It was my first night in New Orleans, when I walked through the French Quarter, I heard the warm notes of a ten-piece brass band, then a blues band, led by a piano player wearing a top hat and a drunk singer, whose raspy voice reeled through Ray Charles and Dr. John tunes. Up ahead there was a gypsy jazz group good enough to make everybody in the room think they could swing—in fact, all around the French Quarter, there were impromptu brass jam sessions and dance parties on historic street corners, encircling trumpet, trombone, and tuba players. Even the outskirts of the Quarter had a rhythm: it moved to the sound coming from a solitary horn player, who looked out onto the Mississippi and blasted lonely notes into the early-morning sky.
Amid the many pleasures and temptations of the New Orleans’ French Quarter, it can be easy to forget that the city’s wounds from Hurricane Katrina remain wide open.
I came to New Orleans as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, and while driving into St. Bernard Parish for my first day of construction, the first thing I noticed about the largely uninhabited neighborhood was the spray paint on the front of each boarded-up home.
“What do those spray-painted X’s mean?” I asked another volunteer.
“It’s from when they first inspected the houses after the storm two years ago,” he explained, “The number on the bottom says how many dead bodies were found in the house.”
It took a moment for this to sink in. “X’s” and numbers were everywhere.
Shards of glass littered each front porch, and there were blown-out roof-tops all around us. I could see inside many of the houses, when the sun filtered through the gashes in the walls. Old furniture sat beneath hanging wires and insulation and beside broken dishes and toys. This is the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and it seemed like the storm had hit three weeks ago.
While working construction in St. Bernard Parish, I met Robin, the lively young mother of two that would soon be living here. Some of her relatives helped us build in the afternoons after they got off of work. After we had finished the week’s work of putting in the sub-floor, Robin hosted a southern barbeque for us atop the plywood sheets we had just nailed into the floor beams.
It was another muggy Louisiana night of swatting away mosquitoes, and Robin proudly stood barefoot on her new floor. She watched her two little girls do cartwheels and explained to us how to approach the crawfish she had cooked up.
“The yellow stuff on the inside is the brains,” she said, cracking the fish’s hard red shell with her hands, “Most people don’t like that part, so you probably want to throw it out… Eat up, now.”
There were probably thirty or so of us, and Robin generously fed us all crawfish, jumbo prawns, and bread pudding. The night sky was clear and we were full of fish, sitting contentedly upon the new flooring. Four eight-hour days of 100-degree, humid heat, nailing and sledge-hammering and digging and sawing, and now Robin and her kids could be that much closer to having normal lives again. She told us her story of coming back into St. Bernard to see what was left of her home after Katrina, and how happy she was to finally be back.
I was surprised by how freely Robin seemed to divulge her story. But as I soon found out, the people of New Orleans are anything but shy.
A few nights later I met a local fisherman at a St. Bernard bar outside a boat launch who told me most of his life story, including his extraordinary Katrina experience, before he even knew my name. Born and raised in St. Bernard, he had worked as a fisherman in these waters his whole life, and owned half of the boats docked right outside the bar window.
He had a young daughter, was recently divorced, and performed acts of selfless heroism after the storm.
“A day and a half after it hit, I drove back into St. Bernard, doing the craziest run of back country roads you ever seen,” he said, motioning with his free hand, “Bought $600 of water and food supplies for everybody, got in my boat and started getting people off their rooftops and out of their attics.”
His house, he explained, had 22 feet of water, and he had lost everything.
“I rescued three hundred people,” he said proudly. “Got there before the government did.”
I had been in New Orleans for a few weeks, and despite all the damage I had already seen, I still hadn’t seen the most devastated parts of the city: the Ninth and Lower Ninth Wards. I was aware that these had been poverty-stricken areas before Katrina, and that the storm (and the lack of sufficient government assistance in its wake) had further strained the communities. Now many consider the Lower Ninth ward to be America’s most dangerous ghetto, and its future remains largely uncertain.
On a Saturday afternoon, I began driving from St. Bernard towards the Ninth Ward. Driving along the neighborhood’s busiest street, St. Claude, I was struck first by the appearance of several military police vehicles patrolling the area. The trucks are desert- camouflaged humvees, with fully uniformed U.S. soldiers inside.
I also noticed that the building frames on this busy street made it seem like the storm had hit weeks ago. The sight of these dark, hollowed-out skeletons of local businesses reminded me of seeing parts of LA after the riots as a child. I parked my car on St. Claude and began walking around the neighborhood.
It was immediately apparent that the Ninth Ward was in a much different state than anything else I had seen in New Orleans. The structural damage seemed similar to St. Bernard, but fewer homes were gutted and there were no FEMA trailers.
I walked four blocks in broad daylight and didn’t see a single person. The isolation was unsettling.
I looked inside the spray-painted shotgun houses filled with abandoned possessions, and walked up to a little boarded-up church house. I peered through the fallen front wall.
I tried to imagine the rows of neat wooden pews that must have once stretched to the back wall, the pulpit up front, and the hundred or so congregants filling the room with gospel songs on a Sunday. Now those people were gone and the church was just another darkened pile of wood and glass awaiting demolition.
I drove over a rusty drawbridge into the lower Ninth Ward. Kids rode their bicycles and weaved in and out of the rubble in the street. I remembered what a teacher friend had told me the day before—that a neighborhood middle school had just recently reopened in the lower Ninth, operating in a tiny cafeteria with 500 kids, two teachers, and three police officers.
I walked around the neighborhood—much of it looking like a third-world country—and returned to St. Bernard in somewhat of a daze.
I had been in New Orleans for three weeks, and had worked on four different houses. It was one of my last nights, and I headed to the French Quarter to see another jazz show on Frenchmen Street at a venue called The Snug Harbor. It’s a small place with balcony seating, so I went and sat above the stage. A young quintet led by a brash, muscular trumpet player started off with a Miles Davis tune.
As the band laid into Freddy the Freeloader, my mind began to wander. As I tapped my fingers on the balcony railing along with the rhythm, I couldn’t help but think about all the things I had seen and the people I’d met in the last few weeks.
The neighborhoods rolled across my mind, the faces on street corners, and I started thinking about the White House and Congress, wondering why it has to be that small volunteer groups have done more to rebuild this city than our own government.
I envisioned a Congressional bill that would involve training unemployed local residents to rebuild their own communities; this is what you hear local grassroots groups talking about.
I wonder if the next administration in Washington might entertain such an idea.
I wonder if they’ll be interested in helping people move back here and preserving this culture, or if they’ll support the business community that wants to take a wrecking ball to the whole Ninth Ward and fill it with McMansions, condos, and strip malls.
My anger and idealism were interrupted by the laughter of the audience. The song had ended, and the bandleader was insulting his band-mates and his friends in the crowd. He pointed to another trumpet player in the audience, and began talking trash before ultimately challenging him to get on stage.
“I didn’t bring my horn,” the man yelled from the back of the room.
“How you gonna come all the way across town and forget your horn? I know you’re just scared of me, that’s all,” the bandleader said playfully. His friend finally came on stage and sang a few songs.
The trumpet player kept talking and the audience laughed for the rest of the night.
I slipped back into reflection on the balcony and thought about the ironic, but wonderful sense of humor this place has. I’d talked to several people who told me they had lost everything, and within minutes, had me laughing at a joke. That is New Orleans, the city that marches at its funerals with music that is joyful and light.
These basic things—the soulful warmth, the sense of humor, the music—they can’t change, and I’m worried that they will. If this city is not properly rebuilt and repopulated by the people that make it special, its unique culture will slowly become just another casualty of the storm.
