When New Orleans’s Desire Projects opened in 1956, its first wave of residents recognized that the housing complex was not only undesirable but dangerous. A segregated development for Black families—the neighboring Florida Avenue Projects housed white residents—Desire’s 1800-plus housing units made it the nation’s largest public housing project. Built on swampy soil and lacking a proper foundation, the site immediately started showing signs of purposefully neglectful design and construction. Foundations cracked, sidewalks fractured. Porches sagged, detaching from doorways. Water, gas, and sewer lines ruptured.  

A tenants’ association report, released six weeks before Desire welcomed its first residents, put it plainly: “It is our conclusion that this project is a waste of public money, that it is undesirable for many reasons and finally that it is unsafe for human habitation.” Desire, the report continued, is “a blight on public housing in New Orleans.” 

Nevertheless, the Desire Projects opened to eventually house over ten thousand people, including Clarence Nero, the future author of Cheekie. Subtitled A Child Out of the Desire, Nero’s semi-autobiographical novel traces the adolescent years of his stand-in, Charles Webb III, nicknamed Cheekie.  

Told in Cheekie’s voice, the novel opens at a time just before his birth, an era before Desire was, according to Nero, a “place of ongoing violence, homicides, and drug dealing.” This was the early 1970s, when the neighborhood was “the place to live, if you lived in a New Orleans housing project, that is.” 

Cheekie is not a grim portrait of ghetto life, but rather a loving portrait of the women in the character’s life, and presumably by extension the life of Nero. Cheekie’s mother, Faye, strives for a better life for her children, but keeps getting waylaid by the men she thinks will make her dreams a reality. Her own mother, Pam, is a tobacco-chewing, church-going, stubborn-hearted family matriarch (it’s she who nicknamed her grandson for being, in her words, “such a cheekie baby, always whining and crying, and never satisfied”). The only way Pam is capable of keeping her finances stable is to ship one of her daughters, Cheekie’s beloved aunt Safot, off to a group home in the suburbs.  

Growing up in the Desire forces Cheekie to grow up quick. His father physically abuses his mother, who chases him out of the projects and out of her life with a butcher’s knife. Not long after, Cheekie is raped by an older boy who lives next door.  

He takes solace in daily comforts. His morning bowl of Apple Jacks. A trip to the corner store for huckabucks and Mary Jane candies. Skipping rope, even if this means crossing the Desire’s coded gender lines. “I didn’t care about the fact that no boy wasn’t suppose to be jumping rope like no girl,” Cheekie says. And watching episodes of Sanford and Son and Good Times, a show he especially loves “because it shows that even families living in the project can have good times—sometimes.”  

Sometimes, indeed. Faye’s boyfriends each show promise before reverting to the same monstrous behavior as Cheekie’s dad. She gets pregnant twice again. A single mother of five, she desperately wants out of the Desire. As the 1980s roll around, the twin scourges of drugs and violent crime—once always in the background—are now a constant presence. “Last year, there were more homicides in the Desire than in the rest of the whole city,” Cheekie tells the reader. Faye determines to try her luck at the Section 8 housing lottery, and succeeds.  

The family moves on up, “just like the Jeffersons,” Nero writes, to a four-bedroom shotgun on St. Claude. There the book ends on a hopeful note. His mother returns to school to earn a GED and an associate’s degree. Grandma Pam and Safot make amends. And Cheekie graduates from Carver Middle with the highest grades in his class.  

We can turn to Nero’s own life to continue the storyline. After graduating valedictorian from Carver Senior High, he attended Howard University on a scholarship, earning a chemistry degree. He stayed in the nation’s capital, taking a city government position as a toxicologist. “The money was good but it wasn’t enough,” Nero explained in a 2015 interview. “I also had issues from the past growing up in the Desire that I was running from and hadn’t fully dealt with.”  

Those issues include the loss of family members due to the city’s epidemic of violence. Three of his brothers had been murdered in the preceding decades. “Just because you live in this space,” Nero said in a 2011 CNN feature, “doesn’t mean that you have to die there.”   

Pulling stories from his adolescence, Nero started drafting Cheekie. Though some of the harsher realities—the links between social inequities and civic blight, the deaths of his brothers—are absent from the narrative, Cheekie remains a heartfelt representation of life in the New Orleans housing projects. The novel won endorsements from Maya Angelou and the Library Journal, which named it one of the year’s best debuts.  

By the time of Cheekie’s 1998 release by an independent publisher out of Oklahoma, the piecemeal demolition of Desire was three years underway. Nero eventually quit the chemistry profession and enrolled in Louisiana State University’s creative writing MFA program. “Writing was rewarding and healing at the same time,” he explained. “When I found the gift, I discovered my true self.” He’s since published two novels featuring protagonists who contend with the challenges of being closeted queer Black men. 

Today the former site of Desire is home to a mixed income neighborhood of rental units that developers have christened Abundance Square. 

Rien Fertel wishes to thank T. R. Johnson and his wonderful book New Orleans: A Writer’s City for putting Cheekie on his radar.