A Paradise Built in Hell (38 page)

Denise Moore went to Memorial Hospital, where her mother worked, to take shelter in the solid many-storied building, but was so offended when she and her family were booted from the room they were assigned in order to accommodate two white nurses who showed up late that she went home. Her home quite literally collapsed around her, and so she ended up at the Convention Center. She recalls, “And we were left there. Without help. Without food. Without water. Without sanitary conditions, as though it’s perfectly all right for these ‘animals’ to reside in a frickin’ sewer like rats. Because there was nothing but black people back there. And then the story became, ‘They left us here to die, they’re going to kill us.’ By the time the rumors started that the National Guard was gonna kill us, I almost halfway believed it. The police kept passing us by. And the National Guard kept passing us by with their guns pointed at us, and because they wouldn’t—when you see a truck full of water and people have been crying for water for a day and a night and the water truck passes you by? It was almost like they were taunting us. And then, don’t forget they kept lining us up for buses that never showed up. I didn’t see anybody get raped; I did see people die. I saw one man die, and I saw a girl and her baby die. But I didn’t see anybody getting hurt.”

The rumors were right about one thing: there were gangs there, if
gang
is the right word for inner-city men who grow up together and hang out together. Moore said that they “got together, figured out who had guns and decided they were going to make sure that no women were getting raped, because we did hear about women getting raped in the Superdome, and that nobody was hurting babies. And nobody was hurting these old people. They were the ones getting juice for the babies. They were the ones getting clothes for people who had walked through that water. They were the ones fanning the old people, because that’s what moved the guys, the gangster guys the most, the plight of the old people. That’s what haunted me the most, seeing those old people sitting in their chairs and not being able to walk around or nothing. They started looting on St. Charles and Napoleon. There was a Rite Aid there, and you would think they would be stealing stuff, fun stuff or whatever, because it’s a ‘free city’ or whatever, according to them, right? But they were taking juice for the babies, water, beer for the older people, food, raincoats so they could all be seen by each other. You know, I thought it was pretty cool and very well organized.” She compared them to Robin Hood. “We were trapped like animals, but I saw the greatest humanity I’d ever seen from the most unlikely places.” Though undoubtedly not all armed men were as altruistic as those Moore reports on, there was more mutual aid and far less Social Darwinism inside the Convention Center and the Superdome than the media reported and the authorities imagined.

Newhouse News Service reported on September 26, 2005, that a doctor with FEMA—the organization that couldn’t initially get relief into the city and kept a lot of supplies and rescuers out—had sent a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process the bodies. They quoted the doctor saying, “I’ve got a report of two hundred bodies in the Dome.” The actual body count was six, including four natural deaths and a suicide. The September 26, 2005, Newhouse story went on to conclude, “The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees—mass murders, rapes, and beatings—have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical, and civilian officials in positions to know.”

There were many ways in which the war in Iraq spilled over into Hurricane Katrina. Governor Blanco’s troops fresh from the battlefields of Iraq, M16s locked and loaded, implied that New Orleans too was a war zone and that the job of the National Guard was to retake the city. The
Army Times
took this literally in a September 2 news article headlined, “Troops Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans” that began, “Combat operations are under way to take this city back in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.” In other words, the stranded citizens were the enemy and the city was to be taken from them. New Orleans was not to be rescued, but conquered. Blackwater security forces, whose casual massacres in Iraq became notorious, were sent in. Jeremy Scahill reported for
The Nation
magazine that the four Blackwater commandos he talked to “characterized their work in New Orleans as ‘securing neighborhoods’ and ‘con fronting criminals.’ ” He reported further that “they all carried automatic assault weapons and had guns strapped to their legs. Their flak jackets were covered with pouches for extra ammunition. When asked what authority they were operating under, one guy said, ‘We’re on contract with the Department of Homeland Security.’ Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, ‘He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary. ’ The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck.” Eventually the U.S. Army arrived. National Guard units in fatigues and armored personnel carriers were still patrolling the city in 2007, per Nagin’s request, since crime was high, and the police department continued to be in disarray. The belief that poor black people were going to attack, or were attacking, or had descended into some sort of maelstrom of animality, shaped the governmental responses and the media coverage. And it turned citizens into vigilantes. The real violence of Katrina deserves its own chapter, however.

For many of the tens of thousands stranded there for the better part of the week, the trauma was not merely the terrible storm and the flooding of their city, the waters in which bodies floated and poisonous snakes swam, the heat that blistered skin and killed many, the apocalyptic days in which people gave birth and died on freeway overpasses surrounded by unclean waters, in which many despaired of ever being taken from a city that had utterly collapsed into a wet and filthy ruin, or that people tried to give away their children so that they might be evacuated first. It was being abandoned by their fellow human beings and their government. And more than that, it was being treated as animals and enemies at the moment of their greatest vulnerability.

W
hen I came to the Gulf Coast, I thought that my subject was the extraordinary communities of volunteers that had sprung up in the wake of Katrina and become funnels through which hundreds of thousands had come to the region, and that is one of my stories. But though no one seemed to be looking for the story of the murder of perhaps dozens of African American men, I couldn’t avoid it. At first it was all secondhand. Or thirdhand. On my first trip to New Orleans after Katrina, I heard that an uptown woman had said her son had seen the forces patrolling the French Quarter shooting black men and throwing their bodies in the river. A friend who’d done extensive investigations himself in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane knew someone who’d witnessed a military escort on one of the rescue boats shoot down two young black men stranded on a rooftop. The black men had fired first, but probably into the air—much of what would be imagined as sniper fire or threats were shots fired to get attention. (It turned out that an astonishingly high number of New Orleanians of all classes and races seemed to own pistols, rifles, shotguns, and semiautomatic weapons. Even the most altruistic rescuers went out in boats with sidearms as well as life vests.) But the witness later committed suicide.

This was all hearsay, but it didn’t arise from the kind of fears and stereotypes that the other rumors did. It was white people talking about the savage things other white people had done to black people. And then there was Jeremy Scahill’s account in
The Nation
magazine of private security firms—part of the mercenary army that along with the official army overran the city in the wake of the storm—firing into the night at “ black gangbangers.” They were allegedly returning fire, though none of the hired enforcers had been hit. They left behind, in their own words, “moaning and screaming.” The army showed up to check out the mercenaries, but no one investigated the injured then or after. A few days after the storm, middle-aged Danny Brumfield was shot in the back by police in broad daylight, in front of his son and daughter, outside the New Orleans Convention Center. He had a pair of scissors in his hand, and the police inside the car claimed their lives were in danger. His family said the scissors were for cutting up cardboard to make shelters for his grandchildren.

Sixteen months after the hurricane, seven policemen were indicted on murder and attempted-murder charges for the one incident that did become well known: the September 4, 2005, shooting on the Danziger Bridge that left two people dead and four wounded. The police claim they were responding to reports of snipers. Witnesses said there never were any snipers. One of the dead was a mentally retarded man, age forty, Ronald Madison. Madison’s brother Lance said the two were walking across the bridge to the dental office of a third brother when shooting broke out. The police claim that Ronald Madison reached for a weapon in his waistband, but his brother, a longtime Federal Express employee who has no criminal record but was arrested that day for attempted murder, says they were unarmed. The retarded man got five bullets in the back, though the police report says he was shot only once. Nineteen-year-old James Brisette was walking with a friend’s family to get groceries when the police opened fire. He died. One of his teenage friends was hit by bullets in the hands, elbow, neck, and stomach and now has a colostomy bag. The friend’s aunt, Susan Bartholemew, had her forearm blown off. “My right arm was on the ground lying next to me,” she recalled. Her husband was shot four times. The Bartholemews’ daughter was unhurt. The policemen were out of uniform and had emerged from a rental van. The victims thought they were vigilantes. The indictments led to no convictions, though in late 2008, the United States Justice Department opened an investigation into the shootings at the request of some of the victims’ families.

Michael Lewis, a native son of the affluent Uptown area, wrote a wryly humorous piece about his and his neighbors’ experiences of Katrina and the fears that afflicted them. The few who remained behind in unflooded Uptown were mostly men convinced they needed to protect their property, turning each pretty old home into a fortress to be guarded with an arsenal. “Pretty quickly, it became clear that there were more than a few people left in the city and that they fell broadly into two categories: extremely well armed white men prepared to do battle and a ragtag collection of irregulars, black and white, who had no idea that there was anyone to do battle with. . . . The police had said that gangs of young black men were looting and killing their way across the city, and the news had reached the men inside the forts. These men also had another informational disadvantage: working TV sets. Over and over and over again, they replayed the same few horrifying scenes from the Superdome, the Convention Center, and a shop in downtown New Orleans. If the images were to be reduced to a sentence in the minds of Uptown New Orleans, that sentence would be ‘Crazy black people with automatic weapons are out hunting white people, and there’s no bag limit!’ ” Lewis can afford to be amusing because he assumes the people who sat on their porches armed to the teeth didn’t actually use their weapons. That’s probably true of Uptown. Elsewhere, crazy white people with automatic weapons were killing black men and joking about it.

There were vigilantes, and they committed the most heinous crimes during Katrina—well documented but not publicly acknowledged. The
Times-Picayune
won two Pulitzer Prizes for reporting on the devastation of its own city, but the newspaper didn’t always ask tough questions. In the commemorative Katrina book the paper published, there’s a photograph of a chubby, snub-nosed white man in an orange T-shirt sleeping on his side, an arsenal next to him. The caption reads, “On a balcony in Algiers Point, resident Gary Stubbs catches a couple of hours of sleep as part of a self-appointed posse that guarded the neighborhood against looters. The weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle, five shotguns, a derringer, a flare gun, and a pistol, were donated by evacuees who had given the neighborhood defense force permission to enter their homes and take what they needed.” CNN’s Katrina picture book ran the same picture with the caption, “A New Orleans man grabs a couple hours of sleep next to an arsenal of guns. He and several friends rode out Hurricane Katrina. . . . The guns were donated to them by out-of-town residents so they could protect everyone’s property.” Most people would come up with two questions immediately: did people menace that property? And did the vigilantes shoot them? The answers appear to be no and yes. The media didn’t ask those questions, though the answers were pretty easy to come by.

 

 

 

New Orleans is both a city and a parish—the latter being the term Louisiana uses for its counties—and New Orleans Parish stretches across the broad Mississippi to claim Algiers, a small portion of what is usually called the West Bank. As the Mississippi snakes along to form the undulating southern edge of the city, it creates a bulge on the northern shore that is the community of Algiers, a mix of old and new houses with black and white inhabitants. At the top of the bulge is Algiers Point, a neighborhood of pretty pastel-painted cottages with gingerbread trim where some of the bloodiest crimes of Katrina took place. A native New Orleanian told me that there on the West Bank, the other side of the river—where no flooding and what appears to be the worst massacre took place—officials issued her cousin a bulletproof vest, a badge, and a gun and told him to “go shoot niggers.” He may not have, but some did, and the confessions fueled by a sense of impunity and perhaps by guilt have seeped out everywhere. At the Common Ground clinic founded in Algiers shortly after the storm, everyone who came in for an injection or a dressing or medication also needed to tell their story, and the volunteers heard a lot.