Before and After North Dorgenois

InBefore and After North Dorgenois,Ebony Bolding examines life in New Orleans’s Sixth Ward. She talks to friends, family, neighbors, and people on the street, interviewing newly arrived doctors, members of the church on her block, the Bayou Road Boys, and a woman who has returned to the area where her mother grew up. From her porch, near John McDonogh Senior High — the scene of a notorious school shooting that made headlines for weeks — she looks at the ways the block is changing, and writes about her mother’s decision to move the family deeper into the Sixth Ward after a new landlord buys their house. She interviews the new landlord as well, and ruminates over the universal fear of changing schools. Written before the hurricane hit,Before and After North Dorgenoisvividly documents, through photographs and Bolding's fresh voice, the neighborhood’s people and places, offering a potent reminder of the area as it once was.