The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  NOT EVERYONE who stayed perished. Leonard Morris, who was in his eighties, was planning to leave with his family when he ran into his fishing buddy. When his friend said he was going to ride out the storm at home, Mr. Morris sent his family on and remained behind. Even though he was elderly and suffering from cancer, Mr. Morris and his buddy used the friend’s fishing boat to rescue six or seven people on their street who had stayed behind.

  A week after the storm passed, I knew I had to head up to Baltimore and get to work. HBO had been terrific to us, sending bedding and clothing so my parents, who had lost everything except what was in their suitcases, would have something to wear. Tee told me to get back to work. I flew back home to L.A. to gather some things, then went to Baltimore to begin shooting.

  As soon as I could, I flew back to Louisiana to help my folks find a house in Baton Rouge. As my father’s leg was still broken, I was pushing him around in a wheelchair. We had so many mixed emotions heading north into Baton Rouge from Uncle L.C.’s place.

  “Why are we doing this?” Daddy said. “Why are we looking at houses? Can’t we stay at L.C.’s a little bit longer? You know we’re going back home.”

  “Daddy, there won’t be any little bit longer,” I said, my heart breaking.

  The realtor took us to a large four-bedroom house in a comfortable subdivision. I thought it was great. You had to move quickly on Baton Rouge real estate in those days; so many displaced New Orleanians were resettling in Baton Rouge that houses were not on the market long. My folks gave me the thumbs-up, and I picked up the phone and started the process of getting the mortgage.

  The hour-long drive back to L.C.’s was somber. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get back home,” my mother mused.

  “No, don’t think of it that way,” I said. But I feared she was right.

  The Baton Rouge place was a nice house, but it wasn’t home. The worst part about their lives in Baton Rouge was their lack of friends. One of the benefits of your golden years is having lifelong friends around you, folks who understand the difficulties, the fears, the anxieties, and the ever-present specter of decline and death. My parents were afraid that everyone was gone, or soon would be, and they wouldn’t have said good-bye.

  “We have to find out where everyone is. We’ll get that list together, and after that, I want to start seeing them,” Tee said to me. As she located friends, she would invite them over. Others she would travel to visit. The thing that allowed my mother and father to wake up every morning and carry on with life was their quest to find the lost and reestablish contact, and to begin repairing their shattered world.

  Their Catholic parish in Baton Rouge, St. Louis King of France, was very welcoming. It was a white Catholic parish that suddenly had these new African American members. The locals were kind, though it was plainly awkward.

  “Those people are being really nice,” Tee told me. “I know it’s uncomfortable for them. It’s uncomfortable for us. And I really thank them. But that’s not my church. I need to get back to my church.”

  Sitting in Baltimore on the other end of the phone line listening to my mother long for home, I resolved that if I had to move heaven and earth, I was going to get Tee and Daddy back into their real home. I found it unbearable to think of their loneliness and their fear that they would never see their friends again. It made me think of what it must have been like in Europe after the war.

  I FLEW to Baton Rouge every two or three weeks, when I had a break in filming. We had some small triumphs to celebrate, almost all of them involving bumping into someone from New Orleans. I once was at a Walgreen’s on Perkins Road getting medicine for my parents when I ran into the daughter of one of Tee’s friends. Her mother had survived the storm and was living on the West Bank, across the river from New Orleans. She gave me her mother’s phone number, and I raced back to the house to give it to Tee, as if it were a winning lottery ticket.

  The first Thanksgiving in the Baton Rouge house, three months after Katrina, gave me a sense of what life must be like in war-torn countries, when people are turned into refugees in their own land. Having to leave everything you own behind when you run for your life, losing your family and friends on a moment’s notice, not knowing where anybody is, or if you will ever see them again. But Tee had insisted that her family, and as many of her friends that she could find, come to the new house to celebrate.

  “We may have lost everything, but we have each other, and that’s the most important thing. We have a lot to be thankful for,” Tee said.

  At dinner, we went around the room, and each person shared what he or she was thankful for in the aftermath of the storm. It was a simple gesture, but it meant the world. It reminded me that if you have the love of your friends and family, you can find in that the faith and strength you need to move on.

  When my turn came, I said that I was thankful that we had survived, that we were still together, and that we had shelter. I said I was thankful for my parents, and everything they did to give me a wonderful life in that home that we lost. Whether we would ever be able to go back or not, I told them, I would always have the memories of the life they gave me there. Katrina stole so much, but she could never take that.

  “Y’all have given me so much over the years,” I told my mother and father. “I am so thankful that I will be able to help y’all now, to repay you in a small way for all you did for me.”

  My mother wrote me a beautiful letter afterward.

  “Wendell, I really appreciate everything you’ve done for the family,” she wrote. “You have been there for us in two of the darkest hours of our lives, when we lost your brother Stacey, and when we lost the home where we had been for fifty years of our life. You have been there for the family, to make sure we’re back on our feet. I just want to thank you.”

  Thanksgiving dinner and Tee’s generous thank-you note after the gathering set the tone for our family’s immediate future: We were going to be thankful, we were going to be resilient, and if we could, we were going to rebuild. After all, can’t died three days before the creation of the world.

  In early 2006, Mayor Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back commission made public its plans for redeveloping the city. Urban planners revealed a map with green dots, representing green space, over neighborhoods where displaced residents should be discouraged from rebuilding. The idea was to allow these areas to return to nature. New Orleanians, both those in the city and in the diaspora, reacted with outrage. Folks were afraid that moneyed interests were going to take advantage of the catastrophe to mount a land grab. Daddy, Tee, and I realized that if we didn’t get back down and start fighting for Pontchartrain Park, people who didn’t have our best interests at heart would take our home.

  I made my mind up that no matter what, I was going to get my mother and father back home. Their roots were too deep in New Orleans, and in Pontchartrain Park; they were withering outside of it. They wanted to be home. They needed to be home. And they could only be in the little half-brick house on Debore Drive that had been their home for half a century.

  I’m going to make this happen, I thought. If they walk into that house and die on the spot, I will have done my job.

  In October 2005, nearly three months after Katrina chased us out of Pontchartrain Park, my parents and I returned to see what was left of our family home. Jonathan Bloom warned me once again to prepare Daddy and Tee for the sight of it. “It was like someone put black detergent in there, filled it with water, and shook it for days,” he said. “It could kill them.”

  HE WASN’T EXAGGERATING. We had heard of one elderly evacuee who had returned, took one look at what was left of his house, and dropped dead of a massive heart attack. For many New Orleanians, the loss wasn’t just a house. It was their entire neighborhood, it was every familiar connection, all gone. Everyone was trying to hold everything together, but in all the chaos and pain, they had so little to lean on. Most or all of the p
eople who would have held them up through any normal crisis had been scattered all over the country, many virtually disappearing without a trace.

  Two years after the storm, the National Institute of Mental Health sponsored the first study of Katrina’s psychological fallout on residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. It found that about half of those studied had an anxiety mood disorder, with more than 30 percent suffering from the more serious post-traumatic stress disorder. New Orleanians, the study found, were suffering far more than Katrina victims from elsewhere. This had to do with the relative poverty of those most affected by the storm, but also with the grinding struggle with FEMA, with contractors, with the city’s dysfunctional bureaucracy—and the fact that most of those having to endure it were among the poorest and least educated in the nation.

  Daddy and Tee were neither poor nor uneducated, but they were very old; he was eighty and she was seventy-five. Both had known hardship growing up, and Daddy had survived the Battle of Saipan. But back then, they still had their lives ahead of them. They had buried a son, but as painful as that was, they had their friends to help them get through the dark thicket of grief. Now, in the late winter of their years, they had to endure the destruction of a home and a neighborhood that symbolized their entire life’s work and achievement, and the obliteration of a tightly knit community that had given them comfort, meaning, and blessing.

  Ron came home for the journey back to Pontchartrain Park with our parents, to see what was left of their dream home. We brought along Tee Mae, the family matriarch, as well. Motoring back into Gentilly after the storm was like entering a foreign country. As we drove up A. P. Tureaud Avenue, the only sign of life was a corner bar called Bullet’s, which stayed open to offer food and drink to people in the storm, even when its first floor was underwater. As the city began to dry out, Bullet’s became a communal place where people could see one another and share information. It was like an oasis in the desert.

  We drove on, passing Dillard University, whose fifty-five-acre campus borders the London Avenue Canal. Dillard was once a place of dignified beauty, known for its majestic white-columned buildings, grand live oaks, and sprawling green lawns. As we turned onto Gentilly Boulevard and laid eyes on it, there was nothing left but a field of brown and gray. The live oaks were barren. There was nothing green or alive to be seen.

  Tee knew then that Pontchartrain Park was going to be far worse than she had imagined.

  The only image I can compare post-apocalyptic Pontchartrain Park to is Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. The devastation was so complete, so definitive. We stopped at a Red Cross station on the perimeter before going in and got food, drink, and supplies, including hazmat suits, because the water that flooded the area had been so toxic. Making our way over to our beloved Debore Drive was like homecoming in Chernobyl. Everything—everything—was gray from caked-on mud left behind by weeks of stagnant water. There was so much debris in the streets that we had to drive on sidewalks. The silence was absolute; not a soul was around. All the trees were destroyed; those left standing had been stripped of their leaves. This is what I imagine nuclear winter is like.

  Months later, when I began rehearsing my role as Vladimir in the Classical Theater of Harlem’s production of Godot (which, in 2007, we would reprise in New Orleans), I didn’t have to work to place myself in the desolation imagined by Beckett. I had been there with my family. I had seen it, smelled it, felt its wrath, and absorbed its numbing lessons amid a silence that seemed eternal.

  At last, we pulled up to our house. The grass was gone, and mud was caked above the doors. But it was still standing. There were no cars. There were no people. If there was movement, even two blocks away, you could hear it. The stench of mold, chemicals, mud, sewage, stagnant water, and decay was overwhelming.

  As silly as it sounds, we tried to open the front door with a key, which didn’t work. So Ron and I broke down the door.

  The inside was worse than our direst imaginings. Much worse. The interior looked as if a bomb made of mud and ink had gone off inside. All the furniture had been overturned and thrown into piles by the water. The refrigerator was on its side, and when we opened its door, the smell of rotten meat nearly knocked us down. Katrina had not merely sacked the house; she had defiled it.

  My father started to cry. “This is where we raised our family, Black. And it’s all gone.”

  My mother stood by silently and cried too. We all did. Everything we had associated with that house, every object, was gone, either washed away by the flood, disintegrated by the toxic brew in which it had been steeping for weeks, or so fouled that it likely could never be recovered.

  Standing on that filth-gilded street that had once, in my family’s imagination, been paved with gold, I knew without the least doubt that I had lost everything that told me who I was. The spirit had gone out of the house that had been the embodiment of our family’s life, leaving it a corpse putrefying under the relentless south Louisiana sun. It felt that the only thing any of us standing there had left was our lives, our memories, and each other. And then the sense came over me that if we didn’t regain at least some of what was stolen from us, we would lose our lives too. Given how old Daddy and Tee were, this was not an abstract threat. In that moment, with the old man’s sobbing the only sound in the sepulchral silence, I felt as if I were standing at my mother and father’s open grave. There was nothing keeping them from stepping forward into the void and letting the desecrated earth swallow them whole.

  Standing in the driveway, a few feet from the filthy front door, Daddy broke down. “I don’t want to go back,” he declared. “It’s too much.”

  But we had to go back. There was no way forward except to go back. The road to the Pierce family’s future, if we were to have a future, ran through Pontchartrain Park. If we didn’t take it, if we didn’t push on through the debris and the despair, we might as well die.

  I thought of Aristile, and what he had come through. I thought of Mamo and Papo, and what they achieved against odds that must have seemed impossible. I thought of Daddy and Tee, and all the older folk who raised me in Pontchartrain Park, and how the tenacity of their hope drove them forward. I thought about the experience of all Africans in the American Diaspora, how they—how we—had everything taken from us. We lost our ancestral homeland, we lost our gods, we lost our freedom, and often we even lost our families. We were poor and abused, beaten and lynched, told we were nothing, humiliated every day of our lives.

  And yet we came through all these things. Not only did we survive them; we conquered them. Every Negro spiritual, every blues lament, every jazz composition is a song of victory. Every true poem, every real drama, and every authentic novel written by an African American is a proclamation of triumph. Every performance by an African American actor, dancer, or musician that faithfully expresses our people’s journey and forges a bond of recognition and understanding among all peoples about humanity’s collective pilgrimage—each one is to defy death, to deflect its sting, and to deny it the last word.

  That desolated house, which had cradled my brothers and me, was now a tomb. The neighborhood founded in one of the deepest valleys in the city of New Orleans, and that Tee and Daddy and their generation cultivated into a lush and fertile garden, was now a desert. The water had long since receded, but it had left behind nothing but dry bones.

  Everything within me screamed: These bones must live!

  And then a light appeared in the darkness. Staggering around the ruins in our hazmat suits and masks, like explorers on an alien world, Daddy found his wallet, which he had left behind in the rush to flee the storm. He opened it and found that everything in it had been destroyed—except for a single item. It was a photograph of my late brother Stacey. The borders had been eaten away by the poisoned water, but Stacey’s face looked upon us with perfect clarity. And he was smiling.

  “Oh my God!” said Daddy. “I’ve still got
Stacey! I’ve still got my son!”

  That was the sign we needed. Finding the image of his dead boy, the firstborn son whose memory he and my mother mourned every day, caused a new birth of hope in Daddy’s heart. If Stacey could come through the flood, so could he. So could we all.

  We doubted our strength to go on, but we made our minds up to do it anyway, one step at a time. Daddy, Tee, Ron, and I decided to come back every single day and clean as much as we could manage, for as long as we could manage.

  And so we did. It was an excruciating experience, like waking up every morning to go to your own wake. My father said we should just throw everything away, but Tee and I said no, we couldn’t afford to do that. We were going to bring every single relic we found inside the house outside, lay it in front of him and my mother, and let them decide what to hold on to and what to let go. If everything really is lost, I told him, you might lose any hope that you have a future.

  In those early days of recovery, Daddy and Tee had a second sign of hope. On the day of our Katrina exodus, a neighbor of ours, a man I will call Mr. Willis, had told them he was going to stay. We were sure we had lost Mr. Willis, just as we had lost the poor Bahams. One day, as we began to clean the house, I heard my mother outside scream, “Oh my goodness, you’re alive!” It was Mr. Willis, returning home.

  It turns out that after the storm had passed that morning, Mr. Willis had gotten into his truck and driven uptown to check on his rental properties. When news went out on WWL that the levees had broken, he sped back toward Pontchartrain Park to retrieve his adult son, whom he had been caring for as the younger man fought drug addiction.

  Mr. Willis never made it back to his house. Authorities had already closed his exit from the freeway, and in fact were launching rescue boats from the off-ramp. He had no idea what had happened to his son. Had he drowned? Was he perched on a roof, waiting to be saved? Had he swum to the levee and walked out? How could Mr. Willis possibly know?