2009
DEEP IN THE BOWL
Before the hurricane, I’d been to off-season New Orleans once, in 1973, with my parents. I remember sitting rigidly sober through a Leslie Uggams performance at the supper club of Le Pavillon, an old mob establishment newly redone in white marble and crystal, while the city sleazed in the summer heat without me. I didn’t want to see the Mississippi River—“a liquid theme that floating niggers swell,” Hart Crane called it—and got away from my parents one morning to look for bookstores in the French Quarter.
Back then, the world’s purpose as I saw it was to confirm the reality of literary imagery. Mine of New Orleans was obsolete: beautiful octoroons trembling behind convent trellises in Alice Dunbar Nelson’s stories; old Negresses mocked for their ignorance on what seemed like every page of Kate Chopin. The city’s slave history had happened too long ago for me to feel it, like the importance of cotton or the romance of the port. Similarly, its Dixieland musical tradition was for me, so young and ignorant, the equivalent of Louise Beavers doing the eye-rolling demanded of black actors in the 1930s. What seemed current to me was a New Orleans full of unhappy rough trade in undershirts, a Stanley Kowalski or a John Rechy hustler-narrator cruising a bookstore near the cathedral.
Militant blacks that summer of 1973 were writing poems about Mark Essex, the Vietnam veteran turned Black Panther, who had ended his rampage in New Orleans six months earlier. Essex began on New Year’s Eve and went on for a week, killing a black policeman to start with, though his stated intention had been to go after only what he called honkies. On his last day, he gunned down a couple at a Howard Johnson’s, then set fire to their room, and television news shows across the country broadcast his gun battle with a police helicopter on the hotel rooftop. He’d shot nineteen people, killing nine of them—including five policemen—before he himself was taken out in a storm of bullets. My father said one night that the dental technician who’d been with him for a quarter of a century dared him to laugh when she compared herself to Mark Essex, who’d also been a dental technician. She was sure she could lose it just as easily, given the right circumstances.
Two years later, my father, back from Super Bowl IX—he went to all five Super Bowl tournaments held in New Orleans between 1970 and 1981—described the city as a place of old-timey jazz, craps, and a bunch of light-skinned, French-speaking niggers. (His generation of veterans did not say “the N word” and hold up fingers to indicate quotation. A conversation’s context told him and his peers instantly, as if instinctively, how and why that word was being used.) Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that sanctioned racial segregation in public facilities, started from a test case in New Orleans that backfired, he added. Voodoo and gumbo were the clichés of a stagnant city. New Orleans was a has-been kind of place, drunken and violent, he reported. My mother continued to loathe Super Bowl weekends and black men’s-club jaunts, whether in Miami or New Orleans. She was consoled because my father was careful never to sound as though he’d had too good a time and because his absence meant that there would be no horrible smells from a chitterlings party to keep her out of her own house the entirety of Super Bowl Sunday.
* * *
No matter where I lived after I left home—Indianapolis, Indiana—my parents expected to hear from me every week. That weekly phone call was for decades a part of the general awfulness of Sunday nights. Then they got too old for me to resent the call, and to phone them daily made conversations less intense. Old age found them sorrowful. My two sisters had both died from cancer. The NAACP faithful, my father and mother became what they had never been before: apologetic and ashamed. They permitted themselves a few survivors’ remarks, sudden lines about one day getting away to a better place, messages I chose to pretend were cryptic. Until that earthly climax, their place was in the family room, among undusted photos of the dead, in front of CNN or CBS or Fox or MSNBC or PBS.
Every day they were in angry dialogue with the television. They still read books and magazines, but it was TV that watched over their fitful sleep, TV news that their bewilderment ate with. The news had always given us something outside ourselves to talk about, and they considered it their duty to keep me informed about what was going on in black America, the real America, far away in unreal Europe as I was. We could just about receive the same books and newspapers, but we weren’t watching the same television. I remember that my parents sounded insane, possessed, during the O. J. Simpson trial, until I realized that it was because I was not living through the saturation coverage. After my sisters died, they paid more and more helpless attention to disaster stories.
In August 2005 I was telling my parents about the floods in Central Europe and the fires in Greece and Portugal. A few calls later they were telling me about Tropical Depression Ten, one of several small cyclones of that hurricane season. My mother handed the phone back to my father so he could explain the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. He admired the mechanics of natural forces, the imperviousness of their self-rule. Because of what steering winds could do, he was distracted from the fate of the Halliburton whistle-blower and the first Bush Supreme Court nominee.
We were chatting our way through the first anniversary of my older sister’s death. Weather facts kept emotion in check. They were in Indiana, assuring me that another storm thousands of miles away from them had gone out to sea. But overnight, Hurricane Katrina intensified and was coming back toward the other side of Florida. My parents relayed the latest to what they pitied as my cable-free pocket of the English countryside. My mother thanked her stars that I was not anywhere near the Gulf of Mexico, just as she was thankful, when she heard about an airplane crash in, say, the Urals, that I was not in Russia that day.
At first, the bad news satisfied my father’s anguished desire that ordinary life be disrupted: an ill child means you live in a permanent state of emergency, and it can continue after the loss of that child. Katrina knocked out power in four or five states, destroyed Mississippi resorts, would cost billions in insurance, probably killed scores of people, and tore up the top of the Superdome. However, the aftermath of Katrina turned out to be more than my father, locked in to Anderson Cooper, had bargained for.
Not long after the levees in New Orleans failed and 80 percent of the city flooded, we were watching the same pictures. Shocked British television journalists had made it out to where there were people who had not fled the city, people looking up from rooftops, people helped into small craft, people who had not eaten, thirsty people, people looking for people they’d lost, people trying to find places to go, people wading in the water. All of them black, my father, along with the rest of the world, observed.
Over the phone my father found again his outrage: there had been no airdrops of any kind that he’d heard of. The army bases that had been closed in the South as cost-saving measures should be opened up for Katrina victims. He’d been saying for years that the country was not making the proper investment in its infrastructure. Everybody knew twenty-five years ago that the New Orleans levees could not withstand a storm of Katrina’s strength, and everybody also knew that a city that voted Democratic wasn’t going to get the necessary allocations to reinforce its defenses. He was sure Bush couldn’t respond to the calamity because to do so required thinking along New Deal lines. The indifference of the Bush administration showed that they wanted to go back to the floods of 1927, when the citizens expected nothing from Washington. We were on our own. But then, black people had always known that.
* * *
Two years following the storm, I went to New Orleans, inspired by Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.
“All black people have a certain level of paranoia,” said a Louisiana schoolteacher, my aunt’s niece by marriage. She kindly drove down from Baton Rouge to talk with me, whom she’d never met. She, her sister, and I were in the near-empty dining room of Le Pavillon, the same meringue-looking hotel on Poydras Street I’d stayed in
with my parents all those years before. My schoolteacher guest lowered her voice.
“You can smell a storm,” she said. “It’s multisensory.” The river changes colors, becoming dark, almost mirroring the color of the clouds. “It comes with a stillness. You don’t know why you can’t hear anything.”
After a storm, you can see death in the river, she said. The longer we sat, the quieter they got. Then politely they slipped away through the lobby.
I’d heard about private security guards with Glocks at the downtown hotels, but I didn’t see any. Following the murder of a young white woman filmmaker, a large demonstration took place at city hall. White people were fed up. New Orleans was 37 percent black in 1960 and 67 percent black by 2000.
“Dutch” Morial became the first black mayor of New Orleans in 1978, and his son also served as mayor, from 1994 to 2002. Ray Nagin, the city’s fourth black mayor, succeeded the younger Morial in 2002, but most blacks hadn’t voted for him. They regarded Nagin, a cable-company executive, as the candidate of white businessmen. In the post-Katrina score-settling of the 2006 mayoral election, Nagin won with a sizable proportion of the black vote, while the majority of whites supported his opponent. Nagin was yet another illustration of the tendency of black people to embrace black stars when they get into trouble (Michael), including black stars who seemed to want as little as possible to do with black America when at the peak of their success (O.J.).
Ray Nagin told the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Indianapolis in the late summer of 2006 that if “that” had happened in Orange County, California, or South Beach, Florida, then “that” wouldn’t have happened. When Nagin said that the slow pace of recovery was part of a deliberate plan to change the racial makeup of his city, my father exclaimed, “You had your chance!” New Orleans will be chocolate again, Nagin vowed.
In the memoir Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement, poet Tom Dent recalls South Rampart Street during Jim Crow, with its pool halls, pawnshops, barbershops, beauty parlors, fish-fry joints, record stores, and clothing stores. The small businesses slowly closed up because of the successful integration of Canal Street, long the show window and main promenade of downtown New Orleans. There had been department stores on Canal Street where blacks could buy clothes but could not try them on, purchase food but not eat on the premises.
In 2007, among the black hotel workers smoking tobacco in the parking lot, with a National Guard unit visible two blocks away, the question wasn’t about Nagin but about who was coming back. Mexican “job snatchers” were living downtown. It was just “us,” but we spoke in low voices. They were suspicious of the jocular white guys in shirtsleeves who were in town to make deals and who addressed elderly black hotel workers as “sir.”
The B-52s and Louis Armstrong blaring from Canal Street’s souvenir shops all seemed ironic, and the photography exhibitions devoted to Katrina in the silent galleries were beautiful, even when the artists worked hard for that not to be the point. A young white Australian couple with backpacks and maps expertly got into position so as not to miss the opportunity presented by a single-file line of black Catholic schoolchildren in blue, bordered at either end by white nuns in blue-and-white habits, crossing a balconied street. In the city museum, one of Fats Domino’s pianos rose on its side from an exhibition floor. Everything was poignant: the wet from the previous night’s downpour, the absence of rush-hour traffic downtown or on Interstate 10, the elevated highway.
I’d told my parents that I had research to do about post-Katrina New Orleans, but I was just putting off going to see them. Because they were hard workers, they never doubted my sisters and me when we lied to get out of family stuff by announcing that we had to work. Mardi Gras was getting started. I should stay for the second lines, a hotel worker urged.
Then my mother admitted she’d hidden a coat from potential burglars in a garbage bag and forgotten about it until she realized my father had put the bag out with the trash. The oven door was open because the furnace had gone out. My father’s stint working for an outfit like the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II qualified him, he insisted, to take over from the repairman who was just out to cheat them. He almost had the furnace licked when it rained and the basement flooded, because of the faulty pump yet another cheating repairman had installed, and then the water froze. My time for parades had passed.
My parents and I were to have one last big news story together—Obama—but both had entered a nursing home by then, and having placed their own fathers in such places, they knew that neither of them would stay in one for long themselves. They went rapidly downhill in their adjacent rooms and died the spring after the inauguration, one quickly after the other.
* * *
Conspiracy theories are a part of our country’s history of racial oppression, David Remnick observed in the days immediately following Katrina, when he met black people who were convinced that the levees had been blown up in order to protect rich white neighborhoods. They insisted that it had happened in the past as well.
On my trip in 2007, Jackie Sullivan, then deputy director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, took me around Lakeshore, a prosperous, suburban-looking neighborhood facing Lake Pontchartrain that had suffered some damage, and Lakeview, which had flooded because it borders on the Seventeenth Street Canal, in order to show me that if one lived in a vulnerable part of town, the floodwaters made no distinction between rich and poor, white and black. Yet it was unsettling to hear a white person say that the white sheriff who had refused to let black people cross the bridge to what they imagined to be the safety of Gretna, a more affluent town across the lake, had probably saved their lives.
In Gentilly, a district north of the Quarter, in a neighborhood called Pontchartrain Park, developed in the postwar years as a suburb for African-Americans, a tornado had touched down long enough to offer a grim reminder of past destruction. Cameramen picked their way around the yellow tape marking off a ruined house. The tornado had broken the roof in half, killing the woman inside who’d come back to rebuild. Someone had put a statue of the Virgin Mary on her lawn.
Pontchartrain Park stirred my memories of childhood visits in the 1960s to middle-class black neighborhoods built in the 1950s in Tuskegee, Alabama, or Augusta, Georgia, plain brick places without basements. It was considered modern to have an attached garage and no front porch. How my mother longed in my childhood of black-and-white television for a ranch-style house, for Formica counters, Danish knockoffs, linoleum floors, and clean white aluminum venetian blinds.
I crossed the Industrial Canal and saw for the first time the wiped-away Lower Ninth Ward. It shocked me how visibly below the canal and the river the area sits. Silt had aged everything. It was hard to explain, and I stopped trying, but that sighting of the Ninth Ward brought to my mind the Warsaw Ghetto, a blank space, a wiped-out place, brown and decimated, a silent memorial.
Before I left town, I was sitting on some steps in the French Quarter, outside the home of the novelist Richard Ford and his wife, Kristina, a former director of city planning for New Orleans. It was Valentine’s Day, and they’d sweetly invited me to dinner. They had come back after the storm to be of use to the city where they’d lived for many years. Four or five black youths in flowing jeans and sweatpants were headed my way. I got up and buzzed the gate. They laughed as they passed on by in the early dark. After dinner, Richard, a Southern host, native of Mississippi, said that if I insisted on walking back to my hotel, then he would accompany me. This was a white guy who had spent his youth hunting with a rifle in the woods, furious that two black youths had attempted to rush him a while back at his own front door. Never ask friends if they’re packing or not.
Kristina Ford’s friend Dot Wilson, the head of a community organization in the Lower Ninth Ward, was engaged in what seemed to be even then a losing battle to save the projects in New Orleans. People thought they were going back but soon found that they couldn’t even collect their thing
s. In some places, you could still see dishes in the sink. “Like Pompeii. Life stopped. Now they want to tear them all down,” Wilson said. “To get rid of the low-income population.”
My image of public housing conformed to the massive tower blocks of New York or Chicago, nothing like the three-story, tan-brick, garden-style apartments of the New Orleans projects, sometimes finished with rooftops of copper sheeting. The projects were the result of federal legislation in the late 1930s intended to stimulate the construction industry; it was not housing built for black people. However, because the housing projects were perceived as hotbeds of drug activity and crime, city authorities approved plans to demolish thousands of units that they claimed—falsely, activists contended—had been damaged by the storm.
There were several projects with hot-weather-sounding names: the Calliope Projects in Uptown; the Guste Projects in Central City; the Magnolia Projects in the Eleventh Ward; the St. Thomas Projects in the Tenth, where Sister Helen Prejean did mission work in the 1980s; the Florida Projects and the Desire Projects, both in the Upper Ninth, the latter torn down in 2003. A few years before Katrina, the owner of the Saints proposed closing the Iberville Projects, on the edge of the French Quarter, to build a new stadium on the city’s dime. “Eighty million for the team to stay,” one old-timer told me. “We’ll pay that kind of money to keep them here, but our school system is falling apart.”
That black activists were defending public housing as the home of the black community, part of the essential character of a black neighborhood, puzzled me. The shelves back home held several earnest books about the slum or the ghetto that routinely portrayed the housing project as one of the clearest indications of how insultingly the poor were treated. Tenants were overcharged, overregulated, forbidden to have pets. Housing projects weren’t just hated symbols; they were dreadful mistakes.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 12