Water and Water

 “Camino Ghosts” by John Grisham, 2024

This story is reminiscent of those by Carl Hiaasen about the destructive shenanigans of real estate capitalists in natural Florida, but not quite as comedic. It is haunted by one of the U.S.'s original sins, slavery. It features the usual array of middle-class heroes – a bookseller, a crusading environmental lawyer and a careerist writer. It highlights the wisdom of an old dark-skinned lady, Lovely. It has touches of black magic and violence dressed up as unexplainable natural phenomena.

Welcome to 'Dark Isle” an uninhabited barrier island on the Atlantic at the northern border of Florida. A 3x1 mile strip of heavy jungle and thin white sand beaches, now populated by poisonous snakes, panthers and deadly bacteria. It used to be home to a colony of freedmen escaped from bondage, in an area first dominated by the anti-slavery Spanish, then the pro-slavery U.S. Now it's 2020 and all are dead except that stubborn 80-year old lady, who left the island at 15 and now lives on nearby Camino Island.

Real estate investors are salivating over this uninhabited island's future, visualizing a casino, a yacht harbor, a golf course, condominiums and hotels after the vegetation is bulldozed – ruining it like every other barrier island in the state.  Yet oddly, occasional trespassers to what the developers want to call 'Panther Cay' don't survive or just disappear. It doesn't seem to always be for factual reasons but they are certainly dead. Is this the result of 'dark magic' – voodoo, juju, gris gris, Santeria revenge? Is that what it takes to fight Florida's 'growth' industry? It's a thin reed to hang onto, a measure of how bad it has gotten that writers have to inject magical curses into their stories to power their narrative.

Grisham writes leftish, happy-ending books, usually with a lawyer as a central character, usually with lawsuits over money corruption, racism or environmental destruction. Like Hiaasen he makes fun of the stable of swarmy Florida creeps, lawyers and greedy suits in the suites. This book has too much about the 'book business' as if Grisham is also riffing off his own experience writing dozens of books. The legal issues, especially Lovely's claim to own the island due to her being it's last living resident, a legal doctrine known as 'adverse possession,' take center stage. As proof she claims there is a cemetery of her relatives somewhere on the island. Will she and they win? Read it and find out.

Tremé by David Simon, S.1, 2010 (A reprise)

Another Southern story, set in New Orleans just after 2005's Hurricane Katrina. The series features a strong ensemble cast with sometimes intersecting stories which I can't recommend enough. There is a hard scrabbling trombone player, a tough Mardi Gras Indian, a lawyer looking for a jailed and missing African-American man, an angry Tulane English professor, a funny hipster DJ, a hard-working chef, two street musicians, a New York modern jazz musician and a bar owner trying to reconstruct her business and find her younger brother. NO jazz takes center stage, as second-line parades, jazz funerals, Mardi Gras, various music clubs and even the New York jazz scene are featured. Famous musicians make cameos or play in this season – Elvis Costello, Kermit Ruffins, Trombone Shorty, Allan Touissant, the Tremé Brass Band, Steve Earle, Dr. John, McCoy Tyner and others. Some of the actors are also musicians, like the two 'street' musicians Sonny and Annie. N'Orlins clubs like the Spotted Cat, Vaughans, Snug Harbor, Bullets, Donnas, Tipitinas and the Howlin' Wolf show up, along with the Blue Note in NYC.

Mardi Gras Indians

I've always felt Tremé was Simon's mea culpa for The Wire, which tried to touch many issues of corruption in Baltimore, but still centered the 'black' drug trade. Here instead of black drug dealers we get working-class people or small businessmen, some very marginal, trying to live a decent life in the wake of the incredible damage of Katrina. No mercy is shown to real lumpenism here. The show is political, attacking Democratic mayor Ray Nagin and the corrupt City Council, Republican president George Dubbya Bush, the Corps of Engineers, FEMA, the NO police, the insurance industry – the whole power structure that failed before, during and after Katrina. It was really the first large example of U.S. climate change and migration, along with being a model of racist removal. Simon at one time called himself a 'half-Marxist' – agreeing with Marx's diagnosis of capitalism, but rejected his solutions. It is reflected in this series, which features both individual, family and group struggles, but that only go so far. Adolph Reed Jr. thinks it simplified the issues, and yeah, it's not a deep dive into the hold of the New Orleans ruling class on the city.

Tremé is the historic neighborhood east of Canal Street and across Rampart from the French Quarter / Vieux Carré. It contains the former homes of many jazz musicians, Congo Square / Louis Armstrong Park and historic cemeteries, with Basin Street winding through. It reflects the proletarian French, indigenous, African and Caribbean heritage of this port city, a city that gave birth to jazz and parts of blues and rock and roll. A raised city Interstate 10 looms above part of the quarter, seen frequently in the episodes. The season romanticizes New Orleans, but that turns out better than demonizing it. If you are a music lover, have enjoyed visiting New Orleans or are aware of the dire politics and issues surrounding Katrina, this season is for you.

Prior blog reviews on these subjects, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “slavery,” “Native Tongue,” “Sick Puppy” (both by Hiaasen); “Florida,” “The Magic Kingdom” (R. Banks); “Nickel Boys,” “The Wire” (Simon); “Jazz,” “Really the Blues” (Mezzrow); “In Search of the Blues,” “Treme,” “Rising Tide,” “How to Kill a City.” “Extreme Cities,” “Shock Doctrine” (Klein).

Kultur Kommissar / June 28, 2024