Fatima Shaid rescues New Orleans history, literally, from the garbage. Her new book tells part of the story of a beloved city long before it was the Big Easy.
New Orleans native Fatima Shaik wrote a history of her hometown with"Economy Hall," which emerged from a series of documents her father rescued from the garbage. Those documents presented a vivid portrait of a benevolent society in the 1800s that helped create the New Orleans culture -- the music, the food, parades, etc. -- so many love today..“Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood” perfectly embodies the old saying about one’s trash being another’s treasure.
Shaik’s story — new in paperback — is a crucial piece of New Orleans history that presents the Société secretary, Ludger Boguille, as an essential figure in the city’s history, a man who endured acts of aggression and violence and nevertheless in his role as a teacher taught a “radical kindness.” Shaik’s book serves as both a time machine and a means to clarify context, as she offers deep history of a great American city and some of the people who helped make it that way.
Q: I suppose you could say this about any place. But Louisiana certainly has those sorts of stimuli you reference. The language, the food, the music, the art and rituals . . . all of it.That’s right. We obviously need historians. We need them to give us these broad strokes of information about our past. We can see movements that cross the nation. I was a fiction writer for years as well as a journalist, and not a historian.
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