The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  I asked her what she meant by that.

  “Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton—we’ll always remember the characters they played,” she explained. “No matter what else they’ve ever done, we will remember those roles. In The Wire, you found your Godfather.”

  I realized that she was right. The Wire will be in the first line of my obituary. Years from now, you may see me out on the street wearing a chicken suit, and some smart-ass kid might come up to me and say, “Look at this fool in the chicken suit!” But I’ll be able to take my chicken head off and look that boy in the eye and say, with a heart full of gratitude and pride, “Hey, kid, I played Bunk.”

  SEVEN

  IT’S RAINING SO HARD

  When I first heard about a storm called Katrina, late in August 2005, I was in Los Angeles getting ready to fly back to Baltimore to start shooting season four of The Wire. From watching the news, I was vaguely aware that a minor hurricane had hit Florida that week, but that was about it. Sunny Southern California was a world away from the Gulf of Mexico.

  I planned to stop in New Orleans for a short family get-together on my way back to the East Coast. Daddy had broken his leg in an automobile accident and was confined to a wheelchair. I was anxious to see him and to enjoy the last few days of summer before starting work. What I didn’t realize as I boarded the plane at LAX on Saturday, August 27, was that Hurricane Katrina had crossed South Florida intact, and upon reaching the warm Gulf waters, was rapidly monstering into a hellstorm headed straight for my hometown.

  As I stepped off the plane into the New Orleans airport, all was chaos. Crowds were everywhere and the air crackled with fear.

  “What’s going on?” I asked another traveler.

  “The hurricane is coming!”

  “The one in Florida?” I asked, nonplussed.

  “It was in Florida, but it’s headed this way.”

  As I walked to the counter to arrange for my rental car, the storm was growing so large so fast that it filled the entire Gulf of Mexico. Officials in several coastal parishes ordered all their people out. At five p.m. that Saturday, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin went on television to declare a state of emergency, asked city residents to leave voluntarily, and said he would open the Superdome as a shelter for those who couldn’t get out. By then Katrina was about four hundred miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River.

  I checked into the W Hotel downtown, as I usually did when coming home to visit my folks, then drove out to Pontchartrain Park. I found Daddy and Tee anxious about the storm, mulling over whether to leave the city while they still could.

  “Listen,” I said, “let’s not overreact. Let’s just see what happens before we decide to hit the road.” We had all come through hurricanes before, hadn’t we?

  My sister-in-law and her daughters arrived that night from New York. Late in the evening, I hit the town—and there was hardly a soul to be found in the clubs in this, one of the most defiant party cities in the world. Still, I managed to stay out pretty late anyway, expecting that the next morning would bring good news on the storm. How many times had the city been threatened by hurricanes, only to have them pass us by?

  When the sun came up, my head was pounding from a fierce hangover. Somehow I pulled it together to drive out to Daddy and Tee’s. When I arrived, my folks, my sister-in-law, and my nieces had gathered in the living room and were discussing whether to evacuate. Nobody argued and nobody was afraid. It all seemed like a routine conversation for people used to living on the Gulf Coast. We figured we would be gone for three days, maximum, and be back in time for my nieces to have fun in New Orleans before heading back to California at week’s end. I even reserved a suite at the W Hotel for us all so we wouldn’t have to leave town.

  Tee wasn’t having it. She insisted that this storm was not going to be like previous ones. She had a feeling. We had to get out while we could, she said. The children wanted to be with their grandmother, so wherever she was headed, they were as well. So there it was: In a call that probably saved our lives, Tee decided we were going to head north.

  But first, she said, we’re going to mass.

  Church wasn’t as crowded as usual. The priest encouraged us all to get out of the city, or at least take shelter with friends. Pontchartrain Park, remember, sits in one of the lowest parts of the low-lying city, hard against the Industrial Canal and fronting Lake Pontchartrain.

  “Be careful,” the priest warned. “This hurricane is serious.”

  After mass, we spoke to the Bahams, an elderly couple who had been sitting near us during the service. Daddy had grown up with both of them, and they lived around the corner from us in Pontchartrain Park. The Bahams told us that they planned to ride out the storm at home.

  It was the last time we would see them alive.

  While we were in church praying that morning, the National Weather Service issued this public bulletin:

  Hurricane Katrina . . . a most powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength . . . Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks . . . perhaps longer. . . . At least one half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail. . . . All wood-framed low-rising apartment buildings will be destroyed. . . . Power outages will last for weeks. . . . Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards. . . . Few crops will remain. Livestock left exposed to the winds will be killed. . . . Once tropical storm and hurricane force winds onset . . . do not venture outside!

  When my family returned home to Debore Drive from mass, we turned on the television for the latest and heard that Mayor Nagin had ordered a mandatory evacuation. “We’re facing the storm most of us had feared,” he said.

  This shocked us deeply. This had never before happened. Every New Orleanian knew exactly what the mayor was talking about.

  For generations, we had grown up knowing how vulnerable the Crescent City was to a bull’s-eye from a powerful hurricane. People in Los Angeles fear the Big One—an apocalyptic earthquake that scientists say is an inevitability. For New Orleans, the Big One has always been a direct hit by a storm like Katrina, whose winds that Sunday morning had already reached 175 miles per hour.

  Katrina was now a Category Five storm, making it one of the most potent Atlantic hurricanes in recorded history. And it was predicted to make landfall that night and roll over the city Monday morning. Everyone in New Orleans knew this day would come eventually, but like everybody else, we hoped against hope that it wouldn’t be in our lifetimes.

  We began loading two cars with everything we could jam into them, while leaving room for four adults and two children. My head was still throbbing from the night before, and I was irritated by all the fuss the family was making. Why are they taking so long to pack these cars? We’re only going to Uncle L.C.’s place up the river for a couple of days, I thought.

  Frustrated and hurting, I said, “You guys go, I’m going to stay.” Then I went back inside and went to sleep. The good Lord takes care of drunks and babies, and I ain’t no baby: When I woke up after my catnap, my family was still piling things into the cars. Okay, hell, I thought, I might as well go with them. I resolved to drive Tee and Daddy in my rental, and let Debbie drive her daughters in Tee’s car.

  The last thing we did before shutting the door was to put the most precious framed pictures we had on top of the cabinets, to keep them safe in case a little water made it into the house. I locked the front door, climbed behind the wheel of one of the cars, and off we drove, along with tens of thousands of our fellow New Orleanians that Sunday afternoon.

  It usually takes an hour to make the trip to St. James Parish to Uncle L.C. and Aunt Maryann’s place. That Sunday, it took us four, even with all lanes of Interstate 10 flowing out of the city. But we made it, and that was the most important thing. We would be safe. It’s strange to think of it now, but in the car with Tee and Daddy, we we
ren’t anxious, only fascinated. We had never seen anything like this. Virtually the entire city of New Orleans—half a million people!—was leaving in a single afternoon. It did not occur to us that we wouldn’t be coming right back in a day or two.

  As we motored out of the city, WWL radio host Garland Robinette took to the airwaves to sound the alarm. “I know the powers that be say not to panic. I’m telling you: Panic, worry, run. The birds are gone. Get out of town! Now! Don’t stay! Leave! Save yourself while you can. Go . . . go . . . go!”

  We were among the lucky ones. We had cars, and a place to go. An estimated one hundred thousand New Orleanians stayed behind, most of them too poor to own a car, or too sick, elderly, or otherwise unable to get out on their own. The City of New Orleans had an evacuation plan in place for them in which city buses would collect them all and take them to shelters north of town. But the plan broke down, and the evacuees ended up stranded in the Superdome while the buses that were to take them to safety ended up underwater. Around sixteen thousand helpless people suffered for days in the stink, filth, and violence of the Dome, and another twenty thousand endured similar misery at the nearby Morial Convention Center.

  That night, Katrina roared ashore in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans. As the savage winds and torrential rains of Katrina’s outer bands began lashing our refuge in St. James Parish, we saw on the news that Katrina had jogged slightly to the east. Uncle L.C.’s place was seventy miles to the west of New Orleans. The thought hit me that if the wind and the rain assault was this hellacious so far inland, I could hardly imagine what New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast were suffering.

  The power went out, and we who were still awake listened to the battery-operated radio for news of the outside world. It was our only connection. All the area radio stations combined their broadcasts and put them on the emergency broadcast network. We sat in the darkness, and then the bruised gray of that Katrina dawn, and waited, and worried, and prayed for our city and its people.

  EARLY THAT MONDAY MORNING, we had reason to believe the worst had passed. What we did not know then was that as the Angel of Death passed over, she sent a massive surge of water barreling up the Intracoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), two massive, government-built canals that funneled the tsunami straight into the city. The MRGO (pronounced “Mister Go”), a 1960s-era shipping shortcut between the Gulf and the city, converges from the southeast with the Intracoastal Canal to form a single channel—the Funnel—six miles west of the Industrial Canal, which runs through New Orleans and connects the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain.

  The same Katrina surge that sent a wall of water nearly three stories tall crashing into the Mississippi coastal cities of Gulfport and Biloxi rocketed up the Intracoastal and the MRGO, converged at the Funnel, and crashed into the Industrial Canal—which forms the eastern border of Pontchartrain Park. As the LSU hurricane scientist Ivor van Heerden would later observe in The Storm, his gripping account of the disaster, “The federal powers that be had inadvertently designed an excellent storm-surge delivery system—nothing less—to ring this mass of water with a simply tremendous load—potential energy—right into the middle of New Orleans.”

  At four-thirty that Monday morning, rising water was leaking through gates on both sides of the Industrial Canal, flowing into Gentilly and New Orleans East. But the worst was yet to come. The surge rolled across Lake Borgne from the east, through the depleted marshes, and assaulted the MRGO levees, which gave way in parts of St. Bernard Parish. At the same time, the surge blasted and overtopped the Intracoastal’s levees protecting New Orleans East, which began to flood. Meanwhile, to the west, residents of the Lakeview district saw walls of the 17th Street Canal shuddering and threatening to give way under the pressure from rising waters coming in from the lake.

  Sometime before seven a.m., the outer edge of the storm surge slammed into the Industrial Canal, sending a shock wave and walls of water along its length. On the north end, billions of gallons of water poured into Lake Pontchartrain. The wave pushing southward could not find an outlet into the Mississippi River because the floodgates had been closed. There was nowhere for the water to go. It overtopped the Industrial Canal floodwalls on both sides. The Lower Ninth Ward began to fill with water—and when the worst of the surge came an hour or so later, the levees began collapsing in the face of Katrina’s blitzkrieg.

  The fate of Pontchartrain Park was sealed shortly after nine a.m., when the eastern walls of the London Avenue Canal, a drainage canal running through Gentilly two miles east of my family’s home, began to bulge outward from the surge rushing in from the lake, and finally gave way. The flood cascaded downhill, drowning the eastern half of Gentilly and submerging Pontchartrain Park, the bottom of the bowl, under as much as twenty feet of water—among the most severe flooding in all New Orleans. Then came multiple 17th Street Canal wall breaks, inundating Lakeview and sending the flood gushing into Mid-City, and minutes later, the western wall of the London Avenue Canal cracked, delivering more water into Gentilly. By the time the winds stopped, there had been over fifty separate breaches in the levee system protecting New Orleans.

  Katrina left New Orleans later that day, but for three days the water kept relentlessly gushing into the city from swollen Lake Pontchartrain. By then, 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater. Except for the French Quarter and the Garden District, both built on the city’s highest ground, every neighborhood in the city took on water. Nearly fifteen hundred people were dead. Half the houses in the city had four feet of water in them, or more. There was no electricity or clean water in the city; looting and the breakdown of civil order would soon follow. Tens of thousands of New Orleanians were stranded in the city with no way out; many more evacuees were displaced, with no way back in.

  Historian Douglas Brinkley described the shock and terror of what it felt like to be in the city’s ruins in Katrina’s immediate aftermath: “All at once, ten thousand years of civilization had been stripped away.”

  And the government—city, state, and federal—had no idea what to do.

  Incredibly, had it not been for a front moving southeast from the Midwest, weakening Katrina and pushing its eye slightly to the east, the destruction in New Orleans would have been even worse. But this was already inconceivably bad—and for the people of Pontchartrain Park, it was the apocalypse. The entire neighborhood sat entombed by filthy water up to the eaves of houses, and even higher. The place sat in that water for weeks.

  Night after night at Uncle L.C.’s house, still without electricity, Daddy sat listening to the radio and staring at the wall, saying that our little half-brick house was strong, that it surely had withstood the flood, and that we would be able to rebuild. He had no comprehension of how bad things really were. Three days after the levees broke, Garland Robinette, who had heroically broadcast through the entire storm, even after gale-force winds blew out his studio’s windows, expressed the fear and rage of the entire city, both captive and in the diaspora, when he tore into the federal government for its inaction in the face of the city’s unspeakable suffering. During his broadcast, which I listened to from St. James Parish, Mayor Nagin exploded in a live call-in interview with Robinette. He tore into the feds, saying, “They don’t have a clue what’s going on down here.”

  Daddy was in denial. Family friends who had somehow evaded checkpoints and made it back into the city called to tell us that things were worse than we could imagine. Jonathan Bloom, a childhood friend from Pontchartrain Park, was the first to call with news of our neighborhood’s fate.

  “I’ve made it into the Park, Wendell, and the whole place is a lake,” he said. “Pontchartrain Park is gone. Don’t let your parents come back here alone. When they see this, it might kill them.”

  We stayed together as a family at the house that week, holding on to each other with all we had. It’s at times like this that you really see the best of famil
y. I tried to get into the city to see what was happening, but the roads were blocked; it was impossible to get out of St. James Parish. So I went back to Uncle L.C.’s and sat with the family, listening obsessively to WWL. We heard the reports of chaos in the city, of people trapped in the Superdome and at the convention center, hungry, thirsty, sick, abused, but it was difficult to imagine these things actually happening in our city—in America.

  Nighttime was the only time our mobile phones worked. I would call my friends in New York City and back in L.A., telling them that they didn’t understand how bad it was down here. “Wendell, we know,” they would say. “We’re watching it all on TV.” I found this so hard to believe. We had no power at my uncle’s place and had no realistic sense of what was going on just downriver from us, until we located a generator later in the week and restored electricity to Uncle L.C.’s house.

  Just before the power returned, people I knew at HBO, the cable network that produced The Wire, phoned and said they were concerned about me. They offered to help my family and me get out of Louisiana. I thanked them for their offer, then walked back into the house and turned on the television. Then I saw what for me were the first pictures of the disaster, the horrific images that are now an indelible part of American history.

  My city was in ruins. My people were in mortal danger. I could not believe that these images had been seen all week long, all around the world, and still so little was being done to relieve the suffering. I broke down in sobs.

  When the water receded, National Guardsmen found old Mrs. Baham in her house, drowned. Mr. Baham had tried to climb a tree in his front yard to escape the rising water, but wind had pulled the tree down. They found his body entangled in its branches. These were two of the nine people in our neighborhood lost to Katrina. My folks grieved over not having pushed the Bahams harder to evacuate with them.