by Dan Baum
Must be I’m getting old, but I’ve been thinking about my parents. They raised us right, man. They’d kick your ass if you weren’t cleaned up. “Take care of your hair.” “Don’t leave clothes hanging around.” We used to go to people’s houses in San Fernando, and before we went in, Daddy would say, “They ask you, you don’t eat nothing.” He was serious. “You don’t give me no trouble in front of my people.” And every time, them people would say, “You kids want something to eat?” and we’d be like, “No, thank you, ma’am.”
Every Friday, Daddy’d say, “What did you learn in school? Tell me something I don’t know.” He once said to my brother Greg, “Spell ‘piano.’” He couldn’t, and Daddy hit him—pow! We laughed, and Daddy said, “What are you laughing at? You’re next.”
But he very seldom whipped us. He’d punish you—take away your bike, make you stand in the corner with two rocks in your hand. He had a sifter in the backyard; he’d say, “Go back there and sift dirt.” Worst thing, though, was when he’d just turn away and say, “Right now I can’t see you.” I hated that shit.
Daddy’d kick my ass, he could see me going in and out the jail. He worked every day of his life. He didn’t play. Never saw the inside of a jailhouse.
Tell you what: I’m getting straight. I’m tired of living like this, man. I ain’t got nothing. Daddy was half my age, he had his own house, shit he could put his hand on. It’s going to change, man.
You watch. Shit’s going to change for me. Big shit.
JOYCE MONTANA
CITY COUNCIL CHAMBER
June 27, 2005
Joyce stood at the entrance to the New Orleans City Council chamber, clutching Tootie’s arm. Behind her, a television reporter was barking into a microphone a summary of the police bust-up on St. Joseph’s Night—the broken arm, the wrestling to the ground of Bertrand Butler, the insults to the old women. Ahead, the chamber looked like a cross between a courtroom and a high-school auditorium: high ceiling, rows of blue tip-up seats sloping gently to a low blond-wood fence running in a semicircle across the front of the room. The council members sat on a low stage beyond the fence, leaning their forearms on a pale wood counter, tired-looking blue velour curtains making a backdrop.
As she moved Tootie slowly down the aisle, hands reached out to touch her arms, touch Tootie’s arms; Joyce smiled encouragement. Flashbulbs popped. A television camera hovered at the edge of her vision like a square-headed Cyclops. Tootie made little huffing noises as he walked, and she tightened her grip on his arm. She’d fretted about him coming, but he’d insisted he was fine, just the burning in the shoulder. He smelled of garlic water. She spotted Darryl up ahead, wearing a shirt of the same bright orange as Tootie’s last suit. She hadn’t seen him in weeks.
They reached the front row and took chairs next to Estabon “Peppy” Eugene, chief of the Golden Arrows. Directly in front of them, on the other side of the wooden fence, sat three men in white NOPD shirts. The white one she recognized from the television. It was Captain Cannatella, commander of the Sixth District, whose men had busted up St. Joseph’s Night.
Oliver Thomas, the big, emotional city council president, called the meeting to order and asked “Peppy” Eugene to speak. His Indians had been the most roughed up. Peppy stepped to the lectern, but gestured behind him. “Our elder, Mr. Tootie Montana, I’d like you all to recognize,” he said, stepping back and waving Tootie forward. The audience murmured; an uptown chief was yielding to a downtown chief—an important moment.
“The godfather,” Thomas said, as Tootie, looking small in his open-necked beige sport shirt, walked slowly to the microphone, massaging the burning spot in his armpit. Darryl came down the aisle and moved to stand near him. “I am Big Chief Tootie, Allison Montana,” Tootie said into the microphone, and a skein of applause wound through the room. “I made fifty-two suits. I masked fifty-two years. When I told my mother I wanted to make a suit that first year, she said, ‘Oh, no. Boy, you don’t want to fool with that.’”
Joyce smiled at Tootie’s back.
“Every year, we got to Pauger and Claiborne, there’d be about eight policemen waiting,” Tootie said. He shrugged a little, as though the shirt were binding his armpit. “When they seen us coming, they’d wrap the strap of their billy tight, so they’d make sure it didn’t come out the hand when they beat your head.”
A twist of anxiety moved under Joyce’s sternum. She could hear Tootie’s breath between phrases.
This is my last suit, he’d said. I’m going to do this until I die.
“Another year,” Tootie went on, “when I get to Roman, police cars coming all kinds of ways. I say, ‘What is this?’ They say, ‘Get out the street. Get on the sidewalk.’ I say, ‘For what? We wasn’t doing nothing.’” Tootie stopped, Joyce could tell something was wrong. Darryl stepped in close to Tootie, whispering. Tootie looked up, surprised, and nodded.
“Take your time,” Thomas said from the dais.
Tootie looked up, started to speak, and turned toward Darryl, wide-eyed. “Say what?” he rasped, and collapsed straight down, like a marionette with its strings cut.
“Tootie!” Joyce screamed, bolting to her feet. The three white-shirted cops vaulted over the fence in unison. Darryl knelt over Tootie.
“Pray!” someone yelled.
Darryl stuck his head up and shouted, “No! Indian Red!”
A voice called, “Mah-day two-de fiyo!” and the crowd began, in a low moan, the most important of the Mardi Gras Indian songs.
“Tootie? Tootie!” Joyce shrieked. “You can’t leave me, Tootie!” The singing grew louder: “Here comes the Biiiig Chief, the Biiiig Chief, the Big Chief of the Nation, the whole wild creation.” Joyce took two steps forward, someone grabbed her arms. “He won’t bow down, not on that ground,” the people sang. “You know I love you, hear you call, my Indian Red.”
RONALD LEWIS
1317 TUPELO STREET
2005
Ronald woke at four-thirty. His body’s internal alarm was still set, and much as his knees and feet ached, he missed going to work. But the retirement party they’d thrown him in the break room on Baronne Street had been second to none, and after thirty-four years on the tracks he was drawing eleven hundred dollars a month pension. The problem was filling up the time.
He shuffled to the kitchen and stood looking out the window at the garage. The rakes and rose dust were long gone; the space was given over entirely to relics of the paradise cross the canal, the mighty Lower Nine. He was spending more and more time among those expressions of joy and solidarity, creativity and life. They were a bulwark against the senseless killings, which seemed to be coming about one a day. Rashad had been right; he did have a museum. A name had come to Ronald in his sleep one night: the House of Dance and Feathers. With the help of a lawyer friend, Ronald had filled out the paperwork, and the IRS had just bestowed upon the museum something called 501 (c)(3) status, which meant Ronald could raise money for it without paying taxes. Mostly, though, people didn’t donate money; they donated things—parading shoes they’d had up under their beds for years, a piece of beadwork off an Indian suit, some photos. Little by little, the House of Dance and Feathers was getting known around the Lower Nine. Even a few people from the other side of the canal came, to discover the Lower Ninth Ward was more than a killing ground or a place to buy dope. Every black person in New Orleans, just about, had grown up visiting relatives cross the canal, and the House of Dance and Feathers reminded them of the soul of the city.
Ronald had the mitigation board on his mind. Its mission was to offset the pain of having the locks expanded in the Industrial Canal. Whole blocks of houses were going to be lost, and a noisy industrial area was going to intrude farther into the Lower Nine. What had Ronald steamed was the board had arranged scholarships to Nunez Community College, but it wasn’t telling anybody. Ronald had found out about the scholarships at a meeting. It seemed clear to him the board wanted to be able to say it had made the scholarships a
vailable, but it didn’t really want anybody to apply for them.
He drove over to the board’s headquarters in his struggle-buggy—the ancient white Cadillac Seville that had replaced his Cutlass—and picked up thirty applications. He put the stack on the passenger seat and began patrolling the streets of the Lower Nine. Three young men stood on the corner of Charbonnet and Urquhart, casting sidelong glances—watching for police, for rivals, for white folks cruising to buy their drugs. Ronald W. Lewis pulled up and stepped out. One of the boys was little red Michael from Derrick Jenkins’s gang, still in the game. Stuck on stupid. It was a miracle he was alive.
“I ain’t here to talk about this what you’re doing,” Ronald said. “Come look at this here paper.” They looked at one another and gingerly approached. “The city’s going to widen the locks on the Industrial Canal, which would take out all them houses on Sister, Jourdan, Dauphine, Burgundy. Hell, Michael”—Ronald nudged him with a forearm—“your auntee lives over by that way.”
“Tha’s right.”
“Now, to make the bitter pill go down easy, they’re offering scholarships to Nunez Community College over in St. Bernard. ’Stead of hanging on the street corner here, where you’re just as like to get killed, you could get yourself a trade, like carpentry, plumbing, electrical, that kind of thing.”
They stared at him.
“Michael,” Ronald said. “I thought you were hanging with Derrick Jenkins.”
“He dead.”
“Well, there you go.” Ronald put the forms and three pens from his pocket on the hood of his car. “Listen. They trying to put one over, offering scholarships without really telling nobody, hoping nobody apply. What we doing here is like snatching two thousand dollars from the city. We got to pick the fruit. They won’t like it, but it’s ours.”
Michael stepped forward and picked up a pen. “What do I do?”
Ronald kept at it all week, finding young men on the street corners, at the convenience store, at the park on Forstall Street—where Ronald had played baseball as a kid but which was now a field of trash and used syringes. On Friday, he piloted the struggle-buggy down St. Claude Avenue, past Jackson Barracks, into St. Bernard Parish, and turned up Paris Road and found the big brick administration building of Nunez Community College. Grunting, stiff legged, he climbed out, the papers gripped in his fist, his porkpie hat pulled low. In the entry hall, he could feel people looking at him; he was too old, too poor, and too black to be coming round a college office building.
“I’m Ronald W. Lewis, from Tupelo Street in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans!” he announced in as loud a voice as he could muster. The young white woman at the reception desk looked up, startled. “I’m bringing these applications from the young people of my neighborhood!”
JOANN GUIDOS
ST. CLAUDE AVENUE
July 2005
JoAnn stood behind the bar with her hands on her hips, smiling. She’d done it; she’d opened her bar on St. Claude Avenue. The apartments upstairs were barely habitable, and the building next door, where the restaurant would someday be, was still a wreck. But now she had an income stream.
Kajun’s Pub, though, was more than that to JoAnn. It was the best kind of bar—neither gay nor straight, black nor white, biker nor punk. At any given time you’d find tall, skinny black men playing pool with tattooed white chicks; a couple of nellies leaning on the bar, drinking cosmopolitans out of plastic cups and laughing loudly with a big yat in coveralls; a pair of well-dressed black women working the video poker machines for all they were worth; a longhair with a Chihuahua in his backpack taking cash from the ATM; or just Kenny, shirtless, telling a long-winded story to a leathery old biker with Renée, his girlfriend, hanging on his arm. Except for the gorgeous, curved bar that JoAnn and Roney had built together, Kajun’s wasn’t fancy: a cement floor, a pool table salvaged from another bar, fluorescent lights. JoAnn kept prices low—a buck for a Jello-O shot, a buck for a beer, five for a pitcher—which suited St. Claude Avenue just fine. What mattered was that it was a place where anybody could feel safe, where people could be themselves. After fifty years of covering up, JoAnn felt this was more than a job; it was a mission.
The fifteen thousand Roney and Kathy had borrowed from Roney’s mother had made all the difference. Kathy owned 49 percent of the building—though not of the bar—and she and Roney worked their asses off. Kathy ran the books, wrote the checks, dealt with the city. Roney helped JoAnn with construction and kept the place clean with a mop and bucket. Roney and Kathy lived among the exposed wiring and unsanded floors upstairs, though they’d also managed to buy a country bungalow in Carriere, Mississippi, about ninety minutes away. They didn’t draw a salary, but the apartment was free, and JoAnn fed them. Roney’s son even worked the bar from time to time. It was like family.
Sandy, all grown up, was dealing blackjack on the riverboats in Mississippi, and JoAnn loved it when she’d come swinging into the bar, yelling “Hi, Mom!” to Kathy and “Hi, Dad!” to JoAnn and freaking out the customers. Paul was in the Navy, and when his carrier had docked at Norfolk after a tour in the Middle East, the whole family had driven over to meet him. At Sandy’s insistence, John had hauled out the sports bra and big vest; it was a Navy base, after all, and there was no point in making trouble. JoAnn had thought she’d manned up pretty convincingly, but when she’d headed to the men’s room, a well-mannered sailor had stepped up: “Miss, the ladies’ room is on the other side.” It was the high point of the trip.
JoAnn was succeeding in ways that John never had. Pretty soon, it would be time to get the surgery done and finish the transformation.
BILLY GRACE
2525 ST. CHARLES AVENUE
August 20, 2005
Billy took the elevator downstairs with the poodles. The sun was barely up, but the air was already thick and hot—hurricane weather. He walked around to the front, passing under the chandeliered portico that covered the side driveway. George was sitting on the porch in his wheelchair, a cannula running from an oxygen tank beside him into his nostrils. Ivory sat on the step at a discreet distance, neither hovering nor fussing over George. George appeared to be dozing. Billy went up on the porch, moving slowly so as not to let the heat grab him.
It was heartbreaking to see such a force of nature—planner of weddings, comforter of the bereaved, appreciator of art and fashion, guardian of tradition, nudger of recalcitrants—butchered and feeble. George’s shortness of breath had been nothing dire, but he thought he should have a checkup. That started him on a daisy chain of one specialist after another, ending in surgery to install a stent in a coronary artery. But someone botched the job, dislodging plaque that clogged his veins or leaving a hole in an artery. Then more bungling; by the time the doctors paid attention to his blue extremities, gangrene had set in. Both legs and all his fingers had to be amputated. It was a thoroughgoing disaster, but George couldn’t very well sue Ochsner Hospital; he was a member of its board.
For the Zoo-To-Do, Audubon Zoo’s black-tie fund-raiser, George had shown the old spirit, insisting on getting his tux re-tailored to accommodate his missing legs, greeting every lady at the gala with “Forgive me for not standing up.” But he slept a lot now, and Billy checked in on him often, staying around to talk whenever George could. Tootie Montana’s death had hit Billy hard. He’d never gotten around to inviting the big chief to lunch. The old guard of New Orleans was fading.
Billy gathered up the dogs, snapped on their leashes, pressed the button to open the iron gate in the ivy-covered wall, and set out for a short walk. On his cell phone, he punched the number of the pilot of the time-share Learjet that would carry him and Anne off to North Carolina. He was looking forward to seeing the McIlhennys—not at their Avery Island home, where their family had been making Tabasco sauce for a hundred years, but at the Freemans’ place in North Carolina. After a few days there, it would be off to the beach house in Destin. Billy didn’t like leaving George and Big Anne, especially on such a suff
ocating day, but Alston, Anne’s sister, would take good care of them. And Ivory, of course, was always on duty. There was no point in trying to move George and Big Anne in such oppressive weather.
TIM BRUNEAU
666I ARGONNE BOULEVARD
August 29, 2005
Tim took from his gun cabinet a shotgun with a flashlight on the end. The light didn’t work, so he took the Mini-14 rifle instead. He had his service Glock on his hip, and put his miniature Glock in the overnight bag along with three days’ socks and underwear. The phone rang on the kitchen wall. “The lieutenant has fixed us up at the Hampton Inn,” said Jeff, a fellow detective. “We’ll have food. Bring whatever guns and alcohol you want.”
“Great. See you there.” Usually, the Sixth District cops slept in the station house during hurricanes. The Hampton Inn would be deluxe.
Tim looked through the liquor cabinet, decided against whiskey, and fetched a twelve-pack of Budweiser and a gallon of water from the fridge. As he was loading his unmarked Crown Vic, a neighbor drove by in a Land Cruiser. “Where are you going?” Tim shouted.
“To the overpass! In case the water comes up.”
Tim looked at his beloved Ford pickup sitting with beefy oversized tires. “Mine’ll ride it out,” he called back. “It’s an F-150!”
PART III
A THOUSAND WHISTLES
“There will one day be a substantial loss of life unless we have Category Five protection.”