It's a bright Sunday morning in New Orleans, the kind that instantly warms a chilled and sleepy face with golden rays. But today is not a day for steamy coffee and crinkly news. We sit on a concrete stoop in a mostly empty and boarded-up neighborhood in the upper 9th ward, waiting for our volunteer coordinator to drop off the key for 1317 Feliciana. Few residents have moved back since the levees broke and the flood washed out their houses, and we are here to help clean up. Across the street, two black women linger in the pleasant morning. One wears a boxy pink gingham frock, the other, black sweats and a headscarf the color of mermaid scales. They motion us over.
"What color do ya'll think?" The woman in pink shows us some paint chips. "I wanna paint my house. Somethin' happy, somethin' sunny. I like this one. ‘Corn Gold.' It's a good color, don't ya'll think?"
We look at the chips and nod. "That's a nice one," I agree. The woman in pink shares her stories from the flood-- how she watched the water rise, how she moved up to the attic, how she punched through her roof to reach air as the Mississippi rushed in, and pieces of her home rushed out.
"Yeah, that's how it was. Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah." Her friend says little, just a few validating remarks and shakes of the head. When she parts her lips, a solid row of metal-capped front teeth shimmer.
"I seen people down here dying. Dyin' from the water and mold, yeah, but not just that. Plain dyin' from grief. I lost so many friends from grief, so many." She shakes her head. We don't know what to say, so we examine the strips of yellow shades again and say that, yeah, that one there is the happiest hue.
"Yeah, that is a nice color, huh? Thanks, sweeties. I just wanna come home, you know? I want my community back here, too."
The key arrives, and we thank the women for their stories. "No, thank ya'll. God bless you for being down here. Really. We ‘preciate it so much. God bless ya'll."
Katharine, Annelle, Morgan, Steve and I fly from Walla Walla, Washington, to New Orleans to volunteer for a week. It is only our first day, but I am overwhelmed and already feel like I need a break. Flying into the city, I notice that only streetlights, no building lights, illuminate the city into grids, and as our taxi driver navigates through the 9th ward, my airborne suspicion proves correct-- there are no house lights on. Street after street, houses are boarded up. Even though we arrive on Saint Patrick's Day, no one is celebrating outside; the mythic perpetual party isn't part of this urban landscape. Each house is spray-painted with a large X and TFW. We learn the meanings later; TFW stands for Toxic Flood Water, and each quadrant of the X reveals information about the house. The top quadrant is for the date the house was searched; the left quadrant, the group that did the search; the right quadrant, the obstacles in the house; and the bottom quadrant, how many bodies or animals were found inside.
We gut a house, pick up debris, and till new beds in a community garden through the volunteer organization Common Ground, which offers housing and food in exchange for work. Our housing for the week is in a classroom on the third floor-- the only floor that wasn't flooded-- of Saint Mary of the Angels Catholic Middle School in the upper 9th ward. When we arrive, the room is full of sleeping volunteers. By the rays of moonlight streaming through big school windows, I examine the classroom. Cutouts of famous African American scholars border the chalkboards. My inflatable mattress is halfway deflated and fuzzy with dust. A chalkboard at the far end of the room is covered in writing, but I can only read the words in caps at the bottom. "THEY LEFT US HERE TO DIE." I tiptoe between bodies to get closer. A group of local residents had taken refuge in the school, because it was the only building in the neighborhood that wasn't completely submerged. The U.S. Coast Guard saw the residents waving from the large classroom windows, but didn't come to help. They were abandoned, left crying for help.
In the morning, we don full-body, blue polypropylene suits, respirator masks, goggles, and rubber boots in preparation for gutting a house, so the owners will soon be able to move back. A safety talk in the morning reminds us of what we need to be careful about: black mold, asbestos, toxic flood water, rusty nails, moldy ceilings falling on our heads, brown recluse spiders, and staph infections. My stomach tightens and I miss the safety of home. I want to feel happy to help out, want to be strong, but I'm pissed that I have to do this work. Shouldn't the government be doing this? A year and a half after hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the following floods, shouldn't the entire city be more cleaned up, not just the wealthy neighborhoods? Hurricane Rita hit 3 1/2 weeks after Katrina, keeping much of the city flooded for nearly 6 1/2 weeks. I'm shocked about the destruction, debris, and despair that still remain. I didn't see this on the news at home. Before Katrina, New Orleans housed 484,674 people, but in July 2006, the population was down to around 250,000. Neighborhoods are deserted, houses boarded up, and debris is still everywhere, a year and a half later. In the back of a truck, driving through the city to our worksite, spray paint messages flash by. Dog left. Come home Marvin, we miss you. 1 person found. TFW. TFW. TFW.
Perhaps there is still so much destruction because the city government wants some of this land—yellow notices tacked along doors in the lower 9th ward warn absent residents that they have 30 days to clean up their houses, or else. If your lawn is not manicured, if there is trash in your yard, or if your house is a threat to public safety and you don't do anything about it in the next 30 days, the city will demolish your home and seize your land. The mayor wants to bulldoze the lower 9th ward so moneymaking casinos can bloom. So the five of us pull out clovers and pick up trash to give the displaced people who can't afford to come back a chance to keep their houses.
1317 Feliciana was someone's home, maybe someone's everything. Maybe a little boy and girl played tag or hide and seek in this home. Maybe the neighbors came over for Sunday brunch. I want to take a step back, want to breathe deeply, meditate on what we are about to do, but my respirator mask only allows a certain amount of air per breath, and workers from my team already have their arms full of the household goods, ready for dumping on the street. We take out everything. School books, moldy couches, newspapers, tax receipts, a white ceramic toilet and sink, buckets of paint, a roll of barbed wire, armfuls of undistinguishable moldy stuff, kitchen utensils, wallpaper covered in black mold, paintings that once hung on walls, a full length mirror, a pale blue teddy bear, boxes of clothing, shoes, an orange thermos, cabinets, plaster walls, horizontal wooden strips between supporting beams, molding around windows and doors, a fuzzy Santa hat. With sledgehammers, a found golf club, and shovels we beat the house down, rusty nails flying everywhere. One hits and breaks a hanging chandelier, crashing down glass and toxic floodwater on Katharine. This is ridiculous. We should be wearing hard hats. I call Adrian, our volunteer coordinator, to ask for hats, but he just laughs. They don't have enough.
Thank god for music. Across the street, two men are cleaning out their duplex and pumping out the latest R&B hits at full volume. Around 3p.m. they take a break and invite us over to their steps.
"Ya'll wanna have some barbeque?" one man hollers from across the way.
"What?" I'm still in whacking mode.
"Ya'll aren't ‘fraid of black people food, are ya?"
"Hah, no of course not," I respond quickly, slightly shocked. I toss a piece of window molding onto the reusable woodpile. "You have some barbeque over there?"
"Yeah, com'on over."
We untie our respirators and lift our sweaty goggles over our heads. The guys have prepared us a feast of barbequed chicken wings, sausage, white bread, bottled water, and beer.
"Wow! Thank you so much. This is so generous!" I exclaim.
"That's southern hospitality for ya. We ain't got much, but what we got, we share."
At the end of each day, 1317 Feliciana is emptied out into four piles on the street-- reusable wood, paint containers and other toxics, trash and debris, and photographs the family asked us to save. An old box of slides is full of wedding and nature images. We save a taxi driver license plate, a painting of a roaring panther, a fur and silk vest, and a yearbook. Before we leave, we bring the items back into the house so they will not be carried away, and arrange them on the bare floorboards. That's all that's left. A small still life in a hollow home.
It takes our crew of eleven members three full days, working 9 to 5, to gut the one-bedroom, single-story house. I have a new appreciation for what makes a home.
There's still life here. Noisy festivities down the street lure us to take another break. Today is Saint Joseph's Day, and a man dressed up as an Indian shakes his feathers and stomps his feet to tambourines and drums on the potholed street. New Orleansians grasp any excuse to celebrate. Call and answer songs belt from the wrinkly throats of two old black men. Girls' clothing sparkles from rhinestone designs and heels provide distance from gutter trash. We tromp up to the celebration in our heavy boots and blueberry suits, eager to experience some New Orleans culture. After chatting with a friendly woman about Saint Joseph's Day, we pull our masks back over our eyes and head back towards 1317. She turns to us with a last comment. "It was nice talking to ya'll. White and black folks don't talk much down here in New Orleans."
New Orleans is still very segregated, which may be why white and black folks don't interact much here. The poor are primarily black; the rich are white. The rich folks in the French quarter live 13 feet above sea level; the black folks are mostly underwater, still swimming. But now, much of the black population has been scattered around the country, with no means of returning home. Many were forced at gunpoint to get on busses and leave. Free volunteer labor like ours and cheap Mexican labor are now brought in to clean and rebuild the city.
But why rebuild a city that lies below sea level? Are the homes worth saving, when they might be flooded again? The levees broke in 1956 with Hurricane Flossy, and Hurricane Betsy led to catastrophic flooding in 1965. It could easily happen again. If homes are rebuilt on the Mississippi flood plains, an organized evacuation plan must be in place, and the levees need to be stronger. Hurricane Katrina was partially a man-made disaster. There were no plans to help the elderly, disabled, or people without cars or the means for transportation to leave the city. So they just waited for the storm to hit. The US Army Corps of Engineers knew that the levees were not strong enough, so in 2005 they asked Congress for money to rebuild them. Congress rejected the proposal-- that money was needed for Iraq. We continue to rebuild another country while neglecting our own.
Thousands of roofs are still blanketed in blue tarps, concealing punched-out holes left by souls trying to escape rising floodwater. New Orleans now has the highest per capita crime rate in the country, and residents watch as their neighbors and loved ones die from grief.
But don't worry, the neon lights on Bourbon Street are plugged in and flashing. White men in business suits and college boys on spring break wander from bars to gentlemen's clubs, holding dollar beers, admiring photos of naked women on the sides of buildings. Drink your hand grenades, get a lap dance, listen to some real Dixieland jazz, flash your boobs for beads-- the N'awlins you know and love is still alive. On Saint Patrick's Day, cabbages and carrots are thrown into Bourbon Street, into the slippery beer rivers of green, gold, and purple beaded necklaces. When the parade is over, inmates from the nearby prison sweep the streets.
This city of Delta blues and Dixieland jazz is often called The Big Easy for its relaxed party laws and its historical status as one of the cheapest places in the U.S. to live. The 9th ward is one of the first neighborhoods where blacks could own homes after slavery. Because of the easy-going carefree nature of its residents, New Orleans is also known as The City that Care Forgot.
"How can we get home?"
Living in trailer parks as far away as Seattle, many New Orleansians are asking this. They want to come back to this spectacular city, want to see their families again, want to chat with their neighbors and sing with their friends, want to stroll down streets of brightly-colored houses, want to sit on their porches in the hot summer evenings and sip ice water and coke, want to fill their bellies with catfish and shrimp Po' Boys, potato salad, coleslaw, and cornbread that melts on your tongue. With its unique spirit and diverse cultures, New Orleans instantly intrigued me. More than any other city I've ever visited in the U.S., I felt a deep connection to this place-- after only a week. I can't imagine what it must mean to the residents who have lived here for generation upon generation to see their homes lost.
But some people don't want to come home. I wouldn't either, if I had struggled to stay afloat as my house disappeared under 30 feet of toxic water beneath me. I question what we are actually doing down here. Who will come back? The poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free, the Mexican workers? While the rich folk sit high on the hills, sipping cosmopolitans from their balconies, the poor are forced to live on floodplains. This is the geography of poverty in the U.S. As ice caps melt and New Orleans sinks, the poor everywhere will be the first to feel the effects. Bourbon Street, 13 feet high, avoided major damage and sparkles now, but our friends in the 9th ward struggle with the effects of Katrina daily. As the black working class was pushed out, Mexican immigrants flowed in. Home will never be the same.
What will happen to the men who shared sticky chicken wings with us? Will the woman in her Sunday dress have a chance to paint her house Corn Gold before Feliciana floods again? Will the owners of 1317 Feliciana actually move back?
On our last day, the five of us rent a car and drive south on Highway 23. We want to see the country, so we head to the southernmost tip of Louisiana, to Venice, that small dot on the glove compartment map at the base of the Mississippi delta. Delta blues. Big brass band blues. And the trumpet goes doo dat un do dat, doo dat un da ba dat. We glide past old sugarcane plantations, orange orchards, endless dusty gravel roads lined with shady plains trees, past mansions and shacks, hurricane-damaged homes and overturned fishing boats, past black mountains of coal and white cylinders of oil, past FEMA trailer parks and schools on stilts, past a closed Cajun Boiled Peanuts and Christmas Collectibles stand, until Highway 23 ends. A gravel road leads us past a ship graveyard and shrimp factory. Bayous surround us as we drive out onto a narrow strip of land, through murky water concealing alligators and hurricane debris. We are separated from the Gulf of Mexico only by patches of wet islands spotted with scraggly trees. I've never seen a bayou before, and it is strange to me-- like a flood, like a flooded forest. A lone black man, the first person we have seen in awhile, has stopped to enjoy the balmy Friday afternoon. He is sitting in a lawn chair, fishing pole in hand.
"You catching anything?" I slow the car and roll down the window. The air is thick and hot.
"Nope, not yet." He turns and squints into the sun.
"Whatcha fishing for?"
"Whateva will bite," he replies with a crooked smile as he adjusts his moss-colored cap.
"Is Venice down the road this way?" I gesture ahead.
He chuckles. "Naw, ya'll passed Venice already. That way down there," he tilts his head towards the road in front of us, "that down there is the end of the world."
"Yep," he says once more, still grinning. "That's the end of the world." He settles back into the crackly lawn chair and waits for a tug on his line.
Venice was hit hard. Street posts poke their way through the bayou, slanted trees to an inattentive eye. Everything here is tilted; there is no plane of reference but the water. Driving back, we stop at a run-down gas station that still sells chips and candy bars. We eat Cajun-flavored cheetos and try to digest all that we've seen. But it can't be organized. The disaster is still so much a part of life here. They are like jazz, these thoughts and images and unanswered questions. Like houses in piles in the middle of the street. For now the most we can do is try and distinguish what is trash, what is toxic, what can be reused, and what should be saved. I grab my box of colorful images and board a plane, headed back to my safe, clean home on a hill.
I wish I could paint New Orleans yellow. Not Bourbon Street gold, not sickly yellow, not cheap hamburger bun yellow, not dehydrated urine yellow, not underwater yellow. I want to paint New Orleans Corn Gold, the color of happiness. The color of a home in the sun.