For twenty years, starting in 1999, Jarvis DeBerry’s New Orleans Times-Picayune column was the place where the city got its most honest look at itself: the good, the bad, the wonderful, and yes, also the weird. And the city took note. DeBerry’s columns inspired letters to the editor, water cooler conversations, city council considerations, and barbershop pontification. I Feel To Believe collects his best columns, documenting two decades of constancy and upheaval, loss, racial injustice, and class strife. In a world of tradition in which lifelong New Orleanians hold strongly that one has to be us to truly see us, DeBerry arrived and began his journey. Generations from now, his readers will receive a deep look at the Crescent City before, during, and after Katrina. I Feel To Believe is all at once an accounting, a reckoning, a celebration.