The first gunshots startled me.
It was only 7pm, and usually the mayhem starts much later, the sounds of automatic pistols and assault rifles punctuating the darkness from midnight until about four in the morning. But there they were as I started cooking dinner, pocketa-pocketa-pock-pock, then the same metre repeated again.
Jim Gabour is an award-winning film producer, writer and director living in New Orleans. His website is here
Also by Jim Gabour in openDemocracy:
"A New Orleans diary" (February 2006)
"New Orleans ode to carnival"
(February 2006)
"Out of order"
(March 2006)
"The deliveryman's story" (March 2006)
"An electoral storm in New Orleans"
(April 2006)
"The choice is not choice" (May 2006)
"Frozen assets: letter from New Orleans" (June 2006)
"Urban renewal"
(June 2006)
"The big heat"
(July 2006)
"Disarmed"
(August 2006)
"Insecticide"
(August 2006)
"Hell hath no fury"
(29 August 2006)
"Life as a remainder" (14 September 2006)
"Long life lines"
(6 October 2006)
"Swimming"
(19 December 2006)
The sounds of one human trying to render another dead. Not a real appetite stimulant.
Only another hour or two into the evening - I admit it, I was already in bed with a book - the sirens started. There had been none for the first, earlier shooting, and these were different from the usual long wavering wails of the American police car. These were shorter, maybe ten to fifteen seconds, and happened in bursts of six to seven sirens within fifteen minutes, then nothing for an hour, then another set.
I suspect the police were trying to let the Bad Guys know they were in the area, and at the same time both reassure, and not alarm, the real residents.
They woke me up. I was not reassured. I was not alarmed. I was angry. Because it has come to this.
New Orleans is now two separate creatures.
One is the same welcoming, bawdy, colourful ageing auntie who brings visitors into her living room and gives them a fine old time of food, music, and genteel decadence.
Then there is the monster - the deadly cash- and dope-fuelled fiend that those of us who live here have to contend with on a daily basis. And she is out of control. The politicians all say they have the answer. They have said that a number of times over the last eighteen months, but here we are losing neighbours and friends on a daily basis, a murder a day thus far into 2007.
In an hour I will join with hundreds, maybe thousands, of others and march from all over the community to the steps of city hall, to tell the other face of the monster - the politicians - that we have had enough. That we won't live here if we have to die here, at least not die like this.
Please don't be frightened away. Visitors are safe. They are sacred. They are coddled and protected, even while seated comfortably in the massive air-conditioned tour buses that roll through destroyed neighborhoods on "disaster tours". Make no mistake, we need people to come here, to spend money here, to make us feel that it will eventually be alright. We want you to see how valuable and magic this place really is.
But we also need the world to shame the American government into doing what it was founded to do: protect its citizens with more than hollow sirens in the middle of the night.
