I love New Orleans. If I’m going to live anywhere in America, as a matter of choice, then I choose New Orleans . . . I mean, I love New Orleans, yeah, but sometimes I hate it.
Here we have both the best and the worst of the so-called New World coexisting in paradoxical symbiosis like a cathedral squatting next to a whorehouse, like the studded storefronts which spread jaded legs on streets called “rue” this and “rue” that. Here, we have Africanisms, such as umbrellaed processions, existing intact, a lived culture that sparkles in speech, dances in the streets, makes high drama out of boarding a moving bus, laughs out loud at ugly, and is always there touching us in every little thing we do. Here, we have a city so culturally rich that newborn Black babies ought to be declared national treasures. Yet, somehow, it can be so depressing, somehow, a big, fat joke, New Orleans. A tragic, obscene twist on the familiar French proverb: The more the crescent changes, the worse it seems to get.
But then again, as they say in the sanctified church, on the real side, I don’t believe that ugly can last forever. Better must come. Like Marley said, “We are survivors. The Black survivors.” And we are living to fight another day. Don’t believe in despair. Don’t believe it’s too hard to be made soft again. Don’t believe that times won’t never change. Despair is the disease of the idle rich watching their kingdoms crumbling. Despair is the response of the bourgeoisie unable to prevent you and me from coming into our own. Despair is the last supper of the ruling class.
—Kalamu ya Salaam, “Notes on a Banana Republic,” Black Books Bulletin 7, no. 3 (1981): 17, 21
Kalamu ya Salaam was born Vallery Ferdinand III in New Orleans in 1947. While a student at St. Augustine High School, he participated in civil rights protests as a member of the New Orleans NAACP Youth Council—the beginning of a lifetime of critical engagement and activism. After serving in the Army in South Korea, he returned to Louisiana, became involved with the Free Southern Theater, and helped to establish BLKARTSOUTH. Since then, he has served variously as the director of the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Health Center, the director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, the editor of Black Collegian magazine, the founder of the NOMMO Literary Society, a DJ on the New Orleans radio station WWOZ, and the curator of the literary website Neo-Griot. For many years, before and after Katrina, he helped to lead a writing program for New Orleans teenagers called Students at the Center.
Salaam also is a prolific author and editor, across many genres. Among his recent books are Cosmic Deputy: Poetry and Context, 1968–2019 (2020), an anthology of a half-century of his poetry; Be About Beauty (2018), a collection of essays that won the 2019 PEN Oakland award; New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader (2018), which Salaam edited and which was the 2020 One Book/One New Orleans selection; Seeing Black: Black Photography in New Orleans, 1840 and Beyond (2024), in which Salaam and his coeditors gathered the work of ninety photographers in order to consider the city’s image; and Walking Blues: A Speculation and Mediation on the Life and Legend of Robert Johnson (2024), his first novel, which Salaam published at the age of seventy-seven.
Taken together (and I mean no disrespect with what I am about to say; nor, I suspect, would anybody aware of his lifework take offense), this extraordinary career establishes Kalamu ya Salaam as New Orleans’s most important living writer and intellectual.
It also explains why I was eager to hear from Salaam about how Katrina fits into his life and thinking today. My colleague Joshua Guild graciously agreed to conduct an interview. Guild is a scholar of modern African American history and a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. His dialogue with Salaam has been ongoing since 2006, when he interviewed Salaam for a Southern Oral History Program initiative called “Imagining New Orleans.” That project documented how New Orleanians were facing the future after the Katrina flood. “What’s happening with New Orleans, and what’s happening with the Gulf South,” Salaam predicted to Guild in 2006, “that’s what’s going to happen to the country as a whole.”
What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of Guild’s conversation with Salaam. Their meeting took place in January 2025 in Salaam’s apartment on a New Orleans street named for Oretha Castle Haley, one of Salaam’s early mentors in the Civil Rights Movement.
—Andy Horowitz
Watch part of the interview, featuring Kalamu ya Salaam, Eric Waters, and Joshua B. Guild. Directed by Kira Akerman and Zac Manuel, produced by Andy Horowitz.
Joshua Guild: You’ve been interviewed many times. When you go into these interviews, how do you introduce yourself?
Kalamu ya Salaam: There’s no one way. I believe in a jazz aesthetic, and part of the jazz aesthetic is, as Stevie Wonder says, you got to work with what you got. Today, I’ll say I’m from the Lower Ninth Ward, below the [Industrial] Canal. Where I grew up was a combination of city and country people. New Orleans is built in the bowl of a swamp, as you well know. So, I grew up around water. My playground was the swamps.
JG: What set you on a path toward writing?
KYS: In eighth grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Nelson, played a recording of Langston Hughes. That was it for me. What really resonated with me was that Langston Hughes was interested in Black people and was also very interested in cultural work. When I say cultural work, I mean he was a poet, but he was more than what most people mean by saying “a poet.” He also did a lot of biographical work and so forth and so on.
JG: What was your exposure to what we call Black history up to that point?
KS: It all happened at Rivers Frederick Junior High School. I had a ninth-grade teacher, Miss Green—I’m convinced that she was a follower of Marcus Garvey. I didn’t know it at the time, but New Orleans was one of the major sites of the UNIA [Universal Negro Improvement Association].
Then I went to St. Augustine for high school. The priests were on a mission not only to educate Black folk in this city, but the Josephite branch of the Catholic church, in particular, was dedicated to working with Black people. This is stuff that I began to understand as I grew older, but I was just in the right place at the right time: it was a combination of the Josephite priests at St. Augustine, my interest in civil rights, and being reared by parents who encouraged all of us to get involved and to do things.
JG: After high school, you joined the Army, then you came back to New Orleans and continued your work in the Civil Rights Movement, eventually becoming the kind of culture worker you saw in Langston Hughes. Then, in time, you became an educator yourself, leading Students at the Center.
KYS: I’m not a formal educator. Do not mistake me. I’m what might be called an organic intellectual, but I don’t have a college education. I have an associate arts degree from Delgado Junior College. And I got that eleven years after I graduated from high school.
JG: Talk to me about the choice to join the Civil Rights Movement formally.
KYS: There’s no simple answer. I graduated high school in 1964. I was a part of the NAACP Youth Council under Oretha Castle Haley. Then, when I got home after my discharge from the Army, I joined the Free Southern Theater, which at the time was based in the Lower Ninth Ward. It encouraged my activism and my arts work—it was a marriage of the two. Later, as I traveled more and became interested in political development, my hero became Amílcar Cabral from the PAIGC [O Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, or African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde]. “Claim no easy victories,” he said. “Mask no difficulties.” That was the orientation I had.
JG: I want to ask you about Tom Dent, the New Orleans writer who ran the Free Southern Theater. You edited a book of his work, and there’s a passage in your introduction that just knocked my socks off. You wrote, “Before Tom, I never consciously thought about what it meant to be a black New Orleanian. Since Tom, I’ve never stopped contemplating what has become a lifelong commitment to learning from, propagating, documenting, and loving black New Orleans. Ultimately, our second line culture enables us to elegantly deal and dance even with death. Individually, each one of us will sooner or later expire. Collectively, we will never die.” What did Tom teach you about being a Black New Orleanian?
KYS: Everything. Now, as a young man, my parents were my first teachers, of course, and they were very important. My mother was a schoolteacher; she taught third grade. My father was a laboratory technician; he had been in the Second World War. He worked at the VA Hospital, which was right down the street from the main library. After school, I would go to the library and read books and magazines. Then when my father got off at four-thirty, we would catch the bus down to the Lower Ninth Ward, which was a long bus ride, but he and I [rode] together. I was close to my father. My father read Reader’s Digest. He was not college educated, but he was always trying to intellectually improve himself. That was what I knew.
JG: So your parents were your early teachers, you had very influential formal teachers in school. Then you served in the Army, you came back, and in your twenties, Tom Dent became another kind of teacher to you.
KYS: More than a teacher. We became very close. Tom knew James Baldwin, and James Baldwin was one of a triumvirate of writers—Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka—who are my lights as far as intellectual development goes, but it’s deeper than that. And Tom knew them personally. So, through Tom, I met a lot of people that I only knew of, or many cases did not know of, through reading.
Tom was the bridge that took me from being interested in literature to something on a personal level. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s one thing to know people through books. It’s another thing to know them personally. Tom introduced me to writers whom he knew personally, and I got to know them, whether we’re talking about [the poet] Marcus Christian, who was here in New Orleans, or [the Barbadian poet] Kamau Brathwaite, some of the European writers, whatever—up and down the hemisphere, in the South and the Caribbean. Tom really was the person that opened me to understanding the world. Tom set the template for me to follow as a conscious writer. And in New Orleans, he introduced me to [the jazz musician] Danny Barker and through Danny Barker, a whole other world opened up.
JG: One of the things that so impresses me about you is your commitment to documenting this history. You’ve spent so much of your life as an editor, as a writer, and in other ways, really capturing this history and making it known— truly a “lifelong commitment to propagating, documenting, loving black New Orleans.” But it’s not easy to love a place, and it’s not easy to try to hold on to a place like this.
KYS: It’s no more difficult than loving a woman if you’re male, of a heterosexual persuasion. It’s no more difficult than loving an individual, whomever it may be and whomever you may be. To be truly in love with someone and to live with that person is a difficult task.
JG: Let me ask you to say more about that this way. In 2007, you wrote, “those of us living in post-Katrina New Orleans find ourselves engaged in this difficult quest to know ourselves as we struggle to save New Orleans. Every day, we are faced with difficult choices. Every day, we ask ourselves, what is this New Orleans we want to save?” What were you thinking in that moment? And how does it strike you now, looking back?
KYS: New Orleans has often been described as one of the most nativist cities in the United States—by which is meant that people are born in New Orleans, but not many people leave New Orleans. I mean, they just stay here. And Katrina drove people out of New Orleans. Just about everybody had to leave. People who—I’m talking about generations—people who had never left New Orleans, left New Orleans. What we call the bricks, the projects, most of those people who lived in the bricks had to leave. And in some places, the bricks were torn down and new housing built to replace that.
JG: What is the New Orleans that you would want to save? And then how do we separate the parts we want to save from the parts that you want to cast away?
KYS: You’ve got to understand there is no New Orleans I want to save. New Orleans is New Orleans. It’s going to always be New Orleans. But Katrina meant that the city was depopulated in a way that it had never been in my lifetime. I was not a typical New Orleanian in that I had lived outside of the city, in the Army, before. But you have people that have never left New Orleans, and here comes the hurricane and now they are forced to leave. Psychologically, that’s a break. And nothing prepares you for it. There’s nothing in your life that prepared the [End Page 72] majority of New Orleanians for that. It’s a psychological break that forever altered how you looked at life and everything else. So, I’m trying to honor the meaning of the question you’ve asked, but my response is tied up with that reality that New Orleans was never the same. And at the same time, New Orleans was always New Orleans. It is always going to be New Orleans. It’s the bend in the river.
JG: After the flood, you were gone for about six months, and then you returned. Tell me about that.
KYS: I was in Nashville, but I would drive to New Orleans from Nashville. I mean, that in itself tells you how much I, like many other New Orleanians, really wanted to be here. The city was flooded, but I was fortunate in that there was a house to come to because at the time, we lived on the West Bank.
I wanted to be in New Orleans so much I’d drive down here and then go back to Nashville. You look at it on the map, and it’s crazy, but I’m New Orleans born, bred, and hope to die here. New Orleans is like a magnet for many people, no matter what happens, you know? “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? And miss it each night and day.” It’s hard to explain to people that its pull on people was not like other cities’.
There are things that we don’t even think about until we leave New Orleans and then you miss it, something as simple as gumbo. You can’t find gumbo, good gumbo, at other places. Now, people try. But it’s not quite the same. Gumbo was not just a New Orleans variation of soup. Gumbo was really a food that was developed by the maroon community, people that ran away from the city proper during slavery time. They would run up in the swamps, and they couldn’t carry a whole kitchen with them, so you carried a big pot and you’re in the swamp, so you got water. You heat the water, and you put into that mixture any food you could find. So that’s why gumbo runs everything from gumbo z’herbs that Mrs. [Leah] Chase [the restaurateur] used to cook, with collard greens and so forth, to what we would call today seafood gumbo. You could have all these different things in the gumbo.
So, think about New Orleans. We don’t have a conscious thing of this, but it’s a craving that you have when you leave here that you can’t find in other places. There are many New Orleanians who left here and established themselves in other places as a result of Katrina, but there were many of us that just had a taste in [our] mouths that [we] could not satisfy no other way but to get back home. You understand?
JG: Two decades ago, I asked you if New Orleans could come back better after the flood. You said no. You said, “It can only come back as something else. It can’t come back better. If all the people who were here before could come back, it would be a better city. That’s what I would consider a better city. But just to make it a better city for a smaller, more select population is not making it a better city. It’s making it a different city. It’s another kind of city. It’ll have its own set of circumstances, problems, or opportunities.” How is the city different now than it was twenty years ago?
Kalamu’s Will and Testament
When I die
I want to be everywhere
And nowhere
Previously unknown but always rediscovered
A sliver of sunlight at each new dawn
A fading, glowing ember at each exhausted nightfall
When I die
Let the cooing of turtle doves
Be both the soundtrack of my arrival
As well as the departing train’s moan, whistling
The sounding that I am gone
What is there to say
I am a faded away taste
On the lips of joy, the moment
Of brief but unforgettable exhilaration lovers know
When they carnally come together
The rainbow memory that disappears but
Is always there, coloring each emerging emotion
Of the inextinguishable love humans can have
For each other, for rewarding toil
In the fields of our lives as we cry
Joy tears that announce both our arrivals
And departures, we are an ancient future
A dying albeit recurring eternal moment of fecundity
That will always blossom regardless
Of the ashy finality of death
Let our laughters echo
Throughout the centuries of non-existence
There is no need for pity, although we never last
We are always here
Wine on the breath of every final gasp,
Every grave in reality, just another beautiful
Plot of resurrection, an eternal
Hello and goodbye!
KYS: Twenty years ago, you had people that never left the scene. Today, there are very few people that have lived here for generations. Katrina was a major rupture of that generational living, and that rupture involves thousands of people never coming back. This is a completely different city than it was before.
JG: How do you reflect on the last twenty years for yourself, for your own life?
KYS: I’m not a citizen in the way that I was. I used to be on the streets a lot, different places. Now I don’t travel much. I get up in the morning, I walk around this big block three times, and I read, look at the computer screen. I’m checking out different things. But as Duke said, I don’t get around much anymore.
JG: I know you don’t like to talk about yourself. When I’ve asked you before about your legacy, you have brushed it off. But you just made a profound statement. You said, “I’m not a citizen of New Orleans.” Is it hard for you to feel that way?
KYS: It’s different. I can’t say it’s hard. I’m still alive, you know.
JG: What is Katrina to you now?
KYS: I’m at a point where I don’t even think about it anymore, but I’ll give you one example. I was going down Claiborne [Avenue] and I passed the old ILA [International Longshoreman’s Association] building. For some reason, I looked over there and saw it, and I was so emotionally shook, I almost cried. ILA don’t mean much to anybody away from here. But for people of my generation, that’s where we had our high school parties and get-togethers. And it’s not the same thing anymore. A lot of the buildings along Claiborne Avenue have been replaced—I mean literally torn down and other buildings put in this space. And for some reason, that just hit me. I said, damn, my city’s changed.
Many, many, many people, including some of our major icons like Louis Armstrong, had left, and World War II moved a lot of people, but Katrina was one of the major dividing lines. Not in a pejorative but in an accurate sense, New Orleans never had as many white people as it does now, because it was a Black city. I mean, people today cannot imagine what it looked like being in New Orleans, growing up here, and all you saw were Black people. You cannot imagine it because there is nothing, unless you go to the Caribbean, that prepares one for being around so many Black folk all the time. There’s nothing that prepares most of us for that, particularly now. Katrina was a major dividing line because Katrina was the first event that emptied the city of Black folk.
JG: How has that demographic change impacted Black New Orleans culture?
KYS: It’s the other way around. The culture itself was so strong that the people who left miss New Orleans, and the people who stayed here held on tighter. It’s just like, if you’re a parent, and something happens to your children, and you want to hold them even closer. But I don’t know. I’m at a loss for words to express the profoundness of the change that happened.
Kira Akerman is a documentary filmmaker and educator. Her film Hollow Tree won a Jury Prize at the New Orleans Film Festival, and an award for Best Documentary at Chicago’s International Children’s Festival. Akerman’s short films have been featured with PBS, The Atlantic, the Camden International Film Festival, MOMA, and the Rotterdam Film Festival. Akerman is currently a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Joshua B. Guild is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century African American history. He is working on a book about the Black freedom movement in New Orleans.
Andy Horowitz is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and he serves as the Connecticut State Historian. He is the author of Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Harvard University Press, 2020), which won the Bancroft Prize in American History.
Zac Manuel is a director and cinematographer from New Orleans, Louisiana. His work draws from complex legacies of southern identity, with a particular interest in the impacts of history and inheritance on Black communities. Manuel’s cinematography credits include Alone (Sundance 2017 Jury Award Winner, Best Non-Fiction Film), Time (2021 Academy Award nominee for Best Feature Documentary), Buckjumping, and Descendant (Sundance, 2022). His directing credits include This Body, released on PBS, and Nonstop, which was acquired by the Criterion Channel. His debut feature documentary, Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero, premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and was acquired by HBO Max. His second feature, Ghetto Children, premiered at the 2024 New Orleans Film Festival.
Kalamu ya Salaam is an author, editor, and teacher from New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. His most recent works are Walkin’ Blues: A Novel (MBW, 2024) and Seeing Black: Black Photography in New Orleans, 1840 and Beyond (University of New Orleans Press, 2024).
Video Credits: Featuring Kalamu ya Salaam, Eric Waters, and Joshua B. Guild.
Interview conducted by Joshua Guild in January 2025.
Directed by Kira Akerman and Zac Manuel
Produced by Andy Horowitz
Cinematography by Zac Manuel
Editing by Kira Akerman
Color and Sound by Zac Manuel
The poem “My Will and Testament,” excerpted in this film, is written by Kalamu ya Salaam and dedicated by him to Eric Waters.
“Katrina,” Dr. Michael White. MGW Jazz Publishing (ASCAP), Patti Rae Publishing (ASCAP) from Blue Crescent. Courtesy of Basin Street Records.
Archival funeral procession, funeral procession with the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, New Orleans, Jules Cahn Collection at the Historic New Orleans Collection.
Header image: Kalamu ya Salaam, image still by Zac Manuel, 2025.
