A Paradise Built in Hell (42 page)

Overall population had been steadily declining from a high in the early 1960s; other than tourism, the port, and the universities, there were few jobs—and so the city did not have the financial momentum to rebuild after disaster that, say, San Francisco in 1906 had. Without Katrina, it would have been doomed to a long, slow decline. With Katrina, its fate took a strange turn—and remains uncertain in many ways years later. The poor were once again most injured and most likely to be dispersed by the calamity (and by the city’s decision to board up and then tear down nearly all the huge housing projects across the city, which in many cases were not even damaged).

Even in decline, it is an extraordinary city. Its poverty is obvious. The ways New Orleans was and is rich are not so easy to measure, though a statistician could surely find out how deeply embedded in family, neighborhoods, associations, the annual cycle of celebration, and love of place a great many Orleanians are. New Orleans has an unusually low transience rate: a lot of people, rich and poor, live in the neighborhood, or on the street, or in the house where they were born and have a deep sense of belonging, to their networks of people and to the city itself—as though they had broad branches in the social present and deep and spreading roots in the historical past, like the magnificent live oaks that shade many of the older avenues of the city. Many live in a forest of cousins, aunts, uncles, and ties of blood and of people they grew up with and presumed they would know forever, along with places, institutions, rites, foods, music, and the other threads of the fabric of New Orleans. After Katrina, many were devastated by the loss of something most of the rest of us in the United States had never had. Our grandparents lost it in emigrating from the Old World or leaving the farm, or our parents in moving to the anonymous suburbs, or we ourselves in joining that free and lonely legacy—not tradition, for it is antitradition—of transience and rootless-ness. This embeddedness can also be described as a diffuse love, an atmosphere of familiarity and affection in which many of its citizens bask.

New Orleans is also a town of festivals. Not only the rites of Mardi Gras but also of St. Patrick ’s Day, St. Joseph’s Day, Jazz Fest—enough holidays that one parade the second Mardi Gras season after Katrina featured a long, long series of floats commemorating the annual cycle of holidays. Mardi Gras itself is not one day of parades, costumes, and revelry, as many outsiders imagine, but rather the whole ancient carnival season from Twelfth Night in early January to Fat Tuesday, the last day before Lent, a cycle of several weeks of intensifying celebration. Many plan and prepare costumes and floats all year, and the krewes who put on each parade are social organizations that function year-round. Second line parades may occur any day of the year. They evolved out of jazz funerals (and aspects of the jazz funerals apparently trace back to West African traditions that were not lost in the Middle Passage). The Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs that commission the second lines themselves evolved from the African American benevolent societies that came out of the postwar Freedmen’s Bureau as a means to provide funerals and other forms of support as well as fellowship and security. They were one of the many forms mutual aid took in a more close-knit era that lingers on in New Orleans. Their very name acknowledges as little else does in everyday language that mutual aid and pleasure are linked, that the ties that bind are grounds for celebration as well as obligation.

Louis Armstrong, New Orleans’s most famous jazz musician, remembered with great joy how early on in his life music gave him the diplomatic immunity to move relatively freely through New Orleans—while playing in parades through rival groups’ neighborhoods and through the white districts otherwise off-limits. New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz and the capital of the Mississippi Delta, where the blues arose from sorrow and genius and mixed musical legacies. It is also a divided and dangerous city; but the wealth of music undid something of the profound impoverishment that is racism. Parades by definition travel, and the musicians, if not their followers, in the parades of Armstrong’s youth, could go almost anywhere, which is why an early parade with the Tuxedo Brass Band was one of his happiest memories: “I really felt like I was somebody,” he recalled, and his biographer Thomas Brothers writes, “With his 1921 success with the Tuxedo Brass Band, Armstrong believed that he had solved, through his growing musical ability, the problem of trouble-free movement through a dangerous city.” In those frequent celebrations, New Orleanians renew their ties to tradition, place, and each other. In Spike Lee’s documentary
When the Levees Broke
you can see one of the members of Black Men of Labor exult that their second line parade has let them come to Jackson Square in the heart of the French Quarter, which would ordinarily be out-of-bounds for them.

The second line parades continue, if not unabated. Nearly two years after Katrina, I followed the Hot Eight Brass Band through the areas upriver from the French Quarter, starting near the Walmart on Tchoupitoulas Street that during Katrina had been plundered by police as well as other locals. The members of the band mostly wore T-shirts, but the Social Aid and Pleasure Club members marching with them wore matching peach-colored short-sleeved suits and porkpie hats. The musicians played their instruments with joyous zeal, and the mostly black crowd in their wake danced exuberantly through the middle of the streets, joined by people trickling out of the old houses the parade passed. It was an hour or two of joy for no particular reason, under the spreading oaks of the residential streets and past the bleakness of dying industry. Such an event on a small scale does what carnival does on a large scale: the subtle work of making society.

New Orleans is extraordinarily rich, as well as appallingly poor, and it sometimes seems to be made up largely of contradictions. This social richness is shot through with crime, racism, fear, and apartheids. But the divides themselves are not easy to explain. The media in the wake of Katrina tended to equate race and class, but the city has a black bourgeoisie with deeper roots than any other on the continent, and plenty of poor white people. Progressives from other parts of the country sometimes assume as well that the white people there are all racists, but there are ardent antiracists among both the native white population and the many newcomers who were and are artists, filmmakers, lawyers, organizers, drag queens, environmentalists, and bartenders deeply smitten with the city. There are mixed-race alliances and the children that resulted, as well as a thriving Vietnamese community, a Latino community that exploded with undocumented workers doing demolition and renovation after the catastrophe, and deeply rooted indigenous communities in the surrounding countryside. The lines are not simple. The flood of 2005 overran the middle-class white neighborhood of Lakeview, as well as the black middle-class sprawl of Gentilly, the Vietnamese enclave in New Orleans East, the poor neighborhoods of the Ninth Ward, and the economic and racial mixed zones of the central city—and much of the rest of the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coasts.

Katrina tore apart many old ties and networks and begat new ones as well. These were no substitute for what was lost, but they matter all the same. When Katrina struck, people around the country immediately responded with an outpouring of grief, anxiousness to help, outrage at the government, and concrete support. Huge sums were donated. Within the week, the liberal political action group
Moveon.org
had set up a Web site,
Hurricanehousing.org
, on which nearly two hundred thousand people would volunteer housing, much of it in their own homes, to the displaced. These invitations to join households express something of the deep emotional response in those first days (even as the media were still describing New Orleanians as monsters but showing them as sufferers):

But there was also a pagan bisexual couple in their thirties in San Francisco. And a young married couple in Bozeman. And tens of thousands of others in a nationwide surge of altruism.

 

 

 

Communities of people thrown together by circumstance were everywhere. I met a gaunt older man, a housepainter by trade, named Keith Bernard Sr., in his neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward, and he told me his story of survival in a sweet, plaintive voice. Where he lived on the south side of the Lower Ninth “was a nice quiet neighborhood, it really was. Katrina ran all our best friends away, most of our neighbors were elders, as a matter of fact in a two-block radius all of our neighbors were elderly. They were beautiful. Talk about fine people, they were homeowners, they were nice people willing to help to give whatever they can.” As for himself, “I stayed because I could’ve been of help to someone, which I was.” The Lower Ninth is notorious for drugs and crime, but like most such neighborhoods the reputation is earned by a fraction of its population, and the majority of churchgoers, retirees, working people, children, and others lead ordinary lives. Bernard was a renter near the high ground of the Holy Cross part of the neighborhood, but not high enough when the storm surge burst into the area. His house flooded and the water chased him up into the attic. His only way out was to dive back into the house and through a broken window into the lake his neighborhood had become. He and his dog came across a boat and made it to a two-story house, where they sheltered for the first, worst brunt of the storm.

They were rescued by police who dropped them off on the St. Claude Bridge that crosses the canal that cuts off the Lower Ninth from the rest of the city. Bernard was able to walk to an elementary school, where many others had taken refuge. “It turned into a community effort. Everybody cooked. They fed one another. They scavenged the food that they had from stores that had been vandalized, whatever, but they were really, really nice. I saw people being compassionate about people that they never met, people that they never saw, people that they never knew reaching out to them, feeding them, giving them clothes. You know, we didn’t have no use for money, so the basic was the clothes and the food. This was New Orleans everywhere. This was everywhere in New Orleans.”

That might have been the school I visited six months later, when New Orleans was still something of a ghost town. Written on the green chalkboard in one of the upstairs classrooms was, in neat handwriting, “September 2nd, 2005, 9:15 a.m. We are sorry for the school, but the shelter was a blessing. We had to bring over 200 people here with no help from any Coast Guard boats. People died and are still in their house, we had to leave them, we asked the C. G. for help and got NONE. Thanks to Mickey, McK inley, Eric, Phil, Tyrone, Karl B., J-Roy, Richard, Cedric, Jeff D., Jeff, Ben, Big Greg, 10th Ward Al, Lance + Anthony. We saved the whole project. THEY LEFT US HERE TO DIE.”

After the disaster, people in the devastated neighborhoods were scattered. NENA, the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association, keeps a big map in its cement-block office—which was, in 2007, a former community center lent by St. David’s Catholic Church next door—with a green pushpin for every returnee. The green dots were scattered everywhere, though they represent only a small percentage of homes and residents. NENA was founded by resident Patricia Jones, a former accountant, in June of 2006, to help people cut through the extraordinary red tape that surrounds the new building codes, the FEMA money, the Road Home fund from the state of Louisiana, the insurance regulations, and other bureaucracies returnees face, but it also fosters connections and community. Help came from all over the country, but there was plenty of mutual aid from within the city.

Pam Dashiell, a warm, easygoing political powerhouse, had been president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association (named after the Holy Cross School, it encompasses the southern stretch of the Lower Ninth and its highest ground). As members of the HCNA began to return, they held meetings several times a week. In the summer of 2007, they still met weekly, rather than monthly as they did before Katrina. The group has been potent for both its ambition and its coordination of many outside groups and funders. And while a lot of individuals and groups aspired to just restore what had been, the HCNA looked at how to make the Lower Ninth better. The list of who came to help sounds like the setup for a joke: churches, the movie star Brad Pitt, graduate students, lots of young anarchists, and the Sierra Club.

Most of the returnees had lost family members to the Katrina diaspora, and the fabric of the neighborhood is still mostly holes. Dashiell evacuated to St. Louis with her daughter, daughter’s partner, and grandchild. Only she returned, and she returned even though she was a renter who lost everything in her home. She set about to reclaim not only a home but a community in the Lower Ninth. A lot of people elsewhere bought the story that these places did not make environmental sense to reclaim and reinhabit, and Dashiell recalls that the developers who were part of the city’s Bring New Orleans Back Committee were, like the businessmen trying to abolish Chinatown after the 1906 earthquke, “in reality looking at ways to not bring the Lower Nine back. To hear what they were really saying at that level and what they were doing was just unbelievable, and for me that was a catalyst. We had to do something. We organized. We developed a plan. We were everywhere we could be.” Though the businessmen were arguing that rebuilding didn’t make environmental sense, environmentalists were the ones “who provided the support,” Dashiell said. The HCNA pursued a rebuilding effort that would address the ways New Orleans had chosen to violate the natural landscape. Unlike mostly middle-class white Lakeview or largely Vietnamese American New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth is not a new neighborhood or one on extremely low ground. Its ecological precariousness is relatively recent, the result of man-made waterways that brought storm surges into the area.