What is the importance of New York City in the novel, The Floating World?

Where Tess and Joe meet, where Del attends college and then works. New York stands in for the American North, as opposed to the American South; both Joe and Del see living in New York as a means to disown their fraught Southern heritage. Joe “had gone north too, escaping to a place where people looked at him only half funny, only said ‘nigger’ behind his back” (111). It is Tess who lures Joe back to New Orleans, where the deep racism of Southern culture eventually undermines their marriage. Del returns to New Orleans to reclaim her “birthright,” her calling to make furniture in the Boisdoré tradition.