I am a senior high school student at a progressive. independent school in Western Massachusetts.
Last week, I had the tremendous experience of visiting New Orleans up close and personal, with my entire school. We did community service, talked to politicians, organizers, radicals, developers, and locals, wrote, filmed, and photographed our time there, and brought it home with us to share.
My time there left me deeply moved and concerned. The city is in shock, and its people are suffering. There is no money and no plan; basic services such as electricity, water, and heat are nonexistent for many. There is much contention over what to do, but all agree that if New Orleans is to be rebuilt, the work must start in earnest NOW.
I wrote this to raise awareness, to provoke dialogue, and to deal with my own thoughts and feelings about this city, one of our oldest and most precious, which is now dying in front of us. Plaese comment and leave your own thoughts, insights, experiences and impressions. Thank you very much.
New Orleans is not wired for simmering rage or despair; the popular anchors of the city have traditionally been the flamboyant outbursts of joy and catharsis: jazz, Mardi Gras, Carnival. The food, the clothing, the architecture: it all bespeaks a sensuous, Epicurean stance on life and life’s attendant travails. Thus the wounds of Hurricane Katrina are not immediately apparent. From the viewpoint of the French Quarter, or indeed most of downtown, the storm has been visually forgotten. No signs or monuments mark out the extent of the destruction, one must venture well out into the surrounding neighborhoods to find these things. The mill of tourism, the last profitable industry left standing after the flood, grinds ceaselessly on to the tune of canned and recycled jazz music pouring out of every theme bar on Bourbon Street. But this is more than a facade, or a purely cynical marketing scheme. This unique cultural milieu was in the fabric of the city’s self-image long before the cottage industry of imitation French markets and pre-made beignet mixes popped up to exploit it. Moreover, the staunchest defenders of this New Orleans, the Afro-Caribbean Paris of its hey-day, were always its own native residents, who gave the town its many names, The Crescent City, The City That Care Forgot, The Big Easy.
Despite its slowly crumpling social infrastructure, New Orleans consistently rated itself very highly on satisfaction indicators for urban quality of life. The reasons for this can be seen with just a short walk out of the Quarter, across North Rampart Street, its traditional northern boundary. Welcome to Treme (pronounced: "tre-MAY"), America’s oldest African-American neighborhood, and one of its poorest. The toll of Katrina makes itself strongly felt here. Row upon row of dilapidated houses sag onto their foundations. Most are either boarded up or gutted; many have remained untouched since August 29th, 2005. Just to the west are the Iberville projects, a complex of red brick public housing units that were notorious for their crime and general disrepair before Katrina. Now they too sit vacant, slated for demolition by a city government that has neither the money nor, many residents charge, the inclination to repair them.
But these grim statistics hide a much more intangible yet compelling fact: For many, these streets were a home that no other could ever be. New Orleans had far higher rates of black homeownership than anywhere else in the nation. Most had remained in the family for generations, some from the early days of Reconstruction. Furthermore, the architecture of Treme, and of the whole city, was and is astonishing, especially given the racial and economic classes that it catered to. Looking at the industrial-chic style of low-income housing that has dominated America’s urban landscapes in the postwar era, New Orleans has clearly resisted the urge to restrict its well-built, attractive housing to the most wealthy of its citizens. As a fellow student observed on our visit, "They don’t look like the kind of houses that poor people own". All the disparate threads of the city’s heritage shows up in its houses: from mini Victorian and Colonial imitations to Dutch townhouse rows and a turreted lime-green concoction that looked like someone’s idea of Caribbean Gothic, New Orleans has it all. Even the Ninth Ward, with its plantation era "shotgun houses", offered decent, attractive living space. For many poor blacks, and many poor folk in general, this was far better than they could get anywhere else. So they stayed, and brought their families, putting down roots deep into the sandy floodplain on which they sat, surrounded by water on all sides.
People of all nationalities and backgrounds have come to New Orleans for centuries. French Acadians, kicked out of Canada by the victorious British in the French and Indian War; Spanish settlers who laid claim to Louisiana for much of the 18th century; Irish, and later, Italians, who came as part of the great immigrant waves of the 1800s. They all came bearing recipes for the food of their homeland, the distant strains and rhythms of the music from their childhood, the clothes, the languages, the accents, the colors, the religions. Many of them stayed, many moved on. But New Orleans soaked it up all the same, and as this bizarre stew coalesced, its natural heirs were the slaves, the freedmen, the slave children. The reason black people see New Orleans as uniquely theirs is because, for the longest time, they had nowhere else to go.
When you are tied to a place for long enough, it has as much of a hold on you as any fellow human. Congo Square, where embryonic blues and jazz were birthed, was the only place in America where slaves were allowed to dance and sing on Sundays; in essence, to be themselves. Where else could they have gone? The freedom of movement is a precious but little understood phenomenon of life, the means - economic, social, psychological - to simply move on. Black people have routinely been denied this freedom, at first outright and then through the long metaphysical construction that was Jim Crow. They had to construct their own community, with its own set of understandings, its own culture, to make survival possible, even when living on someone else’s land by someone else’s rules. New Orleans was the place, maybe the only place where this really worked. So they took the bizarre stew, the world that had come to their doorstep bearing gifts like the magi, and made magic of their own. When the water finally came, those without anywhere to go often refused to leave their houses, their most valuable possessions, even in the face of a Category 5 hurricane. They had no cars, but they also had nowhere else to call their own, so why leave even if you could?
Considering the ancient, troubled heritage that New Orleans’ blacks lay claim to, the defiant embrace of the Dionysian impulse is thrown into context. New Orleans still maintains its attitude of "laisser les bon temps rouler" in the face of catastrophe, because like many of its forsaken individuals, the Crescent City is suffering from a bad case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Katrina was a natural disaster; in its aftermath, it is reopening the old wounds in America that trace the fault lines of race, class, and economic advantage. It may be unimaginable for me, as a privileged whitey from New England, to understand this to its core, but in essence, the only home they have ever had has now been shattered, and now the same culture that enslaved them and brought them across the Atlantic in the first place is arguing behind closed doors about whether or not they deserve to be saved. The humiliation of this is unspeakable, and it reduces grown men to tears whenever the subject arises, almost against their will, helplessly, as though there’s nothing left at all to love or live or even smile for. The only thing to do in this situation is to celebrate what you have lost, either through Mardi Gras, through turning your pathetic apartment into a neighborhood museum, as one man in Center City has done, or though reuniting with your old Brass Band "krewe" on the streets of New York and playing for tips dropped into a drum case, promising yourself and anyone who will listen that you will return someday.
New Orleans deserves to be saved, not because of economic viability, or because of cultural value, or even because we owe it to them. New Orleans deserves to be saved because it is through acts like these that we point the way to our own salvation as a species. If it will be done, it will be done because we care enough to do it, and if we care enough to do that, we have it in us to do whatever else confronts us in this time. The final frontier is not geographic or scientific, the final frontier lies within ourselves, at moments like these, when the evidence lies before us, and there is a pregnant silence as everyone waits. Will we be found wanting? That is the question that I ask every day now. The answer is, of course, that its up to you.