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For many of us here in New Orleans, hurricane season never went away. Just two weeks ago, a storm landed right in front of my house. Clouds began collecting two Thursday ago over City Hall. A watchdog organization arrived at a City Council meeting with about 30 activists asking to make a presentation, whereupon they gave over an hour’s worth of testimony on police abuse and corruption since the hurricane. They reported cases such as a police officer taking several immigrant workers hostage at his home and forcing them at gunpoint to do construction work for over ten hours without pay; of public strip and cavity searches of detainees by the NOPD in broad daylight in front of the neighborhood; of a growing trend of “charge bargaining” where an officer arrests a person, then offers to write a weak report that won’t stick – for a fee. A college student from the Midwest volunteering for local clinic told of being arrested for questioning a cop he saw abusing a civilian. The volunteer was then taken in place of the previous detainee, held for several hours, and made to ‘overhear’ cops plotting to shoot him in the back and dump him in the river.
In the last five months, almost 200 cops have been fired, resigned, or are under investigation for stealing, abandoning their post, and other misconduct during the flood, this on the heels of a termination of 300 cops back in 2000 during a corruption crackdown. With the bad cop firings and civilian criminals being driven out by the flood, New Orleanians were optimistic that our city had been purged of its worst criminal element. But these horrific accounts confirmed that the NOPD is still terribly diseased. And murders and theft cases are on the rise again in the N.O. again. The report was like a terminal diagnosis for New Orleans – the cancer is back now, in a more aggressive form –sociopathic lymphoma.
I tried to put the council meeting out of my mind and focus on work. That following Saturday, I went to cover a story on the Ninth Ward Homeowners Association meeting. Their testimonies were even more tragic than the police report.
Black senior citizens strained their voices in outrage after hearing the Federal/State/FEMA reimbursement option for their homes: a buyout at their pre-Katrina value, about $50K for these homes, which will buy you nowhere anyplace else in New Orleans, as home prices have soared in the tiny, unflooded areas of town. To add insult, 57% of the Ninth Ward are homeowners and the majority of them had already paid off their mortgages. Now these property owners, many of them in their 60’s and older, are devastated at the prospect of having to start all over again with a house note, an impossibility for most of them on their fixed income.
Their houses are destroyed as a result of faulty federally engineered levees, the tribe they’ve known for generations blasted to the four corners of the earth, and the government shrugs and hands them a ‘take it or leave it’ option. Seeing these senior citizens racking their brains, trying to figure out a way to hold together the most fundamental pieces of their lives, friends, family, memories, history, hope, all seeping through their fingers like water, is nothing short of heartbreaking.
Catatonic and unable to take even the most basic notes, I finally decided to give up the meeting. It was cold and gray when I stepped outside the Holy Angels Church. New Orleans looked like she was about to break down too. By the time I turned the corner onto my block, the hurricane made landfall. That I even finished parallel parking before the storm ripped through me is a small miracle.
I’m mad at everyone. I’m mad at New Orleans for letting herself get so flabby and weak with political corruption that the feds don’t feel obligated to take our suffering seriously. I’m mad at these Red State people who truly believe in George Bush, regardless of contrary evidence. I’m mad at people who blog online about not wanting their tax dollars to go towards rebuilding our city. I’m mad at anything that moves right now. I’m mad at feeling so helpless and overwhelmed and without answers. I’m mad there’s no superwoman cape with powers to match my desire to put together the pieces of these shattered lives, to remove every tear with super-strength absorbent pillows, to erase this nightmare from our collective conscious, wind the clock back, and hold it at August 25th – before any of us ever heard of a hurricane named Katrina.
And then, I crossed a bridge.
Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Bill Cosby came to town the following week to rally us around voting rights for our displaced. I went, begrudgingly - I was supposed to write a story about it but I was just too shut down to care anymore, drained by corrupt cops and political pharaohs whose hearts are hard, and the way New Orleanians, and Black people in specific, have been discarded by our government. I sat in the crowd, detached from the star-studded speeches and activist pageantry on stage, holding a bottle of water and a shrimp po-boy, waiting to walk that bridge.
Once they opened the bridge blockade, I whizzed through the 2,000 plus crowd and made my way to the on-ramp. My feet were suddenly powered by some strange second wind as I marched towards the tremendous bridge. Before I realized it, I’d left Jackson, Sharpton, and Mayor Nagin way behind, not good considering I needed quotes and photos for my story. But I forged ahead anyway, compelled by an unnamed-as-of-yet stirring inside.
It was baking hot, but only about a third of the burn you feel at the end of Louisiana’s Augusts, that same month last year when Blacks New Orleanians ran across this bridge hoping to be rescued from the flood, but where stopped instead by Gretna cops, guns drawn and dogs ready, who terrorized the civilians for several days before they managed to escape the city.
That bridge held yet another tragic story. But somehow my heart, in her infinite wisdom, decided rather than deflecting the pain, to open up and take it all in. My feet walking in the shoes of my neighbors on the GNO Bridge somehow pushed me through my dark stormy sorrow over to the other side.
And I noticed the sun for the first time in two weeks.
During my lone march, I met John, an activist from the Treme neighborhood. He made me laugh, took my mind off ‘The Struggle’. At the end of the march, we decided to shake the closing ceremony and take the ferry back home to New Orleans.
Walking through Gretna and into Algiers, we passed a fish market. John suggested we reward our civil rights efforts with a bag of crawfish – a brilliant idea! We got five pounds of crawfish, four turkey necks, requisite newspapers, and walked down the block to a little corner juke joint. When we entered, the bartender gave us and our bag of crawfish a ‘look’, then nodded ‘O.K’. We ordered cold beers from her and took a table next to the slots machine, spread newspapers across our table, and poured out a Louisiana feast.
Sitting on the old school red leather stools under the cool air conditioner, we sucked, snapped, guzzled, and coughed from the spice, listening to drunk regulars debate issues they’ll never resolve, as B.B. King and his guitar wailed in the background.
We left the bar and headed down the back road towards the ferry, passing spooky, old-fashioned Victorian homes with elderly ladies sitting on their front porches, waving at us. We passed Blain Kern’s ‘Mardi Gras World’, the carnival float factory with a giant Michael Jackson looming in the entrance, and laughed about Kern’s upcoming ‘Mardi Gras Party 2007’ happening…NEXT WEEK.
At the ferry dock, we watched helicopters fly over the river, pulling victims from the water. Thank God for Denzel, over there somewhere on the New Orleans’ side of the river, rehearsing his lines, injecting a much needed cash infusion into our city with this new movie of his – Deja Vu.
If the irony here doesn’t kill us, we’ll all be Iron Man ready by the end this!
Watching art imitating life, it suddenly dawned on me – one of the things that makes New Orleans so remarkable is her ability to make fun of her pain. She believes in celebrating to spite a hard knock life. Maybe dancing when someone dies is the most brilliant thing you can do. Could it be that the antidote to the poison in our struggle is – to celebrate? At that moment, I remembered the high school student I interviewed from New Hampshire who gave up a week of her youth to come down and gut wet plaster from our homes. “I see why New Orleans needs Mardi Gras,” she said. “You need time to unwind. If you just did this all the time, you wouldn’t make it to the next day. You’d just be too sad.”
From the mouth of babes…
Deborah Cotton is a freelance journalist and public speaker based in New Orleans, covering on-the-ground stories of the city’s recovery and chronicling the rebuilding efforts of the historic Ninth Ward. She can be reached at Deborah.cotton@gmail.com