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City of refuge : a novel
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2008
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City of Refuge A Novel Chapter One Deep mid-August in the New Orleans heat. Not even much traffic a block away on North Claiborne, a Saturday afternoon, and the sound of SJ's hammer going in the stupefying thick air. SJ was almost finished framing the new shed he was building in his backyard. Wiring and Sheetrocking would be for after Labor Day. Way off in the distance, past the Industrial Canal and the reaches of the Upper Ninth Ward and the Bywater, the skyscrapers of downtown and the iridescent blister of the Superdome roof lay naked under the brilliant sun. Out front, SJ's truck and his van sat in the curved cement driveway he had laid in front of his house (he had moved the structure back seven feet to make room for that driveway), with the magnetic sign on the door--New Breed Carpentry and Repair, and his phone number. It had been cheaper than getting it stenciled on the door itself, and it worked fine, he got calls off of it. He had, however, painted his own name in script on the front fender, the way the taxi drivers did, for an extra touch of distinction. Most of his work came from out in New Orleans East, a sprawling area of new houses and curving, landscaped streets in the subdivisions, reclaimed from swampland in the 1970s, where he could certainly have moved, if money were the only question and he had wanted to leave the Lower Ninth, which he didn't. SJ's father had built his own house in a vacant lot on North Miro Street, five blocks away, when he came back from World War II, with two-by-fours and weatherboard and nails that he salvaged from all around and saved up by his mama's house. He pulled the nails out of scrap wood, carefully, or found them on the ground, and sometimes even straightened them if they could be straightened, one nail at a time. He kept them in what his mother called put-up jars, sorted roughly by size and thickness and purpose. SJ had kept that old house, although his father was dead and gone, and he rented it out to a widow lady. Sometimes when he wanted to get off by himself he would walk those five blocks to the old house and sit on the side steps and think. He hammered some finishing nails into a line across the bottom of a small French cornice. He was trying something different with this shed, which he had seen in one of the books his daughter, Camille, sent him from North Carolina, something a little more decorative in a different way, not just utilitarian. His thin, ribbed undershirt, with thin straps over his shoulder, was soaked through with sweat, which glistened on his shaved head, shoulders and upper arms. Around his neck on a thin chain hung a St. Christopher medal. In his mid-fifties, SJ was still a powerful, compact man. He loved to build things, to work with his hands, and he loved to cook, especially outside, and he liked to read. After Rosetta, his wife, had died of an aortic aneurism six years earlier, he had read less and built more. He would finish the line he was working on and then stop for the day and get some food going. He would go out to find Wesley later if he could; he had left his nephew to finish up a part of the job the day before and Wesley had left the tools sitting outside and SJ had come out in the morning to find them slick with overnight wet. He had wiped them down and put them in the oven to sweat them out, but he didn't understand that carelessness at all. His nephew was a smart young man, nineteen years old and teetering on the edge of some-thing anyone in the Lower Nine knew all too well. Lately he had been riding around at night on these motorcycles where you had to hunch way over, weaving in and out of stopped traffic. Where he got the money for the bike SJ didn't know and Lucy, SJ's sister, would not say. At least, SJ thought, they had the bikes to work on. Working with your hands kept you focused on the real world. Still, you could hit a pothole on of those bikes and end up in a wheelchair for life. Two weeks earlier the police arrested Wesley for beating on his girlfriend. SJ had drilled into his nephew many times the importance of surviving the encounter with police when you had one. Wesley had a quick mouth and a mannish attitude, but he had done allright, at least he hadn't gotten the police mad, and SJ got the call from the jail at 3:30 in the morning and SJ and Lucy had to go down and get him out on bond and later on SJ had demanded an accounting from his nephew. "Uncle J she slap me and I didn't hit her. I'm not lying." They were sitting in SJ's living room, the sky just getting light outside. Wesley had on jeans with the crotch halfway down to his knees, and an oversize T-shirt hanging out, and he had taken off his Raiders cap at his uncle's request. His reddish skin seemed to be breaking out, and his hair was uneven and untended. "Then she slap me again and called me a pussy. What I'm supposed to do?" "Walk out the room, nephew. You already paying for another man's baby. How she going to respect you? You need to find a woman who gonna watch your back and not put a knife in it. It doesn't matter how good that pussy is, you got to stay alive." Wesley looked up at his uncle then, sly smile, the charming look, "It is good, Uncle J." SJ allowed himself a small laugh. He knew as well as anyone. He remembered one of the old blues records his father liked to play, something about "Some people say she's no good, but she's allright with me." City of Refuge A Novel . Copyright © by Tom Piazza. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from City of Refuge by Tom Piazza All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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Trade Reviews
New York Times Review
Varied experiences, similar resolves in Hurricane Katrinas wake. FOR Americans curious about the mysterious ways in which their current president chooses to govern, the submerging of New Orleans under as much as 15 feet of water was particularly revealing, if only to convey that governing seemed to be the furthest thing from his mind. Five long days passed before federal troops were sent in with supplies, during which residents too poor to evacuate were corralled into the Superdome (until part of the roof peeled away), and then to the convention center (no food, no water, no electricity) or else the sidewalk outside, while those who stayed with their homes were swimming among their belongings, gasping for air in the few feet between the water line and the ceiling, as corpses drifted by, bloating in the heat. President Bush appeared ready to travel everywhere but Louisiana, stopping in Arizona to present John McCain with a birthday cake and in California to receive a country singer's gift of an acoustic guitar. The two Michaels (Brown of FEMA and Chertoff of Homeland security) made reassuring noises that they were on top of the situation, until it became obvious they weren't, at which point they denied ever knowing that Hurricane Katrina could amount to anything more than a lot of rain. In New York, secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bolstered her end of the united front by taking in a performance of "Spamalot." The musical numbers included "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," in case she needed reminding. It is against the backdrop of this American Grotesque that Tom Piazza has written two books about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina: a short, furious treatise called "Why New Orleans Matters," rushed to publication in the winter of 2005 after it was written in a five-week burst of anger and mourning, and now, three years later, "City of Refuge," a novel that follows two fictional families among the ruins of the actual event. One family, named Donaldson, is white; the other, named Williams, is black. The Donaldsons evacuate before the hurricane begins; the Williamses do not. The Donaldsons eventually find themselves in Chicago, with their relatives; the Williamses are separated during the flooding and are sent to Houston, Albany and a little town in Missouri. Craig Donaldson, the editor of the city's alternative newspaper, moved to New Orleans as an adult (as did Tom Piazza), and his attachments to the city have grown more tenacious ever since; SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, has lived in the Lower Ninth Ward for his entire life, and his attachments to the city were inscribed from the very beginning. If all of this sounds both well intentioned and schematic, that's because it is. "City of Refuge" seems to have been planned as a novel about the triumph of virtue in the face of disaster; not a novel concerned with what may or may not happen to virtue in the lives of particular characters, but a novel in which the characters are deployed to show that virtue will, in the end, prevail. Craig and his wife have been having troubles before the hurricane that are due, as far as I can tell, to her underappreciation of New Orleans, which is described in more than one instance as "the city he loved." The Williamses have had their troubles too - Lucy, SJ's older sister, drinks, and her teenage son, Wesley, has been questioned by the police for hitting his girlfriend - though the inquiries of a social worker, we are told, missed the point: "The fact was, above all else, that Lucy truly loved Wesley and the boy knew it and it was the closest, most stable relationship in his life. SJ loved Lucy, too; almost everybody did. She could get drunk and act foolish, but it came out of a generosity of spirit." That the word "love" is used so liberally throughout is indicative of how earnestly Piazza wants to move the reader, who apparently has to be told just how meaningful everything is in order to comprehend the magnitude of what will be lost. There is "the big oak tree Craig loved," and the fact that "SJ loved his house" ; when Craig sees his daughter, his "heart is flattened with joy and love," and he objects to his wife's "attacking this place and the life that they had loved and shared together." Before the hurricane, Craig gives a party at home, and we learn that "few things made him happier than this, having friends in his house, with the music he loved playing," and after the hurricane, contemplating whether to return to New Orleans, he resolves not "to be a suburban squire in Chicago while the city he loved sank." So diligent are his characters at their work that Piazza gives them occasional breaks, inserting passages of sociological commentary that describe what is happening elsewhere in the city. But the actual urgency of the situation, the horrible vitality of it, is too often stifled by the sloppiness of the writing: "The poorer the neighborhood and the harder people had to fight to stand their ground through the years, the less likely they were to jump ship and head for higher ground, even if they had the means to do so." Although the gist of this sentence is easy enough to apprehend, the careless confusion of clichés - if the people are standing their ground, what is a ship doing there? - overlooks the living experience for the received idea, dutifully noted but cursory and inert. The haste with which so many lines seem to have been written, the plucking of sentimentality's low-hanging fruit, suggests a novelist who assumes he can neglect literary possibilities in his pronouncement of what he takes to be a Greater Truth. I would have expected otherwise from the author of "Blues and Trouble," a collection of stories, and "My Cold War," a novel, both of which were willing to linger in worlds thick with surprising locutions and moral ambiguity. Perhaps there are those who believe that a novel tasked with telling the story of a reallife tragedy deserves a special dispensation, a reprieve from literature's more complicated concerns. But to relieve fiction of its burdens is to relieve it of its power. Indeed, much of "City of Refuge" seems to have been written with the same heavy hand as "Why New Orleans Matters," in which Piazza declares, "New Orleans inspires the kind of love that very few other cities do." If it is Piazza's hope with "City of Refuge" to encourage empathy on the part of the reader, which is as worthy a purpose as any, then to begin what is supposed to be an emotional love scene with this - "Now they stepped onto the first steppingstone of what there was no keeping a Ud on" - is to gamble that his readers are paying enough attention only to register the momentousness of the occasion and that the prose will slip by, unnoticed, like bad breath. I don't doubt that there are readers who couldn't care less, who might turn to "City of Refuge" simply to learn more about Hurricane Katrina, but I wonder what they could find in this novel that isn't available in other, more immediate, forms. Douglas Brinkley's nonfiction chronicle "The Great Deluge," for instance, and Spike Lee's documentary "When the Levees Broke" include the true stories of those who suffered and endured and lived to tell us about those who didn't. The actual words of the actual survivors are devastating already, and a novelist who dares to create a fictional version of their experience has also taken it upon himself to issue more than a swell of emotion. The citizens of New Orleans were failed by government officials in thrall to foolish optimism and best-case scenarios; what fiction offers is the potential to confront such lazy habits of thinking with a relentless focus on complexity and nuance. Although Piazza's intentions are clearly sincere and good, to slather a novel in sentiment only replaces one set of abstractions with another. A transplanted newspaper editor determines not to become a 'suburban squire while the city he loved sank.' Jennifer Szalai is a senior editor of Harper's Magazine.
Library Journal Review
In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, setting off a catastrophe of flooding, panic, and death on a scale never before been seen in the United States. Piazza (Why New Orleans Matters) recaptures the devastation of that storm and its aftermath through the stories of two families--one black, one white--who are driven from their homes by floodwaters and spend days as evacuees in shelters and on the road, finally ending up in Houston and Chicago, where they try to piece together temporary lives while waiting to see what the future holds. Through the Donaldson and Williams families--their memories, their longings, their determination--Piazza paints a beautiful portrait of the Crescent City, as indefatigable in spirit as its citizens. This emotional novel reads like a memoir, teeming with fear, anger, pathos, hope, determination, and love. It is absolutely essential reading for every American who watched and prayed through those terrible days. Highly recommended for all fiction collections. [This book was just picked for the One Book, One New Orleans program.--Ed.]--Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
A passionate ode to the Big Easy's cracked bowl, the latest from Piazza (Why New Orleans Matters) offers two alternating perspectives on Katrina and its aftermath. For Craig Donaldson--a white Michigan transplant who edits local culture organ Gumbo, who has a tidy house near Tulane University and whose two-child marriage appears headed for divorce--Katrina becomes a pressure valve for his own stifled emotions, as Craig rants about the despicable lies of George Bush, the man-made nature of the Katrina disaster, and his own marriage. Much more effective are sections that focus on SJ, a black Vietnam vet and widower from the Lower Ninth Ward, who is taking care of his invalid sister, Lucy, as the hurricane strikes. Craig's and SJ's approaches to evacuation couldn't differ more, and while their competing narratives occasionally illustrate the city's race and class divide a little too schematically, the point that thousands were left to rot is brought home with kinetic intensity. In stark contrast to Craig's bluster--and to some of the stereotypes handed to Lucy's character--SJ's methodical approach to the disaster and his ability to rebound from devastating loss speak volumes. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Piazza knows New Orleans, its flavors and aromas, music and magic, pragmatism and joie de vivre. He also understands the full tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and is determined to dispel complacency to make sure it isn't forgotten. So we meet SJ Williams, an African American carpenter and Vietnam vet who loves his home in the Lower Ninth Ward, keeps his demons at bay through the discipline of hard work, and looks out for his sister and teenage nephew. Craig Donaldson is an Anglo-American magazine editor crazy about his adopted city, a passion no longer shared with his wife now that they have young children. In the pre-storm chapters, the conflicts and dreams of Piazza's characters, men and women of bedrock goodness, define home, revealing all that Katrina will disrupt and destroy. Then, in unforgettable scenes of biblical consequence, Piazza dramatizes more devastatingly than any journalistic account the hurricane's shocking aftermath, aligning the failure to protect, rescue, and respect the people of the Lower Ninth with the sweeping brutality of war. By following his characters into the Katrina diaspora and back again, Piazza tells a towering tale of self, family, and place, a story as old and heartbreaking as humankind itself.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Piazza follows the cultural history of his adopted city (Why New Orleans Matters, 2005, etc.) with this powerfully empathetic second novel about Katrina's impact in 2005. His focus is two New Orleans families; one white, one black. The white Donaldsons (husband Craig, wife Alice, two small kids) are transplants from the Midwest. Craig, editor of an alternative newsmagazine, loves the city; it is his "refuge." Alice has become disenchanted; this strains their marriage. In the predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward are the Williamses: SJ, his older sister, Lucy, and her 19-year-old son, Wesley. SJ is a third-generation Orleansian with his own carpentry and repair business. A widower, SJ has seldom dated since his wife's death, finding salvation in work. The less disciplined Lucy battles drug and alcohol problems, and is a loving but part-time mother to Wesley. The story chronicles the time before, during and after Katrina. The Donaldsons leave town, endure horrendous traffic and wind up with distant relatives in Chicago; the Williamses stay put. The day after the hurricane SJ finds himself living in a lake; only his second floor is habitable. He commandeers a rowboat, as dead bodies float past him, and rescues neighbors; a Vietnam vet, SJ knows how to tamp down emotions. What pulls the reader in is this struggle with adversity; the sensitively portrayed Donaldsons are necessary for Piazza's balanced, big-picture view, but their suffering is just an itch compared to the travails of the Williamses, and that's a problem. In their confrontations with death, their accidental separation and disorienting relocations (Missouri, upstate New York), SJ, Lucy and Wesley (eventually reunited in Houston) are simply more real. The Donaldsons, after some lucky breaks, make the wrenching decision to stay in Chicago, while New Orleans, though looking post-Katrina like someone who "had had a lobotomy," still has enough spirit to celebrate Mardi Gras. The struggles of the two families depicted are not always well balanced, but Piazza's writing is so fresh and vital readers will feel, all over again, the outrage at the abandonment of this beloved city. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary (Español)
En el tórrido atardecer del viernes 19 de agosto de 2011, se producía un hecho insólito en la Plaza de Cibeles de Madrid. Una serie de pasos procesionales de Semana Santa poblaban el Paseo de Recoletos, miles de jóvenes se agolpaban en los alrededores y un hombre, vestido de blanco y rojo, observaba con devoción y respeto este singular espectáculo. No, no era Semana Santa, ni estaban en Sevilla, Valladolid o Cuenca. Pero se trataba de un acontecimiento excepcional: estaban a mitad de una Jornada Mundial de la Juventud, celebrada ese año en Madrid, y aquel hombre era el papa Benedicto XVI que, por primera vez en una JMJ, participaba en la celebración de un Vía Crucis.
Summary
In City ofRefuge, a heart-wrenching novel from Tom Piazza, the author of the award-winning Why New Orleans Matters, two New Orleansfamilies--one black and one white--confront Hurricane Katrina, a storm that will change the course of their lives. Reaching acrossAmerica--from the neighborhoods ofNew OrleanstoTexas,Chicago, and elsewhere--City of Refuge explores this turning point in American culture, one whose reverberations are only beginning to be understood.

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