Lake George

I just read John Bailey’s The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans (Grove; New York: 2003). New Orleans has always been fucking over her Black citizens. The book can make you indignant about history’s wrongs. If God existed, He’d have flooded old New Orleans and saved only Sally Miller. Bailey’s a lawyer, and the book functions as a page-turning mystery. I read it alongside a Fodor’s guide to New Orleans: how could God be so cruel as to flood that wonderful city? God is not immanent, justice is not imminent, and the president, like God, was paring his nails after cutting brush in Crawford.