A Paradise Built in Hell (45 page)

As Rahim, a substantial, powerful, deep-voiced man with long dreadlocks, remembers it, “Scott on the morning of the fifth of September, he said it was time that we organize. And when he told us this, we sat down at my kitchen table and we started organizing Common Ground. The name came from Robert King Wilkerson. King said that what we have to do—because our main discussion was upon how come social movements, all social movements, in America start off with a bang and end with a fizzle—what he said was that we allow all our petty differences to divide us. And King said what we have to find then is that common ground that’s going to bring everybody together. So with that we said, ‘Hey, that’s it, Common Ground, let that be the name.’ ” The response brought up another King, the one who had popularized the term “beloved community” and declared, “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

Rahim continued, “After that I had twenty dollars, Sharon put up thirty dollars, and with that we financed Common Ground.” Millions of dollars would follow. “And from there we was blessed that our phones were still working, so from there we started getting on the phone. We started calling around the country to everyone we knew, and started asking them for some assistance. After that here comes Veterans for Peace. The first to come up was the Veterans for Peace from Florida, and they brought up a bunch of supplies. The next thing you know people start coming. Cindy Sheehan came. And with her came a lot of help. By then we had opened up our health clinic, at least it was a first-aid station by then. A group from France came and helped us make the transition. We organized Common Ground Relief on the fifth of September, and on the ninth we organized a first-aid station. And then maybe three weeks later we made the transition from a first-aid station to a bona fide health clinic. But when it was a first-aid station, it was open twenty-four-seven; we must have been serving at one time from 100 to 150 people a day. Again, like I said, I’m a spiritual person and I truly believe that the Most High casts no burden on you greater than you could bear. My life has been a life of community activism, so I was always able to call upon some of the things that he had blessed me with to provide, to use now in this time of need. A food distribution center was easy for us to start with because this was what I learned how to do when I was in the Panther Party. The health clinic or the first-aid station: again, what we did in the Panther Party.”

The Panthers had started out as an oppositional group to fight police brutality and discrimination in the inner city. The rhetoric of the Panthers was fiery, and the images of young African Americans with weapons and spectacular shoot-outs with the police (and ambushes by police in which Panthers died) were all too memorable. Much of the rest of the Panthers’ achievements have been overshadowed by their outlaw glamour and “off the pigs” rhetoric. The year of its founding, 1966, the Party had come up with a “ten-point program” whose last point was, “We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace, and people’s community control of modern technology.” As the party spread to cities across the United States, the members went about providing some of those things. They fed breakfast to schoolchildren, tested for sickle-cell anemia, and escorted elders to the bank to cash their checks safely. They called these “survival programs.” The term underscores how much the inner city felt like a disaster zone.

Common Ground started out with its own survival programs. And the truth of the organization’s name was borne out by a clinic that immediately began offering medical services to everyone on the West Bank—including some of the vigilantes who confessed about the murders to the medics while receiving care. Rahim credits the medics who bicycled around the area with preventing an all-out race war in the volatile area. They went door-to-door checking on people, offering care, and softening the divides and fears. At first Common Ground was run largely out of Johnson and Rahim’s modest one-story house, and then the storefront clinic nearby in Algiers was added.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, Common Ground set up a tool-lending station, and as the volunteers began to flood in, some were put to work gutting houses ruined by the floodwaters. Others began to work on bioremediation, on a soup kitchen, and on other projects. It was an ambitious organization that planned, in addition to basic survival programs, to replant the cypress swamps killed off by the salt water of the MR-GO canal on the north side of the Lower Ninth, to try to take over a big apartment complex on the West Bank to lodge many of Katrina’s displaced, and to publish a small newspaper for a while. Sometimes its reach exceeded its grasp: the housing project fell through, after a lot of time and money were squandered on it.

The organization was sometimes criticized for bringing white people into black communities, for attempting to make policy as well as practical change, for the ambitious scope of its plans and programs, for its sometimes turbulent internal politics. Thousands of volunteers cycled through, bringing fresh energy—and chaos. A lot of the activists needed to be oriented on how to work across cultural and racial differences. Many came from groups that operated by consensus and wanted that form of direct democracy to be the modus operandi at Common Ground. Allowing transient volunteers to make major decisions without living with the consequences didn’t make sense to Common Ground’s leadership, and so a lot of friction resulted.

Still, the extremely informal methods often worked, and they allowed improvisation in constantly changing circumstances. Emily Posner, a white volunteer who came early on and stayed a long time, recalled, “After the disaster, it was amazing; the Red Cross had a hundred warehouses all over the place and their stuff was just sitting there. Sit, sit, sit, and then we would befriend some Red Cross workers and say: ‘Come on, we need to drive our trucks in here.’ So we would just get the stuff and get it out and distribute it all over the community. And we did this in not just Red Cross warehouses but all kinds of groups. We had a network of grassroots people working together all over the Gulf. ‘We have all this chicken and no electricity yet—can we send a truck over to your community? ’ And that way the most amount of people would get something. There’s all kinds of communities within Common Ground. When you work with eleven thousand people [the number of volunteers who had passed through by early 2007], hundreds of people have taken up, at a certain point, long-term roles. While it’s an informal thing, there are friendships that have been made that will last forever, and those friendships will be needed in the future for sure. We’re a network of people now that if a storm happens we know what to do. And we’ll all call each other.”

When it worked well, people on both sides of the old racial divides went away with changed perceptions. The volunteers mitigated the racial violence and demonization of the first days after the storm. And they went back to their homes and communities around the country, often transformed in some ways by the experience, and spread the word. This kind of social change is incalculable but important. When he studied Common Ground’s beginnings, disaster scholar Emmanuel David thought of Freedom Summer, the movement to register Mississippi voters in 1964, which brought a lot of college-age youth from around the country down to witness and combat racism and poverty. They then went home again bearing stories of what they had seen, galvanized to keep working toward some version of the beloved community. Freedom Summer is a landmark in American history, but the actual number of participants in rebuilding New Orleans is far, far larger—certainly in the hundreds of thousands at this point, but no one is counting. Of course, what transpired also made visible who had abundance and who was destitute—a nation of haves and have nots.

Rahim says the encounters his organization fomented “showed blacks that all whites are not evil or oppressors or exploiters because here that’s the only thing that we ever had. And it showed the whites that all blacks here are not criminals, that there are good God-fearing people here.” Volunteers stayed in rough barracks in the community, often in reclaimed buildings. “We work with solidarity. That means that if you work here, you going to have to stay here. You going to have to keep your presence in the community, and it breached those gaps. We was the first organization to reach out to the Native American community in Houma, we was the first organization to reach out to the Vietnamese community here.” Common Ground’s motto is Solidarity, Not Charity, an emphasis on working with rather than for that sets it apart from many national relief groups, however messy its realization of its goals. Projects begat projects. The clinic split off to become a separate organization, Common Ground Clinic, which begat the Latino Health Outreach Project, which for a few years provided outreach and aid to the hordes of mostly undocumented immigrants who arrived to do the hard work of demolishing and rebuilding the city.

Aislyn Colgan, the young medic who had told me about vigilantes confessing to her about the murders, reflected on her nearly two years on and off with the Common Ground Clinic: “I was only twenty-five when I came down here, and I was in the middle age range. There were very few people over the age of forty, so no one had any experience and we were all learning how to be a leader without being forceful, and a lot of people had different ideas about that. I use the excuse all the time: it was so life and death, that chaos and crisis was propelling a lot of our actions. It took a long time for the clinic to transition. I don’t think it was until right when I was leaving that we realized that we have to keep that spirit alive, the spirit that it was created in, that ‘we have to just give everything we can.’ We were open twelve hours a day, seven days a week the first three months and giving, giving, giving because that was the spirit that it was created in and how do you institutionalize that? How do you make it sustainable?

“It is so rare that you get an opportunity to put into action what maybe you’ve sat around the coffee table and talked with someone about. When do you ever see that the powers that be are failing at their duty, and when do you ever get the chance to move beyond being angry about it and actually do something very concrete and tangible and immediate? Like, you can’t provide these people with health care, but we’re here and we can do it. We would get calls from the Red Cross asking us if we had any gloves because they were out of gloves. You’re the Red Cross, you just got billions of dollars donated to you and you don’t have gloves? And here we are getting everything donated to us through all of these informal networks of organizations, and the National Guard was referring people to us. The systems that you’d expect to be in place were just not, and we were able to provide, to fill that gap. I was really surprised by—I don’t know if the right word is
empathy
—but I was really surprised by just how far down you go with someone. I really built my life around the struggle the last year and a half. I gave every ounce of my attention to this city and it really has changed my whole way of thinking about things and viewing the world.

“On one level I’m a lot more scared that the government isn’t going to come through. I don’t have faith in the government, or even large organizational city bodies or anything to come through in a natural disaster, and I live in the Bay Area, so I’m really scared about earthquakes. I don’t believe that anyone is going to come save me and that really freaks me out. Then also on a personal level I feel like the further down—I don’t know how to describe it, but there’s a depth to my understanding of pain and a depth to my understanding of joy. I was never a person who cried about happy things, but I find that I cry more often. I feel like I have a much stronger sense of the harshness of life and also the beauty. It’s like they’re one and the same.”

After the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco became a landscape of ruin, but also of improvised outdoor community kitchens, tents, odd piles of salvaged stuff, lavish giveaways in a largely nonmonetary gift economy, lowered social boundaries, and humorous signs—and heartfelt signs, such as the Mizpah Café’s “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” As one of the witnesses described the scene, “When the tents of the refugees, and the funny street kitchens, improvised from doors and shutters and pieces of roofing, overspread all the city, such merriment became an accepted thing. Everywhere, during those long moonlit evenings, one could hear the tinkle of guitars and mandolins, from among the tents.” It resembles the campouts that have become a major part of counterculture gatherings since the 1960s, notably the biggest and longest-lived of them all, the Rainbow Gatherings held annually since the early 1970s.

They have bridged the gap between utopian experiment and traditional carnival, incorporating costuming, dancing, music, festivity, ceremony, and large-scale mingling. In creating an infrastructure to maintain weeks of communal life, the gatherings recall utopian communities, but in producing nothing practical and instead relying on resources garnered in the outside world, whether by Dumpster diving or putting it on a credit card, they are more like a festival. If you regard mainstream society as a disaster—some Rainbows call it Babylon—it makes sense to create the equivalent of a disaster community as an alternative and refuge from it. This is one of the arenas in contemporary society where revolution, disaster, and carnival converge into something namelessly new. The first Rainbow Gathering was in 1972, and it’s said that Vietnam vets with experience in setting up field kitchens, latrines, and hospitals were instrumental in creating the infrastructure. This emphasis on autonomous systems of survival—as the back-to-the-earth movement, among other things—is one of the overlooked legacies of the 1960s, arising from a sense that the mainstream was already a disaster (and maybe from childhoods spent amid scenarios of postatomic survival). The right-wing sur vivalist equivalents are notably less gregarious, focusing on pioneer-style nuclear-family units holed up alone and armed against everyone else.