Some folks who know what it means to miss New Orleans

AFTER the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even the most ardent red-staters saw in New York City an essential manifestation of the American spirit. The nation seemed to agree that the ruins of lower Manhattan should be rebuilt bigger and better.

What, then, of New Orleans? These days the national resolve to fix that least American of U.S. cities still seems shaky.

Forget for a moment pork-barrel politics, persistent charges of local corruption and legitimate engineering questions about protecting a city that sits below sea level. Most Americans know New Orleans from the tourist’s perspective -- as the birthplace of jazz, sure, but also as an incorrigible den of iniquity, the city of topless girls and bottomless hurricanes, a place to temporarily escape those cherished heartland values without need of a passport.

That’s all fine and good for a party weekend or two. But is it the kind of place a God-fearing nation should strive to save?

Some of New Orleans’ best-known residents and fans set out to answer that question in “My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers.” At best, their inside knowledge of its day-to-day peculiarities describes a place as worthy of salvation as another famously decadent -- and famously sinking -- city half a world away.

“Because it’s a world treasure, there is an international Save Venice movement,” writes former CNN chief Walter Isaacson, a New Orleans native. “I hope New Orleans will evoke the same response.”

Rosemary James, a former reporter for the New Orleans States-Item newspaper and editor of this anthology, has culled submissions from novelists, journalists, musicians, humorists and restaurateurs. (A portion of the book’s sales goes to local writers’ funds.) There are poems, newspaper-style opinion pieces and novelistic remembrances of cherished neighborhoods.

Calling the pieces “ballads” gets at their shared wistfulness and urgency, but a good balladeer knows that emotion must be tempered with restraint. If not, the results can be a treacly mess -- more Michael Bolton than Buddy Bolden.

Indeed, some contributors over-emote their way into parodies of regional pride. “The eyes of my fish must sparkle and the tails of my crayfish must curl,” writes chef and cookbook author Roy F. Guste Jr. “I am a survivor.... I am Creole. I am New Orleans.”

Others rely on specious generalities. Chef Leah Chase claims that New Orleanians are especially kind and open -- they “smile at one another and say something nice.” But locals can be particularly guarded toward outsiders, their poverty-stricken streets notoriously dangerous.

In her introductory essay, James claims that differences “have not separated” New Orleanians. It’s a nice sentiment -- and perhaps a forgivable one, given the city’s current need for cheerleaders. But as news coverage has shown, there are troubling gulfs of race and class that the city has never bridged.

The true strength of “My New Orleans” lies in its contributors’ acute observations of a culture that has remained defiantly different from its younger host nation. The city may be most famous for its French colonial roots, but novelist Mary Helen Lagasse deftly sketches the more familiar multiculturalism of its 20th century neighborhoods, describing her upbringing in the city’s working-class Irish Channel with a Mexican grandmother who found all of the familiar spices of her homeland -- achiote, cilantro, comino, herba buena -- at the open-air French Market.

Chase, who earned the sobriquet “Queen of Creole Cuisine” at her revered Dooky Chase restaurant, notes how the past informs the living city in half-remembered snatches of ghost language -- vestigial proof that when it’s all said and done, New Orleans just ain’t Kansas.

Chase recalls her mother’s admonition: “Fix yourself up, look good. We don’t want to run around looking like Joe Lapicote.” She had no idea “who Joe Lapicote was, just that he was trashy looking and all the old Creole ladies who raised me used that phrase and I knew it meant we were not to go out of the house without fixing ourselves up.”

Writer Randy Fertel describes his father, a beloved local eccentric known as the “Gorilla Man” for a 1969 mayoral campaign in which he traversed the city in a safari outfit and a single promise: to bring a gorilla to the Audubon Zoo. “Dad tracked down a man whose gorilla suit he had admired during Mardi Gras,” Fertel writes. “They rode together in a convertible and every few blocks Dad would send the gorilla over the side to make a show, sniffing at some unfortunate young woman and beating his chest.”

James argues in her introduction that New Orleanians must reinvent themselves as heroes in the wake of Katrina. But the book’s contributors seem to say: Let New York supply the heroes. New Orleans will make its plea for salvation on the basis of its ancient and curious American sideshow, full of Joe Lapicotes, gorilla men and Mexican abuelas whose cooking wafts through a German-Irish neighborhood that outsiders mistake for French.