Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  Yet physical threats to the city were the ones that most alarmed Lewis. He had left New Orleans in the mid-1970s hoping that more rational voices would defeat what he called the “unrestrained greed by land sellers and house builders,” but by the start of the new century, nearly a hundred thousand people lived in New Orleans East. To drive home his point about the vulnerability of those living in the East and other low-lying areas, he cited an article appearing in Scientific American near the end of 2001, “Drowning New Orleans.” “New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen,” its author, Mark Fischetti, wrote. “If a big slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water.”

  MIDDLE-CLASS WHITES WERE THE first to settle into the early subdivisions being built in New Orleans East. A couple could purchase a four-bedroom, three-bath home with a nice expanse of backyard for less than half of what it would cost Uptown. Lakeview was closer to the center of town, but the homes there were more expensive and generally smaller.

  Inevitably, blacks with money visited those model homes developers had built for prospective home buyers. The passage of fair-housing laws in the 1960s reduced aggressive discrimination, and mortgages—in part because of Liberty and the two small black-owned competitors that followed—were becoming easier for African Americans to secure. “Black people were testing the rules, testing the market,” Alden McDonald said. “First it’d be one house in a community, then a second, then a third.” The McDonalds moved to New Orleans East right after they were married, in 1974.

  New Orleans East in the late 1970s was a kind of racial nirvana. There the middle class and upper-middle class, black and white, lived side by side and seemed to want more or less the same thing. “It was like suburbia on steroids,” said Beverly McKenna, a black woman who moved to a subdivision called Lake Willow Estates in 1977. “You could fish in the lake. There was a beautiful shopping center. Everyone not black. Everyone not white. Life.” A graduate of Indiana University, McKenna had taught high school English before quitting to raise a family. Her husband, Dwight, was a surgeon. Their neighbors, whatever their race, were lawyers and accountants and junior executives commuting each morning to a downtown office tower. “That’s what makes me so sad and angry,” McKenna said. “It was such a beautiful little community.”

  McKenna and her husband started noticing the FOR SALE signs shortly after they moved in. The tipping point, McKenna eventually figured out, was when nearly as many black families lived in a subdivision as white ones. Alden McDonald called it a “round two of white flight”—the transformation of New Orleans East into an almost all-black community.

  “We were people moving in who had as much money as they did,” said McKenna, who within the decade would revive the New Orleans Tribune as a monthly newspaper. “We were as well educated. We spoke the same English. We drove the same cars. But these people were moving because of us.” She thought of a neighbor, a white man, who lived in a large, white antebellum home that made McKenna, a northerner, think of a southern plantation. A good-natured man, he stayed longer than most, but that only meant she had more time to eye him mistrustfully. “I barely said hello to him,” McKenna said. “It was a defense mechanism. I didn’t feel very welcome and so I wasn’t very welcoming myself.”

  Yet a new and more modern New Orleans was the animating idea that gave life to the East, not integration. The area was “still a magnet for strivers and achievers,” according to J. B. Borders, who after Katrina wrote a long feature about the East for the New Orleans Tribune. “The outlines of an Afropolitan utopia could be glimpsed.” There was an ice-skating rink where Beverly McKenna and the other moms would bring their children. There were upscale restaurants and “whatever you wanted to buy, you could find out in the East,” McKenna said. The former teacher praised the local schools. The city’s successful black entrepreneurs and some of its ballplayers and even a televangelist moved into Eastover, a gated community of McMansions boasting its own golf course. Meanwhile, the city’s postal workers and clerks and truck drivers bought in Little Woods and Pines Village, where the homes tended to be small, tidy cottages. They were the children of the hotel and restaurant workers who made the city run, the offspring of its elevator operators and custodians. The East, Alden McDonald said, meant that for “the first time in New Orleans history, the African-American community had seen significant wealth creation that they could hand down to the next generation.”

  Yet other changes came to the neighborhood once its population shifted from white to black. Landlords who once only rented to aspiring young professionals were now happy to accept the government’s Section 8 vouchers and house lower-income residents. Eventually so many poor people were living in the apartment buildings along the service roads and main arteries that, at the time of Katrina, according to one community group, 40 percent of the city’s government-subsidized housing was located in New Orleans East. The retail face of the community also changed. Pawnbrokers and check cashers and payday lenders opened storefronts at the bottom of the off-ramps. So, too, did Dollar General, Family Dollar, and the Dollar Tree. The East had a Maison Blanche and a D. H. Holmes, two of the area’s frillier department stores, but both shut their doors. A Sears closed down, and so, too, did a Dillard’s. Lake Forest Plaza was open when Katrina hit but was already dying before it was drowned under eight feet of water.

  McDonald was part of a group that organized to fight for the East in the early 2000s. On Wednesday nights, people would meet in a conference room at Liberty Bank, trying out their ideas for bringing higher-quality restaurants, better stores, and amenities to the East. Liberty funded a study to document the great sums of discretionary income sloshing around New Orleans East. A second one showed how the East had become a dumping ground for the city’s problems. McDonald, who often pitched the businesses they were trying to lure to the East, had even put up some of his own money to open a twelve-screen movie theater on the site of the old Sears parking lot. The city put up several million dollars in federal redevelopment money as well in what McDonald characterized as a “risky venture” to prove that New Orleans East was a community worth investing in. “We were very close to getting some national restaurants out here,” McDonald said. “We were getting close on some big retail. And then Katrina hit.”

  CASSANDRA WALL WAS AS shocked as anyone else that she bought in New Orleans East. Wall had always seen herself as an Uptown girl even if technically she grew up in Central City, on the woolly fringes of the Garden District. Central City suggested black and low income, but though there was no denying her skin color, she had not grown up poor. Her father was a contractor who made good money buying and restoring dilapidated properties, her mother an English teacher who taught all her girls to enunciate and drilled them in good grammar. Wall grew up a few blocks from St. Charles and attended the Xavier University Preparatory School, a fancy Catholic girls’ high school on Magazine Street. Even the grand, two-story Victorian home they grew up in set the Walls apart from most of their Central City neighbors. This 150-year-old jewel had been restored by their father, who had kept the original chandeliers, the flocked wallpaper, and the crown moldings. Like any good Uptown family, they ate on china and drank from crystal during formal meals.

  “I’ve always appreciated the finer things in life,” Cassandra said. “We’re all that way.” Yet she was a public school teacher who earned extra money teaching composition and literature at Xavier and the University of New Orleans. She had married a hospital technician. The finer things in life would mean a two-story, three-bedroom, two-bath home in New Orleans East for under $200,000.

  Cassandra Wall was the oldest of four girls—or five if you included her cousin Robyn Braggs, whom they all referred to as a fifth sister. Growing up, Cassandra was the child in the corner reading a book, the rule-follower who never got into trouble. All the girls heard it growing up: Why can’t you be more like Cassandra?

  “The perfect pill,” cousin Robyn said
of Cassandra.

  Cassandra attended Xavier University, a ten-minute drive from their house, and then moved West when offered a fellowship to the University of Oregon. There she earned a master’s in English literature and secured teaching jobs at Portland State and a local community college. Cassandra moved back to New Orleans in the 1980s after an eight-year stint on the West Coast that included a first marriage that ended in divorce.

  Cassandra’s sister Tangeyon—Tangee—was the first Wall sister to move to New Orleans East. In 1982 Tangee and her then husband, both still in their twenties, bought a three-bedroom, two-bath, in Little Woods. A decade later, they traded up to Eastover—a gated community where for $400,000 or $500,000 you could buy the same-size house that would cost $2 million Uptown. The black aristocracy lived in Eastover.

  Cassandra followed Tangee to the East in 1990. She lived briefly in a three-bedroom, two-bath house she bought for $65,000 before remarrying and moving to Tamaron Estates, a more upscale subdivision that ranked somewhere between Little Woods and Eastover economically. Her youngest sister, Talmadge, whom they called Petie, followed her sisters when a year later she and her husband bought a home near Cassandra’s. The final Wall sister, Contesse, bought in the East a year after that. Robyn followed a few years later when she bought around the corner from Petie.

  Petie, the baby, was more of a party girl. “She could’ve excelled if she pushed herself a little harder,” Cassandra tsk-tsked. The sisters had the usual assortment of resentments, tensions, and buried feelings that form among any group of siblings. The others loved Contesse, but she could also be exhausting. “It’s always been Contesse against the world,” Petie said. Tangee, the second born, had always been the intrepid one. She was the leader who had the others following her even when they were small. That was also the role Contesse sought for herself. “Contesse wants to be in charge,” Robyn said. Corrected Petie, “She thinks she’s in charge.”

  Yet it would be challenging to find a group of five women any closer or more similar in their likes and habits. New Orleans East stretched along a half dozen highway exits, yet the five sisters all chose homes off the same one. None lived more than a few minutes’ drive from the others. All of them lived what Petie called “the Big Easy lifestyle: if you have the money, you spend it and enjoy it.” You saw it in the $400 shoes they sometimes bought or the cars they drove (“We only act like we’re rich,” said Robyn). Sunday nights meant dinner back in Central City, where their mother always used the good china and the heavy silverware. They had their standing Thursday-night dinners, and after Cassandra remarried, Petie’s three kids had a younger cousin. Almost every day, or so it seemed, some combination of them were coming together. The husbands got along, and the sisters and their cousin also had entanglements through a variety of partnerships they’d formed. Cassandra helped Tangee with an art business she ran on the side, which required the occasional trip to Europe together. Petie illustrated a children’s book Contesse wrote and self-published through a company she named Four Walls of Success. And it seemed practically every week that at least several of them would get together for one of their epic shopping expeditions. “That’s when we really had fun,” Petie said.

  CASSANDRA DIDN’T WANT TO leave ahead of Katrina. None of the sisters did. They spent Saturday evening phoning one another, each at home watching the storm coverage and hoping for consensus. “We’re leaving,” “We’re staying”—they changed their minds all night. The old maps of New Orleans described the area as “cypress swamp,” but it had never come up that they lived at least several feet below sea level. They decided to leave only after Nagin on Sunday morning declared the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation order. “I’m thinking, Wait, this is unprecedented? I’m outta here,” Robyn said. They broke into two groups. Cassandra, Tangee, and Contesse formed one caravan, Robyn and Petie another. They would head west and north and reconnoiter in Baton Rouge.

  Petie had been the last holdout. She had a two-year-old Doberman in heat and a pit bull puppy she was training. Her husband, who worked on a ship that ran supplies to the oil rigs, was at sea and motoring toward safe waters. “You all can take Garrett,” Petie said of her son, then fifteen years old. “I need to stay.” The sisters took turns calling to talk sense to Petie while Robyn stuffed the backseat of her Honda with half her closet. “You’re packing all this stupid stuff,” Petie told her. Petie eventually relented but then only brought a nightgown, a single pair of pants, a couple of shirts, the sandals she had on, and, inexplicably, a pair of ridiculously impractical and expensive beaded shoes she had just bought. Robyn had been hoping to hit the road by 1:00 p.m. but punctuality isn’t a Wall trait. It would be closer to 4:00 p.m. when Robyn pulled from the curb, followed by Petie, her son, a dog in heat, and a puppy in a Toyota 4Runner. Facing terrible traffic, they tried to take a shortcut that had them, six hours later, stopping for the night on the outskirts of Jackson, Mississippi, hundreds of miles from where they were supposed to be.

  The other three sisters left New Orleans at around 1:00 p.m. yet didn’t reach the outskirts of Baton Rouge, seventy miles away, until 10:00 p.m. It was a little past midnight when the group of them arrived to take the last two empty rooms in a charmless Microtel at the crossroads of the city’s two busiest highways. Eventually, they’d take up almost an entire floor as Petie and Robyn joined them later in the week, along with their mother and stray members of their extended family. For at least a few of them, the Microtel would be home for more than six months.

  THEY STARED BLEARY-EYED AT CNN. Those first few days were an enervating drone of anchors, a miasma caused by the same few images playing in an endless loop. They didn’t dare turn off the TV out of fear of missing something. With the rest of the country they learned that Uptown (and their mother’s home) had largely been spared, and also the Quarter and the central business district. They learned that big sections of the Lower Ninth Ward had been destroyed and that Lakeview was covered by water. Eventually they started turning channels, but not once did any of them hear a newscaster mention New Orleans East. A well-off black community did not fit television’s narrative about poor blacks and well-off whites. They constituted one-fifth of the city’s population, Tangee said, “but it was as if our community didn’t exist.”

  The sisters ran into neighbors they knew or at least recognized at the Walgreens and at the Walmart buying cheap clothes. “You hear anything?” they’d ask, but no one knew anything. A couple of the sisters even ran into their state legislator while visiting the mall. “She had the same weird look on her face that we all did,” Robyn said. All they had were rumors of government plans to bulldoze the East and a plot by the government to seize people’s land to build a new airport. “There was even talk of entire subdivisions sinking back into the swamp,” Contesse said.

  Ten days after Katrina, Tangee and Robyn ran into a neighbor named Mack Slan at the Shoney’s near their hotel. Slan was eating breakfast with his wife and mother. The group of them were having the same conversation nodding acquaintances were having in Baton Rouge and all over the country until one of them brought up the idea of organizing a meeting. Slan knew a local Baptist minister, who agreed to let them hold a meeting in his church’s community center. “Are You from New Orleans East?” read the handwritten flyer they posted at every Days Inn, La Quinta, and Super 8 they came across driving the area’s highways. People were invited to show up that coming Monday, September 19—three weeks after the storm—at the True Light Baptist Church.

  The first meeting was “more like a reunion,” Tangee said. At least seven hundred people, the sisters and Slan agree, showed up at a gathering marked by a lot of hugging and crying. Hundreds more showed up the following Monday, when Tangee surprised even herself by proposing that they defy the blockade keeping New Orleans East off-limits even to residents. “Tangee would shut down the I-10 if she thought it would bring attention to our issues,” Mack Slan said. “She was always ready to rumble. Cassandra, too—though she
’d show up wearing high heels.”

  The next day, a convoy of more than seventy cars, many of them luxury sedans with a new-car sparkle, took off in the early-morning hours from a Lowe’s parking lot just south of Baton Rouge. “As a group, we decided that it was our constitutional right, that there was no law in the land that could prevent us from seeing our homes,” Tangee said. In the end, they’d get an escort into the city from a police commander.

  * * *

  I. A common rule of thumb among environmental engineers holds that a surge will lose at least one foot of its height for every three miles of marshland it encounters.

  8

  HE SAID, SHE SAID

  Ray Nagin had coffee with Minister Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, his last morning in Dallas. The two had first met a few months earlier, when Farrakhan was in town to give a series of talks. Nagin had sought out Farrakhan. Nagin had attended the Million Man March in Washington, DC, ten years earlier, in 1995, and had been surprised that he felt as moved as he did when all those black men stood together on the Mall and recited, in unison, their commitment to improving “myself, my family, and my people.” Nagin remembered the experience when he saw on one of the city’s intel sheets that Farrakhan was coming to New Orleans. He had enjoyed their first meeting and was pleased when he heard the peripatetic minister’s voice on his BlackBerry. They met at the Dallas airport before Nagin flew home to New Orleans.