The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  This gets to Didi. “I don’t know what to think anymore,” he confides to Gogo. Didi is tempted to believe that the life he leads has been a pointless exercise in repetition, and that “habit is a great deadener”—meaning that going through the motions is a way to numb oneself to the pain of existence. Yet when Godot’s messenger boy arrives with the news that Godot won’t come today, but perhaps he will tomorrow, Didi says, as usual, “Tell him that you saw me.”

  The play ends as the first act did: with Vladimir and Estragon seated under the tree, resolving to get up and go, but not moving.

  GODOT, of course, is never going to come. Are Vladimir and Estragon heroes or fools? Is their persistence in the face of absurdity a sign of their indomitable will to live, or of their supreme idiocy? Is there a difference?

  Well, what would you say about the people who second-lined through the ruins of their city? An affirmation of life in the face of death—or folks acting silly in a time that calls for solemnity? What would you say about people who drove out to a wasteland to watch a bleak play about the meaning of life, performed in what amounted to a graveyard? Sages or fools?

  When you sense that there may not be much of a difference, you are getting close to the point of Beckett’s play, and why it resonated so profoundly with Katrina survivors in New Orleans.

  “It is ours, it speaks directly to us, in lines and situations that have always been there, but which now take on a new resonance,” said Times-Picayune critic David Cuthbert, in his review of our production. “There is no great entity riding to our rescue to ‘fix’ what has been broken. We must do it ourselves, as we have, with the help of compassionate strangers and our own crazy courage. The play brings light, life, and humanity to a dark corner of the city and the ongoing dark night of our souls.”

  Ann Maloney, also writing in The Times-Picayune, conceded that had she seen Godot in the theater, she might “have found it pretentious—too arty. But as we drove home on Sunday night, I felt a camaraderie with the two men who joked, hugged, cried and fought as they dealt with crushing disappointment and a yearning for better days.”

  Dewey Scandurro, a New Orleans lawyer who attended one of our Gentilly performances, shared this view. He said he had read Waiting for Godot many times, first as a French major at Tulane, but he never really understood it until he had lived through Katrina and watched Godot performed in the ruins.

  When a friend from far away told Scandurro he didn’t understand why such a difficult play resonated with New Orleanians, he responded, “Return to your city after it’s been laid waste, and Godot makes some sense. Wait for FEMA to answer a phone for a month. Watch them turn away Walmart trucks full of water when people at the Convention Center are on the verge of dehydration. Listen to the government explain that they cannot get into the city when your 63-year-old mother was able to get out on roads that were always open. Watch the mayor and governor and parish president go insane on live TV. Read about the New Orleans Police Department spokesman committing suicide in a squad car.

  “Chaos. Hopelessness. Absurdity. That play summed up what it meant to live in New Orleans in those days,” he said.

  Listening to the audiences after the performances, we heard people saying how strange the play was, but how sorry they felt for Didi and Gogo, and how they know what it’s like to feel abandoned, because . . . and then the theatergoer would inevitably tell his or her own Katrina story. A few people who didn’t know Godot thought someone had written it in response to Katrina. From my perspective, the sense of unity in compassion that Godot brought to our broken, beaten-down community was a minor miracle. There were people of all races and social classes in those audiences, and it seemed that nearly everyone left feeling that, while they had lost a lot in the storm, there were others who had lost even more—and they wanted to help.

  It was profound.

  According to Beckett, that’s what it means to live in modern times. Waiting for Godot deals with the aftermath of a catastrophe that annihilated everything that gave humanity a sense of direction and ultimate meaning, leaving us all in a void. For Beckett, the catastrophe was the two great wars that pulverized the pillars of Western civilization, prying away our illusions like a torturer extracting fingernails from his victim.

  I don’t see Didi and Gogo’s repetitions as pointless, as empty rituals to pass the time until death. Rather, I see their repetitions as attempts to remember the past, when things had meaning and they knew where they were going. As foolish and trifling as their games may seem, the men are not surrendering to hopelessness; in fact, they are fighting the battle against despair. They are tempted to believe that they cannot go on . . . but they must go on. So they go on. Even waiting is an act of hope in the face of the void. To refuse death is, however feebly, to affirm life.

  “All mankind is us, whether we like it or not,” declares Didi. This is the human condition: thrown into the void, confused, uncertain, and forgotten by those outside. The only difference between the people of post-Katrina New Orleans and every other American is that New Orleanians no longer had the illusion that life was always going to be normal, predictable, reasonable. A storm, or an earthquake, or a tornado, or a war can sweep aside everything you know and love, leaving you with no direction home.

  What should we do? How can we go on like this? Our city is gone. Godot—that is, the government, FEMA, insurance companies, and so forth—isn’t coming to save us. All of us here together in New Orleans—rich, poor, black, white, Uptown, downtown, from Gentilly to the Bywater—have only each other, and our memories of what we have lost.

  Here is one big difference between Beckett and the people of New Orleans, including me: We did not lose faith in God because of the storm. God didn’t make the levees fail; man did, by building them badly and maintaining them poorly. Far from blaming God for our suffering, or losing faith in His existence, New Orleanians drew closer to Him. Over and over, you would hear people say that we needed God more than ever, and that prayer was the only thing that was going to get us through.

  Prayer, and hope. Hope is a memory that desires. If we can remember who we were and what we had, and can act in concert to reenact the rituals that defined us, we might find in that the hope to go on, despite the indifference of others to our fate. Godot says let’s try our rituals—not only the rituals of the church, but the rituals of festival, of family, of sport, of cuisine as well—any piece of ritual that you can remember and bring back can help restore us and make us whole again. We know Godot is not coming, but in the meantime, we’re not going to give up the quest to recover our collective memory, and to use it to rebuild the present and create a future.

  In the darkest of times, we were never resigned to fate. We call New Orleans the Big Easy, the place that care forgot, but deep down, that’s not true. Our city and its culture mean everything to us. That’s why Waiting for Godot speaks so powerfully to people in times of extreme difficulty. Living under occupation, Beckett knew what it was like to have everything taken from you, and he reached across the decades and the ocean to connect with people in New Orleans who understood what this means.

  His play reached across time and place and spoke to the people of besieged Sarajevo, just as it had spoken to the black sharecropper in the civil rights era, the one who saw the Free Southern Theater’s production in rural Mississippi and said, “Godot? He ain’t comin’. I know that.”

  It was important to that sharecropper to recognize that fact. He needed to rid himself of false hope, and he needed to see his own experience of life’s hardship, in Sontag’s words, “affirmed and transfigured by art.” There is power in that.

  The search for humanity and purpose in life is at the heart of Waiting for Godot, a search that does not end despite the failure of the world to do the right thing. My ancestors did not cease to believe that a better day would come for African Americans, but they never sat idly by waiting to be rescued by Godot. They
would not allow themselves to be defeated by slavery, or Jim Crow, or the Ku Klux Klan. They would not succumb to ignorance, or self-indulgence, or moral lassitude. How easy it would have been for them to believe that nothing they did or ever could do would make a difference in their life or in the lives of their children, and their children’s children. “Segregation forever!” swore the white politicians, who held all the power in a society that told black folk they amounted to nothing.

  My ancestors and so many of those Moses generations—those who led our people out of slavery and the degradation of bondage—refused to believe they amounted to nothing. They refused to believe that their suffering had no meaning, that it would not be redeemed. They persevered, against breathtaking odds, strengthened by their culture: by their faith, by their families, by their communities, by their rituals, by their songs. In fact, it was only in suffering that my people found their song—and gave to America a song of itself.

  Waiting for Godot tells us that we are in the same predicament as Vladimir and Estragon. We can find our purpose not in the empty promises of others, but in ourselves, and in our ability to determine our own futures. The only way we are going to find hope is by doing so together. Didi and Gogo, they stay in place. They go on. As we New Orleanians must.

  This message, I am certain, struck a chord in the hearts of all the people who saw our production. I do not know what every one of them thought as they left the performance. True, we made a political statement with that production—on opening night, we invited leading local, state, and national leaders, and reserved seats for them, with their names on the chairs, but—surprise!—they did not come. But overall, Godot doesn’t have a particular political message, a platform, or a specific call to action.

  When asked by The New Yorker if his Godot experience gave him new insight into the possibilities of art in achieving social justice and political change, Paul Chan said it did not. It brought people together, yes, but he was trying to bring about “articulate speechlessness.” He went on: “My mind was cleared for something else to happen, which I think is what art does. If you do it right, that’s what happens.”

  People who had never crossed the bridge into the Lower Ninth Ward came in to see this existential play about the isolation of man, the abandonment of man, what it is to lose faith, what it is to lose hope—and how to find it again. In that surreal landscape, where our city used to be, in the presence of men who just got off a shift working on the docks, to a suburban housewife, to some button-down white lawyer driving in from the Central Business District, to a poor black man living in a FEMA trailer—all of us, together, as New Orleanians, in that moment, we were all mankind. We can’t lose hope. We’ve got to find a way. Nobody will save us but ourselves.

  We can’t go on. We must go on. Pull up your trousers. Let’s go! Let’s do something!

  After the show closed, I couldn’t shake the conviction that more was required of me. I couldn’t just fly away, back to my life in L.A., and forget about New Orleans. I thought hard about what performing Godot in the Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly had meant to me. I thought even harder about how nearly losing my city revealed the depth and intensity of the love I had for the home I had left behind more than half my life ago. No, I could not simply fly away. But what could I do?

  Here’s how I found the answer.

  LESS THAN TEN DAYS after New Orleans flooded, The Wall Street Journal published an account of the Katrina aftermath as seen from Audubon Place, the gated Uptown neighborhood where some of the wealthiest New Orleanians live. Jimmy Reiss, a rich and politically well-connected resident from an old family, came back to the city in a helicopter and hired an Israeli security firm to protect his house from looters.

  The newspaper reported that Reiss was headed to Dallas the next day with about forty other Crescent City bigwigs to powwow with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, whose family had taken refuge there, to discuss the future of New Orleans. They were going to insist on a New Orleans with a lot fewer poor people.

  “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,” Reiss told the Journal. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.”

  Papo had seen men like this coming a long time ago. Jimmy Reiss was not a man who had the best interests of people who looked like me at heart.

  Reiss was by no means an outlier. In his terrific 2005 book Why New Orleans Matters, written that terrible autumn from his outpost in the Katrina diaspora, Tom Piazza recalled talking a month or so after the storm to a “very privileged Uptown white woman in late middle age” who couldn’t see what the fuss was all about. She had returned from staying with family in Florida, and her house was undamaged. Everybody in her neighborhood was doing fine. She had not heard from tenants in one of her rental properties, and she had sought a legal opinion, which said she had the right to clean the place out and leave the tenant’s belongings on the sidewalk.

  “I don’t want to,” she said, drawing out the word want, “but there are a lot of people looking for places to live.” And anyway, the severity of the disaster had been so overstated on the news—all that focus on the Ninth Ward and all that. “The Ninth Ward isn’t New Orleans,” she said to me. “You can come to New Orleans a hundred times and never even see the Ninth Ward.”

  So true, I thought—and that kind of savage, self-satisfied, ignorant attitude of large numbers of the criminally oblivious privileged is also a part of New Orleans. God plainly loves them because they have electricity, and it is also plain what God thinks of those who don’t. They hold many of the purse strings, and they will be trying with everything they have to determine the future of the city.

  Piazza chewed on former First Lady Barbara Bush’s remark that things seemed to be working out for the “underprivileged” New Orleanians in the diaspora, who in her view really had not had much to lose.

  The “underprivileged” people of New Orleans spun a culture out of their lives—a music, a cuisine, a sense of life—that has been recognized around the world as a transforming spiritual force. Out of those pitifully small incomes and crumbling houses, and hard, long days and nights of work came a staggering Yes, an affirmation of life—their lives, Life itself—in defiance of a world that told them in as many ways as it could find that they were, you know, dispensable.

  He was right. The people who were the least able to fight for themselves and their own stake in New Orleans were the ones whose culture had made New Orleans worth fighting for.

  Jimmy Reiss was a member of the mayor’s Bring New Orleans Back commission, which in early 2006 released a controversial report that called for allowing some flood-prone areas of the city that had been inhabited pre-Katrina to return to green space. The report suggested that if residents of these neighborhoods—most (but not all) of whom were low-income folks—could not demonstrate within four months that they had the means and the intention to rebuild, then the city could buy them out or seize their land under eminent domain and redevelop it.

  So now we knew: If we didn’t get back in there and start fighting for Pontchartrain Park, those who didn’t have our best interests at heart were going to take our homes.

  Daddy and Tee were among the first displaced Pontchartrain Park residents to return. I had paid a premium price to hire a contractor to rebuild their house. They moved in a month or two after the Godot performances. Rumors flew around the frightened Pontchartrain Park exile community. One story had it that Donald Trump had been through and was going to work with the city to seize our land under eminent domain and turn our neighborhood into an exclusive gated community. After all, this was prime property close to the lake, in a quiet part of town with a golf course at its heart.

  “Wendell, you’ve got to get involved with the neighborhood,” someone said to me at the time. “Whatever attention you can br
ing to Pontchartrain Park to help it get back on its feet would do a world of good. Decisions are being made now.”

  But what could I do? I was an actor who lived in Los Angeles and worked all over the country, and even overseas. What role could I possibly play on a stage like Pontchartrain Park?

  Then again, had I not just played a literal part on two stages that actually were storm-ravaged neighborhoods, just like Pontchartrain Park? Was there a connection?

  I had emptied myself out in playing Vladimir, channeling into my performance all the hope and the anger and the confusion that all of us in New Orleans had been feeling, doing all I could to connect with the hometown audiences. When human beings make art, we say collectively, “These are our values; this is what is important to us.” On those street corner stages in the Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly, all of us—the cast, the crew, the audience—shared an intense and cathartic communion, and in that moment, many of us reflected on who we were, what we stood for, and where we were going, together. On those nights of live theater in the wasteland, art intersected with life in an electrifying way. This, Albert Murray had taught me so many years earlier, is where culture is born, and reborn. Folks who saw the show told us, many of them with tears rolling down their cheeks, how much the play meant to them, and how seeing it had given them hope.

  It was a resurrection moment. As an artist and a New Orleanian, I had had the privilege to be part of it. I had hoped Godot might change something for the better in the city, but I didn’t know what. Now I could feel Godot changing me. When I ran through the darkness toward the stage lights in those performances, the audiences heard my voice before they saw my face. “We’re going to change things,” I had said. “I’m coming . . . for you . . . for all of them”—that is, for all those who perished in the flood.

  MAYBE, just maybe, I was being called to stay for all the people, living and dead, who had given me so much. Especially our fathers and mothers of Pontchartrain Park.