The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Residents of New Orleans were airlifted by a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter from the misery of the Convention Center to an evacuation staging area at the Louis Armstrong International Airport on Saturday, September 3. ROB CARR/AP

  Sara Roberts of Lake Charles, Louisiana, helped organize the Cajun Navy, a loose consortium of private citizens with boats from southwestern Louisiana that rescued residents of New Orleans East. Along with her husband, André Buisson, Roberts carried flood victims to the safety of Chef Menteur Highway. ERIC GAY/AP

  U.S. federal troops began to arrive on Thursday, September 1. Their primary goal was to establish law and order in the streets of New Orleans. LINDSAY BRICE

  FEMA marked searched homes with DayGlo paint, but the recovery of bodies was slow. This body of an unidentified man remained exposed below Interstate 10 at Earhart Expressway more than a week after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. LINDSAY BRICE

  Lucretia Fly, ninety, of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, broke down crying on the shoulder of her daughter, Nyshie Seymour, when she found a family heirloom, a glass bowl over one hundred years old, in the sand behind where her home used to be. CHUCK LIDDY/THE NEWS AND OBSERVER/AP

  Glenda Thomas sat in despair on the steps of what was the front of her home in Gulfport, Mississippi. Many residents along the Gulf of Mexico lost all of their worldly possessions. ROSS TAYLOR/GETTY IMAGES

  Gulf South residents expressed their frustrations by “street blogging” on boarded-up buildings in the days and weeks following Hurricane Katrina. ANJA NIEDRINGHAUS/AP

  A Red Cross volunteer comforted a hurricane victim in Houston’s Reliant Center Astrodome on Friday, September 2. More than 65,000 evacuees were processed through Reliant Center Park. The Astrodome itself housed 17,500 persons, while the Reliant Center and Arena housed over 9,000. ANDREA BOOHER/AP

  Lt. General Russel Honore (left) talked on a cell phone while waiting for a helicopter as an aide took notes. Honore provided leadership in the Gulf South in the days following Hurricane Katrina. ROB CARR/AP

  The largely evacuated Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans was left littered with muck and debris in the ghost-town aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. LINDSAY BRICE

  Shotgun row houses on Elysian Fields in New Orleans remained flooded one week after Hurricane Katrina. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dropped sandbags around the clock to bolster the breached levees. LINDSAY BRICE

  Members of the D-Mort team carried the body of Leola Lyons, seventy-two, from her New Orleans home weeks after the hurricane. A month after the storm hit Louisiana, more than 972 victims in the state lay nameless in a morgue on the outskirts of Baton Rouge. ANN HEISENFELT/AP

  A wheelchair covered in mud and debris remained in a room at St. Rita’s Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, where thirty-five people died. The owners apparently neglected to evacuate the residents, resulting in their drowning in the Wall of Water. JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

  NBC News videographer Tony Zumbado discovered bodies lined up before the altar in the second-floor chapel of Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. Photographer Tony Carnes of Christianity Today later took this photograph. TONY CARNES

  Tony Zumbado fearlessly followed leads and captured images that shocked the world. He was the first videographer to film the Convention Center mayhem. Much of his footage was deemed too graphic for broadcast. DWAINE SCOTT

  The Hancock Medical Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, did not turn away a single patient despite the rising waters and limited resources within the hospital. Pictured here are Dr. Fredro Knight and nurses Sydney Saucier and Angie Gambino, who worked nonstop for days treating nearly one thousand hurricane victims. LINDSAY BRICE

  Ruth Berggren landed in Fort Worth, Texas, and was embraced by longtime friend Libby Goff after having made sure all of the patients and staff from the Nine West Ward at Charity Hospital were rescued together. RICHARD GIBBE

  Rug merchant Bob Rue raised “street blogging” to an art form at his St. Charles Avenue emporium, where he threatened looters and invited tourists to return to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. CNN’s Anderson Cooper frequently used this storefront as a backdrop for his reports from New Orleans. LINDSAY BRICE

  Michael Knight (left) and Jimmy Deleray, two of the heroes of what became known as the NOLA Homeboys movement, met for a beer at Vaughn’s in the Bywater. Bob Marley aficionado Knight saved hundreds of people in Tremé in his personal boat. After warding off looters in the Riverbend section of New Orleans, Deleray became a leading rescue boatman in the flooded neighborhoods of the city. LINDSAY BRICE

  Larry Banks, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chief of Watershed Division for the Mississippi Valley, examined the breached section of the 17th Street Canal levee in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans. CHARLIE RIEDEL/AP

  Every morning Dixon started his day with a bag of his pork skins. They were better than doughnuts, he’d say. At night Dixon, his Dobbs hat hiding his bald spot, would walk up to Sweetwater’s Bar, play Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” and Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” on the jukebox, and have four or five bags of pork skins, washed down with Crown Royal and water with a twist of lemon. Just seeing that pale, copper whiskey bottle made him grin from ear to ear. For well over a decade, Dixon had owned three retail shops, specializing in 45s, called Gemini Records. What a grand time he had, a good run while it lasted. But Gemini Records was now defunct and the Upper Ninth was underwater. His two thousand warehoused boxes of pork skins in New Orleans East were also now mush. “To kill time in the attic I thought about all the people I loved, how I’d be a better man once the Katrina mess was over,” Dixon said. “No more scolding my wife.”

  Like most of the attic people, Dixon had to knock out his vent to allow air to draft in. He spent most of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on his roof checking up on neighbors. According to Dixon, the attic dwellers of the Upper Ninth had created their own communications system “like in Africa.” Standing on the eaves, they made slight hand gestures, as if in a prison yard; for example, holding up three fingers, followed by two, meant that three houses down, there were two people stuck inside. National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters flew over the Upper Ninth, but never dropped a basket. Dixon surmised that their infrared, high-tech maps probably showed that the Lower Ninth Ward was in much worse shape. It was. He didn’t blame them for not stopping. “They were just busy tryin’ to get as many people out as possible,” he said. “Remember I served at Fort Polk. I knew what they were trying to do and they were doing it very well.”

  By day Dixon busied himself with business books. He had a dream that someday his pork skins would be stocked in every A & P and Kroger from San Diego to New York. Maybe even Wal-Mart would carry them. Every person in the Delta—his home turf—could testify that they were good, they were damn good, ten times better than all these New Age snacks like Cool Ranch Doritos or pizza-flavored Pringles. His snacks had that real pig-grease flavor, straight from the slaughterhouse, not saturated with salty chemicals concocted in a laboratory. What the hell did those fools know about food? “I kept thinking about new marketing plans up in the attic,” Dixon said. “Ways to quadruple my distributors. I had a few business books with me and they were helping out.”87

  At night, Dixon would sit on the roof and study the galaxy. He was looking north for Polaris, which during the Dark Ages of slavery had been a guiding star which had directed 70,000 to 90,000 of his brothers and sisters to the Promised Land. How little things had changed, he chuckled. Here he was sitting on a roof, in an all-black neighborhood, trying to follow the drinking gourd in the dark sky, while he saw flashlights talking in code up and down Mazant Street. There was no Peg Leg Jones, whispering directions, but the Underground Railroad was alive and well; blacks were still trying to escape Alabama, Mississippi, and New Orleans. Nobody could argue that point. Just another black migration moment was the way Dixon wrote off all the Katrina hullabaloo. He simply didn’t believe the U.S. government was going to lift him out of the debris. A
frican Americans had to take care of each other, without the “Caucasian race.” To think that President Bush was going to lift the black man out of the muck was absurd. Self-reliance was the ticket for survival. So by Thursday morning, Dixon had stopped waving his fedora at the choppers like a beggar. The best way to deal with whites was to walk past them, not bringing any undue attention to yourself. They’d pick you up in a chopper just to arrest you for unpaid parking tickets.

  Given this pessimistic attitude, there was no jubilation when he popped out of his roof vent and saw his forty-seven-year-old cousin Arthur “June” Thomas rowing down the street, engaging in low-grade rescues, a person here, another one there. June wasn’t trophy-hunting, like some of the NOLA Homeboys, claiming two or three hundred saves. The only reason he was rowing a sixteen-foot aluminum boat was that his house was a junk heap. He had stayed for the storm, hanging out in his attic, when his house had moved off its foundation, causing the gas pipes to break. His entire downstairs lit up like a blue fireball, Thomas recalled, like an enormous baked Alaska being served up to the Jolly Green Giant.88 All over the Lower Ninth, “people were hollerin’,” and he didn’t try to save them. He swam for his own life. Eventually he was picked up by a Wildlife and Fisheries boat and dropped off on the St. Claude Bridge with everyone else. June, however, wasn’t the kind of man to sit around. He went and found himself this aluminum boat and now was pulling his Uncle Larry off his roof. “He was in no real hurry,” Thomas said of his uncle. “He just tried to stay all dignified.”89

  Without question, Dixon was glad to be saved. But it was a long way from Mazant Street to Houston. All he had were his walking shoes and credit cards. He asked June to dump him off at the St. Claude Bridge and he’d walk the 4.3 miles to the Morial Convention Center. Little did he realize that the massive center, the very place he had sold pork skins a few years ago at a snack convention, had become uninhabitable. Upon arriving, he surveyed the situation, wiped his brow, and went looking for water. That was no easy chore. His lips were as swollen as a brass band player’s. But he recognized an NOPD officer smoking near Harrah’s and went up to him. They had known each other for twenty years. “You can have a bottle,” the officer told him. “But don’t tell anybody where you got it from.”

  Quietly, as if invisible, the still well-groomed Dixon, now hydrated, entered the Convention Hall and shook his head in disbelief. Clearly this was the wrong place to be. So he moseyed back outside, walked across the Convention Center Boulevard to the foot of Canal Street, and deliberately sat down under an awning; shade was the key for surviving. Shade was as important as a canteen. He sat there all Thursday night. He didn’t even get up for a nature call. He just sat and stared as if in a trance. He missed his wife, Joanna, terribly. “‘Gotta get to her in Houston,’ I kept thinking,” he recalled. “We were going to reunite. No doubt about it.”90

  At 5 A.M. on Friday, Dixon stood up, dusted himself off, and made sure his clothes weren’t rumpled, that he looked respectable, snappy enough to have lunch with Ralph Bunche or Eartha Kitt at Commander’s Palace with nobody thinking he was a second fiddle. He had on his favorite shoes and he started walking to the Crescent City Connection, the bridge that the Gretna police had blockaded. And he just kept walking, one step at a time, head held high, a man not in a rush. As he approached the police barricade, he just saluted and walked right past them. They must have believed that he was a city councilman or private eye. At least, he hoped so. He had purposely exuded the aura of a man who owned a pocket watch.

  Although he had plenty of opportunities to hitchhike in his youth, hopping on the back of cotton trucks headed to the levee market in Memphis, he had always declined. He wasn’t a tenant farmer or a day wager. He was a Mississippi businessman, one of the Crackling Kings of Leake County. But Katrina had messed him up. Out his thumb went, hobo style. He was headed west. Another displaced man, about his age, walked up to him and talked. He seemed like a decent fellow, with a strain of Jamaican or Trinidadian blood in him. They decided to hitchhike together. Dixon never really got his name. For about an hour, no vehicles would stop. Then again, there were virtually no cars on the road. As luck would have it, however, they stumbled upon a pickup truck wedged in a drainage ditch. The driver’s misfortune turned out to be their ticket out of misery, or so they thought. “We helped pull him out of the hole,” Dixon recalled. “And he, in return, gave us a ride.”

  Out of all the Katrina-related experiences Dixon encountered, this ride with a drugged-up, manic gangbanger was the most harrowing. Even though there was debris littering the road, Mr. Pickup Truck insisted on driving 75 or 80 miles per hour. Dixon was in the passenger seat and kept glancing back at his hobo partner scared silly in the truck bed. “You’ve got to slow down,” Dixon pleaded with the driver. “He’s goin’ fall out.”

  The drug addict dropped them off. At least he had gotten them past Gretna. They were now hoofing it down Highway 90 to the hamlet of Boutte in St. Charles Parish, sixty-seven miles from Baton Rouge. Out the thumbs went again. Before too long, a pickup pulled right beside them, the driver sizing them up with his eyes. They passed muster. A deal was struck. He would give the hitchhikers a lift to the Baton Rouge airport if Dixon filled up his gas tank and the other man gave him twenty dollars. “Sounded fair to us,” Dixon recalled. “And you know what? He took me right to where I wanted to be.”91

  Once at the airport, Dixon caught a break. For some strange reason, there was a burgundy Malibu still available on the rental lot. He tossed down his credit card, showed them his Louisiana driver’s license, signed a form, and took off headed west over the Mississippi River. Houston had by now taken on a mythical dimension in his head. Dignity was still his lodestar. The Astros looked play-off bound and he imagined himself in the Homeplate Bar and Grill, watching the baseball games in air-conditioned glory just a few weeks ahead. He imagined his wife’s warm embrace followed by a carefree shave, baby powder—the whole nine yards.

  And the big reunion came. He parked the car on Pebbledown Street, walked up to the appropriate door, and knocked. Joanna answered. There was no joy in her face. She just stared at him and him at her. A few awkward moments passed, and she gave him a perplexed look. “Damn,” she said, with arms folded, full of disappointment. “You still livin’.”92

  Chapter Thirteen

  “IT’S OUR TIME NOW”

  We acknowledge some forms of considerations.

  We open for those who adhere to our one rule endure.

  —Louise Erdrich, “Asiniig,” Original Fire

  I

  SOME PEOPLE CALLED IT the “Battle of Oak Street.” It lasted from Monday to Thursday and forty-eight-year-old Bruce Foret—a white, middle-class business owner—was in the thick of it. Foret lived in a 3,500-square-foot house on Finch Street in Lakeview, a Lake Pontchartrain neighborhood tucked between the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal. His family business was an Ace Hardware Store, located along a somewhat dilapidated shopping strip just off Carrollton Avenue, only blocks from the Mississippi. The store, at 8338 Oak Street, opened in 1929 and Foret’s father had acquired it in 1964. In 1970, they purchased the “Ace Hardware” franchising rights. “At one time, before the big-box stores, we were a good-size hardware store that specialized in service,” Foret recalled. “We knew fifty percent of our customers by name. It was a family business with guys that worked for us for anywhere from twenty to fifty years. New Orleans always had an underlying racial tension. I’m no expert. Probably sixty percent of my pre-Katrina customers were black. New Orleans was probably the most integrated city in America. We never had many problems, but it took something like Katrina to uncover the problems.”1

  Like most New Orleanians, Foret spent the weekend before Katrina boarding up his Lakeview house. He had evacuated his wife and their three children to Dallas, Texas, while his brother evacuated their mother to Jackson, Mississippi. That Saturday, as Katrina approached, Foret kept Ace Hardware open, selling nails, hammers, and p
lywood. “Business was brisk,” he said. “But basically not a single African-American family came in. They weren’t boarding up.” They were, of course, but perhaps not in his area. Realizing that Lakeview would probably flood, Foret decided to spend the storm in Harahan, which lay above sea level, at his mother’s suburban home. It proved to be a wise move. His Finch Street house took two feet of water and then burned to the ground when a gas line ruptured. He lost everything in the fire. “I woke up at around 6:30 A.M. Tuesday and something told me I better get down to the hardware store,” Foret said. “I threw some clothes on, got in my truck, and started heading Uptown. It was pretty difficult. There were a lot of power lines down, a lot of trees. So I just meandered around, up and through old Jefferson Parish, up on the Mississippi levee where it was dry, all over. I finally got to my store and that’s when I found out it had been looted.”2

  The word “looting,” derived from the Hindi lut and the Sanskrit lunt, was defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “seizing goods wrongfully or by force, especially in times of riot or war.” Basically, looting was considered an opportunistic act, an open season to get “free” stuff during a crisis. Although the term had ancient antecedents, it had been used by the American media to describe a whole series of recent historical events. When Islamic fundamentalists bombed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, ATMs all over Manhattan were “looted.” Then there were the unforgettable scenes from Baghdad of the Iraqi National Museum being looted in April 2003. In times of unrest, the fear of looting was a constant in every storekeeper’s life, particularly when massive power outages occurred. At Ace Hardware, the possibility of collective theft had caused Foret to install a sophisticated alarm system. But it only worked with electricity. In a powerless New Orleans, his store would be wide open, like a free buffet, for looters to carry off his merchandise in droves. As a precaution, back in the late 1990s, he had taken out full-coverage liability insurance against theft. “Good thing I was covered,” he said. “Man, I ended up needing the insurance.”3