ABSTRACT
One of New Orleans’s many informal historians begins her 1973 outsider’s guide with a description of signage “mercilessly bludgeoning” the tourist entering the city. Visible there is what she calls clashing legends: an elegant Latin culture doing battle with corruption and turpitude. Both are for sale. 1 “A dreadful whimsy assaults the stranger’s intelligence, threatens everything of beauty in the city, peers out between the pages of the countless ‘stories of new Orleans.’” 2 Determined not to write a booster’s book, she introduces New Orleans’s merciless advertisements for itself before she has a sazerac in hand, shrimp remoulade in her mouth, and the scent of urine-soaked pavement and sweet olive in her head. She will not succumb to these charms. The corruption and violence that are as endemic as the poverty contribute to a frontier atmosphere, whose other aspects—an untarnished landscape, a simplicity, a friendliness—an outsider finds hard to resist; he is even hypnotized by it all, as if the heavy scent of the flowers, the rank acridity of the Delta, the heat and haze and humidity had lulled him like a lotus-eater to forget the harsher realities. 3 No lotus-eater, she purports to correct the work of other writers who do not separate fact from fiction about the city.
