Busted in New York and Other Essays

by Darryl Pinckney

  There is no architecture in New Orleans except in the cemeteries, Mark Twain said. I got anxious one afternoon when alone in the lanes of the walled St. Louis cemetery. I couldn’t find the grave of voodoo queen Marie Laveau. The Iberville Projects were next door. I made myself walk the courtyards between its quiet buildings.

  * * *

  In August 2010, freer in some ways, I returned to New Orleans for Katrina V, the fifth anniversary of the storm. I couldn’t get over Spike Lee’s film. When the Levees Broke will be remembered as one of the great documentaries in American film history. I walked up a hot New Orleans street on my way to see Lee’s second documentary about the city, If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, with another beautiful score by Terence Blanchard, lengthy celebratory scenes of the Saints’ Super Bowl victory, when the place went wild, and the rushed inclusion of the effects of the BP oil spill in the Gulf in April 2010, when people got furious again.

  Twain said in Life on the Mississippi that in 1882 New Orleans had intended to celebrate the bicentennial of La Salle’s claiming of the Mississippi basin for France, but when the time came, all energies and surplus money were required in other directions, “for the flood was upon the land then, making havoc and devastation everywhere.”

  The oil spill had finally been capped in July. Injections of dispersants into deep water to break up the oil had been halted early on, though dispersant-type compounds came out of the Mississippi River’s mouth every day, carried by dishwashing liquid from as far away as Minneapolis. A geologist under contract to BP whose job it was to make certain BP’s data could withstand congressional and judicial scrutiny told me that shrimp boats were out for the first time since the spill, and just that week a University of California, Berkeley, study claimed that a new microbe, Gammaproteobacteria, which was particularly aggressive at eating oil, had been found in the Gulf. He had seen a three-hundred-foot-long area of marsh grasses in the beginning of July covered in oil, but now, a month later, he couldn’t tell that the spill had happened. The grass was rejuvenating itself.

  The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe was still unfolding when a nonprofit group, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, in conjunction with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, issued an upbeat report on the city’s recovery, “The New Orleans Index at Five.” It identified twenty key indicators by which the city’s recovery and progress could be measured against that of the country as a whole and fifty-seven other “weak city” metros that had, like New Orleans, experienced decades of industrial decline. The report went on to relate that access to schools was improving, preservation of the arts succeeding, the number of cultural nonprofit organizations growing, and that these indicators said the city could attract families and businesses. However, violent crime and property crime in New Orleans were twice the national average. Algiers, a neighborhood on the other side of the Mississippi where the river bends sharply and where Zora Neale Hurston lived in the 1920s when she was studying voodoo, was considered one of the most dangerous.

  New Orleans had an old family restaurant on the river, near the convention center, that, it was rumored, would give a ham to any police officer who killed a black person in the line of duty. The practice stopped sometime in the 1980s when a black policeman came in to claim his ham.

  The city’s first two black policemen in 1950 were not allowed to wear uniforms or to arrest white people. In the 1970s, as the racial makeup of New Orleans was changing, Felony Action Squads patrolled the streets with shoot-to-kill orders.

  People my age remembered very well the Panthers in the Desire Projects in 1970. Even as the Panthers established political-education classes and breakfast programs and sold newspapers, they were also raising money by intimidation. When two undercover black policemen were exposed, the Panthers held a trial and turned them over to sympathizers for punishment. They were beaten nearly to death. After that, an armed confrontation between Panthers and police failed to evict the militants from their Desire headquarters. But a midnight raid succeeded.

  New Orleans got its first black police chief in 1984 but led the nation in police-brutality complaints in the early 1990s. It was an underpaid, unprofessional force in a poor city. It was not uncommon for cops to spend most of their time working second jobs. There were corruption scandals; black cops figured in some of the worst crimes.

  During the hurricane nearly three hundred officers abandoned their duty, many probably to see to the safety of their own families. But people freaked out over what they perceived as a breakdown of order. There were several reported shootings of black people involving the police. When Mitch Landrieu was elected mayor in 2010—his father had been mayor; his sister is a U.S. Senator—one of his first acts was to request that the U.S. Justice Department open investigations into accusations of police misconduct.

  The federal prosecutor was already focusing on two notorious Katrina killings. In the Danziger Bridge incident, two unarmed black men were shot, one in the back. In another case, police burned the victim’s body in a gruesome cover-up attempt. “The cops is the awfullest thing about New Orleans,” a waitress told the young writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, who was spending time in New Orleans, going about in a battered gold Mercedes, somewhat on Hurston’s trail, but reluctant to describe her sojourn as such.

  * * *

  During Katrina V, the city’s mood seemed to alternate between the mellow boosterism of young white entrepreneurs at an all-day TED Conference opened by Landrieu in the French Quarter—the first white official in city hall since 1978—and the chilled-out skepticism of the young blacks, Sharifa’s friends, whom I met at a café hangout for writers and artists in Tremé. The entrepreneurs believed in the power of the private sector to come up with creative answers for problems government was too atrophied to fix, while the young black intellectuals did not believe that the start-up dreams of hipster businesses would include a significant number of the New Orleans poor, not in a city where 27 percent of the population had been living below the poverty line before the hurricane.

  “Not always have we fallen for this okie doke,” the poet Sunni Patterson recited at the Community Book Center, with her infant son strapped to her breasts. Her home in the Ninth Ward had been demolished. It had been in her family for so many generations, she did not have the necessary paperwork for reimbursement. She’d come to participate in Katrina V from her unwanted new home in Houston. For a small, leftist, Afrocentric bookstore, the place was jammed. But I was to notice how sparsely attended were those Katrina V events sponsored by progressive groups and held in black neighborhoods. One woman suggested to me that the reason audiences were so small was that the very people who would have attended remained dispersed.

  Those Who Fell Through the Cracks: Hurricane Katrina Survivors Five Years After the Storm was a mobile exhibition housed in a semi. The trailer was moored in the parking lot of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center. The mural photographs by Stanley Greene and Kadir van Lohuizen showed New Orleans’s changing scenes of recovery over the five years since the storm. The center hosted a panel about the problems renters were having in their efforts to return to New Orleans. One woman said she worked ninety-eight hours a week in order to keep her children out of jail: she wanted to show them that they didn’t have to rob people. “Poverty is poison to the mind,” she said. The only thing she felt she knew about life was work.

  Nobody followed New Orleans’s poverty home from the hotels and riverboats unless they took a wrong turn, I recalled my schoolteacher almost-relation saying softly in that hotel dining room a few years earlier. Before Katrina, few tourists ever went to the “Lower Nine,” as locals called it. Now it attracted the curious. It was no longer brown and soft with silt as I’d seen it three years before but overgrown and buggy. The frogs were so loud, they sounded like geese. Otherwise, it seemed as quiet by day as it was at night. The blocks were empty; vegetation covered up crumbling concrete foundations. The Make It Right dwellings—“the Brad Pitt houses,”
people called them—were conspicuous: brightly colored rectangles on stilts with modernist curves or hard edges. Their minimalist style did not please some, while others asked why shouldn’t the poor also get a chance to live with high design. Either forty-two or twenty-two of these houses had been finished, depending on whom you asked.

  A black activist, Nat Turner—his real name—from New York City had started an organic farming commune on a large parcel of land in the Lower Ninth. The commune was thick with okra and barking dogs. I was told that the black youth from New Orleans he recruited were offended by the filth and unconcern of white students who’d come from other places. The white volunteers expected the revolution to have one shower for twenty people. The black youths left. Meanwhile, in a large house in the Upper Ninth, Greer Mendy, a black dancer, helped found the Tekrema Center for Art and Culture, which featured an installation of fifty-two jars of Katrina water.

  I saw a very striking photography exhibition that week, held in the L9 Center for the Arts, a space run by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, a husband-and-wife team whose photographic archives got wet in the flood. Their son persuaded them not only to salvage the work but to display the damaged photographs with the rainbow patterns the waters left over the black faces. A loud band played for an interracial crowd. The party spilled out the door. Yards away, corporate events were taking place under taut white marquees. Everyone was friendly at these noisy dos, but in the cricket dark of walking back to cars, white people tended to hug themselves to themselves and did not return my greetings.

  New Orleans East, a large district undeveloped until the 1950s, lies to the north of the Lower Ninth, across swamp, wide outfall canal waters, and the hated river channel called Mr. Go. In recent years it has become a thriving Vietnamese community. The principal church there, Mary Queen of Vietnam, reopened two months after Katrina. Anh “Joseph” Cao, the first Vietnamese-American congressman, is a parishioner. Cao, a Republican, was much in evidence during Katrina V, if not really recognized by everyone he shook hands with.

  Not many people wanted to try to explain why New Orleans East had recovered so quickly, compared with black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth. Some said the immigrants in New Orleans East didn’t wait for the government but used their own capital to rebuild. If there wasn’t open resentment of Asian immigrant success in traditionally black neighborhoods, there was sometimes a disdain. I was told that one Vietnamese-owned store in Tremé not only got looted in the chaos after Katrina, but that the looters also defecated in it. I had heard the same about the Los Angeles riots: black vandals left their shit in Asian-owned stores.

  Black neighborhoods like those in the Upper Ninth, the Lower Ninth, Gentilly, and Central City didn’t look so bad if that was all you saw, but on the other side of town, to the west of the French Quarter, along the high ground bordering the snaking river, the rich, lush sections of the Garden District and Uptown, with their enormous houses and imposing lawns and gates, told you who did not live there. Debutante balls got up and running as quickly as had the Vietnamese Catholic church.

  This is Kristina Ford’s point in The Trouble with City Planning: What New Orleans Can Teach Us (2009), which takes a hard look at how citizens get left out of decisions that affect their cities’ future. She looks back to urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who talked about “unslumming,” a by-product of economic and social change that happens in a neighborhood when people don’t want to leave. Jacobs had been an early observer of gentrification, how the diversity of a neighborhood attracts newcomers, but soon this infusion occurs at the expense of some other tissue. I could see what she was talking about in districts immediately adjacent to the French Quarter that had been mutating for years: the Warehouse District to the west, the Marigny and the Bywater to the east, on the river, on the way to the Upper Ninth, and Tremé, which in some ways, including architecturally, was an extension of the French Quarter.

  The Warehouse District, with its big spaces, seemed to host the largest Katrina V parties with the loudest Cajun bands. Mellow whites were everywhere, as black people on their private missions, like a woman whose business card introduced her as the Tambourine Lady, circulated among them.

  Tremé, in the Sixth Ward, was thought of as a black neighborhood, but it has always been mixed. Segregation was not absolute, street by street, in New Orleans. Old black neighborhoods in Southern cities typically had a variety of housing—mansions and shotgun cabins—because as segregated sections they had different classes huddled together. But the historic black South was wiped out by urban renewal schemes of the 1950s and 1960s. Homes and churches were torn down to make room for highways that, theoretically, would speed motorists from suburbs to downtown areas, thereby eliminating contact with slums in between.

  Urban renewal in New Orleans meant bringing Interstate 10 from the airport just to the west of the city into downtown, where it goes southeast toward the Mississippi, then heads northeast, through old neighborhoods in Tremé, the Marigny, and Gentilly before crossing the Industrial Canal and curving up through New Orleans East, shadowing Lake Pontchartrain. In Tremé, Interstate 10 is an overpass above Claiborne Avenue, another black shopping street back when Canal Street was hostile. Claiborne Avenue is also the gathering place of the Mardi Gras Indians. Residents of the French Quarter had enough clout to get the proposed highway moved away from them, into Tremé.

  To build the elevated highway, the oaks that lined Claiborne Avenue were cut down, the earth covered by concrete. Block after block under the highway had become parking lot. In 2002, a project called Restore the Oaks had New Orleans artists paint Afrocentric themes on the thick support columns holding up the highway. After Katrina, abandoned cars were stacked under the highway, and they rusted there for some time.

  The Tremé that isn’t on television lies on the other side of Interstate 10. The houses are not historic, but several of the one-story and two-family houses were for sale. The churches looked poor; not all of them had reopened. There were few stores; the warning signs in the windows of the corner bars concerning dress codes and weapons told you how volatile the nightlife could be.

  Pick out your steamboat, Pick yourself a train …

  Poetry was everywhere, but little graffiti. (Chuck Perkins: “She’s a pretty face with dirty feet. / The good witch of Lake Pontchartrain…”) In the Marigny, in the Café Rose Nicaud, named for the black woman who in the early 1800s set up the first public coffee stand in the French Market and purchased her freedom, there were young black writers, an anthropologist of the style of hip-hop called Sissy Bounce, and a student of Carnival throughout the Caribbean, none of whom felt any kinship with a sidewalk table of young white musicians with dreadlocks and tattoos preparing signs for their band’s evening gig. Poor blacks may not have come back, but white hipsters were showing up in droves. The grainy, alternative newspaper of the youth scene in New Orleans, Antigravity, with its Anti-News section, reminded me of the Indianapolis Free Press of the late 1960s.

  New Orleans has always attracted crazy people. A young white waitress at a restaurant in Bywater that kept the nude swimming pool from the days when it had been a private gay country club said with enormous confidence in her street cred that, having survived Chicago and Philadelphia, she wasn’t worried about New Orleans; but the young black intellectuals I talked to were unimpressed by the whites who acted as though they had found America’s answer to the free city of Amsterdam.

  My father said that the black people made homeless by Katrina had probably never been anywhere else in their lives, and maybe it was not a bad thing, this forced migration—maybe it would turn into the chance for them to know something else, to start over. He remembered meeting black people there who, as if scared of the rich part of town, had never been on the St. Charles Avenue streetcars.

  Andrew Young, a former congressman born in New Orleans, where his father was a dentist, said that people get tired of protest, have to go back to work, look after their families. At some point, you have to
settle. The successes of the civil rights movement—the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for example—were way stations on the journey to freedom. I. F. Stone once said that after so many years of being a dissident, he was used to losing. Many black people warned that Barack Obama’s victory was not the end of anything, not the climactic meeting of our aspirations. But it was not nothing, either.

  For Katrina V, President Obama spoke at noon on Sunday at Xavier University, the only Catholic black university in the country. The audience came in its Sunday best and endured without grumbling having to show up two hours early to go through security checks. We couldn’t see the president and the first lady when they entered the hall, but we knew where they were from the mobile phones that flew up to take pictures of them as they passed along police barricades.

  Obama praised the new Veterans Administration hospital and pledged $1.8 billion for Orleans Parish schools. He was interrupted by applause when he said we ought not to be playing Russian roulette with the levee system, that it had to be fortified. He recognized the importance of the wetlands. He made assurances that the BP leak had been stopped and the damage was already being reversed. But he got the loudest cheers when he declared the need to clean up the New Orleans police department.

  The hands of a signer for the deaf far to Obama’s left rode the air in pursuit of presidential cadences about the legacy of Katrina—wounds that may not get healed, losses that can’t be repaid, memories time may not erase. We said the Pledge of Allegiance, then “The Stars and Stripes Forever” blared over an intercom, and young Governor Jindal squinted from a corridor into the brightness of the camera lights.