On Living Between Two Cities: Atlanta and New Orleans

On Atlanta as inheritance, New Orleans as recognition, and the artist who needs both

I was brought to Atlanta at five. I did not choose it. My parents chose it for me, and by the time I had any say in the matter, I had already become the kind of person who needs a city to belong to. I have spent most of the years since trying to figure out which one.

The official Atlanta of my childhood was a clean, white-washed suburb — the kind of place that looks like a brochure for itself. Cul-de-sacs and chain restaurants. The promise that nothing surprising would happen if you played by the rules. I might have grown up entirely inside that Atlanta if not for an older brother who, without quite intending to, handed me a different city.

He took me to Eat More Records, a shop in the part of town the suburbs pretended not to know about. The man behind the counter weighed close to four hundred pounds — a mountain of a person, encyclopedic about music, kind to a wide-eyed kid. I learned the language of records standing in that shop, but more importantly, I learned that everything was connected. That one record opened onto another, which opened onto something I hadn't heard of yet. Music as lineage. Music as a map.

That map led to bookstores I had no business browsing in, restaurants that served food my suburb didn't know the name of, and, eventually, to a place called The Point in Little Five Points. I was too young to be a customer there. But I was old enough to be the drummer in my brother's band, which meant I was inside the bar most weekends — passing through a threshold I was not supposed to cross yet. The creative life recognized me before my ID did.

This is the Atlanta, I mean, when I say Atlanta birthed me. Not the suburbs that contained me, but the underground that called me out of them. The forge had a name and a zip code, and it was the part of the city that the official city was a little embarrassed about.

I first walked down Bourbon Street with my father at thirteen or fourteen. Family wedding. I ,remember the neon and the sound, and a feeling I did not know how to name. Most people's first New Orleans is overwhelming — too much, too loud, too willing. Mine was the opposite. It felt right. It felt familiar, even though I'd never been. I have spent years since trying to understand why.

What I have come to think is this: New Orleans did not introduce me to anything new. New Orleans took the Atlanta my brother had shown me in secret and wore it in the open. The underground that had to be hidden in the suburbs was just the city, in New Orleans. The records, the books, the food, the strange and beautiful characters, the willingness to be unsuited to the brochure version of America — all of it, in the daylight. Of course it felt right. I had already been introduced.

That is the difference between the two cities, for me. Atlanta was the forge. New Orleans was the mirror. The forge made me. The mirror recognized what had been made.

My second novel, Invisible Sun, is set in New Orleans and was finished here. It is the first book I wrote inside the city that recognized me before I recognized it.

I go back to Atlanta now mostly to see friends. The clubs and buildings I knew are largely gone — the geography of who I was, mostly absorbed by something newer. The city has been rebuilt around the absence of the places that built me, which is, I suppose, what cities do.

But the ghosts are still there. Not all of them are mournful. Some of them are good company. I'll drive past a corner that used to hold a record store or a bar and feel a wash of who I was when I lived inside that block — a sixteen-year-old discovering that the world was bigger than the suburbs, a college kid badly in love, a young writer who had not yet figured out he was a writer. The buildings are gone. The selves they housed are still here, riding shotgun. Atlanta is a city of ghosts in the most generous sense of the word. It is full of the people I used to be.

New Orleans, by contrast, does not feel haunted to me. New Orleans feels alive. Maybe because I came to it after I knew who I was, or after the city showed me. Maybe because the city itself is uninterested in the brochure. New Orleans never had to hide the underground; the underground is just where everyone lives. There is no clean version of this city to be the negative of. There is just the city.

I think this is what it means to live between two places. You owe each one something different. One forged you; one greeted you. One holds the selves you have already been; the other holds the self you are still becoming. You do not get to keep just one. The artist needed both — the city that made him, and the city that, when he finally arrived, was already waiting.

I split my time between Atlanta and New Orleans, not because I cannot decide. I split my time between the two cities because both are required.