Drenched in its identity

Cities 2010 | From social organizations to Mardi Gras and from Black Indians to jazz funerals, New Orleans is anything but a nonplace | Marvin Olasky

Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS—Why has New Orleans, economically depressed for years and then knifed by Katrina, come back to life? (See WORLD's cover story, Aug. 15, 2009.) The Saints' Super Bowl helped, but part of the answer lies in an old funeral home reincarnated as the Backstreet Cultural Museum.

Walker Percy, one of the two great American Christian fiction writers of the last half century (Flannery O'Connor was the other), lived in Covington, La., across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. He wrote in 1980 that he liked living in Covington because it was "a nonplace in a certain relation to a place." He wrote that he would not have wanted to live where his fore­fathers had lived because "such places are haunted. Ancestors perch on your shoulders while you write."