The Great Deluge
Page 53
Ben Jaffe, the son of the founder of Preservation Hall and a fantastic stand-up bass player, was also suddenly a member of the expatriate music community. He had driven out of New Orleans for Lafayette on Tuesday. Then he headed to New York City. He and his wife, Sarah, dug into their own pockets to help relocate great local musicians. Other New Orleans music legends who lived in the Lower Ninth—like Oliver “Who Shot the La-La” Morgan and Al “Carnival Time” Johnson—lost everything they owned. Ben was worried about the Lower Ninth Ward, and not just the stranded people—as the brothel song goes, “There is a house in New Orleans….” The status of a particular Lower Ninth Ward building haunted him. On Sunday afternoons as a kid, he used to go over to Sister Gertrude Morgan’s house on North Dorgenois Street, right near where the Industrial Canal breached. The combination house and church was called the Everlasting Gospel Mission. “She used to preach to my parents while I picked four-leaf clovers in her front yard,” Jaffe recalled. “We were mesmerized by them. My brother and I would pull them up by the root and transplant them to our yard. They never grew.” Sister Gertrude had died in 1980 and was buried near the airport; her home was sold. Nonetheless, he prayed the flood hadn’t destroyed her home. “She profoundly affected me when I was growing up,” Jaffe said. “She was always exuding love, care, courage, warmth, and strength. I was a Jewish kid going to synagogue, but she didn’t care. She was the most liberal person. Her Jesus was about love and I never forgot it.”43
Sister Gertrude, a self-taught painter, was a French Quarter soap-box evangelist who interpreted the book of Revelations as if it were emblazoned in her soul by a bolt of Mississippi lightning. An Alabaman by birth, she had arrived in New Orleans in 1939, christening her Lower Ninth “back-a-town” house the Everlasting Gospel Mission, and told people that she was a bride of Christ. She wrote poems about the apocalypse, strummed folk songs like Odetta, and illustrated passages from the New Testament on toilet paper rolls, lamp shades, and detergent boxes. She was, in artiste parlance, a practitioner of “outsider art.” There was no holy water jive in Sister Gertrude’s repertoire, no snake oil pretense of having the Jordan River bottled up in a vial. She delivered her sermons with a cardboard megaphone, her satisfied mind spreading the gospel with a wildcat rebuking Hallelujah! The Lower Ninth was her New Jerusalem and she was its wild-eyed African-American spiritualist, bouncing a tambourine with one hand while painting a self-portrait titled Jesus Is My Airplane He Hold the World in His Hand He Guide Me in the other. She was one of the Elect—“Oh, Sister Gertrude”—an apocalyptic seer whose Throne of God art would compensate for all her youthful indiscretions. As she inscribed one of her paintings: “G is for a girl a female child O don’t Be so frisky and wild.”44 She constantly warned people to beware of “conjurers,” aka Lucifer or the Devil. Her heart was wide open, however, to “angel children” in trouble; her home-church-studio always had room for an orphan or seeker or wanderer. She was safeguarding them from New Orleans which, in her mind, was “the headquarters for sin.”45
Jaffe’s parents early on realized the untutored Sister Gertrude was a primitive art genius—one who eventually had a major retrospective titled “Tools of Her Ministry” at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Although her paintings went for $100 during her lifetime, at the time of Katrina, Sotheby’s was selling them for upwards of $5,000 apiece. But Ben didn’t know about the rising value of her art; he just loved her radiant colors and folk wisdom. He remembered her Everlasting Gospel Mission as an exotic theme park dedicated to Jesus; the walls were illustrated with brightly colored red camels, blue angels, and green churches. Art filled up every nook and cranny of her ranch-style house.
What Jaffe recalled most, however, about Sister Gertrude were the four-leaf clovers that blanketed her lawn. Right there in the middle of the Lower Ninth Ward, a short walk from the Industrial Canal, were fields of these shamrocks which surrounded Sister Gertrude’s home studio. While Ben’s parents were listening to her sing “Precious Memories” or watching her paint a self-portrait on her guitar case, Ben would pick four-leaf clovers, treating them gingerly so as not to have bad luck.
Driving to New York, leaving the bowl behind, Jaffe kept thinking about Sister Gertrude’s lawn. He imagined it underwater. Even though somebody else now owned the church, he still considered North Dorgenois Street sacred ground. And then there was the keepsake, one of her self-portraits that Jaffe inherited when she died, of Sister Gertrude in an all-white nurse’s uniform, carrying a bag, fleeing the flooded Lower Ninth. It was titled Lord, I Don’t Want to Be Buried in the Storm. Jaffe made sure her post-Betsy artistic vision of the Big One stayed high and dry throughout Katrina, but he was haunted by whether her house survived the deluge. “I knew that when I got back to New Orleans,” Jaffe said, “I’d go check up on Sister Gertrude’s place, to see how it fared.”46
When the Jaffes returned to New Orleans weeks later, Ben solemnly drove through the Lower Ninth. He saw the giant rusted ING 4727 barge, owned by the Ingram Barge Company of Nashville, Tennessee, which had gotten loose from its anchor in the MRGO during Katrina and had burst through the Industrial Canal levee, perhaps causing the breach. With a length of over 200 feet, a beam of 35 feet, and a height of 12 feet, ING 4727 could carry 1,877 tons of cargo. He grew numb. For the first time ever, Jaffe felt God’s presence lurking in his car. He turned off St. Claude Avenue, pulled in front of the Everlasting Gospel Mission, turned off the ignition, and froze. The flood had lifted Sister Gertrude’s house off its foundations and moved it ten or fifteen yards away. But it was standing—the Lower Ninth Ward was gone, but the house was there. For decades Sister Gertrude had talked about Judgment Day—now it had arrived. “I never have really felt that alone in New Orleans, sitting on her stoop for hours on that Sunday afternoon,” Jaffe recalled. “Nobody was around. It used to be a busy block—everybody out and about in church clothes. Everything now was still. It was the first time that I cried…. It was cathartic, though.”47
Why would God do such damage? Jaffe wondered. All around him were desolate, uprooted, trashed, cracked, and broken homes. What a messed-up, vengeful world, he thought. And then he looked down. All around him were four-leaf clovers. They had survived the deluge. Everything else in the Lower Ninth was mud-gray, and lifeless, smashed-concrete desolation. But like sunflowers blooming in junk heaps, the field of clovers had survived. He bent down on one knee and passed his hand lightly over the clovers. Carefully, he plucked one, stood up, and walked to his car. He had never bought into Sister Gertrude Morgan’s notion of New Orleans as “the headquarters of sin”—if it was, then he was a terminal case. The four-leaf clovers, however, were a sign that Sister Gertrude was all right in heaven. He made a pact with himself to try and save her house. Or was it just a pipe dream? The City of New Orleans had allowed the federal government to destroy Storyville to build I-10; back in 1964 they even razed the birthplace of Louis Armstrong. The wrecking ball, however, wasn’t going to claim Sister Gertrude’s house-church. Not if Jaffe could help it. Preservation Hall was going to get into the preservation business.
V
Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was another New Orleans expatriate glued to his television that week. “It’s as if your parents have died,” he told David Fricke of Rolling Stone. Marsalis was safe in his New York home, but he wasn’t comfortable. “All your memories, your ancestors, are underwater. My great-uncle’s house is probably gone. I go back to that house in my mind all the time. It was a shotgun house. I think of the fan they had in the front room, the shed with all the newspapers he put up for wallpaper—old yellow paper from the 1920s; the little plot of land he used to cut with a hand mower. His front porch—we put that down ourselves. He was a stonecutter; I was five or six.”48
Marsalis had been born on Louisiana Avenue in Flint-Goodridge Hospital, right across from the Magnolia projects and just down the road from Reverend Willie Walker’s Noah’s Ark Missionary Baptist Church. He loved everything about the birthplace of jazz. He wasn�
��t alone in having New Orleans memories etched into his imagination. Ex–New Orleans residents scattered all over the world were in the same sentimental situation, watching the city’s demise on television. No matter whether they lived in New York City, Denver, Milwaukee, or Seattle, they possessed a New Orleans state of mind. All the Big Easy expatriates would surely agree with Marsalis when he wrote, post-Katrina, “Our city is still alive. It’s generations of us who are still here, and will get our city back together. There are things that are tragic losses that will never be recovered, but I feel like the most valuable thing is the people, the spirit of the people, the will of the people, the mind, and the hearts…that’s not lost. That’s not even close to lost.”49
Mark Broyard of Los Angeles counted himself among their ranks. He had been born in New Orleans—one of the first “colored” children ever born at Ochsner Clinic—and lived in town until he was five. His father and grandfather had their own bricklaying company, working mainly in Harahan and Metairie. With white flight to the suburbs in the 1960s, the firm thrived, but the racism became too much to bear. “My brother was scheduled to start first grade,” Broyard recalled. “They didn’t want him to be the first colored kid back there and have things thrown at him and have him abused at all. He was already kind of a sickly kid, asthmatic and all that. So with my dad’s two sisters taking the lead, we all moved to Los Angeles. But they never really left New Orleans, it was always their home. I think now, even forty years later, every time, I’m with my mother, at some point, she’ll say, ‘We should have never left New Orleans.’”50
Every summer during Broyard’s childhood, the family would hop in the car, get on I-10 in Los Angeles, head east for the Franklin Avenue exit in New Orleans, near Bayou Sauvage. The London Avenue Canal helped the various residential neighborhoods—Gentilly Ridge, Filmore, Gentilly Terrace, Gentilly Woods, among others—drain water into Lake Pontchartrain. “There were oyster and clam-shells in the street,” Broyard recalled, “so when you turned onto Franklin, there’d be a dip and the wheels of the car would start grinding in the dirt in the oyster shells. That sound was like music to me. I knew that I was home, just hearing the sound of the car on those white streets full of broken-up oyster shells.” The Broyards spent the summer months in Gentilly, not far from Lake Pontchartrain, and it was a magical place. Using his grandparents’ house as a base, Mark befriended all his neighbors. He remembered eating piles of crawfish and corn on the cob off old Times-Picayunes with his Uncle William. Both of them were sprayed down with Off!, to keep the bugs away. Not too far from St. Gabriel the Archangel Church, where his family often attended mass, was Grandma’s bungalow, where once a week they had a trout or buffalo fish supper. He could still smell the butter, corn dumplings, turnip greens, and cayenne pepper decades later.
Now, as Broyard learned that Gentilly had been destroyed by Katrina, and all of his relatives’ houses filled with floodwater from the London Avenue Canal breach and MRGO topping, the precious memories came pouring back like a brass trumpet titillating with pain. There was Teddy’s Grill, where the dressed roast beef po’-boy sandwiches were overstuffed. They were his absolute favorites. He ordered them with delicious little lemon pies for dessert, washed down with a Barq’s root beer.
Broyard was carefully monitoring the Seventh Ward from his Los Angeles home. The little boy who used to run the streets of Gentilly was forty-eight, director of the choir at St. Jerome’s Church and cantor for Catholic churches all over Los Angeles. He was part of an expatriate New Orleans community there, always singing at weddings what poet Langston Hughes called “lucky hymns,” for other former New Orleans residents. What most concerned him on Wednesday, however, was the fate of his godmother, who was in Lafon Nursing Home in New Orleans East. He had called Sister Augustine McDaniel as Katrina approached and he didn’t like what he heard. “What evacuation plan is in place?” Broyard asked. “Have you evacuated everyone?” The response was, “No, no, everyone is asleep.” Broyard said, “You are aware that a Category 5 storm is on the way?” Again, the response was inadequate. From California, all Broyard could do was shake his head. “It just blew my mind,” he recalled, “but sometimes, that’s just the New Orleans mentality about things. ‘Oh, there’s a Category 5 on the way, fix me a sausage sandwich and let’s go pick up a beer…. Everything’s goin’ to be all right.’ Katrina, particularly the breached levees, just caught everybody by surprise.”51
Twenty-two residents of Lafon Nursing Home died, but Broyard’s godmother wasn’t among them. She had weathered the storm on the second floor and on Thursday was among the forty residents boarding Irvin Boudreaux’s bus. “My godmother thinks she did something wrong and they put her in jail,” Broyard said. “Isn’t that terrible? I talked to that manager [Sister Augustine], and just chewed her out. I just couldn’t believe that they’d be so inept and so incompetent to leave those little old people stranded like that and that some of them would die and that my godmother, at ninety-six years old, thinks at this stage of her life that she did something wrong, so that she’s now in jail. That’s just horrible.” Sister Augustine didn’t need anyone to tell her that it was horrible. She knew firsthand.
Two days after helicopters ferried the rest of the residents away from Lafon, Rosalie Daste died from the strain. Broyard and his friend Roger Guenveur Smith, an actor who’d appeared in Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus, had already created and performed Inside the Creole Mafia, a play to honor New Orleans culture. They now reconfigured the dark-humored show to reflect post-Katrina angst, to remember the Rosalie Dastes of the Big Easy.52
When Broyard was asked how he felt about Gentilly now that the Tambourine Choir was shut down, the delicate jazz silenced, and his dreamy-eyed summer playground transformed overnight into a dead neighborhood, he paused and fought back tears. He gave the matter serious consideration. He put his finger on his chin to meditate. He was fishing for a verdict worthy of Matthew or John. “Well,” he said forlornly, “Teddy’s is gone. So that means no more roast beef po’-boys for me.”53
VI
Expatriates were one thing, but nearly one million displaced residents of the ravaged areas were also watching the coverage of the storm, or reading about it. “I just heard that in the area where I live—people are on top of their roofs,” said Aaron Parker, who was at a Red Cross shelter in Beaumont, Texas. Parker managed a Walgreens in New Orleans.54 He had no way of knowing what had become of his house or his store. Nearby at the shelter, a woman clutched a cell phone, hour after hour, hoping it would ring with a call from her son, who had remained behind in New Orleans. She and Parker were among the many who had left their homes believing that they were escaping the winds but expecting to be home in a day or so. With little in the way of clothing or other belongings, they were stuck in a kind of limbo: safe in body, but literally clueless in regard to their own lives, past and future. They were the Children of the Exodus.
Towns across Louisiana were burgeoning with evacuees. The city of Lafayette, for instance, population 110,000, took in 40,000 of them. Many, if not most, stayed with friends or relatives. It was not unusual for a family of four to take in eleven people. Had the hurricane been only a very bad storm, that might have been akin to a holiday gathering for the hosts and guests alike. But Katrina was a vicious and unending disintegration of society’s fabric. According to academics such as Carl A. Brasseaux, a professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the family networks that had remained strong in Louisiana were more important than any government aid in helping to ease the impact of the disaster. “If family structures in Louisiana,” he said, “had eroded to the point they have in many parts of the country, many refugees here would face a very long and bleak road ahead.”55 Aside from the fact that every foldout bed across inland Louisiana and Mississippi was in use, the storm ensured that hotels and motels in the same regions were filled to overflowing. You couldn’t even rent a room at the Fountain Motel, the Shades Motel, Riverbend Motel, and scores of roa
dside accommodations, whose hallmarks were vacancies. Rest stops along highways were also filled, with people unable to find or afford a hotel and living out of their Oldsmobiles and Grand Cherokees. All fees were waived at state parks by Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, so evacuees could camp at Sam Houston Jones Park north of Lake Charles, Chicot State Park in Ville Platte, and elsewhere.
One Louisiana facility running on overdrive was the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge. If the Superdome had become “hell’s island,” and the Convention Center “the pit,” then the Maravich Center was “purgatory central.” The 14,164-seat multipurpose arena was the holding tank for those bused out of New Orleans. It also became a makeshift hospital, a triage hub for medics, volunteers, and a constant stream of patients. The center did have air-conditioning, electricity, and drinkable tap water. Although at times it became too crowded, and there was a definite disorder in the air, the medical teams, including those from the Red Cross and FEMA, did a fine job. Ambulances and helicopters kept dashing in and out, dropping off Katrina victims needing insulin injections, stitches, or IV bags. “It was miserable, miserable, so miserable out there,” Pearl Johnson recalled when she at long last got dropped off in purgatory. Her husband, just grateful to be at the Maravich Center, added, “But we’re here! At least we made it here!”56
Fats Domino was among the hundreds of Lower Ninth Ward residents who eventually wound up at the Maravich Center. Domino and his wife had been rescued from their home on Monday and taken to the Superdome. Sweating profusely, his blood pressure soaring, and confused, the seventy-seven-year-old Domino thought he was there to sing. Sherry Watters, a Department of Social Services caregiver at the Dome, worried that Fats might die. She tried to get him to eat a vegetarian MRE and drink water, but he was uncooperative. He preferred the greasier fare served at the Popeye’s Fried Chicken near his home—in fact, the company, in an act of generosity, had given the music legend an all-you-can-eat card, good at any of its franchises. “He walked around the Superdome, shaking hands,” Watters recalled. “He was really nice, but he just refused to eat because he thought he was about to perform.”57