The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story

by Julia Reed

  As pleasant as that particular “evacuation” turned out to be, I remember thinking: There is no way this city can keep beating these odds. Just one season earlier, the Florida Panhandle and the Alabama coast had been pounded with no less than four catastrophic storms—Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne—and now Dennis was dealing another blow. In the years since I’d first arrived in New Orleans, we had dodged the bulk of Andrew’s heavy artillery, and Opal and Georges had missed us altogether. Since then, the warmer waters in the Gulf had made hurricanes not just more plentiful but a lot more powerful. My father, a successful but prudent gambler, had warned me long ago that the house always wins. In this case the house was nature and there was no way our luck could hold.

  As moments of clarity go, it was a brief one. It had taken me more than twenty years to decide to commit to a city—the daily imagining of its destruction (not to mention the destruction of a house into which we’d just sunk pretty much everything we’d ever had) was hardly a recipe for sanity. For years the nightmare scenario of “the big one,” a Category 4 or 5 storm barreling straight up the Mississippi from the Gulf, had been played out in series after series in the newspaper and on television, with lurid graphics showing the “bowl” that is New Orleans completely awash in floodwater and petrochemicals—“a massive tomb,” they’d always say, containing dead by the tens of thousands. Most of us watched with a half-wary eye and went on about our business, having already made the necessary bargain that living in New Orleans requires: the decision that the city’s ample charms outweighed the peril. And anyway, what could we do about it?

  Certainly no one at any level of government was doing much. Over the years, millions had been squandered on disaster models and, most recently, on a simulated Category 5 hurricane named Pam, but at the start of every season, the only truly serious discussion involved the evacuation traffic flow plan that, invariably, had been botched the year before. Politicians could get impassioned about the traffic because voters got extremely impassioned about being stuck in it. It’s a whole lot harder to summon outrage about something that hasn’t happened yet, so basic stuff, like coming up with the means to evacuate those unable to leave on their own (almost 80,000 households in pre-Katrina New Orleans were without a car) was never addressed. Nor did anyone bother to check the only structures that lay between us and certain inundation—the levees and floodwalls—even though residents whose homes backed up to the 17th Street Canal (and which, therefore, are no longer in existence) had been reporting standing water in their backyards for more than a year. On a national level, three months prior to Katrina, the United States House and Senate, including every single one of Louisiana’s representatives, had signed off on an obscene highway bill whose 6,000-plus pork projects cost $24 billion—more than enough to pay for both the wetlands restoration and Category 5 levees needed to protect New Orleans and its port, the country’s leading gateway for coffee, rubber, and imported steel.

  The port, and much of the rest of the commerce vital to the area—and to the nation—is, of course, directly dependent on the same water that puts us at risk. (Louisiana’s wetlands produce 25 percent of the nation’s oil and gas, and a billion pounds of seafood annually, hence the seemingly contradictory, and slightly scary, moniker of the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival that takes place in Morgan City every year.) The Mississippi pushes 300,000 cubic feet of water past the city every second, Lake Pontchartrain is so wide it is crossed by the longest overwater bridge in the world, and the Gulf of Mexico lies just 100 miles below us. We’re surrounded, which is the reason Bienville’s engineer was so adamant that he move New Orleans, as well as the reason that Bienville refused to budge.

  But the Gulf, the river, and the lake are hardly our only source of hydration. Roy Blount says he thinks the reason New Orleanians traditionally have taken “the threat of inundation so lightly” is not merely denial, it is that the city is “so moist as a rule.” He has a point—the humidity is so dense it is often hard to differentiate between the air and the water; it rains so much and the drainage is so bad that there are mini-flash floods all the time (during one of them, the car I was driving floated into a canal and I was forced to save myself by swimming out the window).

  Not only are we more or less constantly saturated, we have always had a more intimate relationship with death than the residents of any other place in the country, a fact which engenders a certain amount of fatalism. In 1853, six years after our house was built, 8,000 people died in one of the yellow fever epidemics that were a constant throughout the century; as late as 1914 there was an outbreak of bubonic plague. Graves lie above ground in gleaming white “cities of the dead” because the water table is so high that bodies buried below ground would simply pop back up.

  The coroner, Frank Minyard, who is also a jazz trumpeter, attributes our abysmal life expectancy rates to our “killer lifestyle,” and it’s true that we are home to the fattest people in the country, we’ve had highest cancer rates since the 1930s, and we drink—a lot. Legendary restaurateur Ella Brennan says we drink so much because we start so early: “Drinking a Ramos Fizz or a Sazerac with breakfast is considered normal behavior.” Not only is liquor available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in barrooms (pre-Katrina there were 1,500), restaurants, grocery stores, and pharmacies, it is also conveniently obtained from drive-through daiquiri shop windows, thanks to an exemption in the state open container law that makes it okay to drink and drive as long as the alcoholic beverage is frozen. I take Minyard’s point—there’s no question that sucking down a 32-ounce White Russian daiquiri while barreling down I-10 can be construed as a killer lifestyle choice—but we are also cursed with killers of a more straightforward kind, the ones who carry guns. And, unlike other cities, where violent crime and gang activity goes on out of sight of much of the populace, New Orleans is fluid in more ways than one—“nice” neighborhoods abut “bad” ones throughout the city, so that even the occupants of the grandest of houses are not immune to the sounds of gunshots in the night, or indeed, to the sight of a dead body dumped on the curb.

  All this has contributed to something of a survivor’s mentality. When the city fathers printed up a batch of bumper stickers bearing the message “New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home,” another batch appeared within days: “New Orleans: Proud to Call It Hell.” There is a sort of perverse pride the natives take in living in a place that “the big one” may well hit one day, as well as an ingrained rebel defiance. (When the occupying Union troops of General Benjamin “Beast” Butler arrived in New Orleans in 1862, the ladies of the city responded by spitting on them and dousing passing soldiers with buckets of sewage from their balconies.) Seven years before Katrina, when the likelihood of Georges led the mayor to open up the Superdome as a shelter for the first time, the paper carried photographs of patrons in Magazine Street bars wearing hardhats, and the first commodity to run out at my neighborhood grocery store was not water or even batteries, but vermouth. McGee, who had holed up in her French Quarter apartment with a stranded Australian sailor and a case of bourbon, kept calling me in New York to tell me I was missing all the fun. By the time Katrina reared her monstrous head, John was fifty-six years old and had lived in New Orleans for most of his life, but he had never once evacuated for a storm. During Betsy, a powerful Category 3 hurricane that killed 58 New Orleanians in 1965, his uncle held him by his feet out a third-story window so he could unclog the gutters that were pouring water into their house.

  So it was that on the Saturday before Katrina I was busy making a grocery list, not for hurricane supplies or evacuation needs, but for our first dinner party on First Street. Our friends Byron and Cameron Seward, who live in Yazoo City, Mississippi, and have a house in the Faubourg Marigny, just below the French Quarter, were in town with their daughter Egan, a former summer assistant of mine who works as a decorator in New York. Byron farms cotton and soybeans and corn for a living, but he is also a serious wine nut, and all summer long he had been assembling
a collection of rosés in hopes that we might actually be able to sample them—in our house—before the summer was over. I love cooking for Byron because he gets so into it and I’d planned several courses, including a lobster spaghetti John and I had eaten in Sicily that I was determined to replicate.

  The first sign that something wasn’t quite right was the fact that I immediately found a parking space in the always nightmarishly congested Whole Foods parking lot. Then, on my way home, I noticed people waiting in long lines at gas stations—the ones that were still open, that is—while the roads themselves were mostly clear. When I walked back in the house, the phone was ringing. My mother, a steadfast watcher of television (there is one in almost every room of my parents’ house, which would prove to come in handy later) and a world-class worrier, was calling to tell me that we needed to start driving to Greenville immediately. “I am not kidding, Sister,” she said, using the only name she ever calls me (and which is pronounced “Suhstuh”) unless she is really, really angry. “This hurricane is coming straight at you.” Elizabeth, with whom I’d endured a tortuous evacuation during the Ivan false alarm (maximum speed of five miles an hour for the first four hours, coupled with a vomiting Honey), was next. There was no way, she said, she was she was going to get stuck in that traffic again (no one had any faith whatsoever that the new traffic plan would be any better than the last one). “We’re leaving now,” she announced, adding that McGee would not be far behind them.

  Despite all signs to the contrary—chief among them the fact that John himself announced that we were evacuating Sunday no matter what—I was somehow convinced there was still time for the thing to change course before we actually had to leave. Not only did I not want to consider the long-term implications, I did not, in the short term, want to abandon the live lobsters I had just stuck in the refrigerator or cope with tying down the thousands of potential projectiles that littered the construction site that was our yard. I was much relieved when, astonishingly, Eddie called to say he would take care of everything outside, and Byron and Cameron called to say that if the dinner was still on, they were coming. Egan’s plane did not leave until the next morning and all the earlier flights out were suddenly booked.

  So when Rose called I did not have to pretend to be calm. Rosemary Russ, who had worked for me for years keeping house, and who, along with her whole family, had come to Greenville to cook and serve all the food at our wedding (as they do at almost all my parties), is a phenomenally skittish woman. During the thunderstorms that are daily occurrences during New Orleans summers, she steadfastly refuses to answer the phone, convinced she’ll be electrocuted through the receiver if lightning strikes the power lines. I told her that if things stayed like they were, we were leaving the next day. “You better call me if you go a minute earlier,” she said, and I promised that I would.

  The night turned out to be lovely—prehurricane weather is always clear and breezy, and the impending doom we still did not take entirely seriously had us all feeling a tiny bit braver and more alive. Byron had gotten us an extravagant housewarming gift, a case of Billecart-Salmon, at about the same time we’d moved into Elizabeth’s, and he was as relieved to finally unload it as we were to finally be in the house. We hung out in the kitchen, toasted the new growth on the live oak tree Benton’s guys had recently planted, and munched Spanish almonds and tuna tapenade on toasted slices of baguette. By the time we sat down to the spaghetti, Byron, whose life’s blood is the weather, and John, who had talked to a geologist friend monitoring offshore rigs in the Gulf, both predicted the storm would jog to the east at the last minute; we would be prudent and leave, but we would not worry. Instead, we drank more wine and lingered merrily at the table, and then John and I hiked up to the third floor, where we slept like babies in a new down-covered bed of our very own.

  The next morning was not so jolly. Eddie failed to materialize and sent Abel instead, who stayed just long enough to nail some plywood over the big sunroom windows before jumping into his truck and roaring away. I closed and lashed all the shutters, dragged ladders in from the balconies, and cleared the flat roof of the many jagged pieces of marble that surely would have punctured the roofs of half our neighbors, while John got started in the yard. By the time we were done, we had tied down at least a dozen more ladders and filled the shed with random pieces of lumber, wheelbarrows and shovels, piles of brick and pieces of stone. There was not a whole lot we could do about the Bobcat or the cement mixer. We just hoped they wouldn’t end up in somebody else’s living room.

  It was an endeavor that would have gone a lot faster had we been able to avail ourselves of the considerable strength and energy of Antoine Jones. Antoine had worked for me for the past nine years, but for the last four days he had been AWOL, a state of affairs that was not entirely novel. He is an addict and homeless by choice, which meant that he’d be perfectly fine one day, and the next, with no warning—and no way to call him—he’d simply fall off the face of the earth. Sometimes I’d hear from him, hyped up, talking too fast and too loud into a pay phone receiver from God knows where, full of excuses and promises to see me “tomorrow, Julia, I swear.” His mother had died on four different occasions during his time with me, and she may well have been dead to start off with, I will never know. I realize that most sensible people would have long ago dropkicked Antoine to the fates and gone in search of a more reliable helper, but he remains the hardest worker I have ever known—as well as one of the sweetest and funniest people. The truth is that when he fell off the map I missed him. I’d huff and puff and do my own swearing that “this is it, I mean it this time” but after about three or four days, I’d look at Rose and she’d get out the phone book. If we were feeling optimistic, we’d check first with the Quarter Laundrette, a “washateria” on Bourbon, where he hung out occasionally and kept some of his things; the last call was always to Orleans Parish Central Lockup, where Rose was on a first-name basis with the receptionist. More often that not he was in jail, having been picked up for public drunkenness or possession of crack, only to emerge thirty days later like clockwork, rested, contrite, and ready to get back to work.

  Antoine had come into my life when I hired him to move me from my Royal Street apartment to Bourbon, and I knew we would get along famously when he didn’t look at me like I was a lunatic after I showed him the big pots of Confederate jasmine on my balcony and asked him to help me unwind every strand of every plant from the iron railings they had taken over. I couldn’t bear the thought of hacking them off at their bases for the sake of expedience, and Antoine, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, was at least as tender with them as I was. But it was a brief honeymoon—by the end of my first week at Betty’s, he had called three times between midnight and two in the morning asking for ten dollars. The third time he told me he needed the money because he had a “berl” (otherwise known as a boil) on his “butt” that required immediate lancing. In a rare fit of good judgment, I told him never to call me again.

  I didn’t see him for two years, by which time the house was overdue for a major cleaning and I figured no harm would come from hiring him for a few days at most. I put out some feelers, he turned up, and we worked side by side for a week, after which my long dependency began. Antoine was a year younger than I, and while not as tall, he was wiry and strong, with a sharp, if uneducated mind. (At one point it dawned on me that he could barely read, but he was so careful about hiding it, I never wanted to put him on the spot—the only grocery store I ever sent him to with a list was the neighborhood Matassa’s, whose delivery boys kept half the alcoholics and crazy people in the Quarter alive, and where I knew they would artfully fill the order for him.) Over time, his skill set expanded greatly. He had always been able to lift anything (I once saw him carry a sofa down two flights of stairs on his back); and he was an ace cleaner, but he also learned to repair antique furniture and polish silver, and he became an expert gardener. He was my second set of eyes whenever I hung pictures or rearranged rooms, my enforcer wh
en it was time to straighten up my office and dump files, and he invariably knew what I wanted before I did, handing me this tool or that handbag. Once I even pressed him into duty as a bartender.

  He’d turned up at my gate on a Saturday morning after a bender, having been gone for two days, looking like a mess and begging for cash. I was about to throw him out when the phone rang—unexpected friends from New York and London were at the airport and on their way over. As was frequently the case, I went from wanting to kill him to viewing him as a godsend in a matter of minutes. He cleaned himself up first, tidied the whole house and the courtyard, and was done in time for me to teach him how to make Bloody Marys. The guests were rowdy and thirsty and Antoine was doing great, but I had forgotten that he took pretty much everything I said literally. When I told him to “keep the drinks coming,” he thought I meant exactly that; at one point I looked around and saw that everyone had four or five full glasses at their elbows, each one perfectly garnished with a leafy celery stick and a wedge of lime.

  On the days Rose came, they laughed and smoked together and flirted like mad, keeping a standing weekly lunch date at Hula Mae’s, where Rose did the laundry and Antoine brought over shrimp po-boys or fried chicken. Between the two of them, they knew every detail of my personal life, which, in the beginning of their tenure, included A., the man they called the “president,” until he was “impeached” by John, whom they had been rooting for. Rose has a very proper common-law husband named Thomas, and Antoine teased her about him relentlessly, but he looked up to her and carried his version of a torch. “That Rose is something,” he’d say, shaking his head and grinning, but after he walked her to the bus stop at the end of the day, they went to entirely different worlds; hers included a stable relationship, an apartment, a close family, and an education. Still, what Antoine lacked in knowledge, he made up for in curiosity. At least once a week, he’d fix me with the quizzical look I came to know well: “Say, uh, Julia, what is that?” Invariably it would be a crazy white-person thing that amused him to no end, like the leftover take-out sushi in the fridge or the mad Mardi Gras headdress I’d made by glue-gunning dozens of butterflies and birds’ nests onto a homemade tiara of branches. But before long, he’d be practicing with my chopsticks and bringing me the abandoned nests he found in the garden.