True Drama Ripped from the Headlines

True Drama Ripped from the Headlines

Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans

By Jed Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)

New Orleans, "the Big Easy," has always proved to be a great setting for intriguing literary efforts. A Streetcar Named Desire, the Tennessee Williams play, finds its legend set in the city, as did John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. Now comes a non-fiction entry into that tradition, and it is quite a worthwhile effort.

Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans is journalist Jed Horne's first book. Horne, the city editor for The Times-Picayune, the top daily newspaper in New Orleans, delivers a true urban drama ripped straight from the headlines that manages to maintain a crisp southern tone and rhythm.

Desire Street focuses on an aspect of life in the Crescent City that has rarely appeared in book form. Readers will not be romanticized with gumbo, Mardi Gras or sightings of "voodoo queen" Marie Laveau in the French Quarter. The stereotypical perception of New Orleans is challenged as Home reveals how poverty, racism, crime and violence makes life on the bayou for many Black people dysfunctional, hopeless yet wanting. Hence, the book's title, Desire Street - which in this saga is the moniker for a street, a housing project and a neighborhood. Most appropriately, Horne labels the community a "troubled patch" and "the end of the line."

In a nutshell, the story is as follows: In September 1984, a 60-year-old White woman, a grandmother, Delores Dye, is murdered in broad daylight in a grocery store parking lot. Home relates her fate in stark terms, reporting that she "ran afoul of a thief as she loaded a shopping cart of groceries into her car."

But it is also the story of how the search for justice for Dye was badly pursued by the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office. Led by District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., father of the famous jazz singer, the authorities' quest for justice becomes chaotic when it focuses on Curtis Kyles, a young Black man with deep roots in Desire Street.

It is through Kyles that Home presents his brilliant narrative. Every act in Kyles's troubled life is dissected and examined. Home is reporter, detective, sociologist and psychiatrist in his pursuit of the truth. He recreates a compelling real-life drama unique in scope and in aesthetic value. Lives are wasted; heroic acts are scarce. But the people here are compelling always and full of life despite their circumstances.

Horne is not afraid to use stream of consciousness to get inside their heads, either, and that is the key to the story's careful pace. It suggests that he must have awesome creative skills or that he conducted extensive research and interviews in writing this book. The latter seems clearly to be the case judging by the array of information that continues to pour through the pages of Desire Street at every turn.

The scenes selected by Horne to re-create here are priceless. In one, Kyles's family, poor and stretched to the limit, gathers together just enough money to hire him a lawyer. They dump the collected funds from small weekly paychecks and life savings from a pillowcase onto the lawyer's carpet.

Even better is one of Horne's honest but telling sociological observations about the Kyles family and their status as a result of racism in America: "A white family, even a poor white family, can survive a Southern city in relative ignorance of the law," Horne writes, "but no ghetto family is unfamiliar with arrest and indictment."

In all, Desire Street recounts Kyles being tried five times for the murder of Dye. That epic drama possesses the best of any John Grisham novel, but adds concise beat writing that could easily hold its own on the pages of the nation's best dailies. The book is a journey: from the tough streets of New Orleans, to the infamous Angola prison where Curtis Kyles waits for his date with the electric chair, to the United States Supreme Court where the case is appealed to the highest court in the land.

The story unfolds over a period of a dozen years and offers readers a front-seat view of the American judicial system - its checks and balances, and its many fallacies. But most readers - whether victim advocates or staunch defenders of the wrongly convicted - will be frustrated by the case's outcome.

Desire Street, however, will not disappoint. It is a fine literary work, cinematic and enticing, the kind of tale that New Orleans can offer when a determined writer reaches into the bowels of this most unique American city and presents the reader with its true heart and soul.

Brian Gilmore is a lawyer and poet in Washington, D.C.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Jan/Feb 2005
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