by Dan Baum
Recovery was stalled. Federal funds either were being mysteriously held back or were dribbling away. Constructive debate over how to rebuild was mired hopelessly in racial hostility. The suffering was immense, and the people who had the education, experience, and resources to relieve it were the first to be shunted aside.
Maybe Nagin was right. Maybe New Orleans would be a chocolate city at the end of the day, and uptown’s day was done. The Civil War had ended the golden, anachronistic, chivalrous days of the South; maybe Katrina had put an end to the delightfully frivolous life of uptown New Orleans. After a lifetime of feeling like a servant of New Orleans’s unique history—caring for the Rex mansion, organizing Mardi Gras—he was starting to wonder if there was a place in New Orleans anymore for Billy Grace.
After a while, Billy set the papers aside and walked down the grand curved staircase to the living room. The casket stood on a black-draped bier. A bottle of Ojen sat on a silver tray on the closed half of the lid. George lay cold and still, dressed in the morning coat in which he’d have toasted Rex. A Rex medallion lay on his chest, a purple, green, and gold ribbon reaching around his thin neck.
Proteus Monday, Lundi Gras—George’s favorite day on the calendar, when all the Mardi Gras logistics were settled, an evening to relax and watch Proteus roll past. Even when George had had to be wheeled out with a tartan blanket draped over the stumps of his legs—his pink drink of Ojen and Peychaud’s bitters clutched in his butchered fist—he’d never failed to watch the king of Proteus roll down St. Charles Avenue on a giant clamshell. Tonight, though, George scowled at the filigreed ceiling. The funeral home could have done a better job at that: never, in life, as far as Billy could recall, had George looked so forbidding.
A shout went up outside. Through the wavy glass of the front windows, Billy could see the people surging to the curb and waving their arms. Sure enough, there was the king of Proteus on his clamshell, waving magisterially. The men on the float tossed beads. The crowd jostled and hollered.
Nobody out there knew the sadness of the Rex mansion. George was the best of old New Orleans. Would the city ever again have a place for the elegance, manners, and patrician good humor of a George Montgomery?
The doorbell clanged, and Billy turned. Alston, sturdy in crisp slacks and a short-sleeved sweater, hurried in from the parlor to answer. She opened the door on two teenage black girls, tall and skinny, in hooded sweatshirts and straightened hair. Billy and Alston gaped a moment. It hadn’t been all that long that black people used the front door of this house at all. And strangers certainly never appeared there.
“Yes?”
The girls gazed into the chandeliered front hall, wide-eyed. They’re New Orleanians, too, Billy thought. They know the power of this house, and that’s a good thing. Pro bono publico. The whole point of Rex is to share the regal magic of uptown with the rest of the city. But what on earth did they want here? And why now, of all times?
The taller girl finally summoned her courage. “Can we please,” she said, “see the deceased king?”
FRANK MINYARD
CHARITY HOSPITAL CEMETERY
2007
Frank stood at the top of Canal Street peering through a locked iron gate on which tall iron letters, copiously rusted, spelled “CHARITY HOSPITAL CEMETERY.” On the other side lay a flat field of neatly mowed grass about the size of a city block, with a few well-tended magnolia trees. A wall surrounded the lot, above which peeked the tops of gaudy mausoleums in the city’s vast cemeteries.
This incongruously vacant and finely manicured lot was a perfect site in which to bury, finally, the unclaimed dead from the Poydras Street warehouse. Ninety-five caskets remained in that gloomy cavern, ninety-five New Orleanians whose families had never claimed them or who’d been deemed unidentifiable by DMORT. They’d never be identified now; the state had cut off Frank’s money for further DNA testing. Louisiana was moving on from Katrina.
That this lot was available at all was a gift of bureaucratic amnesia. Before World War II, Charity Hospital had buried medical detritus here: amputated limbs, removed organs, miscarried fetuses. Nothing had been interred here since then, though; the hospital seemed to have forgotten all about it. Now Charity Hospital no longer existed; its assets, including this lot, had been transferred to Louisiana State University Medical Center.
Frank wanted to do more than simply bury the dead. He wanted their resting place also to serve as a memorial to all those who’d died in Katrina. A local architecture firm designed for Frank a beautiful park, with sidewalks that spiraled in the shape of a hurricane toward a gorgeous statue of two female angels, one black and one white, holding up a fleur-de-lis and standing among breaking waves. The bodies would rest in mausoleums around the spiral’s edge. Frank envisioned the site being a tourist attraction forever—the Katrina Memorial—right there at the end of the Canal Street streetcar line.
Frank figured he needed $1.3 million to buy the land from LSU and get the memorial built. Mayor Nagin had already given him a million; raising the other $300,000 would be difficult but not impossible.
The problem was perpetual care—locking and unlocking the gates, mowing the lawn, emptying the trash baskets, sweeping the sidewalks. LSU claimed it cost $1,000 a month, and nothing could go forward until Frank raised enough money to throw off $12,000 a year—an additional $200,000 or so. By force of personality, he convinced the archdiocese to ask the person who locked and unlocked its cemetery’s gates to do the same at the Katrina Memorial every day. But that still left the mowing, watering, and cleaning up.
A thousand dollars a month. FEMA was currently paying almost three times that much to rent the warehouse where the bodies were stored. That wouldn’t last forever. FEMA was enjoined by its own rules from paying the thousand a month for the memorial’s care, and Frank was getting nowhere with the state of Louisiana.
Standing with his forehead against the bars of the gate, Frank knew what he’d do: when the FEMA money for the warehouse ran out, he’d take the ninety-five coffins to the Superdome and line them up on the sidewalk outside. Then he’d hire a band and make an event of it. Maybe he’d even play his own trumpet, if he could summon the lightness of heart to put it to his lips. Let the bodies sit on the sidewalk until Baton Rouge came to its senses. He was old now, and tired, but he still knew how to play the game.
ANTHONY WELLS
In Tennessee they like to say, “Storm’s over.” You got to shake a leg up there. They got no compassion. All along the city of Knoxville was saying they’d buy me a bus ticket whenever I wanted to go home. I don’t know why I waited so long. I guess I thought Roger and me would go together. But Roger’s got him a girlfriend now, and a new baby. He’s staying up there. Soon as he and his girlfriend get custody of the baby, they’re going to buy a house.
He’s lost his focus.
Coming down, the bus got to Gulfport, Mississippi, and all but six people got off. Then it stops in Slidell, and three more get off. Then we come down Highway 10 through the east and I’m seeing it for the first time. All those houses empty, buildings closed, big old parking lots with no cars in them. I’d seen pictures, but this was my first time seeing it, you feel me? Two years since the storm and the city ain’t fix yet. It’s like they don’t want us back here at all.
They genociding us on the slick side.
Bus got in about eleven o’clock in the day. Bus stop was empty, but I seen a cabdriver I knew, Robert Ruffin, and he gave me a ride for half price up to the Goose. I had two hundred dollars in my pocket.
The quiet, man, that’s what blew my mind. All that time in Tennessee I’d been missing the noise, but it was like a tomb. Every house was all fucked-up; only way you knew someone was living there was there was a white FEMA trailer in the yard. I looked around in our old place above Jerry’s store; the door was off the hinges and the place all hollowed out. That good stuff we stored behind the wall was gone. I didn’t stay up there long. It felt like I was about to fall through th
e floor.
First thing I walk up Dale looking for Peanut, and in front of his house was a big old piece of plywood that somebody’d painted on it: “P-Nut We Love You and Forgive You—the Family.” Turned out Peanut went off. I mean off. He shot his auntee and Petie and Bunk—killed them all—because he thought someone else might get the house. The family can forgive him all they want; we ain’t seeing him for a long time.
I miss Roger.
Spoonie’s back, and Poochie. My cousin Donald and his brother Jerry, they’re back. They got a little place to eat now in the gas station on Chef, but it ain’t the Arab no more. These are Vietnamese-speaking people. The Goose ain’t like it was, but it’s better than fucking Tennessee. I’m working. I go by Labor Ready, or Delta, or Task Force. Used to be you got hired right with the company, but they cut all that out in the late ’80s, early ’90s. Now, if the job is fifteen dollars an hour, you get six, and the temp company gets the rest.
Always been fucked-up here, man, but it’s home. Till you been someplace else, you don’t know.
BILLY GRACE
GRETNA
June 4, 2007
Billy sat in a Gretna office complex waiting to see a client, looking forward to lunch. His BlackBerry buzzed and he fished it out of a jacket pocket.
“Billy!” Anne shouted. “The house is on fire!”
“What?”
“Lightning! I was on St. Charles and heard it hit!”
“Where’s your mom?” He could hear sirens in the background.
“She’s fine! Come home!”
He ran for the elevator. That old house had nineteen lightning rods. The roof was copper. What could burn?
He swept onto the highway and up the Crescent City Connection bridge. Even before he reached the top, he could see what looked like a bolt of black cloth unfurling above the skyscrapers of downtown. He floored the Mercedes, crested the bridge, and looked left. A dense geyser of greasy smoke boiled up from the lower Garden District. It looked like a refinery burning, pumping blooms of malignant black poppies above the tree line. Chunks of soot were falling on the bridge.
By the time he reached the twenty-five hundred block, half the New Orleans Fire Department had assembled. Yellow canvas hoses snaked over the garden wall, flattening azaleas and camellias. Big Anne sat in her car with a hand on her chest; Anne stood beside her, watching the flames with one hand over her mouth and one on top of her head. The fire was eating the house in great crunching mouthfuls. Claws of orange flame reached from the upstairs windows. Puffs of heat tapped Billy’s cheeks. The carpets, the frescoes, the chandeliers, the paintings, the piano, the tiger-wood floors …
But the water was a sight to behold. It tumbled out of the French doors to the porch, rolled down the steps into the garden, ran in ripply sheets across windowpanes, squirted comically from holes the firemen had hacked in the walls, made rainbows around the second-story balconies, and dripped from them like icing from a cake. The water that hadn’t reached St. Charles Avenue after Katrina was finding the Rex mansion now, hollowing it out from the inside.
Standing in his blue blazer and boat shoes, head cocked back and mouth open like a hungry baby bird, Billy felt himself overtaken by a strange calm. Even as the fire propelled his house into the hazy Louisiana sky, it was planting him ever deeper in New Orleans’s soft soil. It would take years to put 2525 back together. Rebuilding the house that had been in Anne’s family for exactly a century would be Billy’s avocation for the foreseeable future. He could not leave a charred ruin behind. He could not walk away from the city.
Katrina had spared him. It had severed him from the city’s collective fate and left him marooned on a globe-trotting island of plenty. Finally, his walk in the wilderness was over. Well, New Orleans, he thought as his house roared in agony, I’m back.
BELINDA RAWLINS
5972 DREUX AVENUE
2007
Belinda leaned on her metal cane, watching Curtis, Niecy, and Mookey cooing over Niecy’s toddler, Jamaya. She was struck, as so often, by how different her daughters were. Niecy was small and slight, wary and watchful; Mookey was tall and full-bodied, open and trusting. She’d never pictured Niecy as the single mother, Mookey as the scholar. But now Niecy was home minding a baby, and Mookey was a freshman at Northwestern State in Natchitoches. Please, God, let her get through.
Wil came in from the bedroom, wearing a charcoal gray suit and his big gold medallion—WR—and lit up with a smile. Ever since they’d rebuilt the place, he’d taken to booming, apropos of nothing, “Man, I am loving this house!” Wil liked to say the house was better than before, but that was Wil; he could never keep a bad thing in his mind for long. All he had a mind for was the happy times. The neighborhood around their house was dark and deserted, the city was still a wreck, Niecy’s education was derailed. But Wil saw only repairs beginning in the neighborhood, kids coming home to the band, Niecy’s education only delayed. And in this house, a dream fulfilled twice over. “You talk about that white-picket-fence life,” he’d say, putting his arms around her. “Well, here it is, sweetheart! We got it!”
She had to admit there was some truth to it. Somehow, though, life on Dreux Avenue didn’t feel like The Waltons.
This evening they were dressing for an event at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center on Oretha Castle Haley in the Thirteenth Ward. The Thirteenth Ward was as poor and black as the Ninth, but rougher, more urban, less family oriented. She’d rarely, as a girl, ventured upriver of Canal Street, and she retained a downtowner’s aversion to the Thirteenth Ward. But this was a big night for Wil, and she didn’t object.
The Ashé Center was little more than a big room with stark white new Sheetrock walls, and many rows of folding plastic chairs. A crowd of boys, like big puppies, mobbed Wil at the door: the To Be Continued Brass Band. “Belinda,” Wil said. “You remember these boys, don’t you? You met them that night in the French Quarters when we thought they was out to rob us.”
“We was out to rob you,” Brandon said, “until we seen who you was.” They all laughed and touched fists.
“Mama Rawlins,” said Jason, “Mr. Rawlins here, he pulled us out. We wouldn’t be nowhere without Mr. Rawlins.”
With their funky English, baggy pants, and sideways caps, these were the kinds of boys she’d spent her whole life avoiding: sloppy, sensual, dangerous. Even though they’d finished high school, not one of them could speak correctly, much less enjoy reading a book. Yet these were the kids Wil would have traded away his marriage for. They were his whole world.
They took seats and a film started. It followed the boys after the storm, scattered as far apart as Atlanta, Dallas, and Sacramento. In their lumpy, rough English, they talked about how much they missed each other, how they longed to be “breathing the same air.” Yeah, Belinda thought. Life is tough. Everybody got flushed out the city by the storm. Everybody was scattered. Everybody had it hard. But as the boys’ gigantic, immature faces loomed over her, Belinda heard something in their voices she’d never noticed—poetry. “I’m in the right now trying to get to the not yet,” Jason said. It struck her ear as a fresh way of saying what everybody in New Orleans had been feeling since the storm. “All the tears I done seen could have made a flood itself,” Brandon said, and that, from a boy who looked all of about twelve years old. She turned in her seat to look back at the boys. They were such brutes; how did they access such feeling? On the screen, the boys looked lost, wandering strange landscapes, pining for New Orleans, for horns and drums lost in the flood. “That was my heart, my instrument,” said Joseph Maize of his trombone. Belinda scanned the room, then leaned over to Wil and whispered, “Where are their parents?”
“Parents?” he whispered, eyebrows arching with comic incredulity. “Most of them never had parents worth a damn. If they had, they wouldn’t have been cutting up in the French Quarters.” On the screen, four of them had gathered in Dallas, plotting how to get home. “Let’s call Mr. Rawlins!” someone said, and there was Wil’s voi
ce, coming through the cell phone of the trumpeter Glenn Preston, talking the same street jive as the boys—“I feel y’all, y’know?” Belinda glanced over at Wil in his gray suit. He sat straight up, eagerly, chin high—like Da used to sit at one of Wil’s concerts. On-screen, Sean Roberts told the camera, “He used to let us use school horns. If Mr. Rawlins wasn’t at Carver, there wouldn’t be no band at all.”
The audience applauded, and the band members were invited up to speak. A call went out for the boys’ parents to stand, and then a dull murmur went through the room when only one woman, small and meek, popped up briefly. If these boys had parents, only one had taken the trouble to come. The boys were asked to talk about their band, but all they wanted to talk about was Wil—how he’d syncopated marching-band music into second-line tunes for them, how he’d found instruments when they had none and fixed them when they were broken, how he’d run interference with the French Quarter police so they could stand at the corner of Bourbon and Canal streets and play.
“I never had no father. Mr. Rawlins, he been a father to all of us. There were times we didn’t have anything to eat, you feel me? And Mr. Rawlins went in his own pocket.”
“Mr. Rawlins, man, he made this thing happen, y’all. He was like, ‘You boys gots to believe.’”
“I got one brother dead and another at Angola, and if it wasn’t for Mr. Rawlins, I might be right there, too.”
The more they talked, the straighter Wil sat—putting the eye thing on them to keep their manners good and their English proper. It suddenly dawned on Belinda that these were only nine of his kids. Another hundred came to him every afternoon in the O. Perry Walker band room. Another God knew how many—from Carver and Sarah T. Reed—were out there somewhere, walking paths that Wil had set them on. Belinda took his hand, and he looked over at her, surprised and then pleased. “Band” didn’t begin to describe what Wil did, Belinda realized. He’d gathered in a whole city full of neglected, abandoned, forgotten kids and made them his sons and daughters. He was a dad where there were no dads, and he’d be responsible for these kids forever.