A week in New Orleans

We rolled up to St. Mary of the Angels school early on a Sunday afternoon, April 23rd. I was elated to be out of the car after a too-eventful trip from San Francisco that took almost five days. As far as that goes, all I can say is: don’t get pulled over in Texas. The entrance of the school was occupied by mainly white volunteers eating lunch, a somewhat blasé (or exhausted) looking group of twenty-somethings, overlapping shades of hippie/anarchist/hip-hop aesthetics, with a couple of older black men on the periphery, eating their lentils amidst quiet conversation. Enthusiastic and hungry, I greet a few people on my way to the kitchen, my long-anticipated (well, for me) arrival raising hardly a brow. Good, good, I thought – what was I expecting, a welcome wagon?

Sitting on the school steps eating, some announcements are made: a crew is being pulled together to caravan with the 20-ft Ryder truck to go pick up food for distribution. I’m eager to jump into things so I run and clean my plate, and after checking with my co-pilot to make sure my stuff was ok in the car, I jump into the back of a pick-up just as it’s taking off to points unknown. Cruising through New Orleans East, past surreal-but-expected scenes of light destruction, torn-up roofs and Burger King signs, 12-foot high water marks on highway bridge pillars, abandoned industrial zones and the occasional stranded car, I make the acquaintance of some work-mates...

When we get to the parking lot of the St. Mary Queen of Vietnam compound we find pallets and pallets of food that had been sitting there—some of it protected from the sun by a tarp, some of it not—since the flood over seven months previous. I hear the crew leader telling someone that the donors (dumpers?) of this "aid" had specifically requested it not be distributed by the organization I was volunteering with, for reasons I have yet to discover. (Could it have something to do with the fact that this Roman Catholic church was started by refugees from Communist Vietnam and the organization I was working with was co-founded by a Black Panther?) The young woman who greets us informs us that her church has been very busy fighting the construction (now underway)of a nearby landfill for Katrina debris that threatened to pollute the surrounding area and nearby waterways (Story at http://www.nolarises.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1758) She says that her church is very happy to finally get rid of this stuff.

In any case, a lot of this "food" was extremely unappetizing fare to begin with—cheez-its, squeeze tubes of preserved jelly, vacuum-packed juice-drink (10% juice!), toaster-pastries, canned fatty meat products—and I vowed to track down a microbiologist who could tell me what happens to such items when left in the sun for months on end. I rationalized to myself that it probably hadn't been that hot here until recently, and that with all those preservatives the stuff was probably fine. But when one of my adventurous work-mates decided to crack open a can of sausage and beans and test it out I politely refused a taste.

Later that evening, my work crew is established after a brief orientation by a tall soft-spoken young man who I’m sure I saw playing hacky-sack on some quad somewhere. After bedding down in a corner of a third floor classroom I wake up at 6:30 to a sing-song sunshine voice and go downstairs in search of coffee and carbs. That day our crew heads over to the lower 9th Ward to gut a house. The neighborhood is totally devastated, and its incredible that there are people rebuilding there. The images on TV are nothing. (There are signs posted around saying "Not as seen on TV", someone else has spray-painted "Baghdad" everywhere.) Words won't do it justice, block after block of houses and cars upside-down and inside-out, no electricity, no clean water, and usually not a soul.
The structural soundness of the house we gutted was questionable.
But sometimes gutting is necessary in order to make an accurate assessment of this, so I didn't feel like I was wasting my time. The house was brick and hadn't moved in the flood, but the insides were wrecked. We were tearing out almost everything and digging into six inches of muck on collapsed floors.

The owner of the house didn't have flood insurance (even though he lived on Flood Street!), and only got $10,000 from FEMA. He said you only got extra money if they determined you could rebuild your house, and if they said it wasn't possible you got nothing. Still, he is one of the luckier ones who were able to evacuate to somewhere not too far away, from where he and his son can come back to work on the house. As we know, most people without their own transportation had no control at all over where they were placed, and now find themselves unable to return (even after the national guard stopped preventing them from doing so at gunpoint). So there we were carrying out his 96-year old grandmother's baggies of fabric strips and tax-returns and perfume bottles and wigs. She survived the flood but died soon after, "from all the moving around" he said, and he said many old people died similarly. Later, I hear stories of old folks coming back to these destroyed areas and soon dying "of a broken heart." I have no doubt that these stories are true. The owner of the Flood St. house says he is planning on moving out eventually but he'll have to convince his wife who is set on staying. He says his wife cannot come to the house without crying. That afternoon, when I see the private rescue and recovery teams with their dogs, still looking for dead bodies that the government search overlooked (as of this writing there are still officially about a thousand people missing, see: http://www.dhh.louisiana.gov/offices/miscdocs/docs-192/Still_Missing/StillMissing_4032006.htm) I can almost imagine the degree of trauma a resident might experience seeing this, after months of overt abandonment of these neighborhoods by government officials on every level...

My next few days are spent hanging sheet-rock at a Baptist church restored by Common Ground and excavating the library at the now-famous Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. This is the school that 9th ward residents had to defend from bulldozers in order to keep one of the few remaining New Orleans public schools that have not been privatized or charter-ized by the state of Louisiana, who now controls the local school system. I heard one resident describe this scheme as a "brain drain," where lower-achieving youth are left behind by competitive schools with their own admission standards, concerned mainly with the money they are rewarded for higher test scores.

By the time my crew gets there, most of the ground floor has already been cleared, school trophies and an assortment of black history posters, a bust of Martin Luther King, have been collected and put aside on the floor near the front entrance. There is a water mark—not where the flood was highest, but marking a level that the water must have stood for some time—just above the height of the highest trophies. The highest water mark can be seen just below the second floor, about 20 ft. high. When they first broke into the school they found fish in the stairwell. We find mainly brick-heavy moldy books, mud, drowned computers. Somehow a crow had found its way into the library. I carry the corpse out to the grassy divider along Claiborne St. and bury it. After three days of shoveling and scraping and chiseling and wrecking, the school is almost ready for decontamination and reconstruction. I try to imagine the hallways full of kids again, but I can’t quite imagine it yet. Maybe its because of the Tyvek suit and heavy duty respirator I’m wearing. Or maybe it’s because hurricane season is just around the corner and the levees have not been rebuilt.

The most difficult thing to think about in New Orleans is the long-term viability of a city under sea-level in a hurricane zone. We know that, incredible as it is that a city was built here in the first place, the mouth of the Mississippi, with all of the commerce that comes through it, makes the location inevitable too. And of course, not all neighborhoods in New Orleans are equally vulnerable, and of course it is no accident that the burden of the disaster has fallen on poor people, especially African-Americans and American Indians. In my gut, I know that the ultimate demand should be not just the right to return to this area but the right to live in safe, clean neighborhoods, with full participation in their governance and equal access to satisfying work, to livelihoods that benefit whole communities of people and not just the few owners and bosses that are already attempting to re-design the physical and social composition of the city to maximize efficiency and, of course, profit. So is the "right to return" a provisional demand? When do we move beyond such demands?

On the morning of the 29th I wake up naturally, luckily, with the sun shining through the window of the classroom where I’ve bedded down for the past week. A guy named Germ who was "on security" said he would wake me, but I guess I hadn’t had much confidence in that. I leave New Orleans knowing that I have to somehow stay involved in this, that this "natural" disaster is in fact more of a social disaster, the disaster of American justice, part of the long historical disasters of slavery, racism, private property, Social Darwinism, capitalism. What is going on now in New Orleans are defining moments, ones that will well predict our near future and the potential we do or do not have to transform our world. I would encourage anyone who can find the time to find out more and participate in this effort, a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement, a reounding echo of the deep-felt energies of Radical Reconstruction.