by Dan Baum
Joyce elbowed in and gave Father LeDoux a quick hug, and then he was gone, his taillights making a red smear around the corner of St. Claude Avenue. At once, the young people disappeared inside the rectory and closed the door. Joyce could hear a hammer banging; they were barricading it. She walked to the side door of the sanctuary, pausing before the giant rusted cross made of welded anchor chain, hung with manacles. Father LeDoux had installed it years before: the Tomb of the Unknown Slave. No wonder the archdiocese hated him so much.
Inside the sanctuary, cots were laid out in the aisles between the pews and around the pulpit. A young woman played guitar, singing some sweet hymn. Sandra Gordon appeared at Joyce’s elbow. “You know, I get it,” she said. “It’s like the head says one thing and the heart says another. The whole city is like this since the storm. The numbers may say to close Charity Hospital, too, but how can you take that away from the people at this time? This city has never lived by the numbers. How can you follow the numbers when people are hurting? That’s what I don’t get.” They walked back outside into the warm, fragrant night. A table had been moved in front of the rectory door, and sitting behind it, forearms planted solidly, were Marion Colbert and ninety-year-old Cecilia Galle. “If the police come, they’re going to have to come through us,” Cecilia said with a smile. She must have weighed all of ninety pounds.
Marion pulled out a chair. “Come sit down, Joyce.”
Joyce hesitated. Sit down in the middle of the night to join in a protest? Deliberately provoke the New Orleans police? She couldn’t imagine what Tootie would say. She oughtn’t to be out here, fooling around. She ought to be at the kitchen table with Tootie right now, sewing on his next suit.
Tootie had overseen her life for fifty-three years, but he was gone, and she would have to find her own way. She took the seat that Marion was holding for her. She folded her hands and set her jaw, waiting for the sirens.
RONALD LEWIS
1317 TUPELO STREET
March 2006
Students swarmed over Ronald’s house and backyard, pulling down the waterlogged garage with their bare hands, tearing the inside of the house apart with crowbars, piling sodden Sheetrock on the curb. They worked cheerfully in the heat and filth, like soldier ants, having come on spring break from as far as Montana and Kansas, the baton of goodwill having passed from Helen Regis to Steve Inskeep, to the Reinhabiting NOLA conference, to students from all over America.
Ronald bent to pick up a hammer and limped across the driveway to lay it on a workbench; keeping the work site neat was the least he could do. At the curb, a camera crew from WWL-TV was packing up. They’d been around the last hour, to film some of the first rebuilding in the Lower Ninth Ward.
“’Scuse me,” Ronald said, hobbling up to the young woman in blazer and shiny loafers who seemed to be in charge. “I got one more thing to say.”
“We’re finished here,” she said. “Thank you.”
Ronald smiled broadly, hitting her with that gold incisor. “Give me one more minute of your time.”
She looked annoyed, but flipped an eyebrow at a cameraman, who hoisted his big machine back onto his shoulder. The woman held the microphone close to Ronald’s lips. He looked straight into the lens.
“My name is Ronald W. Lewis. We need help down here in the Lower Ninth Ward. Please help us.”
The cameraman waited.
“That’s all I got to say.”
WILBERT RAWLINS JR.
O. PERRY WALKER HIGH SCHOOL
August 2006
The O. Perry Walker High School band room was windowless and none too clean. Another band room, Wil thought. But at least it’s in New Orleans. And there were band trophies on the wall. Hard-luck schools were often the ones with band trophies. They’re the ones that needed band the most.
“Wilbert Rawlins Jr.?” A very fat man weaved his way, splay legged, among chairs and music stands. He wore blue sweatpants, a faded blue hoodie, and a gray T-shirt as big as a circus tent. He was younger than Wil; he might have been a student. He looked exhausted, his skin gray, and the school year hadn’t yet started. “Mike Ricks,” he said, putting out a soft hand and smiling sweetly. “The children call me Big Mike.”
It was Big Mike who had tracked him down in Beaumont and recruited Wil by phone. Wil pulled up a couple of plastic folding chairs. “You’re what, an assistant principal?”
“I’m the interventionist.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, basically I’m here to love the children.” Big Mike laughed, his round face lighting up like sunrise. “Those that don’t receive love at home need an adult at school to say, ‘I love you!’”
“I hear that. I used to work up by the Desire Project.”
Big Mike leaned forward across his huge, soft belly. “When I was coming over here, everybody was like, ‘Oh, you going to Walker, that school bad.’” He laughed. “You know about the shooting here in 2004, right? Then you know the worst. Listen: a child might be able to pass along in elementary school with two-dollar parents. But when you get to middle school and high school, you want to keep up with what everybody else is doing. So where do you look for mentors if you got two-dollar parents? You look to the guys that’s driving the nice cars, that have the women, that aren’t tied down with jobs. You hear what I’m saying?”
“How many of the kids at Walker have both parents?”
Mike leaned back and closed his eyes. “Out of the 900 and something kids, I would give it about 100.”
“And one parent?”
“Maybe half.”
“And the rest, what? Live with grandmothers?”
Mike opened his eyes. “Well, I consider a grandmother a parent.”
Wil did the math. “What about the other 350?”
“They’re on their own,” he said, and Wil felt a chill on his back. “They wanted to be back,” Big Mike went on. “They want to go to school in New Orleans. Maybe their mama in Texas couldn’t come back. Maybe she didn’t want to. So you got children staying by relatives or friends, but most are on their own, roommating with each other. Some got a little apartment; some got FEMA trailers. Some are in abandoned houses. A lot of our kids leave school and go straight to work. They work till two, three o’clock in the morning and come to school at seven. I got fifteen I call every morning to wake them up.” He held up his cell phone.
“So who’s cooking their meals and washing their clothes?”
“We got about seven or eight that washes their clothes upstairs.”
“What about food?”
“Food, hmm.” Mike shrugged. “Sometimes they have money. I give them money, Miss Laurie gives them money. Sometimes they’ll eat by other people’s houses. Our football coach, he’s got about nine boys living with him.”
I wanted intensity, Wil thought. This is going to be plenty damn intense.
“But listen here,” Big Mike said. “Before the storm, this school graduated half its senior class. It lost half to the streets, to drugs, to whatever. Last year? After the storm? We graduated more than 80 percent, and we only opened in December.” Big Mike hoisted himself to his feet. “You got things to do.” He laid his hand on Wil’s shoulder. “It’s up to you, but I can tell you that I don’t address these children by their first names. I call them Mr. and Miss. I say ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am.’ We serve them. We are here because of them. We pay our bills because of them.” He shuffled off, dragging his heavy feet along the linoleum with a soft soughing noise.
Wil was setting up, trying to get his mind around 350 children living on their own, when his cell phone buzzed.
“Daddy?”
Only one girl called him that. “Nyja!” Wil leaped to his feet. “Where you calling from?”
“I’m at Texas Southern.” She sounded happy, but also sleepy, maybe drugged out. He tried to put it together—that she’d made it to college, that she sounded happy, that she was doped up.
“I’m studying pharmacy,” Nyja said.
&
nbsp; Wil laughed. He’d lost track of her, and then there was the storm. Nyja Sanders! Studying pharmacy!
“I still cry myself to sleep since the storm,” she was saying.
“But you’re holding on! You’re in college! How’s Texas Southern? You in the band?”
“Of course! I play mellophone. My boyfriend plays baritone. His name is Calvin, but they call him Turkey. It’s hard here, Daddy. Everything’s spread out. I take buses or get rides. People got stereotypes. If you have a 504 phone, you can’t get no job, ’cause nobody wants nobody from New Orleans. And if you can’t get no job, you can’t get a new cell phone.”
“I hear you,” Wil said.
“But look. I didn’t call to complain. I got something to tell you, and I got something to ask you.” It sounded like she was nodding off on the phone.
“Okay.”
“I had a baby today, Daddy. A beautiful baby girl.”
“What?”
“So there’s your grandchild. Didn’t you always want a baby girl? Now, I want to know if it’s okay with you if I name her Beautiful Music Sanders.”
FRANK MINYARD
ORLEANS PARISH CORONER’S OFFICE
2007
Frank climbed the broad front steps of the gray sandstone building and unlocked the door under the etched pediment: CORONER, PARISH OF ORLEANS. The hall was silent, power still out, autopsy rooms in the basement a long way from restoration. But Frank’s office was okay, as long as the daylight lasted. He sank into the oak swivel chair, surrounded by the photographs that covered the walls from floor to ceiling: Al Hirt and Pete Fountain. Admiral Zumwalt. Sister Mary David. Joe Maumus. Father Therriot. Paul Hornung. Presidents. Football players. Mayors. Governors. Frank in Mardi Gras mask. Frank in tuxedo. Frank in Navy uniform. Frank was the longest-serving elected official in Louisiana—perhaps in all of Louisiana history.
Christ, he was tired. The tightness in his throat since Katrina felt like the choke chain of a vain and decadent life. What good had he done the people of New Orleans, really? He wanted to feel the old pleasures, to access the glitter and strut that had buoyed him through blunders and sins, but it wasn’t something he could summon. Not with the smells of St. Gabriel lingering in his nostrils. Not with the grid of white coffins on Poydras Street imprinted on the inside of his eyelids.
He hoisted his briefcase onto the desk and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers, the week’s autopsy reports from the makeshift morgue north of the city. New Orleans had less than half its pre-storm population, yet as many people were dying each week as before the storm. He flipped through a dozen reports. The ages were striking: Forty-four. Thirty-one. Fifty-six. Twenty-nine. “Natural causes,” his pathologists had written again and again, a vague term usually reserved for the superannuated. Even for the elderly, it was customary, before the storm, to list a cause of death: pneumonia or congestive heart failure. Frank looked at the details of the autopsies. These young people had mild cirrhosis, or minor heart trouble, or traces of pulmonary stress, but nothing that would kill a person. And yet they were dead.
“Frank, are you ready to go?” Nancy stepped into the office in her riding boots and tank top, dark brown hair curling around her shoulders. She couldn’t pull Frank from the depths, but she always pierced the gloom.
“It’s the storm,” Frank said, raising an autopsy form. “They may not have drowned, or died of dehydration or heat exhaustion in an attic. But these are storm-related deaths: grief, stress, misery, uncertainty.”
“And no Charity,” Nancy said. As a nurse, she was appalled at the closing of the city’s massive public hospital.
“Natural causes my ass,” Frank said. “These are about the most unnatural cases I’ve ever encountered. A person can take only so much stress before the heart muscles go into spasm and the person dies.”
FEMA, he knew, was giving five thousand dollars to any family that lost someone to Katrina. Many life-insurance companies paid double if the policyholder was killed by a hurricane.
Frank took a pen from his shirt pocket, leaned over the desk, and, finding the appropriate box on each report, scribbled in it. “I’m putting all of these down as storm related. These are my people. It’s the least I can do.”
“They’ll fight you.”
He laughed. “I’m seventy-seven years old. I imagine I’ll spend the rest of my life in court.” It had been the motto of his office all along: where death delights to serve the living.
RONALD LEWIS
CLAIBORNE AVENUE
August 2006
“I’m going to call my sister and see if she can’t come over and help me cook up a big old dinner to celebrate,” Minnie said. “I want to make baked macaroni, and dressing, and jambalaya.”
Ronald smiled as he piloted the struggle-buggy, bringing Minnie home over the Claiborne Avenue Bridge. She looked sharp in narrow-cut pants, pointed black boots, and a teal blouse. Her hair lay in tiny cornrows ending in tassels that wobbled fetchingly when she turned her head. This was the old Minnie. The happy Minnie. A good day. But she had walked a bleak road, and they’d spent more time apart than ever in their married life. During some of her darkest hours in Thibodaux, he’d been here, putting their little piece of the Lower Ninth Ward back together.
Still so many houses still ruined. Most of them gutted out, but even now some were untouched. He couldn’t understand the people who weren’t striving to come back. It was so different from the time after Betsy, when there was no question. Everybody came back and started right in. Forty years after our liberation movement, Ronald thought, and we’re further back than ever.
Sometimes he found himself thinking uncharitably about the people who hadn’t returned, and had to make an almost physical effort to haul himself back from that. Everybody’s got circumstances, he’d tell himself. Not everybody can set their own destination. But it seemed to Ronald that a fundamental mistake had been made after Katrina. The government dangled a lot of resources, and it made everybody freeze up. Nobody wanted to start in until they saw what they were going to get. We knew after Betsy we weren’t going to get no help from anybody, Ronald often thought, and maybe that was better.
Jesus isn’t always there when you need Him, but He’s always just in time. Every time Ronald would feel himself edging toward despair, the Lord would reach out His hand and pull him back. Just a few days ago, little red Michael, from Derrick Jenkins’s gang, had come up to him and said that after getting his welding certificate at Nunez Community College, he’d gotten a good job by Bollinger Shipyards. Ronald had saved one. His heart swelled up so full he could barely congratulate the boy.
He turned onto Tupelo Street. A couple of houses had piles of debris out front; that was progress. At the corner of Galvez, four young men in white T-shirts lounged on the steps of a wrecked two-story house, back to their sorry business. But they were community minded still. The whole time the soldier ants had worked on the Tupelo Street house, these boys had seen to it nobody touched the tools and lumber.
Ronald pulled the car to a stop in front of the house, a fresh gleaming white with a brown and white awning above the porch. Minnie put her forehead against the window glass. The front stoop had been done up in sharp maroon, with a big fleur-de-lis in white. He led her up the path, unlocked the front door, and held it open.
The two front rooms and kitchen were one big room now, the ceiling raised to the roofline, smart-looking brown-wood beams traversing the open space where the old ceiling used to be. In the kitchen: a stainless steel stove and a new black fridge under blond-wood cabinets. Everything smelled sharp and clean.
Minnie really has no idea what I done here, Ronald thought. I protected her from it, so she don’t know how far we come.
MINNIE’S HEELS echoed loudly on the new wood floor as she circled the big front room and walked from bedroom to bedroom. “Mmmmm,” she sang happily as she opened the door to the bathroom and found a gleaming white sink sitting fashionably atop a cherrywood vanity like a punch bowl. �
��Mmmmm!”
I have done for Minnie what I needed to do, Ronald thought. She was my first responsibility. Now I can turn my attention to my people.
Minnie came walking back toward him with her eyes overflowing. She’d always been quicker to comment on what she didn’t like than what she did, more fluent in the expression of disappointment than gratitude. Now, though, she put her arms around his neck like they were eighteen again. “Oh, Ronald,” she said. “You are a great husband.”
BILLY GRACE
2525 ST. CHARLES AVENUE
February 19, 2007
Billy sat in his study in one of the massive oxblood-leather chairs. He could hear the crowd out front on the neutral ground, hoisting children onto ladder seats, eating po’boys, buying beer and cold drinks from coolers dragged on dollies. In the old days, Billy would have been out there with them, or at least sitting on the porch with George, Anne, and Big Anne, enjoying the spectacle. Instead, he was poring over papers from a North Carolina company he was thinking of buying. It made sewing machines for stitching up charcoal bags. Sewing machines didn’t particularly move Billy’s heart, but the idea of a new business did. For the first time in his life—at least the first time since his foray to New York had been cut short—he was dreaming of leaving New Orleans. He had gone through the motions of preparing for this year’s Rex parade and ball—it would go smoothly tomorrow—but he was spending more and more time at the house in Destin, or finding reasons, like this sewing-machine company, to take trips.
None of his friends had lost relatives in the flood. None had been wiped out; everybody was insured. They had big bank accounts, second homes. Yet half a dozen of Billy’s schoolmates had dropped dead since Katrina. Fifty-five, fifty-six years old and they’d keeled over. Worse yet, four had taken their own lives.