New Orleans Diary

by Elizabeth Henderson

Tuesday February 7, 2006

BITS OF BLUE

As our plane circled over New Orleans, I kept my eyes glued to the window. I wanted a perspective on the damage below that did not come secondhand from television or the papers. Soon our group from Sarah Lawrence—a professor, a dean, nine students and two alumnae–would be landing. It was January 5.
We had come for a nine-day stay to work with ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

In December we trained for a day in the Bronx for work as community organizers. In New Orleans we would in turn be assigned one of two jobs: to go into neighborhoods to report on what people needed in order to get back into New Orleans or to work on housing reclamation.

I was prepared for utter devastation–miles and miles of storm-ravaged homes and communities. Instead I saw endless bits of blue. I thought that they were swimming pools. Later I found out what I was seeing were blue tarps put on houses to protect them from the wind.

At the airport we loaded our bags into the vans and were off to our hotel in the French Quarter. By now it was dark, and having the seat next to the window, I took up the same quest for damage I had conducted from the plane. I looked for signs that the storm had been there and found only minimal damage from my view in the van.

HOUSE #200

We visited the two hundredth house that ACORN was gutting. ACORN’s gutting efforts were part of its No Bulldozing campaign, an initiative built on its belief that structurally sound houses should be gutted to remove mold damage. ACORN wanted the government and developers to see that people wanted to return to New Orleans and were invested in rebuilding.

House #200 was in one of the harder-hit areas. Piles of debris still lined the streets. In some yards there were boats, and in others cars with a water line to the middle of their windows. Almost no one had returned. The air quality in the neighborhood was different from the area we had canvassed in the day before. We could smell the mold in the air and feel the particles in our lungs.

I was drawn to the front of the house where the workers were using wheelbarrows to take the moldy remains of the homeowner’s belongings to the curb. The pile of debris was up to my waist. I then noticed a clump of people standing to my right. The group included a tall black woman who was visibly upset yet trying to keep her emotions together. I was introduced to her and told that she was the owner of the house. I followed her gaze as she watched the ACORN crew empty out her house. One of the volunteers paused by the pile, sighting an object of interest. He picked up a piece of framed artwork, thoughtfully looked at it, and then released it from his grip, letting it fall back onto the pile.

The homeowner described to us how the flood waters rapidly swelled to the same level as her shoulders, forcing her to trudge through the murky water in her main-level family room with her pocketbook on top of her head. The only area of her house that provided respite from the rising water was the attic. She pointed to the attic window, a tiny portal too small for an adult to shimmy through and escape. She remained in the attic for three days until she was rescued. Right before we left a large truck pulled up with salvaged refrigerators on its bed. There were about ten of them, and the stench of rotting food and mold was staggering.

INEQUALITY AT THE QUALITY INN

They were going to be evicted at noon. All thirty-five of the people who were displaced by the hurricane and staying at the Quality Inn on St. Charles Avenue were going to be kicked to the curb. FEMA had paid for the rooms through February 7, but the hotel owners were kicking them out so that they could charge tourists in town for Mardi Gras twice what FEMA was paying.

As the noon deadline drew closer, our chanting became more fervent and impassioned: "FEMA, FEMA you can’t hide! You’ve got rooms right inside!" Then, we could see residents bringing their belongings down to the sidewalk on luggage carts. Our picket line suddenly dissolved. We stood, watching as people carried all of their belongings onto the sidewalk. People who worked at the motel were carrying mattresses across the street and propping them next to a dumpster. A woman was sitting on a box on the sidewalk, looking defeated and tired.

For the rest of the day, activist groups tried to obtain a temporary restraining order to halt the evictions. By the end of the day, they had succeeded. The judge ruled that those who had been evicted must be let back in "immediately."

RUINS

The Lower Ninth Ward was virtually untouched by the cleanup efforts. The previous day, waiting in line at Wendy’s, I had overheard a conversation that a young man was having on his cell phone. "I went to the Lower Ninth," he said, "It looks like the hurricane just happened." I took his comment with a dash of skepticism. Despite having heard reports that even as late as November FEMA had yet to check all the houses in the Lower Ninth for bodies, I had never envisioned something as horrific as the Lower Ninth Ward. It was not so much an issue of what had been done to the neighborhood, but of what had not been done in the wake of the storm. In some ways, it reminded me of the ruins of Pompeii and the ash-preserved bodies in museums there that show people clutching their heads and bracing themselves against the volcano’s poisonous gases. The Lower Ninth was equally frozen in time.

It was as if nature had played a hateful prank, throwing boats and cars on houses, exchanging the roof of one house for another. An array of house dresses was hanging on the fence in front of one house. Bits of people’s lives were scattered everywhere, and in many places the rubble was so deep that traditional boundaries, such as those between lawns or the distinction between a road and a sidewalk, were indiscernible. I reached the corner of the street and heard a crunch under my feet. I looked down and saw that I had stepped on a paint brush, and that the box with accompanying supplies lay nearby. In one backyard, a jumble of children’s bikes were twisted together, and string lights shaped like footballs were rooted into the side yard.

HOMECOMING

Mary was in her early sixties and was short with soft brown eyes and no gray in her hair. She was evacuated by helicopter from the second story balcony of her daughter’s home in the projects. It was her first time flying.

"After the storm the water was going higher and higher we thought it was going to go down, and instead of the water going down, the water was going up, up and up," Mary said.

While we were talking, Mary began to cry. Her tears were dignified and restrained. She kept saying, "I’m ok, I’m ok." I touched her arm and told her that we could stop the interview at anytime. She said that she cried everyday, and joked that now she was done for the day. When I asked her how she felt about the government after Hurricane Katrina, Mary said that she was disgusted and that the government could have done a better job of getting people out of the city. Her children and sixteen grandchildren are spread across the country and she hopes for their return.

Hannah was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. She had just returned to New Orleans for the first time since the storm and was looking forward to the release of her church group’s gospel CD. Standing on the sidewalk in front of her damaged home, she told us how she was stuck in a hospital where she worked for a whole week after the storm hit. The generator went out early on, and she and others had to wheel the dead into the crammed hospital morgue. They had little food and water, and she stayed along with others until all of the patients were evacuated. Hannah frequently mentioned her faith in God and the strength and optimism that she gained from her religion. When I asked her if the relief services that were provided in the wake of the storm were sufficient, she said that everyone did the best they could.

A TALE OF TWO NEIGHBORHOODS

During canvassing, I came across three elderly men standing in the backyard near a FEMA trailer and talking. I started to tell them about the initiatives ACORN is undertaking to get people to come back to New Orleans, doing everything from gutting houses to helping people with their tax forms. Then after a moment of silence, one of the men said, "I need three things. Money, money and more money," counting off each "money" on a different finger. I optimistically pointed out the option of getting his house gutted, and he told me that he didn’t have any home to go back to.

As we left Mary’s house, two Spanish-speaking men motioned for us to come over to them. One was short and wiry, and the other was tall and heavy and smelled of alcohol. The shorter man took out a small notebook, pointing passionately to three different lines he had written on the back cover, each comprised of a combination of letters and numbers. I was completely stumped. And then I realized that they were the license plate numbers of contractors who had picked them up for work but had not paid them. We handed them an ACORN flier and tried to explain in our fractured Spanish that if they called the number on the sheet they would be able to get in contact with people who could help them. The men wanted to be understood, and we wanted to comprehend what they were saying so that they could get the help they needed. It was difficult to walk away.

On our final day several of us walked through the Garden District, frustrated by the lack of interest in ACORN in this affluent, white community. We were going down yet another street where no one was out in the neighborhood when we came across a man standing outside of his house with his young adult son. We quickly realized that he was not interested in any of the things that ACORN was doing. But he did give us a bit of advice, "Don’t go down this road too far. That’s the ghetto." I played innocent, "What do you mean the ghetto?" He gave me a tight-lipped smile, "There are shootings and rapes there all the time," he said. His son chimed in, "Though there really hasn’t been any of that since the hurricane."

The student I was with and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. The area that this man was describing as the ghetto was the area that we had been in for the last three days. I could not, I realized, change his mind. But what dismayed me was how this man, in many ways, embodied the New Orleans that the government envisions as a result of its rebuilding efforts–a gentrified white community with no room for a population that is either black or poor.