The late William Stringfellow (lawyer and lay theologian) was a good friend of The Rt. Rev. James Pike.
After Bishop Pike's death in the wilderness of Judea, Stringfellow and Anthony Towne published a book entitled, “The DEATH and LIFE of Bishop Pike.”
His explanation of the non-intuitive reversal of life and death in the title was something along these lines: that Pike's death was implicit in the entirety of his life and that the entirety of his life was implicit in his death.
Something similar could be said for the City of New Orleans as depicted in Tom Piazza's fictional City of Refuge as well as his non-fiction work Why New Orleans Matters.
[Full disclosure: Tom is a high school friend of mine who, though I haven't seen him in over 35 years, I've stayed in touch with via the occasional email and, more significantly, his excellent books. In high school I was the Republican conservative and he was the Democratic liberal and we've both lived long enough for me to see the errors of my ways :-]
Tom is a Long Island white boy who inexplicably (to his classmates) was heavily involved in “Negro” (as we would have called it at the time) music. [He has no doubt forgotten, but I remember asking him at one point in high school, “Leadbelly?! What mother would name her kid, “Leadbelly?!”]
Oh, my :-)
To make a very long story very short, Tom became a jazz/blues performer, a writer and – lastly – a citizen of what is no doubt his version of Mecca, the City of New Orleans.
To read City of Refuge, one would think he had been born and raised there.
Though I had read Why New Orleans Matters shortly after it was published, I unconscionably put off reading City of Refuge until very recently. I was afraid it would be a horror story.
Well, it certainly contains horrors but they are not recounted in a sensationalist way. It is an (on the surface) simple story of two families, one working class Black, one middle class white, who are caught in the maelstrom of Katrina and the death of the city that they, from their very different life experiences, both love.
The horrors are recounted in a very matter-of-fact way. A “sorry folks, that's just the way it was” sort of way.
The book is not a horror story, but an apocalypse.
It is the sudden and complete death of a great American city and the not-so-sudden, tentative signs of rebirth.
It reminds me, of all incongruous things, of Stephen King's book, The Stand.
It is the death of an old life and the frail, but hopeful beginnings of a new life.
For longer than anyone alive remembered, New Orleanians had danced at funerals. It was an obligation on those who were still alive to restate the resilience of the human spirit with wit and style, to be present, to answer when called, even with tears running down your face. If you lost your ability to dance in the face of death or troubles, then you lost everything. The point of holding Mardi Gras... was not to show the world that the city was okay. Mardi Gras was for the people of New Orleans, to prove to themselves that the spirit was not dead. (City of Refuge, p. 374)
As Tom is not merely an author but was an on-the-scene participant in the death (and hopeful resurrection) of the city (and people and music and food and etc.) he loves, I can only suspect how difficult a book this was for him to write.
Bill Bekkenhuis
Bethlehem, PA
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