Speaking with Rowell after the flooding of New Orleans, Hall explains why she once described the city as the most African in America. Africans reached Louisiana in a compact mass before 1731, two-thirds of them from Senegambia, and their languages, religion, cooking and music shaped the colony during its formative years; Louisiana Creole was made by that first generation and their children.

She resists the habit of crediting Caribbean or Haitian influence for what Louisiana made itself, noting that the Creole spoken there is a separate language from Haiti's, that voodoo in Louisiana was led by women rather than men, and that Marie Laveau's ancestry turns out to be entirely local.

Asked why televised images of the Superdome struck other Americans as foreign, she answers twice over: culturally, in the French names and the musicality of speech; politically, in a pattern of governing a hard-to-control population through repression, corruption, mass incarceration and the deliberate encouragement of division by color.