Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s first short story collection reads like neighborhood gossip shared between friends with each story giving voice to New Orleans’ overlooked residents.
Many of the stories are only a couple pages long, giving the reader only partial glimpses into their characters’ lives. Ruffin makes the most of the limited space, however, with sharp and creative observations, describing one character as a man who, “...got a fat neck and skin like old peaches;” and another as “...a scruffy little cat...” The stories’ short length invites the reader to enjoy several at a time and let the collection’s kaleidoscopic view of New Orleans slowly come into focus.
Longer stories like “Before I Let Go” offer a deeper look into how gentrification affects the lives of longtime Black residents and the fallout that occurs when they are displaced. The story’s protagonist Gailya struggles to keep a job, first as a nanny to a white family and then as a maid at a hotel, in order to pay her property taxes. She is one of the few Black residents left on her block and is constantly being asked by her white neighbors to join their neighborhood council.
Living paycheck to paycheck and facing the prospect of displacement, Gailya accepts her neighbors’ invitation and attends their meeting in a recently opened local coffee shop. Gailya recalls:
The coffee shop had been a po’ boy shop….Now there’s a drawing of a po’ boy, like a science man might make, with details of where to insert the fried shrimps, where to put the mayonnaise.
When she looks around at the meeting’s attendees she thinks most of them look:
...like people she’s worked for at one point or another. She knows that if any of her old neighbors were here, they would make them understand. But she realizes it falls on her. It always fell on her, and that if she were gone, nobody would ever come to understand anything at all.
Gailya’s story, like all the stories in this collection, are both an elegy to and celebration of Black life in New Orleans. And though the characters’ lives are filled with hardship, they take comfort in the community they have left. In the closing pages of the final story, Gailya hears a parade marching toward her street and she can’t wait to, “...be in the crush of bodies when it turns the corner to the next block, thousands of arms, legs, and eyes reaching for a bell of brass.” The book, like the parade, is a joyful bearing of witness that’s a pleasure to get lost in.