The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  Visiting Daddy and Tee on those evenings, I would listen to the stories they would tell about the neighborhood in the old days, and it dawned on me that as young men and women, they had done something revolutionary. The simple act of daring to own your own ordinary home was a courageous act. They must have had their doubts and fears. They knew it was dangerous, that moving to Pontchartrain Park might cost someone their life. I remembered Daddy’s story about how he had bought his first gun after they moved in and white thugs began to punch black housewives. If they were doing that in the daytime, Daddy said, no telling what they would be willing to do at night.

  My mother and father had staked their claim, and they weren’t going to back down. Neither would their neighbors. Thinking about all that generation had gone through to get to Pontchartrain Park, and all that Papo and Mamo’s generation before them had endured to make a better life for their descendants, it struck me as blasphemy to allow our neighborhood to be taken from us. What a slap in the face to our ancestors if we let that happen.

  I reached out to Troy Henry, a childhood friend from the neighborhood who had become a successful New Orleans businessman. “We owe it to our parents to do something to bring back Pontchartrain Park,” I told him. He agreed, and he helped me come up with a plan to bring back the neighborhood association and to make sure that residents had the right to redevelop the area ourselves.

  IN JANUARY 2007, I put out a call to the neighborhood, inviting folks to come to a picnic on the playground. At the time, only about 40 percent of the houses were inhabited. It was like living on a frontier. Yet people loved Pontchartrain Park so much that some even came home from around the country to be at that meeting, to learn how we could organize to save our legacy and our future. Nobody was going to come in and save Pontchartrain Park; all we had was each other.

  When I saw that a hundred fifty or so people had gathered on a playground smack in the middle of a devastated urban landscape, eager to discover what they could do to help themselves, for the first time I knew that one person could have a major effect. That one call to action was heard by so many. As I rose to speak to the crowd, I realized that the younger ones among us have luxuries that our parents did not have. They were just trying to build a decent life for themselves. They not only battled bureaucracy, ignorance, and everyday racism, but also had to fear for what the violent hooligans from across The Ditch in Gentilly Woods (which, after 1970s-era white flight, was now all black) might do to them. This playground where we were gathered, our parents put their lives at risk so we, their children, could grow up playing here, like any normal American kids.

  How could we in good conscience let it go?

  “I grew up in this neighborhood,” I began. “It has been brought to my attention that there’s an effort underway to make Pontchartrain Park different from what it was before the storm. I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but I’m putting out a call to action: We are going to restore Pontchartrain Park ourselves.”

  I talked about the legacy our parents had left for us here, and how we had a responsibility to them and to ourselves to fight for it. Katrina had revealed to me the value of this place, and I was committed to moving back to defend it.

  “This is a call to service,” I said. “This is a call to exercise our right of self-determination.”

  This wasn’t mere rhetoric. The threat was real. Tulane University’s architecture school had just created a course on urban renewal in “Pontilly,” as they had renamed the Pontchartrain Park and Gentilly Woods neighborhoods. The funny thing was, Tulane had never before shown interest in our part of town. I had seen how much of Pasadena, California, where I live for much of the year, had been bought up by Caltech, and how seemingly half of West Baltimore, where I had shot The Wire, was now owned by Johns Hopkins, which acquired the real estate under similar distressed conditions. Everybody knew that Pontchartrain Park had a bull’s-eye on it.

  Out of all the neighborhoods in the devastated city it could have chosen, the Tulane architecture school picked Pontchartrain Park as the focus of an urban redevelopment class. Now we saw graduate students photographing Pontchartrain Park and asking all kinds of questions of neighborhood residents about life there.

  Some suspected—I among them—that the university’s interest was really in owning the property and that it was using an academic project as a false front. This was all speculation, of course, but if Tulane could acquire Pontchartrain Park, it would be in a position to petition the state to close Southern University at New Orleans and reopen it as a satellite Tulane campus. Plus, Tulane would own five hundred houses, and a golf course.

  It would be a sweet deal for Tulane. For the rest of us, not so much.

  Troy and I formed the Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corporation for the purpose of restoring the neighborhood. Our hope was for it to be a haven for home-owning families, especially African American ones, to keep our parents’ dream alive for a new generation. Oddly enough, when the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) granted our company redevelopment rights to the neighborhood, it seemed to me that Tulane lost interest in Pontchartrain Park as a laboratory for redeveloping New Orleans. I felt that my cynicism about Tulane’s motives was vindicated. We got to work. Our goal: to build three hundred solar-paneled, geothermally heated houses there.

  Eight hard years later, we are not where we wanted to be on the road to Pontchartrain Park’s comeback, but we are making steady progress. The route to building new homes has been winding, full of detours, switchbacks, potholes, and washouts. In all candor, it has been a very New Orleans story. Unfortunately, one of the most resilient aspects of life in the Big Easy has been its rough-and-tumble politics.

  Troy ran for mayor in 2010, but lost to Mitch Landrieu, son of former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu. I was told the worst thing you can do is come in second in the mayor’s race, because the victorious political machine is going to spend the next four years trying to keep anything you do from succeeding, because your opponents want to neutralize you as a political threat for the next election.

  In New Orleans, politics are as pervasive as they are murky. Plus, competence and efficiency are not virtues we have come to expect in our public servants and agencies. It is difficult, therefore, to say whether obstacles suddenly arising in your path come from bureaucratic ineptitude or political malice. It took NORA two years of hemming and hawing to transfer four properties to us. It tells you something, though, that when U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu was publicly commending us for trying to bring a grocery store to the Lower Ninth Ward food desert, which hadn’t had a decent food store for decades, her brother Mitch was meeting with the bank about the grocery store project, trying, I suspect, to kill the deal.

  As with the Tulane project, I can’t prove my suspicions, but I do know this: Before the deal’s financiers went into the meeting with the mayor, they were committed to financing the grocery store; when the meeting was over, they dropped us. The project’s developer moved on to take on another opportunity elsewhere in the city. It’s hard to believe that this wasn’t about politics. Where our store was going to be in the Lower Ninth, there is still nothing but an abandoned building.

  I also had a letter of intent to open a food store on a blighted corner of North Broad and Bienville in Mid-City, in an area designated as a food desert by the city. Then the developer stopped returning my phone calls, and the next thing I knew, the city awarded $2 million in grants to turn the site into a Whole Foods. Imagine that: attempting to meet the grocery needs of poor and working-class people with a premium supermarket mocked as “Whole Paycheck” for its high prices. Where is the sense in that? But my business partner and I noticed a pattern: Projects we were involved in that had been moving along well suddenly stopped, and we saw that Mayor Landrieu was involved in some way.

  To have had that incredible Godot moment of hope in the desolation of the Lower Ninth Ward, and then to see a pro
ject as worthwhile and as necessary as a grocery store go down because of city politics—was a beat-down. Our absurd struggles with NORA and various bureaucracies to get houses built in Pontchartrain Park are worthy of a Beckett play. Friends of mine have told me that I have done all I can, and that I can’t go on like this. It’s not worth it, they say.

  But I have it on good authority that can’t died three days before the creation of the world. I’ll go on, for as long as I can. What’s the good of losing heart now?

  When Nelson Mandela died in 2013, I read in his obituary a quote of his that resonated deeply with me: “It is always difficult until it’s done.” It made me think about all the times I’ve wanted to give up, to focus on my career, to lay down the burden of rebuilding Pontchartrain Park. It seems impossible that this will ever get done. But we’re not going anywhere but forward.

  In January 2014, I bought a house in the neighborhood, across the park from the street where I grew up. If I am asking others to move to Pontchartrain Park after the disaster, then I need to do it myself, I figured. Because of the nature of my work, I am constantly shuttling between New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. My house in my hometown sits only a few blocks away from my dad. I tuck him into bed at night, and instead of going into my room down the hall, I drive to the other side of the park. I love waking up in the morning there, watching the old neighborhood come back to life.

  The golf course is open once again. Southern University’s campus has expanded. All the churches are praising God on Sunday mornings, just as they always did. Major League Baseball rebuilt the baseball stadium nearby. The neighborhood school is brand-new. And slowly but steadily, we are moving families into houses. When it’s fully restored, Pontchartrain Park will be filled with young families as well as original stakeholders who have been there forever. It will look like the neighborhood I grew up in.

  For the first time, we have four or five white families living in Pontchartrain Park. In 2014, the basketball coach at the University of New Orleans bought a house in the neighborhood. My father’s reaction? “This is America, man, this is what it’s all about.” I never thought I’d see the day when an eighty-nine-year-old black man would be so happy to have a young white basketball coach and his family move into the neighborhood, and to declare that this liberty is what he fought for.

  And so, when people smirk and ask What good has art ever done for anybody? I can point to everything my partners and I have accomplished in Pontchartrain Park. For me, the catalyst was Waiting for Godot. Hurricane Katrina woke me up to how much I loved New Orleans, and how much I owed her and her people. Godot showed me the power art has to galvanize people to change their lives, their communities, and their world. It happened to me.

  We will never know the change that the New Orleans production of Godot created in the city and beyond. Years after the show, I still hear from people who tell me they were there and it was one of the most powerful moments of their lives, or people who have never been to New Orleans but who heard about the play and want to know more.

  It is impossible to measure the change art creates in the world, but that does not mean it has no impact. Did the 2006 All-Star Second Line Parade build new houses, create new jobs, or move a displaced family back home? Not directly. But if it gave the people who saw it, marched in it, or just heard about it reason to believe in the rebirth of New Orleans, and to do their part to participate in the city’s resurrection, then yes, the parade made a difference.

  Who’s to say that someone in the audience for one of the Godot performances left saying to themselves, Yes, we must go on—and then in some way, however small, acted to defend the city and its culture, or to rebuild it, to restore it, to make those dry bones live?

  How do we know what seeds are growing today in the hearts of young people who saw Waiting for Godot and sensed, somehow, that their lives would never be the same? We shall see.

  I can answer only for myself. Pontchartrain Park gave a young boy who grew up there, in a loving community of faith, family, and high expectations, the confidence and nurturing he needed to become an artist. Art gave the man the means and the inspiration to do all that he could to give back to Pontchartrain Park the gift of itself.

  NINE

  TREME TAKES ME HOME

  In the end of 2006 and early 2007, at the same time that my emotional life focused on what was happening in New Orleans, my professional life centered around wrapping up The Wire, then in its final season. David Simon and the cast and crew had been so loving to my family and me in Katrina’s wake. David threw a Katrina relief concert in Baltimore, bringing up the subdudes and the Iguanas, two of his favorite New Orleans bands. It turned out that David was privately thinking about New Orleans as much as I was.

  One night on the Wire set, David called me aside and said his next project would be set in New Orleans. “I’ll let you know more about it later,” he said. “I might want to run some things by you about New Orleans.” Oh, man, I thought, he can’t write a series about New Orleans without including me.

  Later, David handed me a couple of script pages from this planned show. “Here’s a scene about a trombone player, just a couple of ideas I have,” he said.

  The trombone player character? He was an easygoing but still struggling musician named Wendell. That’s how David Simon told me about Treme.

  “David!” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m writing this with you in mind,” he replied.

  To have any writer say he’s writing a series with you in mind is an honor. To have a writer of David Simon’s caliber write something about your hometown, and do it with you in mind, is a gift from God. I couldn’t believe it. I was moved to no end. It turned out that David had been thinking about a New Orleans show for years, since coming down for Mardi Gras one year and falling in love with the place. The narrative in the proposed show, a multiracial ensemble drama, would begin in late 2005, three months after the storm, with the show’s characters—a hodgepodge of New Orleanians of different races and social classes—struggling to rebuild their shattered lives. David’s passionate interest in social realism and complex urban drama added depth and urgency to the concept.

  After The Wire wrapped, the actor Ray Romano called to say that he was creating a cable TV series called Men of a Certain Age, and had written a part with me in mind. It was an hour-long drama about three buddies in their late forties, facing middle age. My character was a stressed-out husband and dad who couldn’t handle working at his father’s car dealership. We got together, and he showed me an early draft; it was literally written in crayon, with stick figures. A pleasant joke to spark my interest. Ray’s production company had the deal all ready to go. At that point, Treme was only in the pilot stage; HBO had not green-lighted production, but the possibility was strong.

  Two shows, each created by an accomplished, successful artist, each of whom created a part with me in mind. I am a man who is blessed by the generosity of my friends. But I had a choice to make.

  Finally, I called Ray to tell him I couldn’t take the role. I was going to gamble on Treme.

  “It’s not about a great television job,” I told him. “You have to understand, Treme is a depiction of my city and my life. It’s so clear that I have to do this. It’s not just choosing one job over another.”

  (The role eventually went to Andre Braugher, who won a Peabody Award and was twice nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards for his work on the show. Despite critical acclaim for the series, TNT canceled Men of a Certain Age after two seasons.)

  Looking back, I believe Treme was divine intervention. Yes, it was a great television show, one that meant the world to me. The Times-Picayune called it “the screen depiction that New Orleans deserves, has always desired, but has been denied.” That I was able to play a part in a historic artistic event in the life and times of my beloved city is an honor I will carry in my heart all the days of my life.

 
Treme sent the message that in New Orleans, our culture, what we create, what has inspired and delighted generations of people around the world, was our polestar. It was the solid ground on which we were going to rebuild our collective house. It was going to be our answer to those who wondered aloud why anyone would want to bring back New Orleans. With our culture, we were going to remind America why New Orleans matters. (And by the way, Why New Orleans Matters author Tom Piazza signed on as a Treme writer from the beginning.)

  More than that, though, Treme was a gift from God because it allowed me to live in New Orleans for the final years of my mother’s life. God gave me that part in Treme to spend time with Tee and Daddy, to prepare for her passing, and to reestablish myself as a New Orleanian who works to help his neighborhood and his city.

  There is no substitute for being there. Treme made it possible for me to be there when it mattered most. A month before Tee died, she told a friend how much I was on her mind. “Audrey, I’m ready,” she said. “But Wendell’s not. He’s not ready for me to go, and that worries me.”

  I knew Tee was sick, but I did not know how sick. I didn’t want to see it. My mother broke the news to me at home.

  “Wendell, I’m dying,” she said.

  I brushed it off.

  “No, Wendell, I’m dying,” she repeated. “I want you to stay close to your brother. I want you to know that.”

  One night, as I was keeping vigil during her final decline, a doctor friend came over to sit with me at Daddy and Tee’s as my parents slept. I poured us a couple of drinks. We didn’t speak of Tee’s condition. All I could say was, “These are the times.”

  A few hours later, I was kneeling in my mother’s bedroom, holding her dead body in my arms. Althea Lee Edwards Pierce left this world on October 22, 2012. She was eighty-two.