Vitality

There's one word I kept grasping for over the past couple weeks, a word that characterizes New Orleans and all the people I met from there. I stumbled across it rereading Tom Piazza's Why New Orleans Matters: vitality.

One of the things that bothers me when I'm writing about evacuees is that I don't have enough room to express that sense of vitality. To some degree, I have to put all my sources in one category--evacuees--and I have a frame through which I'm writing: poor people who have been displaced through a mix of natural forces, governmental incompetence, and a culture-wide apathy. So each person I write about appears in that context--each scene, each quote is noting the similiarities between these people. It doesn't leave much room for their differences.

Their differences are why I have such affection for them and their city. One of the highest compliments I think you can pay people is that you couldn't mistake them for anyone else. That's the case with most New Orleanians. And vitality is what defines them.