The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  American Airlines also stepped up. CEO Gerard Arpey opened a command center to locate and evacuate all of his company’s employees in the Gulf South. With that mission accomplished, Arpey ordered relief into New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong International Airport. American Airlines planes were the first to land, just twenty-four hours after Katrina made landfall. The company flew in boxes of food, hygiene supplies, pallets of water, and other emergency supplies.49 Then company planes took victims away. Over 1,000 evacuees were flown out of the New Orleans bowl after Katrina before FEMA even figured out how to move a Porta Potti down I-10.

  Forbes kept a tally of the big donors post-Katrina. Oprah Winfrey, a Mississippi native, gave $1 million and FedExed a half million bottles of water. Microsoft’s Bill Gates distributed $1.5 million among the Red Cross, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, America’s Second Harvest, and the NAACP. The principal owner of the Houston Texans, Robert McNair, gave $1 million to help Gulf South evacuees feel more comfortable in their new Lone Star State environment. It seemed that every musician who ever sang the lyric “New Orleans” held a benefit concert. Oil magnate T. Boone Pickens gave money and chartered planes in support of animal rescues.

  Ben and Sarah Jaffe of Preservation Hall, after escaping New Orleans on August 30, eventually made their way to New York. Glad they had gotten banjoist Narvin Kimball, the old-time Preservation Hall veteran, evacuated to Baton Rouge, they decided to create the New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund. The idea behind the nonprofit organization was straightforward: purchase instruments for flooded-out New Orleans players so they could book gigs around the world. They ended up assisting more than 775 musicians to purchase keyboards, guitars, drums, brass instruments—and, in some cases, to pay rent. Among those they assisted were Bennie Pete, leader of the Hot 8 Brass Band; Benny Jones, leader of the Tremé Brass Band; and Doc Watson, leader of the Olympia Brass Band. “We did what we could,” Sarah Jaffe recalled. “We just felt so bad for all those musicians. We tried to help Katrina victims, those who played, the best we could. Every day though, while in New York, we cried. We kept hearing bad story after bad story.”50 The worst news of all came on March 17, 2006, when they learned that Kimball had died in South Carolina, heartbroken he couldn’t be in New Orleans.

  VI

  At midday on Monday, Brown began to realize that Katrina was not going according to the rules of the Florida hurricanes of 2004. It was on a scale never seen before: eventually, an astonishing 1.5 million people would register for FEMA assistance. Luminous clouds, a bright sun, blue skies with hundreds of skimmers flying about, and an invigorating breeze were supposed to follow hurricanes—not waves of scummy water full of heavy debris and six-year-olds carrying belongings in plastic bags over their heads, hoping not to drown. Along the Gulf Coast, the humidity, which had plagued the region more than usual that summer, continued to hang heavy.

  At noon on Monday, Brown made an incredible announcement: he directed all emergency responders from outside the region to stay home, until specifically requested by local authorities. “The response to Hurricane Katrina must be well coordinated between federal, state, and local officials to most effectively protect life and property,” he stated. “It is critical that fire and emergency departments across the country remain in their jurisdictions until such time as the affected states request assistance.”51 Unfortunately, many outfits that could have helped in the scramble to save lives listened to this overly cautious FEMA order. Others, who rushed to help, were stopped at gunpoint before reaching the disaster areas and told to go back home. National Guardsmen deployed to guard the approaches to New Orleans were in fact given specific orders to “keep emergency responders out.” On Meet the Press, Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard said, “We had a thousand gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, ‘Come and get the fuel right away.’ When we got there with our trucks, they got the word. ‘FEMA says don’t give you the fuel.’” Broussard also charged FEMA with severing his parish’s “emergency communication” lines.52

  VII

  While officials in Washington, D.C., and the Gulf South were grappling with myriad problems—or avoiding them altogether—dung-colored water from Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf had been draining into New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. By nighttime, the foul water was at least four feet deep. The Ninth Ward, scene of so much misery as the Katrina disaster unfolded, was divided into three sections, the names of which would become entwined with the emerging stories. If the overall area could be pictured as an E, then the backbone would be the Industrial Canal. The top prong would be the lake. The middle would be the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet. The bottom prong would be the river itself. In that schematic, the area commonly called the Lower Ninth Ward was in the lower section formed by the prongs, south of the MRGO and north of the river. The upper section formed by the prongs of the E was New Orleans East. It was north of the MRGO and south of the lake. The area known as the Upper Ninth was to the west of the Industrial Canal (the backbone of the E). As of Monday morning, all were filling with water.

  Both the Ninth Ward and the Lower Ninth Ward had once been the proud domains of Irish, Italians, and Germans. By the time Katrina hit, they were predominantly African American. Many of the clapboard houses, dating from the early or middle twentieth century, were in the “shotgun” style popular in the South, with two adjoining homes laid out front (living room) to back (kitchen and bedrooms). The Ninth Ward developed much of its defiant personality during the late era of segregation. But even with white oppression, the African-American residents built a close-knit community. It was a musical neighborhood where on any given night you could hear Delta blues, Dixieland, bebop, swing, or hiphop emanating from the simple, colorfully painted houses. People there respected musicians. The spirit of jazz cast a distinctly democratic, freewheeling aura over the Ninth Ward. Each section embraced a variety of working-class people—black and white—storekeepers, seamstresses, carpenters, Sheetrock finishers, dockworkers, and day laborers, as well as a broad range of professionals and artists.

  Keith Calhoun had lived in the Ninth Ward all his life. He had been born at Charity Hospital and had grown up on Deleray Street. Back in 1955, the Ninth Ward was a middle-class black neighborhood. Segregation was the social order of the day, as white New Orleanians didn’t want to live on the same street as blacks. So they had long since given them the Ninth Ward, in part a low-lying, marshy scrapland. Money was to be had in the Ninth Ward, however, by working the docks, joining the Longshoreman’s Union, and earning good wages. At the Alabo Street Wharf, Calhoun’s father made a living wage working for shipping companies like Cooper T. Smith and Lykes Brothers. In the eyes of young boys like Keith during the 1950s, dockworkers were heroic figures; one of those who loomed large was Dave Dennis, the gutsy president of the local Longshoreman’s Union. “Guys like my dad lifted 200-pound sacks of coffee and cotton all day long,” Calhoun recalled. “We all hung out at the wharfs, fishing for speckled trout, redfish, and catfish, sometimes crabbing, while our daddies brought home the bacon. A real community had been created.”53

  Calhoun and his wife, Chandra McCormick, became the premier social realist photographers of the Ninth Ward. Their neighborhood was a visual smorgasbord. Calhoun’s vision of it was like John Dos Passos’s “camera eye” in his famous U.S.A. trilogy. If you had a swooping camera panning across daily life in the Ninth Ward circa 1963, you would have seen a culturally vibrant neighborhood obsessed with wild music, hot food, external merriment, and a Caribbean flair for the exotic. Creole dishes were served at Miss Ross’s Eatery, but the best meals were bought for seventy-five cents a plate directly out of neighbors’ houses. There were no Popeye’s or Church’s fast food to contend with, just homemade fried chicken, shrimp étouffée, and okra gumbo. Live music abounded. The local favorite was Boogie Bill Webb, an irrepressible R&B and country blues prodigy. One family, the Barnets, had gospel tents set up in their backyard where, like some scene
out of Eminem’s Eight Mile, contestants would try to outdo one another in their singing. Because many of the African-American residents were middle class, and therefore better educated and better organized, it was not surprising that the Freedom Movement took root in the neighborhood as far back as 1896, when Homer Plessy refused to sit in a blacks-only train compartment headed to Covington, Louisiana. The Supreme Court verdict went against Plessy, and “separate but equal” remained the law of the land until 1954’s famous Brown v. Board of Education reversal. But residents of the Ninth Ward were proud that they had a robust history of standing up against oppression.

  This defiance became even more evident in 1960, when six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first black pupil to integrate a school in the city. Overnight she became a symbol not only of the civil rights movement, but also of the Ninth Ward. John Steinbeck featured her in Travels with Charley, his classic road memoir, and Harvard psychologist Robert Coles analyzed her plight in The Story of Ruby Bridges. On her first day at William Frantz Elementary School, so many bigots were throwing tomatoes and eggs at her that she thought it was a Zulu parade. Four armed U.S. marshals had to accompany Ruby to class; she was in grave danger of being killed. Four years later Norman Rockwell painted The Problem We All Live With, a heart-wrenching portrait of six-year-old Ruby trying to enter school, accompanied by bodyguards.

  The twenty-first-century Ninth Ward had more than its share of poverty; nevertheless, the residents didn’t feel poor. Everybody knew everybody, and engaged in the neighborhood rituals: sharing big pots of red beans and rice or playing dominoes on old-time porches or walking to the “snowball” stand at dusk. They privately visited with ninety-eight-year-old Reverend Pappa Brown at New St. Matthew Baptist Church for wise counsel; attended Mother Washington Church (Holy Family) on Lamanche Street, where tambourines were rattled for salvation; and drank quarts of Budweiser at Junior’s Bar, sitting in cozy shag-carpeted booths. The jukebox at this watering hole, just across the street from where the 17th Street levee broke, often played Little Willie John and Professor Longhair. As former resident Patricia J. Williams, a professor at Columbia University, pointed out, the Ninth Ward was an area “that has perhaps more African-American property owners than anyplace in Louisiana.” Williams noted that in the midst of the flood following Katrina, she “heard a black woman on the radio describe how jarring it was to see the media describe her neighborhood as one driven by poverty and desperation. She was about to get her MBA, her brother already had his MBA, their extended family owned nine homes there, had insurance and owned cars in which they had fled for their lives.”54

  But there was that other side to the Ninth Ward. Nearly 40 percent of its residents did live below the poverty line, twice the statewide rate. Per capita income was only $10,300, less than half the U.S. average, according to the 2000 census. Many of the houses were raised two feet on cinder blocks, a precaution against flooding. The area of the Lower Ninth was 97 percent black. Crime in that part of the ward was off the charts. If you wanted to save anything, especially a car, in the Lower Ninth Ward, you practically needed to drape it in coiled barbed wire. But then there were the indelible Afro-Caribbean charms: many of the elegant street names were the same as those in the French Quarter, like Dauphine, Burgundy, and Royal.

  After Katrina, Deborah Sontag wrote a heartbreaking series of New York Times articles on the Lower Ninth, all related to Delery Street. She reported on how the Calhoun-McCormick team lost much of their art in the flood. “They did not expect their living history of the Lower Ninth Ward to become actual history in their lifetime,” Sontag wrote. “And they did not prepare for disaster. They did not digitize their negatives or create a secure storage system for their photographs…. When the hurricane destroyed their house at the corner of Chartres and Flood streets, they lost two thirds of their life’s work.”

  Although much of the Lower Ninth Ward was seven feet below sea level, over a dozen blocks were actually above sea level. According to USA Today, most of the homes in that area were worth somewhere between $50,000 and $75,000 in the pre-Katrina real estate market.55 These “high ground” homes suffered terrible wind damage, but they were standing and they were dry. The media reports that claimed that the Lower Ninth Ward was gone were incorrect. Weeks after the storm, the Bush administration had it wrong as well: Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson rather offhandedly suggested not rebuilding the Lower Ninth on the grounds that it had washed away with the flood. But on that Monday, as Coast Guard helicopters flew above the neighborhood, Jackson seemed on point. It certainly looked gone forever, and FEMA was treating the Ninth Ward that way.

  The problem the U.S. Coast Guard had with FEMA was that FEMA didn’t know the local geography or place names or wards of New Orleans. They couldn’t pronounce Tchoupitoulas (choppa-too-liss) Street, let alone spell it. They couldn’t cross over the Crescent City Connection bridge because they thought it was a shuttle service to Houston. Without maps, it was hard to understand the 300 miles of levees around the coastal parishes. “The biggest challenge I saw for FEMA was having an appreciation for the nuances of New Orleans and the surrounding area,” Jimmy Duckworth of the Coast Guard recalled. “The fact that the river doesn’t necessarily run north-south was a big deal. The Port of Plaquemine, St. Bernard–New Orleans, Port of South Louisiana, they were often confused. I found myself and some of my fellow operators from New Orleans acting as translators for a lot of FEMA people. We helped them understand what it’s going to take to do something, what are the logistics involved in getting from this point to that point.”

  VIII

  The most famous Lower Ninth Ward resident at the time of Katrina was undoubtedly the seventy-seven-year-old Fats Domino. He had grown wealthy with hit songs such as “Blueberry Hill” and “Walking to New Orleans,” but after gigs around the world he returned to his house on Marais Street, located just ten blocks from where he had grown up. Back then, in the Depression, Antoine Domino used to play piano for money, with a jovial style all his own. His very first record had been about cocaine and heroin in the Ninth Ward, an antidrug anthem titled “The Fat Man.” The single brought Domino his initial success and his nickname. With a husky voice, Creole accent, pounding piano, and heavy backbeat, Fats Domino became a pioneer rock ’n’ roll sensation.

  As his legend grew, the self-reliant Domino stayed wedded to the Lower Ninth Ward. With his colorful neckties, bright pink Cadillac, and brood of children, Fats was the unofficial mayor of the Lower Ninth Ward. He lived in a modest yellow house with “FD” in front; inside the decor was all pink, lavender, and yellow. His favorite object, in fact, wasn’t his piano but a “Cadillac couch,” designed after the rear of a 1950s car. He appeared at the yearly New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and occasionally at Mississippi Gulf Coast casinos, but stayed largely out of the limelight. At the time of Katrina, his international popularity was such that he could have sold out arenas from Dublin to Moscow; to Europeans he was rock ’n’ roll royalty.

  But Fats Domino didn’t like traveling. He was a homebody. As Katrina approached Domino refused to evacuate because his wife, Rosemary, was sick, and he had five of his children, plus their families, with him at his compound. “He said to me, in that wonderful Southern accent of his, that no, he was staying on,” said Charles Amann, a friend who called Domino on Sunday, August 28. “He had gone through the last one and he could go through this one.”56

  When the booming gusts ripped through the Lower Ninth Ward early on Monday, Domino got his family up to the attic in the nick of time. A headlong rush of dark water pushed into his house, and within minutes it rose to eight feet, slapping the bottoms of the first floor’s chandeliers. Fats watched helplessly as his rock ’n’ roll trophies wallowed in the muddy waters of the storm. A virtual shrine to New Orleans’s music was destroyed on Marais Street; his famous “pink-walled room” was splattered with mud, his famous white piano churned into debris. Domino had sold more than 110 million records during his long ca
reer but the gold records that had lined his wall were plucked down and sucked into the muck. The yellow mansion, once the delight of the Lower Ninth, was gutted, although the basic structure survived. Someone, assuming that the family had been killed, spray-painted “R.I.P. Fats” on the side.

  Meanwhile, just about a quarter mile away, Domino’s Jourdan Avenue birthplace, located across from the Industrial Canal, was, as biographer Rick Coleman explained in Blue Monday, “torn in half, split in splinters…in jumbles.”57

  But reports of Domino’s death were premature. Harbor Police, hearing that the legend was stuck, sent rescuers. Officer Earl Brown and Sergeant Steven Dorsey made sure all of Domino’s extended family was hauled to safety. A Times-Picayune photographer was on the scene Monday afternoon to snap a shot of Domino, dressed in blue jeans and a blue striped silk shirt, being dropped off at the St. Claude Avenue Bridge. From there Domino and his family were taken to the Superdome, where, by then, close to 19,000 people were already stranded. Few recognized Fats Domino, lustrous in sweat, standing with his wife. Things were too crazy for the perks of celebrity to mean anything. All that Domino could do was wait for a bus to Baton Rouge. His high blood pressure was causing him grave problems. Around the country, news reports listed Domino among the missing. He was lost in plain sight along with everyone else at the Superdome.

  IX

  Thousands of Lower Ninth residents found themselves stuck in the floodwaters on Monday afternoon as a horrific stench filled everyone’s nostrils. Those who had cell phones and managed to call for help only learned that none was coming. The Coast Guard was preoccupied with helicopter airlifts, although dozens of their boats were on the way to the region. The police and fire departments were as helpless as the residents. The only hope lay with the small fleet of Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries boats, along with a growing flotilla of flat-bottomed boats brought to the scene by local sportsmen. There were fifty to seventy-five boats working the flooded regions of the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish on Monday evening—and about fifty thousand people in need of rescue there.