5 - St. Charles Avenue – Blood and Money

Summary

This chapter begins by charting the way the area upriver from the French Quarter became a part of the city, and then takes up each of its major neighborhoods – the Garden District, the Irish Channel, the University District, and Central City – through the major writing associated with them. As major family fortunes began to develop in this area toward the middle of the nineteenth century, a literature about the forms of violence by which such fortunes are made and held inevitably followed. Anne Rice, Sister Helen Prejean, and John Kennedy Toole, but Shirley Anne Grau, Ellen Gilchrest and Dean Paschal share them too. These themes turn up in the writing of the University District through poets interested in extremes of religious devotion (Peter Cooley), alcoholic self-destruction (Everette Maddox), and political paranoia (Brad Richard). They arise in Central City through the Hip-Hop and Bounce empires known as No Limit and Cash Money, and also in the legacies of racial violence associated with Robert Charles in the early twentieth century and Mark Essex in the 1970s, and the database created by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall that potentially overturns the erasure and alienation that is the long-term consequence of white supremacist violence.