Baum is called "Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans." By the way, great cover on the book, Dan - I love the cover.
Baum: Thank you. That's a photographer named Frank Relle. It's worth going to his website - he does amazing work.
Tavis: He did a great job. Thanks a lot, Dan, congratulations.
Baum: Thank you.
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