A Paradise Built in Hell (36 page)

There Bartholomew saw that the storm had ripped part of the roof off the attic. And even up there she wasn’t out of reach of the waters. “And I’m screaming and hollering, ‘I don’t want to die, Jesus save me, please. What have I done?’ And by the time I closed my eyes, a big wave . . . two big waves just met and covered me, and when it sprayed, it just sprayed on top of all the other houses, because this house was up high, and finally it just sprayed it, and the wind kept blowing, the wind kept blowing. I could reach down and touch the water. The water was pretty, it was nice and white. And I’m screaming and hollering, ‘Please God, don’t let me die. Please God, don’t let me die.’ And then finally all different types of animals I’ve never seen before in my life came into the house. Finally I did have nerve enough to look down. Every ceiling in the house was gone, every window was gone, the back door was gone. All kinds of animals [were] making all kinds of noise, and I was running, because they was coming to my feet. It was horrible. So finally I’m thinking it’s over, and it came and shook the back side of the house, and I’m praying to ‘God, Lordy, Lordy, you know I can’t swim,’ and then finally for about four hours it beared down and so finally I’m standing on the stairs to the roof, and I’m tired, Lord, I’m tired, but if I fall asleep I’m going to drown. So here come the wind again, and then finally it must have been about three o’clock and it stopped. A white couple drowned in front of me, they were trying to get to the river.” That is, they were trying to get to the high ground by the Mississippi River, where they might crawl out of the water. Bartholomew cheered them on as they struggled.

“And like a big wave, a surge, just came and took them under. Oh, the little girl hollered. She just screamed and screamed and screamed. In the meantime the wind is still blowing you still got that fine misting rain. Then a body passed right in front of me. Then I’m looking around the attic to try to get something to pull it up to me, and then there was a big old alligator following the body. Oh, I froze, I couldn’t even move, and then after it calmed down the rain stopped. I thought my neighbor was on the roof, so I hollered and all of a sudden beautiful seagulls came and pelicans. [My neighbor] didn’t have a shirt on, so they was eating him up like he was dead meat, and so he got a shotgun and started shooting at them. And then the wind started up again. Oh, it blowed and blowed and blowed. I was getting tired.” She found her sister’s Bible and read a psalm. She repented of her sins. She saw a beautiful boat without anyone in it float by and took it as a sign from God. She waited to die.

A lot of people waited to die in Hurricane Katrina, and more than sixteen hundred did so, though some of them were so unwell they never knew what got them, or they died not of the hurricane or the flood but of thirst, heatstroke, lack of medicine, or murder in the days after the waters had settled and the wind had passed. It’s hard to say that Bartholomew was lucky, but she lived. She stayed on that torn-up attic a while longer and saw coffins and bodies, livestock and wildlife, alive and dead, go floating by. A boat went by with a young white couple in charge. “So finally I heard the white girl say, ‘I hear someone hollering,’ and he said, ‘No it’s just the water going down.’ She said, ‘No, turn the motor off.’ When he turned the motor off, you know what I did? I hollered, ‘I’m Clarita, I’m alive.’ When he came to the opening of the roof and he saw me, ‘How did you live through that?’ ”

She got into the boat, where one rescued neighbor told her of seeing alligators swimming in the flooded neighborhood, another told of fleeing from rooftop to rooftop as the water rose. They passed St. Rita’s Nursing Home, where thirty-five elderly and disabled people drowned in the suddenly flooded building. Clarita’s rescuer, who worked for the parish, and his wife saved about a hundred stranded people with their boat, she recalls. An armada of volunteers went out in small craft that week and ferried uncounted thousands, tens of thousands, to dry ground. Bartholomew herself got dropped off at a high school and slept on the floor that Monday night. From there, she was evacuated to the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, and when I met her, she was trying to make a home of an empty apartment in San Francisco and keep tabs on when she would be allowed to return to fix her house. She endured something like the apocalypse, more so than most people can imagine, but her ordeal had comparatively few stages. An ordeal of wind and water, an evacuation, an awful time in the Astrodome, and a long exile.

A lot of people who lived in New Orleans Parish went through more. Cory Delaney, a twenty-four-year-old from a one-story home in the outskirts of New Orleans, went with his father, his disabled mother, and a few other relatives to take shelter in his aunt’s two-story house in the city. From there everything went wrong. The possessions on the ground floor began to float in the seeping water, and then the water began to climb the stairs. They were stranded, and a help sign on the roof brought nothing. They ran out of water to drink, and the helicoptors flying by that they hoped would rescue them kept going, guns pointing out the window. On the third day as he began building a raft, a boat came. He carried his mother, while other relatives carried her wheelchair. At the staging area were more men with guns: a policeman with an M16 in hand who told them to walk to the top of the interstate and wait for a bus. They settled in with about two thousand people. Buses did begin to come by, but some didn’t stop, and others took away the most vulnerable.

Delaney found himself in a group of about twenty-five that began to function as a social unit—a lot of people stranded by Katrina would become part of these improvised communities that took care of each other and made decisions together. But sitting on the shadeless blacktop of an elevated highway surrounded by water reflecting back the glare and humid heat was too much for his frail mother. One policeman came and gave them water, but the next round of police to come by “got out of their cars with their M16s and their AK-47s ready to shoot somebody. They told us to back up like we was all fugitives. They pointed their guns at us and told us, ‘They not coming for ya’ll. Ya’ll got to fend for yourself. Try to walk to the Superdome’ So we walked down there pulling my mama, and nobody tried to help. They just ride past—people riding past in boats taking pictures of us like we was just some homeless people, refugees or something. We stayed out there two more nights sleeping on the interstate, this is like five nights now. We was just all frustrated, didn’t know what to do. I had to build a tent over my mama to keep the shade on her ’cause she was dehydrated. She wasn’t eating and wasn’t drinking too much. I mean, she was like going away. So we’re praying, we got people coming up to us praying for my mama.” He asked people for help, to no avail, until finally the National Guard got them on a truck to the suburb of Metarie, where his mother got priority for evacuation—and was whisked away, lost to the rest of the family for days. Eventually, the rest of the family got a bus to Texas. “We ended up in this concentration-like camp with barbed-wire fences and snipers, like we did something wrong.” At the time of his interview, he was in Minnesota, about as displaced as a person could be without leaving his country.

He wasn’t the only one to end up with a succession of guns pointed at him. Fed by racism and the enormity of the storm, the elite panic reached extraordinary levels in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That generated a disaster of its own, whereby the victims of Katrina were regarded as menaces and monsters, and the response shifted from rescue to control and worse. Katrina was a succession of disasters, the somewhat natural disaster of the storm, the strictly unnatural disaster of the failing levees that flooded St. Bernard Parish and much of New Orleans, the social devastation of the failure or refusal of successive layers of government to supply evacuation and relief, and the appalling calamity of the way that local and then state and federal authorities decided to regard victims as criminals and turned New Orleans into a prison city, in which many had guns pointed at them and many were prevented from evacuating. Or killed. Or left to die.

Of course, as Kathleen Tierney pointed out to me, Katrina wasn’t a disaster. It was a catastrophe, far larger in scale than almost anything in American history. An emergency is local—a house burns down, a hospital floods. A disaster covers a city or a small region. After the 1906 earthquake you could just cross the bay for sanctuary, and half the city remained standing anyway. After 9/11 you just had to evacuate lower Manhattan; the rest of the island and other boroughs were fine. On September 11, many people in New York City sat home ordering takeout and watching TV about “New York Under Attack.” The day after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake my power was restored so that I could sit near the exact center of San Francisco and watch network news report on my city’s destruction. After Katrina, 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded, all vital services were wrecked or suspended, and ninety thousand square miles of the coastal south were declared a disaster area. The most impacted areas of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana had devastation far inland. The storm surge alone had pushed ocean water—a nearly thirty-foot-high wall of it in places like Biloxi—miles in from the coast. Places like New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward were underwater for weeks, and basic services were not restored for months. Many places will never return to anything like what they were before August 29, 2005; many communities and extended families were permanently ripped asunder.

But much of what happened after the levees broke didn’t have to. It was the result of fear. When Tierney was speaking about elite panic—“fear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities, and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor”—she was talking shortly after Katrina, perhaps the worst case of elite panic in the history of the United States. New Orleans had long been a high-crime city, but the mythic city of monsters the media and authorities invented in the wake of Katrina never existed, except in their imagination. That belief ravaged the lives of tens of thousands of the most vulnerable.

“What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?” William James had asked in his second lecture on pragmatism. In the hours, days, and weeks after Katrina, those with one set of beliefs were responsible for many deaths; those with another saved many lives. Fear fed by rumors and lies and lurking unexamined beliefs about human nature hit New Orleans like a second hurricane. Ray Nagin and Eddie Compass, respectively the mayor and police chief of New Orleans (and both African Americans), contributed to the atmosphere of fear and turmoil. About twenty thousand people had taken refuge in the downtown Superdome sports arena, which had been opened up as a shelter of last resort but was not stocked with anything near the needed quantity of food and water or backup power. The hurricane had ripped off part of the roof, the restrooms backed up and the plumbing failed, so that sewage seeped out into the rest of the facility, and without air-conditioning and adequate electricity the place became a dark, fetid, chaotic oven. Much of the area surrounding its raised concrete perimeter was flooded. People were not allowed to leave, prisoners of the fears of those in power. Rumors of savagery inside abounded. Compass told the television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, “We had little babies in there. . . . Some of the little babies getting raped.” He was overwhelmed by sobs on television and eventually had a breakdown. Nagin reported that there were “hundreds of gang members” in the Superdome, raping and murdering. During his Oprah moment, he told the national audience that people had been “in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”

Despite the assumption that the Superdome and Convention Center had become nests of vipers, the media focus was for a while on the retail outlets on dry ground reportedly being plundered. The hysteria about looting became so intense that two and a half days after the storm, on August 31, Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco called emergency responders—police and National Guard, mostly—off search and rescue to focus on combating looting. They had chosen protecting property over saving lives. Put that way, the decision sounds bizarre, but the word
looting
itself is maddening to some minds, creating images of chaos, danger, and boundless savagery. What difference would it make if we were blasé about property and passionate about human life? Governor Blanco said, “These are some of the forty thousand extra troops that I have demanded. They have M16s, and they’re locked and loaded. . . . I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.” Ninety-nine years later things had not changed from the San Francisco mayor’s infamous “shoot to kill” proclamation that also focused on looting.

The media took its cue from these hysterical, gullible leaders. CNN declared, “On the dark streets, rampaging gangs take full advantage of the unguarded city. Anyone venturing outside is in danger of being robbed or even shot. It is a state of siege.” No evidence exists that anyone was shot or killed by the supposed gangs, though certainly a lot of bullets were fired. Rumors of policemen being shot down were retracted, as were many accounts of snipers taking potshots at rescue helicoptors—a senseless act that fits the notion of regressive savagery and panicked mobs. The
New York Times
wrote, on September 1, “Chaos gripped New Orleans on Wednesday as looters ran wild . . . looters brazenly ripped open gates and ransacked stores for food, clothing, television sets, computers, jewelry, and guns.” So did policemen, but that news broke later. The police were captured on national television raiding a Walmart. They also stripped a Cadillac dealership of its stock. Some were found driving Cadillacs as far away as Texas. With laconic southern humor, the dealership later reopened with a billboard that advertised its cars were “Driven by New Orleans’ Finest.”