The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Smith was truly “dumbfounded.” A short while later Fox’s Geraldo Rivera, reporting from the Convention Center, confirmed what Smith had reported: stranded New Orleanians were “not allowed out” of the bowl. That day Smith became one of the leading American voices of indignation. “A continuing cycle of gloom was occurring,” he recalled. “The Gretna Bridge thing really ticked me off…. The next day the Gretna police offered to show us the mall where the police substation had been burned. The last thing we had time to do was go to the mall.”46

  The next day, on Friday, an unrelated collection of people had the same idea: to use the Crescent City Connection as a route out of New Orleans. Jill Johnston, a Canadian health care executive on vacation in the Big Easy when the hurricane struck, was among those who made the long trek to the bridge. “We all walked the five or so miles up onto the bridge,” she said, “and the police start shooting at us.”47

  Mayor Ronnie Harris and Police Chief Arthur Lawson Jr. of Gretna did not try to deny that they had told the police to use necessary force to keep people from New Orleans from using the bridge. They claimed that their own city was in a lockdown, as part of a mandatory evacuation order, and that they had no provision for handling refugees. In addition, they seemed to resent the fact that no one at City Hall in New Orleans had even tried to coordinate movement of people with them. “All of this was crashing down on all of us who were in charge,” Harris said to CBS News. “[We] had to make decisions in a crisis mode.” In any case, they deeply resented being labeled as racists for not allowing the (mostly black) refugees into their city, which has a racial mix of about 60 percent whites and 40 percent blacks. “It was the right thing to do at the time,” Harris told MSNBC’s Brock Meeks. “The charges of racism in my community are absolutely off the mark, absolutely rubbish, and that’s a nice way for me to say it, okay?”48

  Perhaps Gretna’s officials were not at all racist. One might as well take them at their word on that. And perhaps they did not have much in the way of water, food, or personnel. That was possibly true as well. Yet that was not the issue. The point was that they had far more provisions than those who came to them on the bridge. If they thought about it, then of course, they came up with somewhat logical reasons to block the way. The impulse to help would have come from the heart, long before the thinking began. That Gretna’s officials, with the support of the residents, condemned their fellow humans, of whatever color, back into the unlivable conditions of New Orleans gave yet another biblical cast to Katrina—the unwanted New Orleanians walked back off that bridge, wandering like refugees in the book of Exodus.

  The Gretna Bridge Incident was a clear example of callousness. Sadly, it wasn’t the only one. Governor Blanco inexcusably ordered National Guardsmen to other bridges and points of exit around New Orleans in order to keep people from walking out. The refugees inside the city could see lights and dry land across the river, but the guards were keeping them from attempting to leave. As the days passed and the week wore on, many believed that they were being held prisoner and that the government was trying to kill them. Neither conclusion was entirely unreasonable under the circumstances.

  VI

  Many of the people who tried escaping to Gretna had already trod the route of the hopeless in New Orleans: dropped off at the Superdome or told to go there, they found that it was closed to new entrants. The next stop was typically the Morial Convention Center. Only after seeing what it was like, inside and out, did some determined people keep plodding on, in search of safety in Gretna.

  The Convention Center offered shelter, if endless rooms running with open sewage can be termed “shelter.” Crime was a fact of life—and death—there. Dereece Bailey, a medical technician, was at the Convention Center on Thursday. “In one of the bathrooms,” she recalled, “you had a little girl. She could have been maybe thirteen. Her neck was slit. Her clothes were like ripped, so she could have been—I can say could have been raped. But she was lifeless and a lot of people were saying that she had been in the bathroom for maybe a day or two.”49 While stories of violence and crime at the Superdome were either exaggerated or fabricated altogether, the horrors at the Convention Center were definitely not exaggerated. Corpses were left in plain sight both inside the building and outside, as Tony Zumbado of NBC had documented.

  Many survivors, like Natalie Rand who lived on Melpomene Street in the Tenth Ward, have vivid memories of what transpired. The National Guard arrived at her door on Thursday and told her, guns pulled, “Get out now!” They gave her family a lift to the Convention Center—just dumped them off. No water or MREs, just the hot pavement. She had her three teenaged cousins with her. Early on Saturday morning, “around 2:00 A.M., for the first time in my life, I saw a man get shot,” Rand said. “A NOPD car pulled up to the Convention Center, shining a light on us. They had broadcast not to move. A scared man simply moved and they shot him dead and drove off. They left him on the ground; it was a drive-by shooting. Somebody put a blanket over his body.”50

  The dead man Rand was referring to was perhaps forty-five-year-old Danny Brumfield, lean and taut like a young Chuck Berry. Since Tuesday he had camped outside the Convention Center protecting his five grandchildren from lurking drug addicts. Rumors of rape were widespread and Brumfield knew that if one of the kids wandered off, he might never see him or her again. He didn’t need to learn from the media that more than 2,000 registered sex offenders in the Gulf South had disappeared, their whereabouts unknown; he could sense it. A nondrinking, decent family man, Brumfield was a success story who had risen out of the Desire projects, married his high school sweetheart, and worked in construction. “The lady next to us, she had like ten to fifteen children with her and nobody to help her,” Brumfield’s daughter Shantan recalled about their nights stuck outside the Convention Center. “He [Danny] helped her feed the children.”51

  Brumfield had built his house with his own hands, so he didn’t want to abandon it for Katrina. When the floodwaters rose inside, however, he was forced to the second floor with his wife, Deborah, and his diabetic mother-in-law, Ruby Augustine. Like so many others, this was followed by an escape through a hole in the roof. The Coast Guard came and did their job just right. They plucked Deborah and Ruby from the roof and eventually transported them to Reliant Park in Houston. But Danny refused to leave New Orleans without his daughter, Shantan. That was a hard fact. The family grapevine said she was at the Convention Center, so that’s where he went to look. He found her in front with her kids huddled around her in the stifling humidity. Next to them was a man with infected ulcers on his legs, the pus so bad all you could do was turn away in horror. Shantan later talked about the “screaming” that was occurring outside the Convention Center starting at around 1 A.M. the evening her father was shot. Others use nouns like “wails,” “groans,” and “shrieks.” Clearly the Convention Center evacuees, tired and thirsty, were cracking under the strain.

  At that moment, on cue, like in some X-rated version of Cops, NOPD officer Ronald Mitchell and his partner arrived on the scene in a squad car. Because Danny Brumfield had become a Convention Center leader, a reassuring magnet of strength for the weak, he started walking toward the police car. His primary motivation was to get a handful of people medevaced out of the area before they died. To gain the attention of the police, he started walking right in their headlights. Brumfield wasn’t going to let the police car leave the Convention Center area without seeking emergency help from the officers. Somehow he had to convey to the NOPD that people were dying while they hovered around Harrah’s Casino like disorganized pigeons. According to family members, the patrol car slammed on its brakes, actually hitting Brumfield, who quickly put his hands on the hood in a quasi-spreadeagle to demonstrate that he was not armed. The squad car backed up and then hit Brumfield a second time. Again he fell on the hood. Responding reflexively, he pulled a pair of garden shears his niece Africa had given him earlier for self-protection. This gesture triggered a lethal response. The t
wo officers, apparently angry and scared, felt threatened. Officer Mitchell shot Danny Brumfield dead. One minute, an evacuee leader, the next, another corpse in front of the Convention Center oozing blood. The NOPD dismissed family complaints as being emotional. Brumfield had lunged at them with garden shears; they had a right to protect themselves. Point in fact, Brumfield had obstructed official police business. That was the public police line. What kind of society would it be if pedestrians would just stop police willy-nilly with a “brick-wall” hand. As of April 2006, an investigation of the circumstances of Brumfield’s death was ongoing.

  A wave of despair swept over the crowd following the shocking death of Danny Brumfield. Nobody knew what to do. Africa stepped up, checking her uncle’s pulse and then writing his name and birthday on gray duct tape. She wrapped the identifying tape around his right arm. One family member, in the midst of the shrieks, had enough composure to write out biographical details about Danny, about how he was a great father and a hard worker. The note was then sealed in a Ziploc bag and taped to his body, which was now lying in a pool of blood. A stranger found a blanket and placed it over him. Too much blood for young girls to see. Prayers were said. The grandchildren were shooed away. As the night wore on and Danny Brumfield’s body started decomposing, maggots arrived. In the morning the humidity increased, and as the sun rose toward its zenith, gnats and flies landed on the exposed surfaces of his brown skin. At 10 A.M. Saturday, buses finally showed up at the Convention Center, three blocks from the corpse. The Brumfield clan had to evacuate; they had to leave Danny Brumfield behind. “My mother walked up to him,” Africa Brumfield later told the Associated Press. “She said her good-byes there. She said as much as we didn’t want to leave his body there, we really didn’t have any other choice. Then we ran because our lives depended on it.”52

  On another occasion a few NOPD officers were standing around the Convention Center, guns drawn, scanning the crowd. Desperate to get a bus out of New Orleans, Conia Sherman approached them for transportation information. She had her young son at her side. Surely they wouldn’t shoot a woman with a child? “Excuse me, Officer,” she said, “do you know when the buses are—” Before she could finish, he cut her off. “Fuck you, bitch,” he shouted, pointing his gun at her head. “They told you hos to get out and you didn’t listen.” Sherman meekly offered, “Officer, I’m just worried about my boy.” The officer shot back: “You better keep your nigger boy with you, because if I had my way, I’d shoot you.”53

  Inside the sprawling Convention Center complex, gangs marked out territory and defended it with guns purloined from stores. All the while, they were drinking liquor (stolen as well). And yet, while some of the gangs were the source of violence, something unexpected happened to others. They realized that there was no authority—or that they were, by virtue of their very organization, the only authority in the whole building. In the human drama that was unfolding at the Convention Center, they stepped up to protect the weak. Denise Moore was an eyewitness: “They were securing the area,” she said. “Criminals. These guys were criminals. They were. But somehow these guys got together, figured out who had guns and decided they were going to make sure that no women were getting raped, because we did hear about women getting raped in the Superdome, and that nobody was hurting babies. And nobody was hurting these old people. They were the ones getting juice for the babies…. They were the ones getting clothes for people who had walked through that water. They were the ones fanning the old people, because that’s what moved the guys, the gangster guys, the most, the plight of the old people.”54

  It rankled Moore to hear the gang members at the Convention Center called “animals” in later press reports. She didn’t see anyone from the government—city, state, or federal—trying to help anyone there. The help of the “good” gangsters didn’t go very far, though. Most of the young men who were armed were threatening one another or anyone who got into the way. People were knifed, robbed, and sexually molested.

  The Louisiana National Guard had arrived at the Convention Center on Tuesday, not long after those people turned away from the Superdome had broken into the riverfront facility. The 247-troop detail were, in effect, squatters, just the same as the other intruders. Representing the 769th and 527th Engineering Battalions, they were specialists in debris removal. They did not even try to restore order; they ducked into a hall and locked the door, appearing only rarely after that.55 Perhaps they couldn’t have maintained the law in the entire facility, but they could have laid out some section as a safe zone, without weapons or violence. Instead, they did nothing. On Thursday, they realized that the place was out of control, and they left for good. The estimated 15,000 people inside—and the 5,000 in the area surrounding it—were left to their own devices for food and water. Late that morning, help seemed to arrive in the form of a SWAT team that entered the building in formation, weapons drawn. Those who thought that they represented the forward detail of a peacekeeping force were disappointed, however. They were only looking for one person in particular, the wife of a Jefferson Parish government official. The woman had sent out word that she had ended up at the Convention Center with a relative. With the SWAT team as an escort, the pair were taken from the squalor and any hope that order would be restored exited too. It did not help that the two women so highly valued by the SWAT team were both white.56

  People who were afraid to go inside the Convention Center, or disgusted by the fetid atmosphere in there, hovered around outside, surveying the desperate masses along the street. Even there, the surroundings had become so filthy, without sanitation, that when night came, it was impossible to find a clean place to lie down. Every so often, an official with the National Guard would yell for the people to line up for the buses. All the while, they were told that if there was any pushing whatsoever, the bus would be waved on. That was a good rule, for the sake of order. Except for one thing: there weren’t any buses. During the first four days, none came. And yet the people, exhausted and ill, had to keep getting into long lines. Some people realized why: it was a cheap, backward way to maintain dominance. If officials let on that there were no buses coming, then the crowd might become truly uncontrollable. The drill of lining up and then sitting them down was a means of holding power over the helpless.

  According to Convention Center general manager Warren Reuther, there were anywhere from 18,000 to 25,000 evacuees who had congregated at the center. Nobody was providing food or water. And although Michael Brown of FEMA claimed these storm victims were receiving medical attention, he was misinformed.57 “It was as if all of us were already pronounced dead,” said Tony Cash after three nights there. “As if somebody already had the body bags. Wasn’t nobody coming for us.”58

  Eight of those gathered at the Convention Center were Ivory Clark and his family. All Wednesday night, Clark guarded his clan, who were forced to sleep on the curb in front of the Convention Center. For good luck he kept rubbing a crucifix he had purchased at Mr. Goldman Jewelry. After seeing a couple of corpses wrapped in blankets, perhaps one of them that of Danny Brumfield, Ivory decided he must move his family to a safer location. On Thursday he found a quasi-safe haven at the Harrah’s Casino parking lot. Grabbing a few cardboard boxes, Clark ripped them in quarters, using them for his kids to sleep on. He had found Grandma a wheelchair, but Auntie was still in desperate need of an electrical outlet for the nebulizer that kept her asthma under control. “Things were real bad,” Clark maintained. “We hadn’t eaten in a couple of days. So, as the man, I had to go find food.”59

  Clark, with his son, Gerald, clinging to his side, decided to walk down the trolley tracks a short distance. Clark worked as a cook for a family at One River Place, a high-rise condominium complex perched on the Mississippi River. An NOPD beat cop tried to stop him from entering. “Look, I live here,” Clark said, even though he didn’t. “I’m just trying to get back to my condominium.” The cop eyed him suspiciously, pointing his rifle at Clark and Gerald. Just then two of th
e One River Place guards recognized Clark from his days as a private chef there. “Hey, Ivory,” Robert Celestine shouted down. “Come on up.” The other guard, Chris Turnball, waved the guns away and invited Ivory and his son to trudge up the hill to the lobby of the high-rise.

  Both Celestine and Turnball put their shotguns down and hugged Clark. During the pre-Katrina years, they used to stand around the lobby and gossip about the Saints. Now they were engaged in a combatlike situation, swapping very different kinds of stories.

  Before long the two security guards waved Clark and his son into the lobby, where they took the elevator to the fifteenth floor. A generator was supplying basic power to the building. Clark had a key to the suite. Five nights a week he had cooked everything from lamb chops to crawfish etouffée for an elderly Jewish couple. They had gone to Europe for a long cruise, leaving Ivory behind as caretaker. For a ravenous man, the sight of two huge freezers of food was like finding a diamond mine. Pure ecstasy—and habit—took over. He immediately began cooking up the perishables. He and Gerald tore the cellophane off the ground pork, knockwurst, bacon, and hot dogs. Using the gas stoves, Clark started cooking like a fiend. Bottles of Perrier, Coke, Tab, and orange juice were also rounded up. “After cookin’ it all up with Gerald, we headed back to Harrah’s,” Clark recalled. “I was real proud.”60