We were slinking through the edge of the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in the United States. It’s about an hour and a half west of New Orleans, Louisiana, where the French Quarter had been restless the night before, with partying tourists and jazz bands. I’d heard Pierre Part (population: 3,000) was about as Cajun as you could get; that it was the most French-speaking town in the US outside a village in Maine. And so that’s where I’d headed.

Out here on the water, the landscape reminded me a bit of the Florida Everglades: an overgrown, labyrinthine place for die-hards and outlaws. A last frontier feeling. This was a place for people who wanted to chart their own course in some downright hostile conditions. I’d come to Pierre Part to meet a couple who’d decided that their American dream was to live part-time in a one-room wooden houseboat on a swamp.

Keith motored us around town a bit, passing porches, docks, weathered houses set close to the water. Pierre Part was essentially an island — a long stretch of high ground surrounded by wetlands. Tara pointed out landmarks. Her grandparents’ house. The street where her stepmom grew up, and her parents before her, and their parents before them. It felt like moving through her family photo album. “This is the end of the road,” Tara said as I looked at the last house on the bank. Everything from here was by boat.

For a stretch it was nothing but open water, brown and opaque. A faint stagnant odor came off the surface. Along the shore, the cypress trees blurred into a solid brown-green wall until little dark cuts began to show. “We call ’em a bayou run,” Keith hollered. “There’s a maze of ’em, just like trails in a forest.” He steered left into a narrow channel. It felt a little mysterious, a separate ecosystem that could only be accessed through local Cajun knowledge. Here and there houseboats appeared along the bank. 

In the distance, I noticed a man sitting on the small porch of a grey cabin. “Who are you, and what are you doing on our houseboat?” Tara called out. She had this fantastic accent, a Southern drawl with a touch of French that carried a playful ease. 

“I’m the boogeyman!” The man smiled. 

Tara burst out laughing. “That’s my dad,” she said. “He’s 82.”

We floated closer. Tara climbed up to tie the rope around the porch post. Her father looked no older than 60 — lean and upright in a faded denim shirt and cap. 

“How are you doing, sir?” I asked.

“I’m doing,” he said, reaching out his hand for a shake. “Carlis Goday.” In his Cajun accent, the weight landed on the second syllables.

“The man without a car, Car-less. Last name’s Go-day. If you can’t go nights, you go days.”

Tara gave me a little tour of the house, which looked no bigger than 250 square feet. “This is the kitchen.” She pointed to the propane four-burner stove in one corner, a single counter opposite, and a roll-out grill wedged between. “Keith does all the outside cooking, I do the inside. We haul this grill out onto the porch just to give us more room in here.” The rest of the room was simple: a bunk bed, a futon folded into a couch, life jackets, tools. Fishing gear in organized piles. A flatscreen TV and an enclosed bathroom with a toilet were the only luxuries. A small sign nailed to the wall read BORN TO FISH, FORCED TO WORK.

Come summer, Keith told me, the bayou turned into a playground: waterskiing, hydrosliding, wake-boarding, swimming in clear pockets before the water thickened to pea green. “The snapping turtles you gotta be wary of, they can really bite,” Tara warned. 

“We’ve got a swimming spot we love, even with alligators everywhere.” She smiled at my wide eyes, as if living a few feet above alligators was the most natural thing in the world. “The bigger alligators are usually shy,” Keith added. “The smaller ones, you can get closer to, but they won’t mess with people. They like swimming up to our dock when we’re cleaning fish or frogs. But out here they don’t really bother us. I think they had maybe two deaths in Louisiana since, I don’t know… hundreds of years.”

***

The Cajun story didn’t start in Louisiana. It began along the coast of the rugged western edge of France, a Celtic stronghold of sailors and pirates who started crossing the Atlantic in the early 1600s, settling in what was then the young French colony of Acadia and is today Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, Canada. Here, the Acadians lived the way they always had: close to the water, close to family, close to the Catholic church. They turned salty tidal marshes into farmland, wove their own clothing from flax, and — stubbornly — made a living 3,000 miles from home. 

But it wasn’t to be. Acadia was in turbulent territory. The Acadians wanted to remain neutral between Britain and France, but when the British defeated the French, the Acadians were pushed to swear allegiance to the British Crown. They refused: their loyalty was to God, not to European empires. That defiance came at a cost, and in 1755, the British forced them out in what became known as the Great Expulsion. Villages were torched, families torn apart, thousands deported. Many died from disease and starvation. No documents written by Acadians during this period have ever been discovered, and so the expulsion remains as much myth as heritage to the people of Louisiana (who love both myth and heritage).

Some Acadians ended up back in France, some scattered through the British colonies, and others drifted to the Caribbean. Those who came to Louisiana — still a French colony in those days — found something familiar. The prairies and swamps reminded them of home, only warmer. Difficult enough to live on that few bothered them and fertile enough to survive, especially with the help of Native nations like the Chitimacha, Atakapa, and Houma living along the Gulf Coast.

Cajun French includes many Native-derived loanwords — even the term bayou, from the Choctaw word bayuk (“small stream”). In time, the groups began to intermarry, encouraged by proximity and shared hardships, and Cajun food developed from indigenous smoking methods, ways of preservation, and seasonings. The Cajun staple filé powder, made from ground sassafras leaves, comes from the cooking traditions of the Choctaw and related Gulf Coast tribes.

The story of black influence in the bayou runs just as deep. Many enslaved Africans sought refuge in the wilderness, forming Maroon communities hidden along the swamps. Some of them lived independently; others mingled with Native tribes and Cajun settlers. Gumbo’s okra-thickened broth has African roots, a stew of cultures that’s simmered for hundreds of years. As time passed, Acadian slurred into Cajun. But the backbone of the culture stayed the same: make your own way, stay close to your people, adapt to whatever the land throws at you.

***

Carlis Goday wasn’t born on the bayou. 

“I was raised in the French Quarter in my younger years,” he was telling me as we stood around on the deck.

“What do you think it’ll be like in 20 years out here?” I asked him. “You think it’ll stay the same?” 

“No, no.” Carlis said it with vehemence and without hesitation. “Things are changing too much. Too much erosion.”

Hurricanes were tearing up so much that there was nothing left to hold the land together but tree roots, while they pulled in salt water that killed off grasses, hastening the decline. 

“Everything’s going,” he said. “Everything’s washing away. But this” — he pointed down at the water beneath the porch — “This was built when they put in some oil rigs back here.”

“Oil rigs?”

“Most of the man-made canals were from the oil companies,” Tara explained, cut as inroads for drilling rigs and pipelines, as well as drainage. “That’s the big industry out here, oil and gas.”

Big enough to employ them both. Keith did maintenance for offshore platforms, Tara was a materials coordinator. It seemed like they had things figured out: one foot in the swamp, the other in capitalism, providing the financial security that let them live by the rhythms of the natural world. A yin and yang approach.

***

Keith trolled slowly, deeper in, scanning through tree trunks to the left of us. Things got quiet, and he looked serious for the first time, like he’d switched into survivor mode.

“Hoping to go find a big nutria rat to show you,” I heard him say.

“Nutria rat?”

“Very invasive around here. They tear up a lot of these marshlands. They’ll eat all the roots of the vegetation, dig holes in levee systems. A lot of people trap ’em for the tails. Certain times of the year you can trap the nutrias, and they’ll give you $6 a tail.”

“It’s a government program,” Tara added.

“We actually shot a few last weekend — and we ate ’em.”

“You eat ’em?” I said, probably failing to hide my shock.

“They’re actually a very clean meat. They’re vegetarian.”

“How many pounds are they?”

“Oh, they can get five pounds to probably up to 20.”

“They’re like midsize dogs?” The image in my head wasn’t getting any prettier.

Keith laughed. “I’m-a show you some in a few minutes — you’re gonna see. New York, they don’t have anything on us in rats.”

The boat slowed, the motor humming just enough to push us along. “They hear the motor and take off running,” Keith said, scanning the shallows. “But a lot of times if you just kind of creep up on ’em, they’ll sit in the lilies or in the marsh and eat grass.”

Suddenly Keith’s posture shifted. He cut the motor and reached for the rifle on the floor of the boat in one swift motion, chambered a round without taking his eyes off the forest, and raised the barrel. A click. Then the sharp crack of gunfire split the quiet, echoing through the trees.

“Oh, I heard it,” Tara said. “That was a good shot.”

The motor coughed back to life, the boat gliding towards the bank. Keith hopped out and slipped into the undergrowth. I followed. He must have been 100 feet away from shore when he finally crouched down to the ground. Then he straightened, pulling up a long, limp brown body by its slick 10-inch tail.

He was holding a wet, shaggy nutria, its long orange teeth jutting like chisels. Its webbed feet dangled in the air, black claws curled tight at the ends. Something between a beaver and a rat, and ugly as sin.

“That’s a small one,” Keith said, raising it high for Tara to see. “My friend calls ’em swamp bunnies.”

“And that’s part of the dinner menu tonight, right?”

“Would you like to try?”

“I mean, if you’re doing it… when in Rome.”

“We could try frying it,” Tara suggested.

“Ah…” Keith considered it for a moment. “I think a nutria stew would be awesome.”

***

I’ve often heard people say that America has no culture, and I think that claim couldn’t be more off. Sure, America doesn’t have one neat, homogeneous culture — it’s too mixed, too big, too complicated for that. What it does have is a whole host of cultures sprinkled across its vast and beautiful geography. That’s the true gift of this country: you can choose the life you want to live, in the culture that feels right to you.

And the beauty is that so much of America still stands with its arms open. If you show up somewhere as an outsider, and take the time to respect how people live there — not trying to change them, not trying to prove that where you’re from does things better — you’re usually met with real warmth. Come in curious, ask questions, listen more than you talk, and try to understand where people are coming from, and wow, it’s a beautiful thing.

For Keith and Tara, I was realizing that it was the unpredictability of life out here on the bayou that’d become the attraction. Keith had told me the biggest threat of living here was the storms — hurricanes blowing 160 miles an hour for hours on end, floods rising fast and rolling through without mercy. Looking out at the still water all around us — the soft wind rustling the moss in slow sways, chorus frogs peeping from the banks — it occurred to me that the risk of living here was that one moment, the place gives you peace, but the next it could strip everything away. 

I try my best to see things from the perspective of the people I’m meeting up with, because I’m always curious how others see the world. Out here, I could feel the comfort that comes from knowing your immediate survival doesn’t depend on supply chains or policies but on your own skills and relationships. Keith and Tara were as connected to their food source as you can get. Swamp-to-table cuisine. 

“So, say the grid goes down,” I said. “Everything stops — no cell coverage. You guys are fine out here?”

“Yeah,” Tara said, no hesitation.

“We’re gonna be fantastic,” Keith said, a wide smile spreading across his face.

“Fuel and clean water would be the tough ones to get, though?”

Keith glanced at Tara, as if checking that they were on the same page. “Yeah, but there’s ways to get clean water. We’d boil it all day long if we got to.”

“And how many rounds of ammo at the house?” Tara asked.

“Ooh . . .” he paused, trying not to look too pleased with himself. “Eighteen thousand rounds, maybe.”

“You’re getting ready for something, Keith?” I asked with a grin.

“Always,” Tara cut in, laughing.

Keith didn’t answer me on the fuel question since, of course, without fuel, all of this stopped: the motorboat, the cooking stove, the backup generator. It’s romantic to imagine making it in the wild on our own — and Keith and Tara could do better than most. But the truth is, we’re all dependent on civilization; it’s just a question of degree. 

“What do you guys feel about the rest of the country out here?” I asked.

“I watch no news. None,” Keith said. He sounded proud. Defiant. 

Tara leaned forward with a small laugh. “We haven’t watched the news in years.”

“I used to keep up a little bit,” Keith said, “and it would just upset me so much to see all the stuff going on. So I was like, ‘You know what? I’m a lot happier, honestly, not keeping up with it.’ ’Cause how much positive stuff do you see in the news?”

“Nothing,” Tara said quickly.

“So this is what we do” — he looked around — “and we enjoy our lives doing it. And if we’re not here, we’re doing stuff with our families. For Christmas, you’re probably looking at 60 to 70 of just my family. People like to get together here. You do a crawfish boil, and you just tell everybody, and they bring a dish, and everybody just has a great time.”

***

Soon the houses came back into view. I spotted Carlis sprawled on the dock napping. Afternoon sunlight warmed the wooden planks, the soft whistle of a cardinal carrying across the water.

“I got you a treat,” Keith said, dropping the nutria at his father-in-law’s feet. “You want some nutria stew?”

Tara set a heavy iron pot on the stove, rice and onion sizzling as Keith busied himself with the day’s catch. Carlis lifted a bottle: homemade wine, wild muscadine from the swamp, generations of craft bottled inside, stretching all the way back to his ancestors in France.

“Tara, can you bring me that gut bucket in the back?” Keith called out. “The white one we found earlier?”

Tara wrinkled her nose and looked at me. “I know, that sounds so gross, huh?”

Carlis cracked the bottle of muscadine open and tipped it forward, the deep red liquid glugging heavily into a white Styrofoam cup. He lifted it under his nose and breathed deep. “Aah. Tolé, ça c’est bon!”

A little Bordeaux in the bayou, I thought.

“Do you feel the Cajun culture’s under threat at all?” I asked as he took a slow sip of the wine.

“We’re losing it,” he said. His face tightened at the thought.

“Back when I was little, just this area here, I’d say 100% of the kids spoke French. Nowadays, you’re lucky if you get 25% to 30%. Just like my grandkids. They understand it, but they never wanted to talk it.”

“But you spoke it ’cause your parents made you speak it, right?”

“They didn’t make me — that’s all we had. French was my first language. In school, they made us quit talking French.”

“So the US school system didn’t want any French being spoken at all?”

He shook his head. “And then just lately, the last few years, they started with French immersion — teaching French.” 

“Language is like a tidal wave,” I said to Carlis. “It’s hard to go against.” 

That was how it went, the pendulum swinging from pushing out French influence to embracing it again. Starting in the late 1800s, you could see the pressure to make Louisiana less French in all kinds of small, telling ways — French street names anglicized, public institutions phasing out the language. Catholic parishes were reorganized, some priests replaced with English-speaking clergy. And yet, for all the pressure to “Americanize”, the culture held on. Children still spoke French at home, even if they were punished at school for it. Music carried the language when conversation couldn’t. Recipes traveled from grandmother to grandchild. What survived did so stubbornly, underground at times, until the Sixties, when the cultural revival movements — Cajun music festivals, immersion programs, the creation of a state agency for Francophone Affairs — began bringing the language and traditions back into the everyday. But the reality is that kids will speak the language that’s cool with their friends, the language of the TikTok videos that they’re watching.

Over in the kitchen corner, Tara lifted the black pot’s lid as the stew roared, a rush of steam and bubbling, rich and heavy. She leaned into the cloud, breathing deep, satisfied.

Plates in hand, we stepped outside to eat in the open air. I lifted a forkful. “All right,” I announced, almost ceremonially. “My first nutria.” 

I was on my toes. Food can be such a big part of identity that the rejection of a meal can seem like the rejection of a culture. I took a big bite and chewed on it for a moment. It wasn’t bad. Earthy, dense, close to rabbit or dark chicken meat.

“It’s like nothing I’ve had before, to be honest,” I said. “Texture’s like…” I hesitated. “Gummy. A lot of flavor. It’s got some kick to it, right?”

Keith leaned closer. “Big question is — would you eat it?”

I smiled, swallowing. “If I was out here, yeah.”

They both laughed.

***

This is an edited excerpt from Your Fellow Americans by Peter Santenello. Copyright 2026 © by Peter Santenello. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Around me, an audience of 10,000 eager fans is going wild. It’s uncertain whether they’re behind the inmates or the bull. “This is suicide right here,” says a man seated behind me as the gate swings open and the beast begins his charge. “These boys are soldiers,” his friend replies. In one swift move of the head, the bull both overturns the table — which comes apart spectacularly — and sends a chair with contestant 11 up into the air. Upon his return to earth, he’s trampled by the animal, and badly hurt. Inmates, who have 59 years’ worth of prison rodeo folklore to draw on, know how to protect themselves: they bury their faces into the mud and put their arms round the back of their heads, while the clowns distract the raging bull.

But number 11 can’t muster any resistance; he is limp, arms splayed. Concerned clowns form a small human shield around him. The trouble is, the red rags hanging out of their back pockets are there to attract the bull their way. The beast begins charging towards the stricken prisoner and his comical guard. The arena goes quiet.

Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola Prison, lies some 130 miles northwest of New Orleans; the country road leading there is littered with roadkill and Baptist churches. Either side are the relics of antebellum Angola Plantations — worked by slaves born in the African nation — to which the prison’s name nods. Sometimes referred to the “Alcatraz of the South”, locals simply call it “The Farm”.

Those locals include 3,900 inmates, but also 1,800 staff members — many of whom live with their families in what is effectively a gated community on the prison grounds, called the B-Line. Jobs at the prison, which start at $14.55 per hour, come with around $100 a month in “location pay”. (They are usually passed down the generations.) This small, company town in the middle of the sprawling 7,000-hectare penitentiary site, has its own parks, swimming pool, tennis court and fishing lake. It also boasts a nine-hole Prison View Golf Course: any member of the law-abiding public can, for a fee, play a round in the largest maximum-security facility in the United States.

But nothing draws in the crowds quite like the Rodeo. Six are held each year, in April and October; between them, they attract more than 70,000 spectators. Around 1,000 prisoners participate, though only a few dozen are actually competing in the arena. The rest mingle freely with the crowds in the fairground, selling impressive artisan goods, from leather handbags to handmade wooden porch swings. Angola is known to be a fun family day out, with children’s rides and petting zoos. The Dale Carnegie organisation sells slushies. You almost forget you’re surrounded by people serving life sentences. But when I asked why a small number of prisoners were selling their handicrafts from behind a wire fence, one old hand explained: “They’re the ones not allowed anywhere near women and children.”

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Not unreasonably, critics of mass incarceration — including the odd prisoner — argue that the Rodeo is exploitative, a Roman spectacle in which inmates must perform for the enjoyment of the public. The events, particularly Convict Poker, seem designed to place the men in danger, and medical care in the prison is notoriously poor.

But the inmates themselves are usually the first to push back against this argument. Myron Smith was winner of 2019’s “Guts & Glory”, the flagship final event, where prisoners have three minutes to corner a bull and snatch the red poker chip tied between its horns. “It’s actually a nice rush,” he said. “Kind of takes your mind away from other things, issues and stuff going on.” Not only do you get to impress your family members, some of whom travel from all over the country to watch their loved ones compete, but you can give something back: victory comes with $500. “I wanted to help my family out,” Smith said.

I asked another inmate, an artist who goes by only the name of Charlie (“like Prince”), whether he thinks the Rodeo is put on for the benefit of the spectators or the prisoners. “Well, the simple answer is both,” he said. “But I think it’s more for the inmates. It gives you something to look forward to — and we don’t got much of that — and it’s good for the prison economy.”

Winston Craddock, a talented woodworker and convicted murderer who carves bowls, explained that he made about five grand in sales the day before. Inmates have to give over 22% of their earnings to the prison. The rest they get to keep for themselves to pay for things inside — from the “stamps” required to send emails to snacks. For its part, the prison says that the $450,000 it collects each day from the Rodeo “pays for Baptist seminary classes at the prison, funerals for inmates, educational programs, and maintenance of the prison’s six chapels”. Well, in theory. In 2017, it was discovered that millions of dollars raised from the Rodeo were being kept in a private account, and $28,000 in concession sales had gone missing entirely.

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The Rodeo also draws attention to some of the more obvious inequalities in the American prison system. Walking round the sites, it’s noticeable that a hugely disproportionate number of Angola’s inmates are black. Around 75% are from African-American backgrounds, more than double the equivalent figure for the whole state. It’s also striking that dozens of those hawking goods at the fair were old men in wheelchairs. The life sentences liberally dished up during the Eighties’ war on drugs mean that some 800 Angola inmates are aged over-60, and 300 of those are over-70. Angola has been described by one campaigner as “a very expensive nursing home”. A recent edition of prison news magazine, The Angolite, published a story about the ageing population, with administrators looking for ways to “keep senior prison inmates engaged” with things such as bingo nights.

Their plight is a reminder that the war on drugs may have slowed down, but America’s prison industrial complex isn’t going anywhere. The number of incarcerated people has increased by 700% since 1970, and it is a $260 billion dollar industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people. Even state-run facilities such as Angola provide exceptionally cheap labour, with inmates generating billions each year in revenue, while earning pennies on the dollar.

The state of Louisiana is in the grip of a gun crime epidemic, and New Orleans has recently reclaimed the title of America’s murder capital. (It is the only non-Mexican city in the global top 10 for homicides per capita.) Unless the authorities make a concerted effort to change this status quo, a steady stream of disadvantaged young men, caught up in senseless gang violence, will ensure that Angola’s declining stock is replenished — and keep the prison Rodeo on the road.

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When I was about to leave, Winston Craddock took me aside to deliver a parting message. “You gotta be careful down there in Orleans,” he said. “It’s very dangerous.” The depressing fact is that, life outside isn’t much safer for many of these inmates, even if prison puts them in an arena with an enraged bull. Earlier in the day, only a bound or two short of carnage, a clown had stepped in front of contestant 11 and darted to the side, distracting the bull to a safe distance. Thousands of spectators clutching oversized sodas let out a sigh of relief. “Folks, a little healing power in your hands right now, right here,” boomed the announcer, urging applause as helpers rushed towards contestant 11. When they couldn’t get him onto his own two feet, they dragged him from the arena.

My programme notes inform me that this inmate is Cedric Carter. For understandable reasons, his name isn’t accompanied by a bio, but he has a profile on writeaprisoner.com, a website where people pay to invite citizens of the “free world” write to them. Carter is a 46-year-old bisexual Virgo who has been incarcerated since 1998 for armed robbery. Calling the prison to inquire about the man’s welfare, I’m told by one particularly surly warden that I won’t be provided with any information. Carter and his comrades are back to being numbers, until the Rodeo fires up again in October.

Portia Pollock was 60 years old when she was murdered outside her home. She was a physical therapist who loved working with elderly folk in care homes. She also loved drumming. So I learned about her life and brutal death when I walked into New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong Park five days later and heard the sound of music.

More than two dozen people were pounding djembes in rhythmic unison in the scorching heat, while one woman in a straw hat played a flute, another tapped a tambourine and a third danced in the drumming circle.

But she was just another fatality in a rising tide of violence plaguing not just this Louisiana city, but the entire United States; I arrived in New Orleans from Austin, Texas, where a late-night shooting just down the road from my hotel had left one dead and 13 injured. National statistics are not yet released but preliminary data shows homicides rose almost one third in major cities last year — the largest recorded rise in the nation’s history — and carried on surging this year, up another 18.5%, according to latest figures.

This rise in killings — seen in cities big and small, red and blue, north and south — threatens to unravel one of the most remarkable success stories of this century: the decline in violent crime. Several cities, including Chicago, suffered their highest homicide rates for nearly three decades. New York recorded a 45% murder increase last year and near-doubling of shooting incidents. As a result, crime is also rising up the political agenda. In the New York mayoral battle, Eric Adams, a former cop who campaigned on public safety, looks set to be the surprise winner of the Democratic primary.

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New Orleans, a city about the size of Coventry, has long suffered some of the highest murder rates in the US. After a dip in 2019, it experienced a 60% leap last year with 195 killings and have so far risen this year at higher rates than the national level. Carjackings, where victims tend to be random, more than doubled in 2020.

The city is still recovering from the traumas of the biggest residential disaster in US history. When the city’s levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hundreds drowned and most households had to relocate, often for months. Today, the city has 100,000 fewer residents. The disaster also led to imposition of an educational experiment: its low-performing public schools were replaced by a charter system — similar to our free schools — based on choice. Test results have improved. But I was also told this policy lay at the heart of many problems, since kids from poor, black and troubled backgrounds were kicked out of classrooms rather than helped by local teachers from their own backgrounds.

“After Katrina large sums of money were spent on improving security in schools, since there was the thought young people would come back traumatised and unruly,” said Gina Womack, 59. “The schools were still in a horrible condition but there were police, more security, more suspensions. We prioritise policing and patrolling over support for struggling families. It shows how as a society we are quick to blame but we ignore the problems of our youth.”

Womack founded a group to keep kids out of prison in Louisiana: “I am a black single mum of three children and I did not want them to end up in an unjust system,” she tells me. And describes how, when the pandemic struck it exposed, with ruthless efficiency, inequalities in education, housing and income, especially in a city that relied for so many jobs on events and hospitality. “Life has been tougher and it’s been really hard for many families with everyone at home,” she says. “There have been many conversations around the loss of life, first through Covid and now homicide — which happens in impoverished communities under stress.”

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Flozell Daniels agrees. He’s head of the Foundation for Louisiana, which spent millions rebuilding communities after Katrina. He believes that many people, often still traumatised by the catastrophe, were subject to extreme pressure by the pandemic in a place which already had a profound lack of faith in government and deep distrust for the police. “Black people do not trust them to keep us safe,” he said. “George Floyd’s death may have been surprising for white people but we knew there was this culture of violence in a system failing black people.”

Others had different reactions. Denise Graves, Portia’s close friend, told me about one black boy from a prosperous family: “He said ‘I’d never understood police brutality, I’d always thought someone shot must have been doing something wrong so I tried to do everything right — but now I realise my skin colour makes me a target.” Graves, a community pastor in her mid-sixties, has raised five boys; she grew up in a tough part of Los Angeles, but said “every night one of them was out of my sight I was terrified”.

Such attitudes cannot be healthy for any society, let alone one as fissured and flooded with firearms as America. A Gallup survey last summer found confidence in police had plunged to its lowest level since the firm started tracking such data almost three decades ago. Yet it also exposed the nation’s divisions: trust actually rose among Republicans to 82% while falling to 28% among Democrats.

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Chabre Johnson, 36, works on the frontline. She’s a project manager with Youth Empowerment Project, a scheme that has helped many young people in New Orleans but has also seen some of its kids murdered or jailed. In the last month alone, a 12-year-old girl and 10-year-old boy have been slain in separate city shootings. So many of the children and teens she works with have seen bodies, heard gunshots and have relatives in prison. “They get tired of trying to do the right thing when everything is stacked against them.”

Johnson believes the dehumanising effect of technology — accelerated in the pandemic — has had a devastating impact. “I think the value of life and self-worth has declined.” The kids she works with are taking less interest in their appearance, and are more interested in the destruction of property and using drink or drugs to blot out problems. She worries too that schoolyard beefs are inflamed on social media and families have lost their ability to control children: “Kids tells parents that if they are not allowed out they will call the police and say they are being kidnapped. Young people do not fear anything.”

These children are growing up in a city with a history of violence, remarked upon even by the Times war reporter William Howard Russell when he visited  in 1861, and the causes are complex. But Flozell Daniels argues that his country does not care about young black men killing each other, becoming alarmed only when violence spills out to affect middle-class people such Pollock. As we drink coffee in a bookshop in a poorer part of town, he explains that these issues are deeply personal: his son was shot dead five years ago at the age of 20 in a murder that has never been solved.

His family thinks they know the killer, now in prison for another attempted murder. This exposes another corrosive issue in black and impoverished communities: low clear-up rates, currently at 36% in New Orleans for murder, despite evidence many proven killers are linked to other violent crimes. “We spent the first couple of years offering the police information, doing our own investigations, offering a reward. We kept calling the police but they never reacted. They were disrespectful — they said he must have been doing something bad to have been killed,” said Daniels. “I am sure that if it had been a 20-year-old white girl from upstate they would have found her killer quickly.”

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Jill Leovy wrote that this issue of impunity for killers of black men was her nation’s “great, though mostly invisible, race problem” in Ghettoside, her brilliant book on homicide. She pointed out that black men comprised about 6% of the population but 40% of homicide victims, arguing that efforts to combat this mostly black-on-black murder epidemic had a dark history of dismissal by authorities that remained “inept, fragmented, underfunded, contorted by a variety of ideological, political and racial sensitivities.” The Californian journalist concluded that when the criminal justice system failed to respond strongly to violent injury and death, such issues become endemic.

The New Orleans police, their union and the district attorney declined to discuss these issues —although as one youth worker said, who would want to be a cop in the current climate? Many commentators and police leaders, however, have jumped on the homicide figures to argue this is the inevitable consequence of demonising the police as “genocidal oppressors of minorities”, thereby reducing their confidence to tackle violent criminals. Such claims are undercut by data showing little difference in murder rates in cities regardless of which party is in charge, despite widely differing policies. The rise also started soaring in June last year, three months after the first lockdowns, so cannot simply be blamed on bored teenagers hanging around streets when schools closed.

Jeff Asher, a crime analyst based in New Orleans and former adviser to the city authorities, was among the first to highlight the alarming murder surge. He points out that police have been making fewer arrests for years as part of the trend to reduce incarceration and soften drug policies — down from about 60,000 a year in 2010 in his home city to some 17,000 the year before the pandemic. So the rise in killings is unlikely to be due to sudden police retrenchment. “De-policing could be a contributing factor but it has been going on for a decade,” he said.

The former CIA officer thinks “anyone giving a single answer to this complicated question is wrong”. He believes it may be part of a cycle of violence and mistrust that has seen cops pulling back, perhaps to more peaceful streets, which fed into existing mistrust of police in more troubled areas. This ends up with more people taking disputes into their own hands, a situation made worse amid the stresses and tensions of a pandemic. “People are not willing to depend on the criminal justice system when they do not see it as something neutral that treats them fairly.”

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Asher backs his argument with another alarming set of figures showing more guns being carried. We know sales boomed last year, with many first-time buyers. But he shows me that more firearms were found by police in early months of the pandemic last year, despite arrests and stops falling sharply, and then the figures rose again after Floyd’s murder and the protests at the end of May. In Chicago, for example, police stops fell two thirds between January and May 2020 — yet they found almost twice as many guns at the end of that period as at the beginning. Similar patterns can be detected in other cities, suggesting this was another legacy of deteriorating trust that coincided — or could have been fuelled — by the pandemic.

Asher points out that there was no rise in killings in Baltimore since trust of the authorities in this city wrecked by gang warfare was already shot to pieces. “George Floyd was the spark, not the cause. The poorest communities have been over-incarcerated, subjected to gun violence for generations and then hit hardest by pandemic. We have too many firearms and policing needs reform — but it’s hard to rebuild trust.”

Yet he also says it is simplistic for the Left to blame Donald Trump’s presidency for such deep societal problems. “One administration does not cause children shooting at police, everyone carrying guns, police becoming less willing to engage and communities historically underserved seeing enormous eruption in violence.” So is this, ultimately, a racial issue, I asked? “Everything in America goes back to our original sin,” he replied.