NOLA Life Stories by Mark Cave and Thomas Walsh (review)

In April 2014, New Orleans radio station WWNO began collaboration with the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC) on NOLA Life Stories, an audio series featuring selections from the HNOC’s oral history archive. Compiled by HNOC historian and archivist Mark Cave, the New Orleans Life History Project seeks to preserve individual voices that reflect and deepen public understanding of New Orleans history, and WWNO’s NOLA Life Storiesprogram provides a sample of these tales as curated by Cave and WWNO producer Thomas Walsh.

Cave and Walsh have spotlighted seventeen individuals so far in this ongoing series, which is housed for permanent public access on the WWNO and HNOC websites. The NOLA Life Storiesintroductory text on the WWNO website explains that the series highlights “first person perspectives of the individuals who have helped to shape our community,” immediately introducing key research questions: How has New Orleans been shaped throughout time, and who has done the shaping?

From my perspective as an anthropologist, I feel that the stories provided do not always speak to this overall goal, perhaps because of the limitations faced by producers to create general, brief radio vignettes. Each story receives four to seven minutes of high-quality audio clips as well as a few paragraphs of written summary of a particular event in the narrator’s life. This minimal approach reduces much longer narratives (available at the HNOC archive) into audience-friendly snapshots more appropriate to the online format. In terms of content, the pieces barely whet an appetite for New Orleans history. An expansion of the number of narrators included, as well as a more purposeful summary of each individual’s whole story, would focus the series’s contributions on the roles of each in the continued development of this oft-called exceptional American city.

Most obviously, NOLA Life Storiespresents a slightly lopsided view of the city and its voices of agency and change. Only three people of color are featured on the website, and each of their stories addresses racialized difference and the various nuances of segregation and integration in New Orleans. The other fourteen stories on display showcase mainly white business owners, but only narrator George Wein, Jazz Fest producer, acknowledges the city’s historic imbalances. Wein speaks of an encounter with a black waiter who recognized him for a crucial role in the integration of the city: “New Orleans is a city of vignettes, and that’s one of the great vignettes of my life.”

The strength of the NOLA Life Storieslies in these vignettes as well. Restaurateur JoAnn Clevenger describes the French Quarter as “the epitome of cultural tourism,” and lingers on memories of the French Market as a past grocery for locals—a historic detail now lost in the transition of downtown New Orleans to a more commercial state. Former New Orleans Museum of Art director Tom Bullard remembers a jazz funeral for King Tut following the 1977 museum exhibit, which attracted a larger crowd than that year’s Super Bowl and inspired donations to the museum for years to come.

In a particularly poignant audio clip, Leona Tate, one of the four students to integrate McDonogh 19 school in 1960, recalls preparing for her first day as if for a holiday: “It was a busy morning, but it was a happy morning,” she explains, and describes how outside the school crowds were gathered as if for a Mardi Gras parade. Her use of place-based metaphors continues to describe the reactions of white parents and students: “Like a hurricane was coming, that’s how fast they were leaving.” These images still resonate in a contemporary New Orleans setting and provide a level of detail and emotion essential to good oral history.

The vignettes illuminated in the NOLA Life Storiesdo not always easily fit together into a cohesive narrative about the city. My own critiques of the series arise not from the New Orleans Life History Project...