New Orleans Exposed clip featuring Brother Peter's single City of my birth

Rebirth Brass Band: Do Watcha Wanna (in the French Quarter)

DIVINE LADIES SOCIAL AID & PLEASURE CLUB 2009 ANNUAL PARADE

SISSY NOBBY ARCH IN YO BACK DANCE 2

NOBBY (VIDEO) GRAB SHAKEDOWN

BATTLE OF DJS AND DANCERS

RONALD SUKENICK AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

Sponsored by FC2

2009 Winner Announced

Fiction Collective Two is pleased to announce Sara Greenslit has won this year’s FC2 Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Contest for her novel As If a Bird Flew by Me. The prize includes publication by FC2 and $1000. Special mention goes to Kathleen M. McLaughlin for her manuscript Burn and to Erin M. Kautza for her manuscript Expiration Dates of Various Creatures. The judge was Susan Steinberg.

The 2010 Contest will be open from August 15 - November 1.

Eligibility

The Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Contest is open to any U.S. writer in English who has not previously published with Fiction Collective Two. Submissions may include a collection of short stories, one or more novellas, or a novel of any length. There is no length requirement. Works that have previously appeared in magazines or in anthologies may be included. Translations and previously published or self-published novels and collections are not eligible. To avoid conflict of interest, former or current students or close friends of the final judge for 2010, Kate Bernheimer, are ineligible to enter the contest. Employees and Board members of FC2 are not eligible to enter.

Judges

Finalists for the Prize will be chosen by the following members of the FC2 Board of Directors: Kate Bernheimer, R. M. Berry, Jeffrey DeShell, Noy Holland, Lance Olsen (Chair), and Brenda Mills.

The winning manuscript in 2010 will be chosen from the finalists by Kate Bernheimer, a member of the FC2 Board of Directors.

Selection criteria will be consistent with FC2's stated mission to publish "fiction considered by America's largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu," including works of "high quality and exceptional ambition whose styles, subject matter, or forms push the limits of American publishing and reshape our literary culture."

For contest updates and full information on FC2's mission, history, aesthetic commitments, authors, events, and books, please visit the website at: http://fc2.org.

Deadlines

Contest entries will be accepted beginning 15 August. All entries must be postmarked no later than 1 November. The winner will be announced in May 2011.

Prize

The Prize includes $1000 and publication by FC2, an imprint of the University of Alabama Press. In the unlikely event that no suitable manuscript is found among entries in a given year, FC2 reserves the right not to award a prize.

Manuscript Format

Please submit either TWO hardcopies of the manuscript, or ONE hardcopy and one Word file of the manuscript on a labeled CD.

The manuscript must be:

—anonymous. The author's name or address must not appear anywhere on the manuscript (the title page should contain the title only). Include a separate cover page with your name and contact information.

—typed on standard white paper, one side of the page only; paginated consecutively; bound with a spring clip or rubber bands. No paper clips, binding or staples, please.

Please include a self-addressed, stamped postcard for notification that manuscript has been received, and a self-addressed, stamped, regular business-sized envelope for contest results.

FC2 strongly advises that you send your manuscript first class.

FC2 cannot return manuscripts, so please retain a copy of your manuscript.

Submission of more than one manuscript is permissible if each manuscript is accompanied by a $25 reading fee. Once submitted, manuscripts cannot be altered; the winner will be given the opportunity to make changes before publication. Simultaneous submissions to other publishers are permitted, but FC2 must be notified immediately if manuscript is accepted elsewhere.

FC2 will consider all finalists for publication.

Submission Address

Full manuscripts, accompanied by a check made out to the American Book Review for the mandatory reading fee of $25, should be sent to:

Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize
University of Houston-Victoria
School of Arts and Sciences
3007 N. Ben Wilson
Victoria, TX 77901-5731

CLMP Contest Ethics Code

CLMP's community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to:

1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors.

2) provide clear and specific contest guidelines—defining conflict of interest for all parties involved.

3) make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically.

STUDENTS CAN WIN UP TO $10,000 IN THIS ESSAY CONTEST!

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 Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 11:05am

FREEDOM’S SISTERS ESSAY CONTEST (250-500 words)

 

“Who is your favorite Freedom Sister and Why?”

 

What are you doing to continue her legacy?

Freedom’s Sisters tells the stories of 20 outstanding African-American women who have fought for human rights from the 1800s to the present. “Meeting” each one of these women personally encourages students to explore the democratic process, to think about values, and to better understand cultural differences. The exhibition gives students the opportunity to discover and develop their own creative thinking, writing abilities and problem-solving skills. It reinforces the message that, like these 20 amazing women, everybody can be a hero. Freedom’s Sisters seeks to encourage and motivate the next generation to become leaders who will make a difference in their communities.

Who is your favorite Freedom Sister and why? What are you doing to continue her legacy? Let us know . . .

 

Eligible Participants:

4th – 8th grade students

 

Prizes:

1st place: $5,000 U. S. Savings Bond

2nd place: $2,500 U. S. Savings Bond

3rd place: $1,000 U. S. Savings Bond

 

1st, 2nd & 3rd runners-up: one (1) $500 U. S. Savings Bond each

 

CONTEST OPEN:

July 24, 2010 – August 30, 2010

 

Essays Should Be Mailed To:

 

Ford Motor Company

ATTN: Freedom’s Sisters Essay Contest – Atlanta

1 American Road – 211 WHQ, Dearborn, MI 48126

On a separate cover sheet please include: name, school, grade level, mailing address and telephone number.

 

Winners will be notified by September 29, 2010

 

Fannie Lou Hamer

Coretta Scott King

Betty Shabazz

Ella Jo Baker

Dorothy Height

Constance Baker Motley

Kathleen Cleaver

C. Delores Tucker

Barbara Jordan

Francis Watkins Harper

Myrlie Evers Williams

Harriet Tubman

Ida B. Wells

Mary Church Terrell

Sonia Sanchez

Mary McCleod Bethune

Rosa Parks

Septima Clark

Shirley Chisholm

Charlayne Hunter-Gault

New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap

Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times

‘PUNKS UNDER PRESSURE’ Big Freedia and Katey Red in the Third Ward of New Orleans.

By JONATHAN DEE

Published: July 19, 2010

If “gay rapper” is an oxymoron where you come from, how to get your head around the notion of a gay rapper performing in a sports bar? What in most cities might seem plausible only as some sort of Sacha Baron Cohen-style provocation is just another weeknight in the cultural Galapagos that is New Orleans. Sometime after midnight on the sweltering Thursday before Memorial Day, the giant plasma-screen TVs at the Sports Vue bar (which “proudly airs all major Pay Per View events from the world of Boxing and Ultimate Fighting”) were all switched off, and the bar’s backroom turned into a low-lit, low-ceilinged dance club, where more than 300 people awaited a return engagement by Big Freedia, who by day runs an interior-decoration business and who is, to fans of the New Orleans variant of hip-hop music known as “bounce,” a superstar.

 The Mix: Tracks by Big Freedia, Katey Red and Sissy Nobby

Enlarge This Image

Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times

BOUNCE THAT Big Freedia shares the stage at Club Caesar's with a few audience members.

Enlarge This Image

Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times

GIRLS' NIGHT OUT At a Big Freedia show, the women rule the dance floor. The men stand back.

Enlarge This Image

Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times

Katey Red (left) and Big Freedia, fixtures of the New Orleans scene.

At 1 a.m., though, Freedia (pronounced “FREE-da”) was still a mile or so away, fulfilling a paid celebrity-hosting gig at Club Fabulous. The fabulousness of Club Fabulous, on this night at least, seemed a function mainly of its Mardi Gras-themed décor, conceived and executed by Freedia herself. Otherwise the crowd was sparse, largely straight and listless. Freedia looked weary as she leaned back against the bar with her dyed, diagonally cut bangs over one eye, holding a cordless microphone. (Freedia, who is about 6 foot 2 and very powerful-looking and dresses in a fashionable but recognizably masculine style, is genetically a man; but neither she nor anyone who knows her uses masculine pronouns to refer to her.) When “Rock Around the Clock,” one of her signature songs, came on the sound system, a few women walked over to Freedia and stood with their backs to her, but the atmosphere wasn’t quite electric enough for them to really start dancing, and the men just continued playing pool. After a while, Freedia’s D.J. and de facto manager, who goes by the name Rusty Lazer — a whippetlike 39-year-old white man with a salt-and-pepper beard — let Freedia know that it was time to move on to the next show.

The two of them had just returned from three nights at three different venues in New York, with a stop for another show in Philadelphia on their way home. These days Freedia performs five or six nights a week, often more than once a night — and increasingly, not just in New Orleans.

“Girl, I’m tired,” Lazer said as he drove them to the Sports Vue in his minivan, which was full of boxes of hand-screened Big Freedia T-shirts he sells at $10 a pop.

“Really?” Freedia said laconically. “I’m just starting to get my energy back.”

At the first sight of the commotion outside the Sports Vue, everyone’s energy level picked up. Lazer pulled the minivan into a long maze of cars parked haphazardly all up and down the grass median on Elysian Fields Avenue. Outside the metal detectors at the entrance, cops were pretending to listen to the grievances of two women who had just been thrown out of the bar. “Every night,” Lazer said fondly. While patrons were being patted down by bouncers inside the door, he and Freedia disappeared into the crowd; a few minutes later, the music stopped, and a loud, excited voice yelled into a mic a brief introduction — so brief the longest part of it was the polysyllabic participle between the words “Big” and “Freedia.”

And then something remarkable happened. The crowd — just about evenly divided between men and women — instantly segregated itself: the men were propelled as if by a centrifuge toward the room’s perimeters, and the dance floor, a platform raised just a step off the ground, was taken over entirely by women surrounding Freedia. The women did not dance with, or for, one another — they danced for Freedia, and they did so in the most sexualized way imaginable, usually with their backs to her, bent over sharply at the waist, and bouncing their hips up and down as fast as humanly possible, if not slightly faster. Others assumed more of a push-up position, with their hands on the floor, in a signature dance whose name is sometimes helpfully shortened to “p-popping.”

Freedia did “Rock Around the Clock,” which begins with a sample from the Bill Haley classic but departs pretty drastically from there, as well as her longtime club hit, “Azz Everywhere,” a title as perfectly high-concept in its way as “Snakes on a Plane.” Softspoken in person, Freedia has an onstage voice as deep and exhortatory as Chuck D’s. Her older songs sometimes had choruses that were actually sung (“I got that gin in my system/Somebody gonna be my victim”), but in her recent work, the beat is too fast to permit much more than short, repetitive chanting. Not that it mattered much in the context of the less-than-state-of-the-art sound system at the Sports Vue, where an occasional obscenity was pretty much as audible as any of the lyrics got.

A Big Freedia set generally lasts only four or five songs (which is why she can book two or three of them a night), but the energy brought to, and generated by, those songs is astounding. So, 20 cathartic minutes later, it was all over. Freedia left the stage, the men gravitated back toward the women and the sexual balance at the Sports Vue was restored. “Well,” Lazer said with a grin as he gave me a lift back to my hotel in his minivan, “I’ve lived in New Orleans a long time, and I know a lot of people, but you’ve just seen something that about 95 percent of my white friends will probably never see.”

Bounce itself has been around for about 20 years. Like most hip-hop varietals, it’s rap delivered over a sampled dance beat, but it has a few characteristics that give it a distinctively regional sound: it’s strictly party music, its beat is relentlessly fast and its rap quotient tends much less toward introspection or pure braggadocio than toward a call-and-response relationship with its audience, a dynamic borrowed in equal measure from Mardi Gras Indian chants and from the dawn of hip-hop itself. Many, if not most, bounce records announce their allegiance by sampling from one of just two sources: either Derek B.’s “Rock the Beat” or an infectious hook known as the “Triggaman,” from a 1986 Showboys record called “Drag Rap.” (That’s “drag” not as in cross-dressing but as in the theme to the old TV show “Dragnet.”) Just as the earliest New York rap records featured compulsory shout-outs to the boroughs, lots of bounce songs will demand (especially when performed live) audience acknowledgment of the city’s various neighborhoods and housing projects (“Shake it for the Fourth Ward/Work it for the Fifth Ward”), even those that have been razed. Otherwise the lyrics are mostly about sex and are so habitually obscene that they have helped keep bounce from spreading too far beyond its New Orleans borders. The success of bounce-tinged New Orleans artists like Lil Wayne and Juvenile notwithstanding, at least one New Orleans record-company executive speculates that major labels consider unadulterated bounce too hard to distribute, because it can’t be played on most radio stations or even sold in many venues.

The overwhelming majority of bounce artists are, of course, straight. But 12 years ago, a young drag queen who goes by the name Katey Red shocked the audience by taking the mic at an influential underground club near the Melpomene housing project where she grew up, and in that star-is-born moment, a subgenre of bounce took root. It is a sad understatement to say that homosexuality and hip-hop make for an unlikely fusion: hip-hop culture is one of the most unrepentantly homophobic cultures in America, surpassing even its own attitudes toward women in bigotry and smirking advocacy of violence. But New Orleans’s tolerance of unlikely fusions is legendary, and today Katey Red, along with a handful of other artists — Big Freedia (who grew up four blocks from Katey and started out as one of her background vocalists), Sissy Nobby, Chev off the Ave, Vockah Redu (who was captain of the dance team at Booker T. Washington High School) — are not just accepted mainstays of the bounce scene but its most prominent representatives outside New Orleans. Katey recently received a New Orleans consecration of sorts when she appeared as herself, unidentified, in an episode of the HBO series “Treme,” with her song “So Much Drama” playing in the background.

Some part of this subgenre’s popularity is surely due to the catchily discordant name by which it has become known: sissy bounce. The term is problematic, because the artists themselves do not care for it at all — not because they object to the word “sissy” but because they consider it disrespectful to bounce music. Even when their lyrics are at their frankest (“I’m a punk under pressure/When we finish, put my money on the dresser”), they rush to point out, correctly, that they’re just drawing from the life at hand in the same way virtually every rapper does. They have no desire to be typed within, or set apart from, bounce culture; and indeed, within New Orleans itself, they mostly are not — even as their bookings elsewhere in the country are founded increasingly on the novelty of their sexual identities.

The term “sissy bounce” is one for which a young New Orleans music writer named Alison Fensterstock takes very reluctant credit. Fensterstock is a native New Yorker who moved to New Orleans for what was supposed to be a semester in college 15 years ago, and now lives in the Ninth Ward with her husband, who D.J.’s regularly for Katey and other bounce artists. She has done as much for the promotion of bounce culture as anyone, not only by writing about it extensively for New Orleans-based publications (in one of which she offhandedly coined the fateful name) but also by spending two years assembling a museum exhibition, a comprehensive oral and photographic history of bounce and New Orleans hip-hop called “Where They At?” which has traveled all over the country. Indeed, the sissy-bounce artists themselves seem to adore her; when I met her in New Orleans, she mentioned that Katey was excited about giving her a makeover.

When it comes to locating sissy bounce’s roots, Fensterstock said, you should look deep rather than wide; that is, rather than try to place it within the current spectrum of American hip-hop, it makes much more sense to understand it as an outgrowth of New Orleans musical culture itself, which has a long tradition of gay and cross-dressing performers not just as a fringe element but as part of the musical mainstream. (Though the definitional lines aren’t as bright as they used to be, among the sissy-bounce rappers, Katey Red is the only one who performs in women’s clothing.) Bobby Marchan, a female impersonator who was a singer for Huey (Piano) Smith and later became an influential promoter, and Patsy Vidalia (born Irving Ale), the cross-dressing hostess of the Dew Drop Inn, were among the most popular entertainers and social figures in New Orleans for decades.

“As far back as the ’40s and ’50s, it was a really popular thing,” Fensterstock said. “Gay performers have been celebrated forever in New Orleans black culture. Not to mention that in New Orleans there’s the tradition of masking, mummers, carnival, all the weird identity inversion. There’s just something in the culture that’s a lot more lax about gender identity and fanciness. I don’t want to say that the black community in New Orleans is much more accepting of the average, run-of-the-mill gay Joe. But they’re definitely much more accepting of gay people who get up and perform their gayness on a stage.”

Outside New Orleans, though, booking the artists, or selling their records, remains a particular challenge. “They’re the hottest things in the club, but they just haven’t been able to get national exposure,” says Melvin Foley, who manages several sissy-bounce artists. “They have clean versions of their songs for radio, but we can’t get the radio to put them into rotation. I took Sissy Nobby and Big Freedia to New York to meet with Universal, but we couldn’t get a label deal. Their main concern was, ‘How would we market this?’ You market it like you market any other artist.”

Or not. For while it may be true that openly gay rappers will never gain much traction with rap’s mostly male demographic, men aren’t the natural market for the music anyway. As attendance at even a few shows will tell you, the eager and underserved audience for sissy bounce is clearly, overwhelmingly, women. “There’s like a safe-space thing happening,” Fensterstock says. “When Freedia or Nobby’s singing superaggressive, sexual lyrics about bad boyfriends or whatever, there’s something about being able to be the ‘I’ in the sentence. That’s not to say that women can’t like the more misogynistic music too. I like it — some of it’s good music. But it’s tough to sing along about bitches and hos when you’re a girl. When you identify with Freedia, you’re the agent of all this aggressive sexuality instead of its object.”

Though it seems insensitive to point it out, a signal event in spreading bounce’s purview was the forced dispersal of Freedia, Katey, Nobby and untold dozens of bounce artists in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They were exiled from their New Orleans homes for many months, to Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and elsewhere; in their restlessness and homesickness, they started staging bounce shows for the locals wherever they happened to be.

Freedia found places to perform in Texas, but she jumped at the first opportunity to get back home. As she remembered: “The first club that reopened in New Orleans was Caesar’s, and they called me immediately and said let’s do a regular night with you here. So we started FEMA Fridays. It was the only club open in the city, and a lot of people had a lot of money from Katrina, the checks and stuff, so the joy inside that club — I don’t think that’ll ever come back.”

“Freedia was one of the first artists to come back after the storm and start working,” Fensterstock said, “and she worked really, really hard. Like six shows a week. If you lived here, it became impossible not to know who she was.”

Which led, unsurprisingly, to a bit of resentment within the bounce community, one that persists to this day. “A lot of the older, straight male rappers have been vocal about having problems with the whole sissy-bounce thing,” Fensterstock said, “but it’s more complicated than just homophobia. These guys have been performing and putting out records for 10 or 20 years. But Freedia’s getting so much publicity now that a lot of people who maybe have never heard of bounce before, or who haven’t thought about it since the ’90s, just think it’s all gay.”

Inaccurate (or paranoid) as that perception may be, the fact is that the notion of unabashedly gay hip-hop is like catnip to some alternative-music scenes around the country. Which puts the artists themselves in something of a bind: while sissy-bounce bookings offer them a rare chance to raise their national profiles, the last thing any of them wants is to put homosexuality at the forefront of what they do. At home, they perform in every sort of venue, before every sort of crowd: at sports bars, at Jazz Fest, at a recent museum benefit called “Sippin’ in Seersucker.” On record too, they fuse freely with other genres. Freedia, Nobby and Katey are all guest vocalists on the latest record from Galactic, a respected (and white) New Orleans funk outfit. And that is the music’s volatile essence: inside New Orleans, the genius of sissy bounce is how perfectly mainstream it is; in the world beyond, the genius of sissy bounce is how incredibly alternative it is.

Vockah Redu — who lives in Houston now, having gone there six years ago to study performing arts in college — probably chafes at the “sissy bounce” label more than anyone. “My daughter’s gonna be reading that soon,” he told me with a tight laugh. “But I’ll be able to explain it to her. It’s just stardom, and I feel like it’ll die down eventually. Right now the media’s buying it, so ‘sissy bounce’ it is.”

Two nights after the Sports Vue show, Vockah and Katey Red traveled to Austin, Tex., to perform at a garagelike space there called the Beauty Bar. This was something of a return engagement: a couple of months earlier there was a bounce showcase at what is probably the mecca of American alternative music, the South by Southwest Festival, and Katey and Vockah made such an impression — despite being just two of the seven bounce artists on the bill, the rest of whom were non-sissies — that they were invited back as part of a subsequent festival called Chaos in Tejas, mostly a collection of hardcore bands whose connection to bounce music per se would normally seem tenuous if not hostile.

Vockah came onstage at the Beauty Bar looking like a latter-day George Clinton, with an Indian wig, a long brown lab coat, purple tights and a gold top hat. Those clothes, and most of the rest of what he was wearing, were shed by the third or fourth song. Vockah has the looks and the bearing (and the dancing ability) of a star; indeed, he really needs a bigger stage than a venue like the Beauty Bar provides. He puts on a very theatrical show, featuring tightly choreographed dancing (in unison with his backup vocalists/dancers, known as the Cru), scripted patter (“Thank you,” he told the audience more than once, “for being a reflection of my gift”) and medleys and reprises rather than a straight set list. Compelling as he was, at times he seemed to lose the audience a bit; they were looking to be related to more directly. “I am not here representing New Orleans, I am not here representing bounce music, I am not here representing gay people,” he said near the end of the show. “I am an artist.” Clearly he is constructing a persona, and it is the type of persona that would go down better in front of a crowd of 20,000 than it did among the 200 heavily tattooed, overwhelmingly white alt-kids who were there for the fickle buzz provided by the authenticity of the new, of the ephemerally romanticized fringe that defines alternative music in the first place.

Katey Red, on the other hand, needs no persona: just the sight of her is a whole narrative unto itself. Fensterstock had told me a story about Katey’s irritation with the reviews of her South by Southwest show, all of which seemed to lead with the fact that she is six feet two inches tall, as if that were somehow the most remarkable thing about her. True, it is probably only the seventh- or eighth-most remarkable thing about her; still, when she came onstage wearing sky-high heels and a Mohawk wig purchased for the occasion, it was literally impossible to see the top of her behind the stage lights affixed to the ceiling, and that says a lot about the way she dominates even a cruddy little venue like the Beauty Bar.

Nothing if not old-school, she led the crowd (and her two backup singers) through a series of shout-outs to the projects and neighborhoods of New Orleans, even though very few in the audience would have any reason to know their names or to distinguish one from the other; she led them in a chant that made “Katrina” and “FEMA” into rhyming objects of the same obscene verb. She did all her best-known songs, including “Punk Under Pressure” (“I’m a ho/You know I’m a ho”) and “Stupid” (“You are so stupid/For calling us guys/Please don’t knock it till you give it a try”). She prowled the stage with the sort of constrained grace Tina Turner used to display while wearing pretty much the same shoes. Once or twice she invited audience members onstage to dance in the classic, hypersexual bounce style, and they did so — men and women — with what might be described as labored un-self-consciousness.

A few hours before the show, Katey, barefoot in a simple blue dress, made macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets for three teenagers, two of them her children, in the kitchenette of her Austin motel room. The children were mostly silent; Katey’s demeanor, with showtime looming, was growing more combative, and they seemed to know that the smartest course was to try to make themselves invisible.

Katey now lives and identifies full time as a woman; her life and art are pretty much one, so it does not seem unusual that she doesn’t perform all that often these days. “One reason,” she said, “they ain’t paying like I want to get paid. Another reason: they changed bounce music. They made the beat faster. It’s all chop and cut, chop and cut. It’s not rapping. I don’t like that. I like to write. I like to sit down and write a song — this line goes with this line, this line goes with that line.”

There were two cheerleader batons in the motel room, though it was unclear to whom they belonged, and occasionally Katey would pick them up and twirl them.

“Ain’t no such thing as ‘sissy bounce,’ ” she said. “It’s bounce music. It’s just sissies that are doing it. I was gone for two years after Katrina — a month in Chattanooga and then 23 months in Dallas. I performed there. They loved me there. They didn’t know the songs, people in New Orleans know the songs, but it don’t matter, people in Dallas still like to shake they ass. Everybody like to shake they ass.” What’s the audience like at shows outside of New Orleans? “Pretty integrated,” Katey said. “Mostly girls, mostly a bunch of nasty hos with they shorts up they ass, trying to shake like a dog. What you laughing at?” she said to her son.

“You said, ‘People in Dallas like to shake they ass, too,’ ” her son said.

“Go get your food,” Katey said. “I made it, I ain’t going to bring it to you.” This exchange escalated, as such exchanges between parents and children will do, until it reached the point where a few hard but playful blows were exchanged.

“Would you hit your mama like that?” Katey appealed to me.

I shook my head no.

“Exactly,” she said.

The first of Freedia’s three successive New York gigs in May began with a preshow bounce dance class, which should give you some idea of how far from home Freedia and Lazer were. But “every night it got better,” Freedia said. “They was all on the Internet, posting up the pictures, like ‘If you missed last night, OMG, you missed a party.’ Each night it built, and the last night” — at a traveling dusk-to-dawn festival known as Hoodstock, held on this occasion in a raw space in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn — “it was just unbelievable. Five hundred people in there. Everybody was dripping wet. The walls was dripping wet.”

Any doubt that that space, like any space in which Freedia performs, quickly belonged to the women in the crowd may be dispelled by a story Lazer laughingly told about a blog post he’d seen the day after their Hoodstock set. It consisted of two photos taken at the show, and their captions: in the first, a group of women were horizontally p-popping in what amounted to a flesh pile. “To the men,” the caption beneath it read, “we don’t need you.” The second photo depicted a woman at the same show sitting on the floor while a man prone in front of her performed a sexual act that might traditionally be described as submissive. “But we like having you around,” the caption beneath that one read.

What strikes Lazer most about the dynamic at these shows, though, is not how unexpected it is but how familiar. Long before he started D.J.-ing, he was a drummer in a series of rock bands; he is old enough to have come of age in the latter days of punk. And when he started playing shows with Freedia almost two years ago — when he started witnessing, over and over again, a same-sex group taking over the dance floor in order to perform an ecstatic act of physical aggression that is both exceptionally demanding and socially unacceptable in other contexts, at the behest of music that’s ritualized and played at seemingly impossible tempos — it all began to remind him of something.

“It’s as if punk had been reinvented for women,” he said, smiling. “I remember going to punk shows when I was 13, slam-dancing, stage-diving. It was a kind of reckless abandon, something you really couldn’t stop yourself from doing. If the girls weren’t just outright afraid of being in there, there was somebody literally shoving them out of the way. Now it’s exactly what was happening when I was young, but in reverse: the girls literally push the dudes right out of the middle. It’s just pure empowerment, physical aggression that’s not spiteful or vicious. I think it’s no accident that the slang term for a gay kid in New Orleans is ‘punk.’ It’s pretty rewarding.”

There have been, it should be said, several promi­nent, strongly voiced bounce rappers who are women. For whatever reason, though, the connection between them and an audience of straight women has never seemed as quick or as instinctive. The fact that the uninhibited ring of rump-shaking and p-popping is centered on a Freedia or a Katey doesn’t desexualize it — not by a long shot — but it does seem to take the sense of threat out of it.

“I think the girls like the gay rappers a lot because they feel safer,” Lazer said. “You can get up in the front, you can dance for Freedia, you can work it for Freedia, but at the same time, if anybody comes up on you and gives you a hard time, Freedia’s gonna be the first one —”

“To defend the girl,” Freedia agreed. We were sitting in her modest second-floor apartment in the Sixth Ward, glad to get out of the sun after a photo shoot she did for a British fashion magazine. “I just had that situation on Tuesday, at Caesar’s. I had like 20 girls in this big old circle around me, shaking it real hard. And the boys started closing them in like in a cage. I’m like, ‘Hold up, D.J., stop the music.’ I said, ‘Fellas, back it up, give me 50 feet, I need my girls to work it out where I can see them and where I have control over them.’ So all the fellas back up, but then one guy tries to put his hands on a girl. I stopped the music again, and I said, ‘Dude, I don’t need you touching on my girls because you gonna make all the boys think it’s O.K.’ ”

Lazer, by this point in the story, was nearly folded in half with laughter.

“If they feel like they can step out on that limb,” Freedia said, “I’m gonna step back on that limb with them. If you want to mess with me, I’m gonna mess back with you, but keep in mind that I have the mic in my hand and I’m gonna have the power over you at that moment.”

“And you’re huge,” said the relatively diminutive Lazer.

“And I’m a man,” said Freedia.

 

 

Jonathan Dee is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent article was about the blog Little Green Footballs.

Love is still the best motivation: Jarvis DeBerry

Published: Sunday, August 01, 2010, 7:00 AM

Jarvis DeBerry
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As news leads go, this one was one of my most cherished: "First came love. Then came marriage. Then came a 15-year prison sentence with no hope of conjugal visits."

Scott Threlkeld / The Times-PicayuneIn this 1997 file photo, prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola who had been evacuated for a flood move from a temporary tent city back to their dormitories.   

The story, published in October 1999 about a crime the previous Thanksgiving, told the sad tale of a Slidell groom who in his apparent eagerness to get his honeymoon started was confronted with a guest who refused to leave the house where the wedding and reception were held. The guest expressed his desire to hang around and keep drinking, and the groom indirectly expressed his desire for his new wife when he picked up a steak knife and cut up the guest.

Three times the groom stabbed Mr. Party All The Time, an act officials deemed attempted murder and for which a judge gave the groom 15 years without the possibility of probation, parole or sex with his bride.

In my reporting, I called the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections to be sure that I had it right and that the couple's consummation of their marriage would be at least a decade and a half off. After all, Mississippi's Parchman Farm -- referred to in many a blues lyric as the most God-forsaken place on Earth -- allows its inmates some occasional cuddle time with their ladies.

But the conjugal visit is verboten in Louisiana, which allowed me to joke about the jailed newlywed's predicament.

Those who didn't know Louisiana's policy were informed of it last week when state prison officials announced an investigation into illicit sex between inmates at Angola and their visitors. The sheriff of West Feliciana Parish said that prison investigators had questioned 96 inmates and determined that 10 had had a little fun in a storeroom.

Sheriff J. Austin Daniel said that allegations are that some employees at the prison had been paid to look the other way during the sexual pairings and that two prison employees had resigned to avoid punishment.

There doesn't seem to be any good that can come from inmates paying prison guards for privileges, illicit or otherwise. But Louisiana probably would benefit if it gave inmates some opportunities for conjugal visits, the same way they do in that hot-bed of liberalism next door: Mississippi.

One of the reasons we allow prisoners to see their loved ones at all is a belief in the positive power of relationships. An inmate who becomes utterly cut off from all contact with friends and loved ones and starved of all contact from the outside isn't well-suited to make the transition back to life on the outside.

It was from that point of view that a local physician asked me last week, "How are (prisoners) to be integrated back into our communities? Can we help them develop meaningful and lasting relationships, perhaps which would help motivate them to stay out of prison when they are released?"

"Perhaps," he continued, "the wardens could use this to help change behaviors and attitudes with positive rewards."

That, to me, is one of the strong arguments for permitting conjugal visits: It would give prisoners something pleasant to anticipate and serve as powerful motivation for good behavior. To paraphrase Richard Pryor, if you had a choice between acting up and getting in trouble or acting mellow and getting a conjugal visit, "which line would you be in?"

There's a popular belief that prison should be a place of unrelenting torment, a place so devoid of goodness that those entering will feel that they're entering hell, a place Dante said was inscribed with the instruction, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

In earthly situations, though, one would think that a hopeless man is particularly dangerous and all the more difficult to control. There are taxpayers who have a knee-jerk objection to every creature comfort at a prison, believing each to be a luxury that a convicted prisoner forfeited with his or her crime. But there are wardens who value those so-called luxuries, not because they give inmates pleasure but because they give prison officials something they can deny uncooperative inmates.

The Slidell groom struck out violently when the annoying guest threatened to delay his and his wife's intimacy by minutes. Wonder how much more violent he is now after almost 12 years?

Jarvis DeBerry is an editorial writer. He can be reached at jdeberry@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3355. Follow him at http://connect.nola.com/user/jdeberry/index.html and at twitter.com/jarvisdeberrytp.

 

Justice Department aims to help

overhaul New Orleans police force

By Sandhya Somashekhar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2010; A03

With a public image smeared by corrupt officers and poor community relations, the New Orleans Police Department tries to shed its negative past.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

 

 

The people fanning themselves in the crimson pews of the Evening Star Missionary Baptist Church had leveled these accusations before. Stories of the police targeting and "executing" their sons, of tiny bags of crack planted by the police in a baby's diaper, of a mentally ill man cooking breakfast when he was fired on by a SWAT team's worth of guns.

The difference this time was that they thought someone was listening. Seated in the front pew was Roy Austin, a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, invited to the city by a desperate mayor and to the meeting by an even more desperate community. His presence is part of an unprecedented effort to remake the scandal-plagued New Orleans Police Department, whose already bad reputation was left as battered as the city it was charged to protect after Hurricane Katrina.

In the five years since the storm, the department's standing has worsened. Eager for a turnaround, the newly elected mayor did something nearly unthinkable for someone in his position: He called in the feds.

"I have inherited a police force that has been described by many as one of the worst police departments in the country," Mayor Mitch Landrieu wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. earlier this year. "The police force, the community, our citizens are desperate for positive change."

Since the federal agency's arrival here, 13 police officers have been indicted in connection with the killing of civilians, and more are likely to follow. But rooting out corrupt officers is only part of the goal, because "doing that alone will not be enough to bring about the systemic reforms that are necessary to transform the department," said Thomas E. Perez, head of the Justice Department's civil rights division.

"The president and the attorney general are personally invested in the success of the New Orleans Police Department," Perez added. "I've seldom seen a situation where we're being invited in . . . and that in and of itself gives me optimism that we can succeed."

Top-to-bottom overhaul

At least a dozen Justice experts have been dispatched to New Orleans to assist with a top-to-bottom overhaul aimed at strengthening the department's ability to police itself, Perez said. They have applauded some of the changes instituted by the new chief, who was installed by Landrieu and has hired a civilian to head the internal affairs office and adopted a no-tolerance policy toward officers caught lying.

Officials hope the efforts will improve the relationship between police and the community, especially members of the city's black majority, which was strained before Katrina but took on crisis proportions afterward. Some killers have probably been wrongly acquitted because juries don't trust the police, Perez said. At the same time, the city's homicide rate has risen to the highest in the nation.

Not surprisingly, the most high-profile indictments so far have involved officers accused of heinous crimes during the tumultuous and lawless days that immediately followed the storm.

In June, five officers were charged in connection with the death of Henry Glover, whose burned body was found in a car near a police station shortly after the storm. Another six were indicted a few weeks later in the killing of two unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge.

Also disturbing have been the alleged coverups. Federal prosecutors say Glover was shot by a police officer and his body was burned to hide the crime. In the Danziger case, two supervisors are believed to have fabricated witnesses and planted a gun to protect the four shooters, and an additional five officers have pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the case.

On Thursday, authorities announced that another two officers had been charged in the beating death of a man in the Treme neighborhood before Katrina. More charges could follow.

Frank DeSalvo, a lawyer for officers in the Glover and Danziger cases, said that his clients are innocent and that the police department is not corrupt. Still, he said, the rank and file welcome the Justice inquiry.

"I don't think New Orleans police officers are opposed to that as long as it's done honestly and fairly. And the truth is, they will be infinitely better off if we can get good, solid, fair, consistent leadership" in the department, he said.

Still, the indictments have dealt a blow to the morale of beat officers who patrol some of the nation's most dangerous streets. Several interviewed said they were eager to move past Katrina, which, rather than exalting the heroic efforts of many officers during a time of extraordinary need, has elevated the profile of the city's worst elements. The department's reputation has been so sullied that it has been the subject of critical articles across the country and television shows such as HBO's "Treme."

"All those officers and leaders who were going up to Baptist hospital flooded up to their necks, no one's ever going to remember that anymore because of what [some] officers, who've admitted what they've done, did at the Danziger Bridge," said Ronal W. Serpas, the department's new chief, speaking from a conference room at police headquarters. "It's stunning. It reads like a bad novel. It's just horrible."

To residents, many of them black, who have long complained of systemic abuse by police, the actions thus far by the Justice Department have brought a measure of relief and vindication. Katrina, they say, simply shone the national spotlight on their everyday reality.

In one notable case in the 1990s, 10 officers were indicted in connection with a cocaine operation, and one of them was sentenced to death for ordering a hit on a woman who had filed a brutality complaint.

Community hearings

Frustrated with what they viewed as the city's inaction on police brutality, community activists organized hearings this year, including the one at the Evening Star church. They videotaped the sometimes emotional testimony, in which parents described opening body bags that contained their dead children and pointed at necks and foreheads to describe entrance and exit wounds.

"They say the old are supposed to die first," Patricia Anderson said into a microphone next to the piano. "How come these days it's the kids that die first? And the cops are going to jail more than the kids?"

Toward the back sat Norris Henderson, an advocate who knew most of the stories by heart. He knows that some sound outlandish, but over time, he said, some of the worst have proved to be true. Many were detailed in a series written by ProPublica, an investigative journalism nonprofit group, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

"To make a claim like that, people's like, 'Come on, get real,' " he said. "Now, because of the revelations, they think, 'Holy smokes.' They have to second-guess themselves. Because now, the proof is in the pudding."

Documents indicate heavy use of dispersants in gulf oil spill

By David A. Fahrenthold and Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2010; A01

 

While the BP well was still gushing, the Obama administration issued an order that limited the spreading of controversial dispersant chemicals on the Gulf of Mexico's surface. Their use, officials said, should be restricted to "rare cases."

But in reality, federal documents show, the use of dispersants wasn't rare at all.

Despite the order -- and concerns about the environmental effects of the dispersants -- the Coast Guard granted requests to use them 74 times over 54 days, and to use them on the surface and deep underwater at the well site. The Coast Guard approved every request submitted by BP or local Coast Guard commanders in Houma, La., although in some cases it reduced the amount of the chemicals they could use, according to an analysis of the documents prepared by the office of Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).

The documents indicate that "these exemptions are in no way a 'rare' occurrence, and have allowed surface application of the dispersant to occur virtually every day since the directive was issued," Markey wrote in a letter dated Aug. 1 to retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, the government's point man on the spill. Markey chairs the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Some of them dealt with separate dispersant applications on the same day. Markey said it appeared that the order "has become more of a meaningless paperwork exercise" than a real attempt to curb use of the dispersants.

In an interview Saturday, Allen defended the decisions to grant the waivers, saying that overall use of dispersants declined sharply after that May 26 order to limit their use. The total use of dispersants underwater and on the surface declined about 72 percent from its peak, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Allen said that on some days the amount of oil on the surface justified a "tactical" decision, by on-scene Coast Guard commanders, to spray some dispersants.

"There's a dynamic tension that goes on when you're managing an incident that has no precedent," Allen said. "You establish general rules and guidelines, but knowing that the people on scene have the information" means trusting them to make decisions, he said.

In the end, Allen said: "You can quibble on the semantics related to 'rare.' I like to focus on the effects we achieved" by dispersing the oil. Officials have said that, in the days since the gusher was stopped, thick sheets of oil have nearly disappeared from the gulf's surface.

EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson conceded that there had been "frustration in the field" from EPA officials about the waivers. But Jackson said it was partly alleviated June 22, nearly a month after the order was issued, when Coast Guard officials began giving the EPA a greater role in the discussions over whether to approve dispersant use.

"EPA may not have concurred with every single waiver," Jackson said. But, she said, the Coast Guard had the ultimate say: "The final decision-making rests with the federal on-scene coordinator. That's where the judgment, the ultimate decision-making ability, had to lie."

The dispersants -- variants of a Nalco product called Corexit -- break up the oil, acting like a detergent on kitchen grease. They are intended to keep the oil from reaching shore in large sheets and to make it easier for microbes to consume the oil underwater.

Charles M. Pajor, a Nalco spokesman, said that the amount of dispersant the company recommends depends on the acreage sprayed and the amount of oil spilled, with variations for oil quality, degree of weathering, temperature and thickness. Typically, two to 10 gallons per acre are used or one gallon for every 10 to 50 gallons of oil, Pajor said.

Similar dispersants were used after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989, and afterward government officials vowed to study their environmental effects more carefully. But urgency faded, research dollars evaporated, and when this spill arrived, the questions were still unanswered.

Now, scientists say, it's difficult to tell what the added use of dispersants permitted by the Coast Guard meant for the gulf. The chemicals may have helped break up some oil before it reached sensitive marshes along the Louisiana coast. But it also may have poisoned ecosystems offshore, helped deplete underwater oxygen and sent oil swirling through the open-water habitats of fish and coral.

"It's still a trade-off. I mean, you're using dispersants to protect the shoreline, and you're going to be killing things in the water column," said Carys Mitchelmore, a professor at the University of Maryland. By using more dispersants, Mitchelmore said, "you're just going to be killing more things in the water column."

In May, under pressure from environmental groups, the EPA and the Coast Guard issued a directive to BP, ordering the company to "eliminate" the use of dispersants on the surface. The directive said BP could seek an exemption in rare cases when other cleanup methods were not feasible.

The government allowed BP to continue injecting dispersants below the surface, as oil leaked from the well on the gulf floor. Their logic was that the chemicals could be used more efficiently underwater, where the gushing of BP's well provided a turbulence that helped them work.

"Because so much is still unknown about the potential impact of dispersants, BP should use no more dispersant than is necessary," Jackson wrote in a letter to BP that day.

But, over the next nine days, BP made daily waiver requests for the use of surface dispersants. Every day the Coast Guard gave its approval. On May 28, for instance, BP sprayed 6,400 gallons of dispersant on the surface, saying it was needed to control dangerous fumes -- volatile organic compounds -- where rig and platform workers were trying to get the blowout under control.

In early June, federal documents show, an EPA official raised concerns about the ease with which BP was obtaining waivers.

"The approval process appears to be somewhat pro forma, and not as rigorous as EPA desires," the official wrote, according to a Coast Guard memo that quoted him. It said BP "must be put on notice that the request for exemptions cannot be presumed to be approved at the point they are submitted."

Two weeks later, on June 22, Jackson said that the Coast Guard had begun giving her agency a greater role in the approval of dispersant use. But federal documents show that the chemicals were still being used, sometimes more than 10,000 gallons a day. A federal official said the last surface dispersants were sprayed July 19.

Scott Dean, a BP spokesman, said that his company had been careful to obtain federal permission before using dispersants on the ocean's surface.

"Since the very beginning, BP has operated in a unified command and we have always worked hand in hand with the Coast Guard and EPA on dispersants," Dean said, "and we've complied with EPA requests regarding dispersants." He added that "dispersants are an EPA-approved and recognized tool in fighting oil spills."

Aaron Viles, at the Louisiana-based Gulf Restoration Network, said the Obama administration gave the impression of controlling the controversial dispersants while allowing their use to continue. The result, he said, was that more oil sank out of sight and out of reach of the cleanup operation.

"Clearly, you know, there was a bit of a show here," Viles said. "Whether EPA wasn't serious, or the Coast Guard didn't care, they kept cranking, and kept exposing the Gulf of Mexico to this giant science experiment."

Dan Froomkin

froomkin@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

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Scientists Find Evidence That Oil And Dispersant Mix Is Making Its Way Into The Foodchain

First Posted: 07-29-10 06:27 PM   |   Updated: 07-31-10 09:39 AM

Read More: BP Oil Spill, Corexit, Corexit Foodchain, Crab, Crab And Corexit, Crab Larvae, Dispersants,Food Chain, Gulf Oil Spill, Oil And Dispersants, Oil Dispersant Mix, Oil Foodchain, Green News

Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the shells of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.

Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent shells of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them "in almost all" of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. -- more than 300 miles of coastline -- said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.

And now, a team of researchers from Tulane University using infrared spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of the blobs has detected the signature for Corexit, the dispersant BP used so widely in the Deepwater Horizon

"It does appear that there is a Corexit sort of fingerprint in the blob samples that we ran," Erin Gray, a Tulane biologist, told the Huffington Post Thursday. Two independent tests are being run to confirm those findings, "so don't say that we're 100 percent sure yet," Gray said.

"The chemistry test is still not completely conclusive," said Tulane biology professor Caz Taylor, the team's leader. "But that seems the most likely thing."

With BP's well possibly capped for good, and the surface slick shrinking, some observers of the Gulf disaster are starting to let down their guard, with some journalists even asking: Where is the oil?

But the answer is clear: In part due to the1.8 million gallons of dispersant that BP used, a lot of the estimated 200 million or more gallons of oil that spewed out of the blown well remains under the surface of the Gulf in plumes of tiny toxic droplets. And it's short- and long-term effects could be profound.

BP sprayed dispersant onto the surface of the slick and into the jet of oil and gas as it erupted out of the wellhead a mile beneath the surface. As a result, less oil reached the surface and the Gulf's fragile coastline. But more remained under the surface.

Fish, shrimp and crab larvae, which float around in the open seas, are considered the most likely to die on account of exposure to the subsea oil plumes. There are fears, for instance, that an entire year's worth of bluefin tuna larvae may have perished.

But this latest discovery suggests that it's not just larvae at risk from the subsurface droplets. It's also the animals that feed on them.

"There are so many animals that eat those little larvae," said Robert J. Diaz, a marine scientist at the College of William and Mary.

Oil itself is of course toxic, especially over long exposure. But some scientists worry that the mixture of oil with dispersants will actually prove more toxic, in part because of the still not entirely understood ingredients of Corexit, and in part because of the reduction in droplet size.

"Corexit is in the water column, just as we thought, and it is entering the bodies of animals. And it's probably having a lethal impact there," said Susan Shaw, director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute. The dispersant, she said, is like " a delivery system" for the oil.

Although a large group of marine scientists meeting in late May reached a consensus that the application of dispersants was a legitimate element of the spill response, another group, organized by Shaw, more recently concluded "that Corexit dispersants, in combination with crude oil, pose grave health risks to marine life and human health and threaten to deplete critical niches in the Gulf food web that may never recover."

One particular concern: "The properties that facilitate the movement of dispersants through oil also make it easier for them to move through cell walls, skin barriers, and membranes that protect vital organs, underlying layers of skin, the surfaces of eyes, mouths, and other structures."

Perry told the Huffington Post that the small size of the droplets was clearly a factor in how the oil made its way under the crab larvae shells. Perry said the oil droplets in the water "are just the right size that probably in the process of swimming or respiring, they're brought into that cavity."

That would not happen if the droplets were larger, she said.

The oil droplet washes off when the larvae molt, she said -- but that's assuming they live that long. Larvae are a major food source for fish and other blue crabs -- "their siblings are their favorite meal," Perry explained. Fish are generally able to excrete ingested oil, but inverterbrates such as crabs don't have that ability.

Perry said the discovery of the oil and dispersant blobs is very troubling -- but not, she made clear, because it has any impact on the safety of seafood in the short run. "Unlike heavy metals that biomagnify as they go up the foodchain, oil doesn't seem to do that," she said. Rather, she said, "we're looking at long-term ecological effects of having this oil in contact with marine organisms."

Diaz, the marine scientist from William and Mary, spoke at a lunchtime briefing about dispersants on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

Dispersant, he explained, "doesn't make the oil go away, it just puts it from one part of the ecosystem into another."

In this case, he said, "the decision was to keep as much of the oil subsurface as possible." As a result, the immediate impact on coastal wildlife was mitigated. But the effects on ocean life, he said, are less clear -- in part because there's less known about ocean ecosystems than coastal ones.

"As we go further offshore, as the oil industry has gone offshore, we find that we know less," he said. "We haven't really been using oceanic species to assess the risks, and this is a key issue."

(Similar concerns have been expressed about the lack of important data that would allow scientists to accurately assess the effects of the spill on the Gulf's sea turtles, whose plight is emerging as particularly poignant.)

Diaz warned of the danger posed to bluefin tuna -- and also to "the signature resident species in the Gulf, the shrimp." He noted that all three species of Gulf shrimp spawn offshore before moving back into shallow estuaries.

Diaz also expressed concern that dispersed oil droplets could end up doing great damage to the Gulf's many undersea coral reefs. "If the droplets agglomerate with sediment," he said, "they could even settle to the bottom."

Nancy Kinner, co-director of the Coastal Response Center at the University of New Hampshire, said the use of dispersants in this spill raises many issues that scientists need to explore, starting with the effects of long-term exposure. She also noted that scientists have never studied the effects of dispersants when they're injected directly into the turbulence of the plume, as they were here, or at such depth, or at such low temperatures, or under such pressure.

She also said it will be essential for the federal government to accurately determine how much oil made it out of the blown well. A key data point for scientists is the ratio of dispersant to oil, she said, and "if you don't know the flow rate of the oil, you don't know what you dispersant to oil ratio is."

After a series of ludicrous estimates, the federal government settled last month on an official estimate of about 20,000 to 40,000 barrels a day, but BP is widely expected to contest that figure and some scientists think it is still a low-ball estimate.

There seems to be no doubt that history will record that the use of dispersants was good for BP, making it harder to tell how much oil was spilled, and reducing the short-term visible impact. But what's less clear is whether it will turn out to have been good for the Gulf.

 

*************************

Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post. You can send him an e-mail, bookmark his page; subscribe to his RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get e-mail alerts when he writes.

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Gulf of Mexico oil spill is just the latest blow for Delacroix: Part one of four

Published: Sunday, August 01, 2010, 6:30 AM

Bob Marshall, The Times-Picayune
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On a blustery spring day, Delacroix native Lloyd Serigne stands on the banks of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, 30 miles south of New Orleans, talking about the village that raised him in the 1950s. Reaching into a deep well of memories, he paints an idyllic picture: A community of several hundred fishers, farmers and trappers whose homes were surrounded by a wetlands paradise of high ridges, marshes and swamps. The outside world -- unwanted, unneeded -- seemed a thousand miles away.

View full sizeTed Jackson, The Times-PicayuneThere was a time when Delacroix was a thriving community of 700 fishers and trappers, surrounded by forests of oak, maple and sycamore trees. Now barely a sliver remains as the marsh continues to succumb to subsidence and hurricanes. This photo was taken June 20.   

But the scene surrounding him only mocks that vision.

Naked slabs and raw pilings that once supported homes stand like tombstones in open, soggy ground. Bare tree trunks rise from a salt marsh that used to be a vegetable field. Battered home appliances, ice chests and derelict boats litter the bank while a high tide moves through the remains of a hardwood forest. And a steady stream of heavy equipment heads down the road to fight the invasion of BP's oil.

None of it matches memories that seem as sharp as yesterday's news.

"Really, what we had here was a paradise -- a natural paradise," Serigne, 70, says with a smile of fond remembrance. He pauses to shake his head, a gesture half of wonder, half of despair.

"But when I try to tell the young people about this, they just stare at me like I'm crazy. They just can't imagine what was here such a short time ago.

"And now it's gone. Just gone."

 

View full size   

 

Just outside the city, within earshot of the vocal crusade to save New Orleans' culture after Hurricane Katrina, communities that were the hub of a unique wetlands culture for 200 years have quietly been slipping into history. There have been no jazz funerals or memorials for places like Delacroix, Hopedale, Pointe a la Hache, Grand Bayou and Shell Beach. But in the course of a few short years, place names that dotted the coastal maps for centuries have become mere ghost towns, victims of a wetlands system undercut by man, then pummeled by nature and more recently stained by oil.

For the vast majority of city residents, these places were destinations known mostly for the seafood they shipped to local markets and the entertainment they provided sportsmen on weekends. But for those who understand their history and the reasons for their demise, these communities carry an important warning for the big city.

View full size

Ted Jackson, The Times-Picayune

 Lloyd Serigne and his deckhand motor down the bayou along what's left of Delacroix Island on July 16.

When Serigne thinks of his childhood here. he remembers a thriving community of more than 700 Spanish-speaking fishers and trappers who seldom felt the need to travel to New Orleans because the ridges and wetlands of their world provided all they needed. He remembers high, dry ground covered with forests of oak, maple and sycamore stretching from the banks of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs. He remembers wild fruit trees, citrus groves, rabbits and deer, ducks and geese, specks and reds and bass. He remembers how children spent half of each year at distant trapping cabins with the whole family, wedging in school between seasons for shrimp, muskrat, mink, crabs and ducks. He remembers thinking the world would always be like this.

But the most amazing memory of all: It was still mostly here just 40 short years ago.

Serigne surveys the ruins surrounding him, and shrugs.

"Everything we had was based on the wetlands," he said. "When the wetlands started going, we were done for. But we just didn't realize it was happening until it was too late."

Those wetlands -- the swamps and marshes of the great Mississippi River delta -- were the reason Delacroix and its sister communities existed. Not only did they supply the basic sustenance for life, but for 200 years they were as imposing an obstacle to the outward expansion of New Orleans as the Rocky Mountains were to Denver. That physical barrier allowed communities such as Delacroix to remain insulated from change despite being in the shadow of one of the nation's largest cities. Without hard-surfaced roads, without electronic communications, and without a real need to use the services and goods a city could offer, generations were raised speaking their own language and answering to a different set of social priorities.

Looking back, former residents now in their 70s realize the differences were stunning. Just 40 years ago, while their contemporaries in the Crescent City were being carried along on the great cultural and economic changes of the post-World War II years -- two-car garages, all-electric homes, subdivisions sprawling along interstate highways and mandatory college educations -- life in the fishing communities had changed little since the late 1800s. It was a subsistence culture revolving around fishing, trapping, hunting and local gardens, a life divided between high land along bayou ridges and the deep marsh, between village homes and trapping cabins, where merchants from the city hawked goods from floating stores on boats, and where no one ever dreamed of leaving.

View full sizeTed Jackson, The Times-Picayune

 Henry Martinez takes a nap in his shrimp trawler docked near his childhood homesite in Delacroix on July 16.   

 

"Why would we?" asked Henry Martinez, 67, Serigne's life-long friend. "We had meat, fish, vegetables. We had school, church, three dance halls. We had a community where every kid had three hundred parents. You could play in the woods, swim in the bayou, hunt and fish.

"We had the best life anyone could think of."

And it never seemed to change. Serigne's ancestors arrived from the Canary Islands in the late 1700s, yet until the early 1960s, he and thousands of others spread across these bayou towns lived routines those ancestors would have recognized. But change was already rushing toward them. Centuries of tradition would wash away in 40 years, the result of activities they witnessed -- even cheered -- but never fully understood.

Levees built along the river in the early 1900s shut off the spring floods that carried sediment to deltas. setting in motion a sinking of their wetlands that should have taken hundreds of years. The dredges for industry that arrived in the 1930s hastened that demise by centuries. Thousands of acres of marsh were removed in the search for oil and gas riches, and many more for shipping and development. As the delta sank and the dredges worked, small ponds grew into lakes and lakes into bays, drawing the Gulf of Mexico ever closer.

In 1965 Hurricane Betsy brought that reality home in crushing terms, basically wiping out the entire community. Within a few years more than 80 percent of the residents had returned, but Betsy told them the end was coming. Between his teenage years in the 1950s and his 30th birthday in 1970, Serigne said, it became obvious that Delacroix and its unique way of life was dying. By his 65th birthday, it was gone: Hurricane Katrina was its final act.

View full sizeTed Jackson, The Times-Picayune archive

Thomas Gonzales waits on the dock for the deckhands and dock workers to unload, weigh and pay for his catch of crabs at Delacroix Island in October 2009.

 

Another of Serigne's peers, Thomas Gonzales, 72, is one of the few natives still crabbing and living on the island. But to accomplish that he resides in a house trailer resting on pilings 17 feet above the narrow stretch of land remaining on the east bank of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs.

"When I grew up, all you saw from the front steps was woods and the bayou and other homes," he said. "Now all I can see is water where the trees and marsh used to be.

"This ain't the Delacroix we boys was raised in. Not even close."

Today Delacroix and other fishing villages are either ghost towns, reclamation projects for sportsmen, or temporary boom towns for the BP disaster response. Some commercial fishermen still dock along the bayou, but they are commuters, driving in from communities on the protected side of the levees. Families that lived along the bayous for hundreds years have given up, chased away not just by the violence of recent storms, but the certainty of more to come. If there's new construction, it's largely by city anglers building recreational retreats.

The newcomers seek their sport in a dying wetlands complex that is a skeleton of the vibrant ecosystem Serigne remembers from his childhood.

The landscape surrounding Serigne on his walks today is as close to his childhood memories as the Sahara is to the Amazon. The forest has been replaced by a salt marsh, the only reminder of the former woodlands a ghostly line of dead trees rising from an encroaching salt marsh that became the graveyard for homes, businesses, farm fields and playgrounds. The community that once was home to a population estimated at 700 now hosts about 15 fulltime residents. The BP clean-up boom has boosted that number, but only temporarily.

"Everything changed so fast," Serigne said, surveying the empty lots and ruined boats along the bayou. "Of course, looking back with the information we have now, we can see how it all happened.

"It was the canals -- the oil company canals, and the MR-GO. Back in the '50s, we could see difference in the way the tide was coming in and out. Faster. Stronger. By the '60s, we could see the marsh starting to eat out.

"Then came Betsy in 65. Then Katrina. Now it's gone. Hard to believe.
"Now when I talk to the younger people about it, they think it's a story."
It's a story worth retelling.

Bob Marshall can be reached at rmarshall@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3539.

 

A PARADISE LOST