The Atlantic

“New Orleans is the only ship I’d go down with,” my friend Ben wrote on Facebook in the hours before Hurricane Ida upended southeast Louisiana. He rode out the storm in the city—“hunkering down,” in standard hurricane parlance.

Oppression runs deep in southern Louisiana, but so does resistance. On January 8, 1811, a group of enslaved people marched from Woodlawn Plantation in St. John the Baptist Parish toward New Orleans. With each plantation they passed, more people joined, armed with cane knives, hoes, clubs, and guns, until more than 500 people flowed downriver, bent on founding a new Black nation.

THE SUN is nearing the horizon when Joey Dardar’s boat propeller starts churning up mud. For a moment, the smell of sulfur is so thick I can taste it, but Joey’s not worried. He knows this area too well for us to run aground. Yellow-crowned night herons glide overhead. “Gros-bec,” Joey calls them. French for crooked beak. To our right is Isle de Jean Charles. To our left, the Gulf of Mexico. Directly ahead, the biggest backhoe I’ve ever seen is parked beside an oil well.

For more than twelve years, Jesse Wilson has eaten, slept, read, showered, dreamed, and shat in a seven-by-twelve-foot room. His sink sits on top of his toilet. His bed is a concrete slab. His four-inch-wide window is angled so that a slice of sky is all he sees of the world outside. For every twenty-three hours inside this room, he may, or may not, get an hour away— time alone in a workout room so drab inmates nicknamed it “the empty swimming pool.”

In a society that values “self-actualization,” the discovery of one’s “true self,” identical twins are something of a cultural snag, a contradiction to the way we think selfhood works. It’s not that twins aren’t individuals. Of course, we are. But popular culture portrays twins as exactly the same, souls assembled from the same base parts according to the same DNA blueprint. In contrast, individuality is about uniqueness, a quality that identical siblings aren’t always granted.

Mallon was forcibly removed to Riverside Hospital, on North Brother Island in the East River, where she lived in isolation from 1907-1910. In 1909 she sued the health department for holding her unfairly. “I am an innocent human being,” she argued. “I have committed no crime and I am treated like an outcast—a criminal. It is unjust, outrageous, uncivilized.”