Many of the homes on Jackson were dilapidated before 2005. After the storm murders reached record levels as people came back to few schools, fewer jobs, and little support.
Vigilantism and overt forms of racism became the norm as "roving bands" of New Orleanians looked for food, water, and of course, goods they could sell. The much publicized thievery did not compared to the threats of individual violence by gun-carrying whites. NOPD police chief notoriously told the police to "take back" the city, encouraging extreme brutality.
The day before the false pageantry and calm of President Bush's speech at St. Louis Cathedral, one of the few spaces in New Orleans with power--run, I think, by generators.
Former 12th grade student of mine, Kristen. With little help from her family, she raised her sisters and brothers independently and sacrificed her own education. I don't have her last name. If you know her, tell her I miss her very much and send me her contact information.
Homes were tattooed with ASPCA and those searching for human remains Central City, NOLA October 2005
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My New Orleans Vertigo
After the
authorities had unlocked the drowned city, I drove around the detritus—what
remained of my new home. The water sat
for days, marinating the city in toxic sludge, like an abandoned half-filled aquarium
scorched by the summer sun. The
horizontal stains upon each home’s face resembled scars from a rusted
rake. The striped corpses of vehicles
littered yards like locust skins or leaned precariously against collapsed
garages. Repeatedly, near felled road
signs, I saw the red hooks of “The Club” Pyrrhically guarding forsaken cars. Peppered atop the surfaces of trucks and
refrigerators and bikes and animals was an unearthly dust, as if blasted from
some terrible nebula beyond the sun. This was my home: New Orleans, October 2005.
It’s far easier
than you think watching a city die. My
hometown leans against Lake Michigan near the remnants of Gary and my father
worked in what’s left of Detroit. I
found Bernard Henri Levy’s descriptions in American
Vertigo quite chilling. He traveled
around Buffalo, Lackawanna, Cleveland and asked a great question: How is it
that America lets its cities die? We are
a nation obsessed with beauty but whose very face is scarred with urban
cavities. From our ghost towns in the
gold-squeezed West to the brick ruins of Hadley, Massachussetts, these scars,
like all scars, tell a story. After
Katrina I saw books like “Why New Orleans Matters” as well as serious debate
about the “feasibility” of saving New Orleans.
For me, it was déjà vu all over again.
In the aftermath of the storm I watched as houses were destroyed or
abandoned or sold. I was reminded of my
Dad and the disorientation we felt, driving around my shrinking hometown and seeing
‘For Sale’ signs and neglected properties where our town once boomed. “There’s nothing left here,” he would say. His words were mixed with pride in me and
sadness as he looked at the now unfamiliar town, “Nothing left for you here.”
I had moved to New
Orleans because it was timeless, unsolved.
I hadn’t consciously traveled to New Orleans to “save” the city nor was
I hoping to “get lost” in its mysteries.
The city, older than the nation, simply intrigued me. Granted, the city was imploding before the
storm. In the schools, ½ boys would drop
out and the kids who graduated rarely surpassed an 8th grade reading
level. Louisiana’s prisons had become vast warehouses
for young black males. Yet the city itself
was indomitable. Surviving floods and
unemployment and fires and wars and epidemics over the years, it was also, I
thought, a city unbleached by modernity.
I was fascinated with this place without watches or rules: “the city
that care forgot.”
A thrilling escape
or feverish escapade, I don’t remember—Katrina has smeared my memory like a wet
photograph—but I do recall leaving Chicagoland in 2005 for the Crescent City. Few options and a head soaked in 22-year old idealism
sent me to the Gulf. I remembered
Yeats’s airman as I traveled south: “No
law nor sense of duty bade me fight/No public men nor cheering crowds,A lonely
impulse of delight/Drove me to this tumult in the clouds.” I little knew then that in the next 10 weeks
I would travel from my teaching induction in New Orleans, teach summer school
in Houston, return for a position in Orleans Parish, evacuate to Western
Louisiana before Hurricane Rita, rest in Bloomington, IN, wait idle in my
hometown, return to discover a destroyed and barricaded New Orleans, and be
re-hired in St. John the Baptist Parish 20 miles outside the city. Those dizzying first weeks still linger in my
mind.
These are
disorienting times. It is an age when,
being lost is much more understandable to me than having a well-whittled
niche. Today, a round, smiling word like
“home” or “community” is off-putting to me because what once seemed so stable
quickly evaporated. Not that homes and
communities are undesirable or undesired, but at present, my sense of place
feels ephemeral and protean. Am I
alone? Perhaps that’s why I fell in love
with New Orleans, a city of once-cemented communities now fractured and
reconstituted by circumstance. This
desire after the storm to remake the broken cross of the city and its homes and
communities was pervasive. But how do
you make it like it was but make it new?
My poetic fervor on
the highway was one thing. But being
lost for the first time in the labyrinthine roads roping the Crescent City was
another. Everything was frighteningly close
but anonymously distant, I felt like being a myopic pigeon in a Chicago
blizzard. Looking around I thought,
where am I? There is consolation in
characterizing new surroundings. To the
clever scribblers who glibly typify cities, it evokes a sense of ownership,
like naming the rusty lemon who housed your teenage years’ sticky fumblings. While Capote said New Orleans was a city
where time stopped “to take a rest,” Twain called it “an upholstered sewer,”
while Faulkner described it as “an aging courtesan in a smoke-filled
room.” A girl I met on that
traffic-crushed day, Shameka, characterized New Orleans not with clever
metaphors, but with honest pride:
“N’Awlins: they aint nothing like my
city nowhere.”
I met Shameka in a
gas station. Hours of bumper-to-bumper
had taken its toll. I had been to proud
to pull over, but relented in a rather uninviting patch of Central City. After the storm I learned that a majority of
those living in Orleans Parish, like others manacled by poverty, had rarely if
ever left their neighborhoods or the city.
I gazed around and the trunks rattled forbidding bass and the glassy
eyes of hunched low-riders stared warnings.
Feeling only inches away, the merciless sun eclipsed all concerns. My body was lacquered with sweat after only a
few steps towards the gas station door.
Entering the wrong
door (the office) I reattempted through the proper entrance with a sunny smile
and requested a proper course to Dillard University—for training—while lamenting
the lack of road signs and the inability to ever
take a left! Portly and with a golden
grill, Shameka yawned. She plucked
briefly at her nametag which emitted an air pulse over her sweaty torso: “You in N’Awlins, nah. Ain nuhtin’ like my city nowhere. Git own dat
road over de’h. Drive bout, hmmmm, tree,
fow lights. You see da Lafitte Projek[1], den you
gown to fah.” The monologue continued,
though not for my benefit. Shameka’s
friend shook his head and mopped beside me as if trying to wash me away. My face probably resembled an unwrapped
gift. But empty. I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand much then.
It’s strange how
the tear ducts can hijack a man. Stall
him. Catch him, like a snowman in the
sun. I smiled, weakly, and nodding,
exited towards my car. Lost.
Crying. Feeling extraneous, vanquished,
and isolated already: How could I teach
English if I could not even understand student responses?
Yes, it was the
language. I had read that after L’Overture’s capture by
the French, hundreds of Haitian exiles poured into New Orleans, many of them
bringing their own slaves. But the additional
influence of Irish immigrants, an open port, the French and Spanish colonial
legacy, and the rise of the Creole class, gave New Orleans a unique if not
unintelligible sound for newcomers, or at least me. It was sonorous and sinewy. Caribbean in its rolling eurythmics. The accent was aurally arresting, like listening
to a street scat, it had a fevered control.
A Pollock painting of words. At
any moment a sentence could end with a fruity chuckle or a trailing curse and both so amazingly heartfelt that you almost
anticipated a bow. My Midwestern tones were
quite different—the rhythms of language were atonal and flat, a colorless
canvas in comparison. Language for me
back home was pragmatic, a means to an end.
In New Orleans, however, words were musical and emotive.
The vocabularies
of New Orleans’s urban youth were small; in fact they were thousands of words
smaller than those of their affluent peers.
One teacher told me that even my pronunciation of known words like
“chair” would be discomfiting to young kids.
Students would have grown up hearing “Cheh.” Known words were rich with hidden meanings. “Messy” could mean unclean or invidious. “Triflin’” could mean devious, obfuscating,
snitching, teasing, or just being a wet blanket. Reading a transcribed conversation between my
students would yield little. All
depended on the context and intonation. I
began teaching and—almost as if the kids’ verbal ink mixed with mine—I slowly
began speaking in inverted sentences, acquiring dramatic pauses, “baby” endearments,
and “cuttin’ up” slang. Even more
intriguing were the “Yeah” or “No” additions which, anchored to a sentence’s stern,
brought a Frenchy emphasis: “I been done
that, (ch)yeah” or “I never stay up in that there place, no.” Slowly, very slowly, the reef between my
language and theirs dissolved.
True, each new
home takes acclamation. And any move is
disorienting. Language, customs—the
rhythms and beat of the street are different in each ZIP code. But New Orleans deserves more than a word on
this point. When I moved to New York
City I thought of Blake’s lonely roaming in his poem “London”: “I walk along each chartered street/Near where
the chartered Thames doth flow/And find in every face I meet/Marks of weakness,
marks of woe.” Okay, this took minutes
to comprehend in New York: Disgruntled urban
creatures (in Kempton’s phrase) looking like they had played a game and
lost. All of them rampaging down ordered
streets with the ferocity of wildebeests.
Check. I got it.
But to enter New
Orleans was to enter some absurd adolescent dream. A sense of displacement I simply wasn’t quite
prepared to tackle. In one day you could
walk by a Mardi Gras Indian dancing alone on an abandoned street, or a man
pissing while walking toward you, or a man mowing his lawn in a Spider Man
outfit, or a man dressed like a nun leaning unconscious against a fire hydrant,
or a couple fighting in a city street with fried chicken skins. I detail the city’s excess because in the
traumatic wake of the storm my first year teaching, as I tried to gain a
toehold of “normalcy” and “community” and “routine,” I discovered all my
efforts undercut. Thousands of displaced
students became “Katrina kids” in their adopted schools after the storm. I, too, was lost and labeled a “Katrina
teacher.” We were all children of the
flood before we even understood the label or identified where we were.
Before the storm,
in mid-August 2005, I entered Read High School in Orleans Parish. I was so tense that first day I could squeak. I had spent the previous weekend in the Orleans
Parish school board office, waiting six hours (with 45 other teachers) aiming to
get a placement in the nation’s worst school district. Imagine the bemused faces at personnel:
dozens of mostly white bourgeois Teach for America liberal arts majors—many of
them Ivy Leaguers, shining and pressed, loitering in the Orleans Parish School
Board office—all begging to be given slots the parish couldn’t give away!
Read High School
opened on Monday with a large teacher meeting.
The principal, Mr. Coleman, had oozing processed hair and “high yellow” Creole
skin. I later learned to my dismay that
in the old days of segregation, using the “paper bag rule” at Creole bars used
the, owners declared if your skin was darker than the bag you couldn’t enter. Mr. Coleman would be called “black” in
Chicago, but in New Orleans, he would point to his blue eyes and say that he
had “Indian blood.” In a 2-hour meeting
with Chief Coleman nothing was accomplished because nothing was planned. But orders were given: “Pass out dem books, y’all. Jus’ pass ‘em out. Parents wonna see dey students with
books.” These books were outdated,
abused by time and misuse. I raised my
hand: “Mr. Coleman. You want teachers to
pass out books we know the students won’t be using? What if they lose them?” “All the better,“ he
said, “They old books anyways.” This was
clearly a high-powered lesson in teaching the students responsibility and
follow-through. Modeling: a concept not yet
practiced in New Orleans Public Schools, I thought.
I discovered my
classroom tucked away, an uninhabited island, visible but hard to reach. It was unmarked on the back end of a twisted
hallway. It had no door, a broken
window—through which, it is said, the previous year’s students had escaped when
their teacher was preoccupied—and was attached to three other classes by
temporary walls one could peer through.
Of three classes, first period had 35 students, second had only one
disabled student with an aid and a wheelchair, and third had 25. The school had not made the schedules. What I mean is: When the students entered the school, they
had nowhere to go and teachers had nothing to teach them. Not many arrived and the majority of those
students who did show up were sitting in courses they’d passed or failed
already. The majority of students would
not show up until after Labor Day, two weeks later. This was an Orleans Parish tradition. From the student’s point of view, what was
the school going to do, punish them?
What could Orleans Parish Schools do that society and history hadn’t
done already?
The clocks in the
halls were broken, the hallway lights half-illuminated. Students who arrived two rooms down the hall
from me would discover a narcoleptic teacher who would fall asleep during
class, loosing his students into the hallways like forsaken spirits. With no door, I of course was blessed with
visitors. I noticed the dumpy narcoleptic
standing in the parking lot after school on that first day. Curious, I asked a security officer nearby
(holding a forbidding 2x4 John Henry style), “Why does he stand there waiting
like that?” His voice hammered: “That man can’t
drive! Not with the medication he
takes! He’s got to be picked up here
e’reday. ”
My roommate,
little more than a stranger, taught at Read as well. A bony suburban Texan who could speak in four
languages (but had little to say to me), he was placed as a Geometry teacher in
a computer lab in which students could not use the computers. After the first day of school we discovered
one broken copy machine and no student rosters or phone numbers. “How can we discipline students if we don’t know
who they are or what year they are in!?” I implored. “You got to earn dey respect,” said the
secretary. Grinning like an overfed cat
she continued, “You got to put the fear of da Lawd in ‘em.” No books, no copies, no rosters, and in one
case, no class. And I should scare the kids? They and the school were doing quite well
scaring me. A security guard walked out
of the office as I exited the door.
Though I darted for the parking lot, he threw me a roll of bus tickets
and an envelope. Many New Orleanians are
great at investing you in their work. “Here
now. Pass dese tickets out, Teach’. Make sure you get ‘xact change, y’erd
me?” Over three dozen students instantly
rushed me. I quickly doled out the
tickets, but it wasn’t fast enough. “You
new, here aint chu?” a young boy snidely croaked. I was.
I was very new here.
Even
the hollow exhausted drive home was disorienting. Read was located in New Orleans East, an area
of concrete sprawl paved over swampland.
A black middle-class escape for hopeful suburbanites after WWII which
had decayed over time, captured glibly in a cynical quip at my school, “Read
High School: The Best of the Worst.” In
those first weeks, I would start out travelling from my Uptown hovel, where
homes dated from ante-bellum’s porch-days, through blighted downtown. The highways ripped Robert Moses-style through
the middle of town and wound around the city in a congested necklace. The great mansions uptown stood beside
crumbling shotguns discarded during the “white flight” years. The streets were so Balkanized economically
that the nickname “The Northernmost Caribbean City” became a comforting comparison. In my first week living on Jackson Avenue (which
boasts the most arrests per-capita in the city) we met our neighbor priests who
lived next to pornographer white-supremacists adjacent to the site of a recent
murder. The first school week’s sleep
wouldn’t have been so bad if the homeless men hadn’t broken in to sleep on our
couch or if the supremacists hadn’t incessantly hinted to my roommates and me
about the white man “sticking together” in the face of the encroaching “mud
people.” Nights at “home” were little escape
from the wild days at Read.
I
had evacuated west with some friends of Teach for America—now my closest
acquaintances in New Orleans. Calamity
can facilitate friendships. What can I
say about the storm? It happened. It ripped across the city and tore off
patches of Superdome’s rooftop. Enormous
shafts of light dropped into the Dome over the tired faces huddled inside. Exposed.
Those left in New Orleans were now exposed to the world and the elements. Since my school was in the now drowned New
Orleans East I looked for my kids’ faces on the news. Where were my kids? One student gave me a TLC medallion he wore
with his name etched on the back. I made
the students trade something with me if I permitted them to go to the
bathroom. He never came back to
class. I held it as I watched the
news.
After
the storm, thousands of the displaced traveled across the country in search of
temporary housing with dizzying speed, flummoxing principals and teachers alike. The majority, including myself, landed in the
River Parishes outside the city. As if
admitting in hundreds of students from the pre and post-Katrina mess of New
Orleans and taking the academic hit for their abysmally low scores were not enough
for a parish, the next hurdles were personal.
They were the matter of bewildering classroom logistics: What could I do with 40 students and 20
desks? How could I teach those 40
students in 20 desks when the students’ varied abilities ranged from second
grade literacy to post-high school? How
do I live with myself, failing over and over again a student like Kristen, who
misses class in this, her senior year, because she has to raise her brother and
sister after her parents vanished after the flood? Or if a senior who read on a third-grade
level said he had all his credits—Orleans parish only had paper files, no digital—who
could argue otherwise?
I borrowed
classrooms to teach in. As if adding
insult to injury as a “Katrina teacher,” I “floated” to different classes each
period. Sleeping on a couch in the
living room of a rented house wasn’t too bad.
I was the last hired and I knew dozens of my students had been going
through much worse. But the borrowed
clothing, lack of textbooks, teaching two different subjects, and the state-mandated
bi-weekly 90-minute Monday drive to a three-hour Baton Rouge class
caused more than a few drinks to be poured.
Of
the 400 and more students displaced after the storm the majority returned to
New Orleans. Again and again I heard: “I ain’ never goin back deh. Them niggas was killin’ one another. I ain tryin to git shot, no.” But return they did, hundreds, and thousands
of them. “Home” and “Community” do mean
something. The time of loss seemed only
to reaffirm the irrational love for a place that had yielded these families
nothing. Sam Harris quoted recently a
study saying that 98% of people in Orleans Parish believed in a personal God
and the statistics after Katrina only reaffirmed faith in the Lord’s mercy. Roads still resembled the rough side of the
Khyber Pass, schools opened and shut like night blooms, and the city’s
corruption would make the Duvaliers wince.
The wards’ tribal mentality runs deep and schools like Read, which now
had fixed-up walls and classes, re-opened in 2006 without much systemic change. I never returned for my materials in my room. It was just one of a series of stops between
a new “here” and “there” that I left behind.
In truth, my
troubles adapting to others’ poverty and adversity are pygmy in scale next to
the elephantine hardships dozens of my students like Kristen survived and are
still enduring. I remember Ezra, a quiet
kid, with dark eyes and a dark mood. I
think of him sitting on a bench at lunch, knowing no one, saying nothing,
looking nowhere, and failing my English class.
He always shook his head with pity and smiled at me, my antics to induce
his laughter and engagement was fruitless.
I remember him there on that forlorn bench because he never spoke to
anyone, ever. Day after day he would
brood in the shadowy corner. One day
after suggesting counselors, I called his mother and asked, “What’s the deal
with Ezra?” Before the storm, his father
died of a heart attack. After his house
flooded, Ezra made his way uptown with his mother to Carrolton Avenue—famous
for its palm trees and department stores, where the white Mommas would shop in
the 1950s wearing white gloves. But the
water never stopped and Ezra hid in a car that sank before he escaped towards
the Superdome. Ezra was 15 and living in
a trailer.
Maybe
humans adapt to anything. Maybe kids
like Ezra will move into homes and will be unaffected years to come. Perhaps they will live thanking the good Lord
for the little they have left and decidedly work with their families to be
“economically viable” with the new faces in their reformed communities. Maybe.
Maybe all of these memories are just idle scribbling, a form of hiding. Observing
the fragility of my recent communities, the temporality of a “home”, even those
considered the most aged and supposedly secure, has been like an invisible hand
drawing back the veil of security around comforting illusions—the truth that we
are safe and valued and free, or that we are part of a secure and stable
community of people that will long endure.
The world of the sons will not be the world of their fathers. If the nightmare of New Orleans has taught us
anything, it has been to abandon the comfort of such illusions.
[1]
Lafitte Projects: Housing projects of 6th ward. Destroyed during post-Katrina flood. Named for Jean Lafitte (ca. 1776 – ca. 1823) a pirate and privateer in the
Gulf of Mexico in the early 19th century;
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