Yeah You Right: A New Orleans Manifesto

08.28.09 | 10:57 AM ET

See, this always happens to me on assignment.

I start picking up local phrases and catch words. It’s my love of language and place—read the business card, “Travel Writer”—and the peculiarities of choice phrases are like linguistic souvenirs, or more accurately, tattoos. If somewhere has a better way of saying something, I let that wording become a part of me.

In New Orleans I learned three magic words: “Yeah you right.” That little line became the city, condensed, the abridged verbiage of a relentless push to live life large. Another shot? Yeah you right. More hot sauce? Yeah you right. Should we cook this bacon in brown sugar? Yeah you right. The more colloquial and emphatic “Yeah” over “yes” coupled with the dropped verb “are” makes the affirmation of your New Orleans activity—often something fun, physically damaging, illegal or all of the above—immediate. “Are” is the copula form of “to be.” “Yes you will be correct if you want that next drink,” evolves into “You have become the fifth shot of Jameson.” Call it Creole Zen. Being a Jedi of the Order of the NOLA.

That’s the academic explanation of the appeal of “Yeah you right” to my inner frat boy. But it’s not fair to characterize one of the greatest cities in the world, the one remembered at this time of year for all the wrong reasons—the corruption, inefficiency and neglect that led to the preventable disaster of Katrina—solely in terms of the epicurean. To stick with the alliteratives, it’s more about excess down in NOLA, a many and varied excess that seeks to celebrate life rather than, as the Bourbon Street booze-geois do, escape it. How? By using life and liveliness to commemorate death, worship and the Sabbath with impromptu parades. By eating indescribably rich cuisine, attending regular live music gigs and supporting monthly art gallery walks. “Yeah you right” applies to the intellectual. Aesthete. Artist. All of the above mixing in an Ogden Museum after-hours show on Thursdays.

Actually, screw all of the above—I prefer intermixed, which is a nice word for miscegenation, which is another keystone of this town’s identity. New Orleans’ population is rooted, culturally and genetically, in the quality of Creole. They call the local attitude towards life the New Orleans Way, and if that Way means blending, it’s a Way in the Taoist, Lao Tzu sense of the word: “hidden but always present.” While the rest of America was segregated this town was ... well, segregated too, but unofficially and often openly the races (and the Euro-Catholic old guard and American Protestant newcomers) never stopped mingling.

That’s why, for all its old-line and modern divisions, this city has always been about acceptance. Its history is one of welcoming immigrants with different languages—French, Croats, Hondurans, Jews, Germans and Vietnamese—pirates with shady histories, even lovers with different sexualities. Think of the overused but applicable gumbo analogy: using everything in the pot to create something delicious. And down in NOLA recognition extends beyond respecting different communities to accepting individuals. New Orleans is always willing to give a new artist or chef a chance. The local love of life, exemplified by all that excess, is always open to a new recipe or angle on beauty. I think that’s why freaks and geeks and misfits are all drawn here, and I count myself among their honored ranks.

Merrily mixing communities stoke the coals of “Yeah you right,” feed the passions of the men and women (and trannies) of New Orleans. But what sets off the city’s fire is, perhaps ironically, her entropy, her constant crumble and semi-permanent rot. I’ve always loved that New Orleans, unlike much of America, welcomes her dark side, practically groping her Jungian Shadow. There are bright lights here, but they’re not Vegas neon. Think gas lamps flickering on sweat and sunlight slanting through a Tulane coed’s summer dress. You appreciate that sort of light, because the lamp fights back the darkness in Milneburg lots washed away by Katrina. The sunlight on the girl can vanish in a storm.

This creates desperate beauty, a sort of loveliness of the ephemeral. Because of desperate beauty the characters of this drama don’t spend their lives day to day, but rather in the final act of some Russian romance, living so strongly they burn like fireflies making love over Bayou St. John. And that love of life comes from an acknowledgment—even embrace—of death. The Carnival season, for all the “Show your tits” silliness, has its roots in fundamentally Christian concepts of denial and resurrection, and in black New Orleans, Mardi Gras begins with the cold march of the Skeletons, men dressed as corpses carrying a sobering slogan: You Next. When medieval Christian theology mixes on the streets with processions that emerged straight from West African secret societies, I can tell you, with more fire than the angriest Republican, I am proud to be an American. 

The city is also shaped, more than most, literally and figuratively, by her geography. From the marsh comes gumbo’s ingredients, but amongst the sassafras were the Yellow Fever and floods that long made life here so short. The surrounding bayous are a moon-lapped orgy of tides, slipstreams, shorelines and storms, where time unfolds slowly and death snaps quickly, like geckos under ceiling fans. No wonder so many South Vietnamese settled here in the 1970s. For a fisherman from Vung Tao, the mouths of the Mississippi and the Mekong mix hardship, flatness, bounty and mudscent into one wind-bent green pancake of geographic equivalence.

All of these qualities—epicurean excess, Creole acceptance, entropic decay and natural topography—make New Orleans effortlessly what many American cities are straining to recapture: a place with a distinctive sense of place, as indispensable to our nation as Yellowstone and Manhattan. And that place almost died four years ago, when its neglected levee system failed and a moderately strong hurricane dumped the city under several feet of water.

Then something amazing happened. Many call New Orleanians laid-back at best, and I know more than a few natives who’d happily cop to being labeled lazy. But people who held on after the storm did so with a work ethic I’d be blessed to possess. They dredged rubble and corpses from their basements and rebuilt their homes and restaurants and bars with the debris of former lives (literally; visit the Mid-City Yacht Club, where the ceiling is built from the old floorboards of washed away neighbors). Thousands of “New New Orleanians” moved here, motivated to rebuild, a generation of 20- and 30-somethings whose only experience of Louisiana hurricanes may have been the Bourbon Street cocktail. Something about this place touched them, a feeling that there was more to the city than parties or corpses on CNN.

In New Orleans, phoenixes chased away the carrion crows.

Many came, in a sense, as travelers, seeking what the traveler most desires: a location that burns itself into the heart. But New Orleans burned too well. Sometimes, when a place is so special, it stops being a destination and evolves into a home. And home—a “where” that both feeds and urges you to feed back, a distinctness denied to so many Americans who’ve grown up in an amorphous nebula of strip malls, fast food, big boxes, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, a world of social interaction and anywhere businesses that can be transplanted everywhere, and thus exists nowhere—is something many Americans of my generation have missed. Home is what so many New Orleans transplants came to rebuild, but before they knew it they were on the cutting edge of green architecture, education policy and the local food movement. They were keeping what makes this city special, and waterproofing its soul all at once. Home wasn’t rebuilt. It was reinvented.

When I left New Orleans—which took me two weeks of false starts and stops, I loved it so hard—and the orange lights of the city blurred into the graveyards and the humid air rushed into my mouth through open car windows, a billboard from a realtor loomed over the highway: “Home matters most.”

Yeah. You right.

©2026 World Hum, All Rights Reserved