by Dan Baum
She felt a rush of shame. She had been competing with them, resenting them, pulling him away. Her life was not going to be like on The Waltons. She had the white picket fence, Ninth Ward style—a husband, which was more than a lot of women could say; a house, which was more than most people in New Orleans could say since Katrina. It was time to turn on the laugh track.
“Wilbert,” she said. He leaned close and she whispered, “I get it.”
JOANN GUIDOS
KAJUN’S PUB, ST. CLAUDE AVENUE
2007
Four Mexicans, spattered with drywall mud, were shooting pool on the cigarette-scarred table. There were a lot more of them around since the storm, JoAnn noticed. And they’d brought with them a new thing for New Orleans: taco trucks. There was usually a big silver one parked on St. Claude Avenue.
All three poker machines were occupied; that was good. An old woman was working the ATM machine, another good sign. Watching people pour their FEMA checks into the machines gave JoAnn’s conscience a pang, but if they didn’t play in Kajun’s, they’d play somewhere else.
Interlocking financial perils threatened at any moment to collapse her St. Claude Avenue empire. The bank was raising the mortgage rate from seven and a half to eleven and a half because she hadn’t made a payment since the storm. The insurance company was finding endless excuses to pay her nothing for Katrina damage. The water company wanted nine thousand dollars, because it turned out she’d had a hidden leak for months. Melvin’s Bar, up the street, was demanding she pay back three thousand dollars for the liquor she’d taken during the storm, though it would have gotten looted anyway. She couldn’t get blueprints for the restaurant approved until she built a ramp for the disabled, and she couldn’t build the ramp, because the property was historic. She sighed. It was time to start investigating cut-rate sex-change surgeons in the Philippines. Otherwise, she’d never get the thing done.
Duck, the bartender, waved her over. “There’s a kid over there that wants to talk to you.” He indicated a pale blond boy with sideburns, sipping a Coke by himself at a round table. He wore jeans and a big Army jacket. He probably wanted a gig for his band.
JoAnn walked over. “You looking for me?”
The boy brightened and shifted in his chair. “Could I talk to you a minute?”
“A minute,” JoAnn said, taking a seat next to him.
He leaned in close. “I want to be a girl.”
JoAnn’s heart gave a thump. He was so young. The down on his lip brought her straight back to Cor Jesu High School. “Are you sure?” she said. “If you’re just excited over women’s clothes, it’s fetishes.”
“No, it’s more than that.”
“Could be you’re just gay.”
“I like men,” he said. “But I’m not gay. I’m a woman.” He opened his Army jacket to reveal a tight-fitting flowered tank top.
JoAnn suddenly felt old, but in a good way. She’d been there. She was wise. She was in a position to help this kid in a way that nobody had helped her.
“You have a lot of soul-searching to do,” she said.
“I want to do the whole thing.”
“Have you told your parents?”
“What do they have to do with it?”
“Everything,” JoAnn said. “Everything will be easier if they’re in on it.”
He shook his head. The poor kid didn’t have a clue. “Thanks,” he said finally, and walked out the door.
JoAnn sat for a while after he left. Every penny, she now understood, had to go toward fighting off the creditors, opening the restaurant, fixing the apartments, and keeping Kajun’s open. She owed it to kids like this. The weirdos, the outcasts, the forgotten—they needed her refuge here on St. Claude Avenue. Life in New Orleans was hard for everybody now, but it would always be hardest on those who, for whatever reason, didn’t fit in. She was responsible, in an odd way, for all of them. Whatever it took to keep Kajun’s open, she’d do it.
And if the surgery had to wait, so be it.
FRANK MINYARD
FAIR OAKS FARM
2007
Frank stood at the big picture window with a cup of tea in his hand, watching the Black Angus bull nuzzle the grass. In the old days, on a Saturday, he’d have been getting ready to go out and tear up the French Quarter. Tonight he’d be in bed by nine.
The television on the kitchen counter was tuned to a religious show; Nancy liked them. The organ launched into “That Old Rugged Cross,” a singer joined, and Frank found himself humming along. Such a sturdy old hymn, a bit jazzy, too. Pete Fountain had practically made a dance tune of it. Frank braced for the inevitable wave of melancholy that overtook him since the storm whenever he thought of the old days. But the wave didn’t knock him over; he took a big breath and let it out slowly, feeling the darkness recede.
What a life, he thought. When I was poor, all I wanted was to be rich. When I was rich, all I wanted was to be useful. Have I been useful? It’s not for me to decide. And the truth is, it never was. When the time comes, I’ll be judged. Until then, all I can do is live.
He walked to the bedroom, got down on one knee, and pulled from under the bed his battered black trumpet case—the same that Mom had bought for him at Werlein’s. The sixteen-dollar trumpet lay patiently in its velvet bed. He lifted it from the case and twiddled the valves. They responded smoothly. He inhaled, set his arms, kissed the mouthpiece, and blew: a clear, mellow note. He inhaled again and blew the first phrase of “That Old Rugged Cross.” He wasn’t winded. His lips felt good. He finished one verse and started another. Nancy came into the room behind him and sang along:
On a hill far away, stood an old rugged cross
The emblem of suff’ring and shame
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.
He turned, playing on. The diamond engagement ring on Nancy’s hand sparkled like a teardrop in sunshine. Frank played louder, arching his back and throwing himself into it, blasting the chorus at the ceiling, jazzing it up. Nancy laughed and raised her voice to meet the horn:
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
Till my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it some day for a crown!
RONALD LEWIS
ST. CLAUDE AVENUE
December 2007
Ronald sat in the front seat of a long blue convertible on the sloping approach to the St. Claude Bridge, a king at the gates to his royal city. The Big Nine’s annual parade stretched ahead, filling the street, a ribbon of dance rising up the bridge. Pete Alexander, Big Bob Stark, Ricky Gettridge, and the rest bobbed and shook and strutted up St. Claude, waving in each hand huge, homemade fans of bright blue ostrich plumes. Each man had come up with a thousand dollars—money they might have spent on building materials, groceries, and insurance premiums—to deck himself out in blue-on-blue pinstripes, blue-on-blue alligator shoes, and a black homburg, in keeping with the Big Nine’s tradition of decking out like stockbrokers and bankers to tell the world that the Lower Ninth Ward was more than country bumpkins. The women of the Four-Five Ladies, the Big Nine’s auxiliary, waved their arms and shook their hips in straight-skirt blue-on-blue business attire. There went Minnie, beaming, her braids bouncing in the sunshine. At the head of it all, the sousaphone of the Free Agents Brass Band caught the sun in a fiery blaze, a battle flag at the head of a victorious army.
The crowd to either side was massive, filling the sidewalk and the neutral ground. Children bobbed on shoulders. Old folks waved and smiled. Faces, gray and tired from the endless struggle to rebuild, were lit up by the music and the spirit of the second line. Ronald twisted in his seat. At the convertible’s fender, the Hot 8 pointed their axes into the sky. Burger Batiste fired notes from his trumpet like bullets. The massive Bennie Pete was toiling so hard over his sousaphone that he left spatters of sweat on the pavement. They blew and blew, soldiers for the se
cond-line cause.
The Lower Ninth Ward had flooded to the rooflines. The Lower Ninth Ward had only a fraction of its people back. The Lower Ninth Ward was, and always would be, the poor side of town. But nobody could say the Lower Ninth Ward didn’t know how to put on a second line.
Ronald wished he could be dancing with his brothers, but his feet and knees wouldn’t let him. In truth, it wasn’t bad reclining in the presidential limo, a Bud Light in one hand, the other extended over the side of the car, receiving affectionate squeezes.
They’d had no parade the year of the storm. In 2006, they’d marched from Mickey Bee’s bar in the Lower Nine over the bridge and into the Seventh Ward in an exodus, as though to say, “We’re coming out to ask y’all for help.” This time, though, they’d started in the Seventh Ward, to bring it on down St. Claude, leading the people home.
The convertible bumped onto the steel-grid surface of the drawbridge and began its long slow climb over the canal. To the right—eddying, rippling, sparkling—flowed the same Mississippi River that Langston Hughes had known. To the left, the site of the fatal breach, now a long loaf of earth topped by a paper-thin wall of new white cement. The convertible crested the bridge. Most of the visible Lower Nine houses were vacant, some of them not even gutted two and a half years after the flood. Barbershops, clothing stores, and auto-parts outlets along St. Claude stood dark and silt smeared. But Mickey Bee’s was open, as well as a new gas station and convenience store across the street. The neighborhood had a long row to hoe, but it was returning to life.
“Stop the car here,” Ronald shouted, and, climbing out, he walked down the bridge and into the Lower Ninth Ward on his own aching feet.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, most of all, to Ronald Lewis, Joyce Montana, Wilbert Rawlins Jr., Tim Bruneau, Frank Minyard, JoAnn Guidos, Belinda Rawlins, Anthony Wells, and Billy Grace. They not only sacrificed many hours to this project but also subjected themselves to the discomfort of candor and exposure. To this day I don’t know why they did it, other than love of New Orleans and a desire to explain it from their own points of view. I am grateful beyond measure.
The sources listed in Interviews also have my sincere gratitude for taking the time to be interviewed.
But as a reporter, I really must thank everybody I encountered in New Orleans—from the po’boy sellers and street musicians to the cops and hat merchants and the tattooed ex-con who fixed my car—for building a culture where nothing is ever “none of your business.” One really can’t ask a question in New Orleans that is too personal, even of a total stranger. For someone in my unseemly profession, it’s paradise.
Christopher Jackson, my editor at Spiegel & Grau, was flexible about deadlines and generous with encouragement. More important, though, Chris disproved the common notion that modern book editors do nought but go to lunch for a living. Chris so thoroughly worked the copy that when the manuscript came back to me I went through Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief—angry that he’d masticated my flawless prose, denial that I’d really have to make such extensive changes, confident I could bargain my way out of most of them, despair that Chris believed so much alteration was necessary, and finally acceptance that he had been right all along. This led to a sixth stage: gratitude. The book improved vastly from Chris’s hard labor. Many thanks as well to copy editor Ingrid Sterner, who went way beyond cleaning up punctuation to full-blown fact checking. I never knew how bad my math and spelling were before encountering Ingrid. Mya Spalter was like air-traffic control during a blizzard—calm and competent in the face of frenzy.
I bow and scrape before the throne of Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency, who sold the book to Chris to begin with. Nothing happens without an agent, and Sarah is a very good agent indeed. I owe a debt of gratitude as well to Jon Lee Anderson, who introduced me to her.
Thank you to John Bennet, my editor at the New Yorker, who got me the assignment to cover Hurricane Katrina and edited my stories. Blake Eskin did a great job editing my daily online column for the New Yorker from January to May 2007. Tom Piazza and Paul Gibb read early versions of the manuscript and provided much-needed guidance. Malcolm Robinson and Anne Guissinger were generous with guidance, logistics, grilled oysters, and their Baton Rouge home. Lynn Guissinger was the one who, on August 28, 2005, said, “Did you hear they’re evacuating New Orleans?” and set this project rolling.
Especially in its final, frenzied stages, the book was to our daughter, Rosa, like some kind of demon sibling with a death grip on her parents’ attentions and infinite power to swing the household’s emotional temperature from anguish to euphoria to—worst of all—incessant low-level bickering. Rosa, who turns sixteen as this goes to press, showed patience and forebearance beyond her years. She also let me read pages to her at bedtime and never failed to say, “I like it!” Bottomless thanks and apologies are her due.
Nobody, though, deserves more thanks than my wife and writing partner, Margaret. Ever since Rosa was born and we decided that I should be the legs and eyeballs of our joint operation, Margaret has worked without byline or credit as my bureau chief—“Did you get this?” “Did you ask him that?” “Go back and ask her about that again”—and as my editor. I do the reporting and the first draft, and then the real work begins. (She carved the manuscript from 190,000 to 117,000 words without losing a single scene or character—just by cleaning up sentences and trimming fat.) Nobody can find precisely the right word the way Margaret can. Nobody else can spot an ambiguity or redundancy with such a relentless eye. The work that goes out under my byline is at least half Margaret’s, but also, she brings me cups of tea. She gets me out for walks. She sings me Mexican songs on the guitar. She scolds me until my testicles retract. She does whatever it takes to keep me sane and on task. And after a long day of working with her, all I really want to do is sit on the couch beside her and massage her achilles tendons. I love the writing life mostly because I get to live it with Margaret.
NOTES AND SOURCES
This book grew out of my work covering Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath for the New Yorker. I reached New Orleans on Wednesday, August 31, 2005, two days after the levees broke, and stayed for three weeks. During those early days of the crisis, I got to know JoAnn Guidos in the beery chaos of Kajun’s Pub and Billy Grace in the silent fortress of 2525 St. Charles Avenue. Wanting to learn firsthand about the experience of being forcibly evacuated, I turned myself in at the Convention Center, where I happened upon Anthony Wells. After a few days at home, I returned to New Orleans on September 21—in time for Hurricane Rita—and ended up spending a lot of hours in the fetid parking garage of the Sixth District police station, where I got to know Tim Bruneau. Then it was back and forth constantly between home and New Orleans for six months, during which I met Frank Minyard in his silent, ruined office and Ronald Lewis amid the muddy wreckage of the Lower Ninth Ward.
In late 2006, Margaret and I conceived the idea of a book weaving together the life stories of several New Orleanians. JoAnn, Billy, Anthony, Tim, Frank, and Ronald struck us as vivid windows on different and unique subcultures of New Orleans, and all six kindly agreed to participate. Then David Freedman, manager of WWOZ, New Orleans’s amazing roots-music radio station, suggested I include a high-school band director, since high-school marching bands are the incubators of fresh generations of jazz musicians in New Orleans. Wilbert Rawlins Jr. didn’t hesitate to sign on, and once I got to know more about his wife, Belinda, her up-and-out story drew me in. Finally, Joyce Montana had lived so long in the shadow of her famous husband that she, too, was eager to tell her own story.
Margaret and I moved to New Orleans in January 2007, stopping en route in Denton, Texas, for an all-day interview—seventeen thousand words—with Tim Bruneau. Over the next four months, Ronald, JoAnn, Frank, Billy, Anthony, Joyce, Wilbert, and Belinda each sat, every week or so, for interviews that often lasted half a day. I conduct interviews with my laptop in my hands, and can type as fast as most peop
le can talk. So I ended up with what amounted to transcripts of our conversations. The file containing all my conversations with Ronald Lewis, for example, is sixty single-spaced pages long—about twenty-five thousand words.
Each of my nine main characters directed me to friends, colleagues, and even ex-wives who filled out the narratives. I asked more than a hundred people for interviews, and it is a measure of New Orleans’s openhearted and storytelling nature that fewer than half a dozen declined. I also bolstered my understanding of the times in which these people lived with many hours reading back issues of the Times-Picayune at New Orleans’s terrific public library, and enjoying the books, articles, and films listed below. Altogether, I boiled down about a million words of notes and interviews into the 120,000-word book you’re holding.
Dialogue was re-created from people’s memories, but also from documentary sources. A few examples: When Tootie tells Joyce on this page, “That King Tut suit come out of a book. It come out of someone else’s head. He didn’t draw that book, so I can’t give him no credit,” those are words Tootie spoke to the filmmaker Lisa Katzman of Tootie’s Last Suit. I know from Joyce that that’s how Tootie felt at the time, so I have him speaking those words—his own—to her. When Ronald Lewis is speaking and taking a cell phone call on this page as he’s looking at the ruins of the Lower Nine for the first time, all those words are clearly audible on Steve Inskeep’s report on National Public Radio. Billy Grace’s toast as Rex was captured in the film By Invitation Only. Frank Minyard’s assertion that Adolph Archie may have slipped on the floor comes from a Times-Picayune account of his press conference. In several other cases—Anthony’s evacuation, the post-disaster scenes in Kajun’s Pub, the Big Nine’s parade into the Lower Ninth Ward, and more—I was present when the words were spoken.