A Paradise Built in Hell (40 page)

“So I’m looking at the guy walking toward me and he was walking pretty slow, and that was because he was trying to get the rest of the gauges in the shotgun. And at this point I’m on the ground and I’m praying, ‘God, please, don’t let this guy stand over me and shoot me, try and take my life.’ ” He got to his feet, but his way was obstructed by the branches the vigilantes in Algiers Point had scattered around when they decided to turn their neighborhood into a death trap. As he tried to hop over one of them, he heard another boom. The would-be murderer had shot him in the back, and the blow knocked him down again. He got up, walked on, and asked the first people he saw for help but they drove him off their porch. He managed to stagger onward. He asked some shirtless white guys in a truck for help, but they called him a nigger and one of them said, “We’re liable to shoot you ourselves.” He managed to stay on his feet long enough to reach the house of the guy who had warned him a few minutes earlier about the men with shotguns.

You had to believe, first, that all African American men are criminals and intruders and, second, that people in a disaster have a pressing interest in acquiring private property to act as the vigilantes did believe. Deciding Donnell was a looter was crazy. He was a Brink’s truck driver routinely trusted with hundreds of thousands of dollars who was evacuating with a lot of money in his pocket and no interest in taking someone’s TV on his way to the ferry. He was a rescuer who’d just saved many lives. He was a kind man who told us later on, “I prayed about this situation and everything, I asked God to forgive those guys that done this thing to me; it was kind of hard to even bring myself to that, but I know it’s the right thing to do. But at the same time those guys have gotta answer for their actions.” So far they haven’t.

He had been a rescuer. Then he had been a victim. In the last act of his extraordinary journey through Katrina’s flooded cityscapes and desperate people, he was rescued. While the man who’d warned him worked on his flat tire, his girlfriend and her mother took him into the house and tried to care for him while they figured out what to do next. Donnell recalls, “Your life is in your blood; when your blood is draining like that it’s like your life is draining in a certain sense. I was actually fainting, you know, I was weak, I was pretty weak at that time; it’s a strange feeling, then at the same time your heart is racing and your mind is telling you that you’re about to die.” The younger woman saw the vigilantes in the street looking for Herrington to finish him off. After Donnell was shot, two younger men with guns had terrorized Alexander and Collins with racial insults, death threats, and a pistol-whipping, and these vigilantes came by to finish off Donnell. The younger woman kept them off the property until her boyfriend, armed, stepped in, though maybe it was the woman’s threat to contact the police that sent the vigilantes scurrying. The guy changed his tire in a hurry, and they got Donnell into the backseat. They drove to West Jefferson Medical Center and were told by a doctor in the parking lot that they were not accepting any more people. The young woman argued with them, a doctor took a look, signaled for a stretcher, and Donnell was on his way to the emergency room to get his jugular repaired, just in time. In his medical charts, the doctors estimate he had lost two liters of blood, nearly half the blood in the body of an ordinary human being. But he lived.

 

 

 

Maybe you can call him one of the lucky ones. The vigilantes confirm again and again that they killed several men, or rather each of the several sources A.C. found describes different murders. Talking to other sources, A.C. came up with another West Bank murder story. Henry Glover, age thirty-one, and his brother Edwin King were walking near a Chuck E. Cheese’s place in an Algiers mall when shots rang out, and Glover was severely wounded. A man with a Chevy Malibu picked them up and decided the hospital was too far away. He thought perhaps the police would administer first aid and drove Glover to the elementary school, where a police tactical team was holed up. The police responded, Adam said, “by getting aggressive instead of rendering help.” They beat up King and his friend, smacked one of them in the face with an assault rifle. “Meanwhile there’s poor Henry in the back of the car bleeding, and no one’s doing anything.” The police took the men’s wallets and marched them out of the area on foot. “The last they saw of Henry and the Malibu was an officer with flares in his pocket getting into the car and driving off. When they finally located the car and Henry, the car was on the levee a short distance behind the Fourth District Police Station, and the coroner had Henry’s charred remains. There was no car left and very little left of Henry Glover”—just a skull, some ribs, and a femur, and a car “burned beyond belief.” A.C. thinks someone took Glover’s skull as a souvenir, because it was there in the police photographs but not in the coroner’s report.

A homicide detective told A.C. that he was instructed not to investigate any homicides at that time. “We heard around the station that the guy had been a looter, shot for being a looter.” He added that the tactical-unit people were crazy and that he thought someone in law enforcement burned up Glover’s body, possibly with a flash-bang grenade taken from the nearby National Guard facility, when it began to smell. “Ever smell a dead body?” he asked. That detective quit the force because of everything that had happened during Katrina, he said to A.C., including shoot-outs between looting cops and law-abiding cops. Hobbesian man in uniform. The police had a substation in the mall, and perhaps they shot Henry. But no one in New Orleans was investigating some charred human ribs with a bullet in them behind a police station. Or a man who’d testified on national television about his near murder and shown the evidence written across his body. Or the suppression of hundreds of coroners’ records of autopsied Katrina victims.

Like elites when they panic, racists imagine again and again that without them utter savagery would break out, so that their own homicidal violence is in defense of civilization and the preservation of order. The killing rage of the Klan and lynching parties of the old South were often triggered or fanned into flame by a story, often fictitious or exaggerated, of a crime by an African American man. Of course there were crimes committed by African Americans in Katrina, but to imagine that every black man is a criminal or to punish a whole group or unconnected individuals for a crime is racism at its most psychotic and vigilantism at its most arrogant. That force, driven by hurricane winds of fear and rumor and a flood of old stories, turned deadly. And because once again a disaster was understood in terms of all the familiar stories, what actually happened went almost unnoticed.

The story I wasn’t looking for and couldn’t look away from changes the history of Katrina. And it fits the history of disaster. The version the media was all too ready to write in the days after the city flooded and the system failed was about out-of-control homicidal rampaging African Americans. They turned out to be largely mythological, and the hundreds of corpses rumored to be in the Superdome and the Convention Center dwindled into small numbers of people who mostly died of natural causes. Almost no one was eager to tell the other story of bands of heavily armed white men, affluent ones in Uptown, blue-collar ones in Algiers Point. If the facts don’t fit the beliefs, murders in plain view can go largely unnoticed.

If you want to count indirect homicide, you could find a lot more deaths. Start with the lack of an evacuation plan for New Orleans. That was clearly a problem eleven months earlier, when Hurricane Ivan headed for and then missed New Orleans. Historian and geographer Mike Davis had written prophetically in 2004, “The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond’s version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and carless—mainly black—were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.” As in the Chicago heat wave ten years earlier, the greatest number of casualties were the aged. Indirect homicide could be Blanco and Nagin deciding to pull law enforcement off search and rescue to focus on looting. Indirect homicide is most certainly the Bush administration’s downsized, crony-stuffed version of FEMA, which was so lackadaisical about getting people evacuated from New Orleans that you could have imagined it was sheer incompetence if that branch of Homeland Security hadn’t also been aggressively turning away relief supplies and rescuers. Someday some researcher with access to those coroner’s records may be able to estimate how many people died, in homes, in hospitals, on those highways, and in the two big public shelters because of the delays and blockades.

Not all of it was that indirect. Donnell Herrington had managed to cross the Crescent City Connection, the bridge leading from downtown New Orleans across the river to Gretna, the suburb next to Algiers. Not very many people would be able to follow him in the days to come, at least not on foot. The sheriff of Gretna and a bunch of unidentified men with guns closed the bridge to pedestrians. Most of the people in the Superdome and Convention Center could have walked away from the squalor, the shortages, the suffering, and been easily evacuated from the unflooded side of the river. The Convention Center was practically at the foot of the bridge. But they weren’t allowed to cross the waters. The blockade was so monstrous that even a television anchor-man from right-wing Fox News afoot in New Orleans, Shepard Smith, vented his own outrage at these authorities on camera: “They won’t let them walk out. They got locked in there. And anyone who walks up out of that city now is turned around. You are not allowed to go to Gretna, Louisiana, from New Orleans, Louisiana. Over there, there’s hope. Over there, there’s electricity. Over there, there is food and water. But you cannot go from here to there. The government will not allow you to do it. It’s a fact.” New Orleans was not just a catastrophe. It was a prison.

Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky are paramedics and longtime partners; they had been at a paramedic conference in New Orleans and, like Berkowitz, been stranded when their flights were canceled. Not long after the storm subsided, they were told that on the other side of the river there were buses waiting to evacuate people. So they and the newly formed multiracial clan they were part of set out for the bridge and a route out of the trouble. “When we left the hotel we were probably sixty to seventy percent white, but by the time we got to the bridge, we passed the Convention Center and all these locals are gathered around and they see a bunch of tourists marching very determined like we know where we’re going and pulling our suitcases behind us. People would say, ‘Where you going?’ And some of our group didn’t want to help these people very much, but it was ‘Come on, safety is just across the bridge.’ And some of the people told us, ‘They won’t let you cross the bridge.’ We heard that and it didn’t register. We thought, ‘Are you kidding me?’ It just kind of went in one ear and out the other.” So they recalled many months later. At the time, they wrote an account of their travails in the swamped city: “The two hundred of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched past the Convention Center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings, and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others, people in wheelchairs. We marched the two, three miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.

“As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move. We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Super-domes in their city. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.” Slonsky and Bradshaw were white, but they were not willing to abandon their nonwhite companions to try to negotiate their own salvation.

Across the river, the Jefferson exits were blocked with junked vehicles. Gretna was not interested in mutual aid. It was not interested in saving lives. Its officials were interested in keeping New Orleanians out by any means necessary, including pointing guns at desperate men, women, children, and babies. As the Reverend Lennox Yearwood said before a November 2005 civil rights march to the Crescent City Connection Bridge, “Can you imagine during 9/11, the thousands who fled on foot to the Brooklyn Bridge . . . ? What if they had been met by six or eight police cars blocking the bridge, and cops fired warning shots to turn them back?” Two years later, Gretna’s police chief, Arthur Lawson, told the
Times-Picayune,
“I don’t second-guess this decision. I know I made it for the right reasons. I go to sleep every night with a clear conscience.” City officials blame their acts in part on the lack of an evacuation effort taking people from Gretna to the undamaged world beyond. The city was worried, they say, about being burdened beyond capacity. They claim they had no food, water, or shelter for the evacuees. Many on the West Bank had been petrified with fear of New Orleans’s violent crime for decades and saw Katrina as the moment when that danger would surge from the east to their safe terrain. But even white Algiers Point residents attempting to push baby carriages across the bridge were pushed back at gunpoint. At least four civil rights lawsuits were pending as of 2008.