The colors were running. It looked like a Picasso painting at first:
unfamiliar. Underneath the reds and blues streaking down the film,
there were dark faces. The water had made it this way, a distorted
reality. It was a family portrait, transformed.
Almost
18 months after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, the French
Quarter and downtown areas are back in business, but the neighborhoods
surrounding the city remain time capsules of the fateful date of Aug.
29, 2005. Besides the white FEMA trailers that grace some driveways as
temporary housing for residents, nothing has changed. Insurance
companies refuse to pay for water damage, and the federal government
has turned a blind eye to its own people. New Orleans residents have
been displaced, most leaving the state of Louisiana to find work in
Texas, Mississippi and even Virginia to find ways of supporting their
families and saving money to rebuild their houses, for it seems their
FEMA checks will never arrive.
I still can't get my thoughts
around what I saw; the carnage was endless. Rusted water marks (some
over six feet) still decorate house siding as a somber reminder of
Mother Nature's fury and of our own country's bureaucratic nightmare.
Roofs caved in, cars disregarded, personal effects untouched, followed
up by spray painted X's where the houses have been searched and so many
animals (or even worse, bodies) were found on the floor. Can this
really be America?
Jessie Goodman, a native to New Orleans for
almost his whole life, is his street's elder. He is a town oracle rich
in experience and knowledge, the guardian of North Rocheblave. He knows
everyone and everyone knows him, as he sits on a folding chair, arms
crossed, staring out into the destruction in the New Orleans sun. "I
lost a lot of cousins," he said matter-of-factly. "A neighbor called me
up and says 'you have a cousin named Peterson?' I said, 'Yes,' and he
told me, 'I just saw him floating face down on the corner of there.' "
He paused. "There is a nicer way to say that he had passed."
The conversation became lighter as Mr. Goodman kept his sense of humor
and told us that "you ain't had real gumbo 'til you been down here,"
and how, for all our help, he planned to cook for us. Imagine that. We
weren't even working on his house and he wanted to feed us. That hit
hard, made me feel ungrateful and made me want to hang George W. Bush,
Mike Brown, Mayor Nagin and Dick Cheney by their balls. But nothing
prepared me for when I saw the lower 9th Ward.
The
lower 9th Ward may be unfamiliar lingo to anyone in New Jersey who did
not follow Anderson Cooper's coverage in the days after Katrina. It is
one of the poorest suburbs of New Orleans, located right next to one of
the three levee breeches of August 2005. Looking out closest to the
levee, there is an area of roughly two football fields of grass and
cement slabs.
These slabs show where houses once stood, houses
that were not demolished, but swept away by the waters of the
hurricane. A cargo barge, the ING, also leveled many houses in the
area. It is like being on holy ground, almost like visiting a
battefield; even the atheists said a prayer, especially after hearing
there were bodies still underneath the debris, still yet to be found,
along with some that never will.
Above, I said the
neighborhoods were time capsules. This is true also for the houses that
still stand, blackened by mildew and mold, and the stench is something
that leaks into your pores, your clothing and your nose. I will never
forget that smell as long as I live. Imagine sour milk swallowed and
then regurgitated all over the walls and all over every single personal
item stored in the house. One parishioner from the First United
Methodist Church in Kenner, La. said, "After a day of cleaning my
house, I'd go back to Mississippi and hold a bar of soap to my nose in
the shower praying to God the smell would go away."
After you
get past the smell, you look into the blackness and see an electronic
toy truck flipped over, couches out of place, beds with the sheets
still on them, clothes still in the closets, a calendar on the wall
that still reads "August 2005," more blackness, dishes still in the
dishwasher, food still in the refrigerator, knives still in the drawers
and a computer. Everything these people ever owned is still in the
house and ruined for eternity. Photo albums over 40 years old, now
nothing more than leaking colors and mildew, memories washed away.
Lives washed away. And still no relief.
There have been
optimistic guesses that New Orleans will be fully rebuilt in five to
eight years and conservative guesses that it will take up to 10. Ten
years sounds more realistic, with barely any help from the federal
government, and it's not just every other house that is damaged, it is
all of them. As for Jessie Goodman, he has his own time reference. "We
haven't had a storm like this in 40 years. I'll be 70 in April and I
have a grandson who is 3 and a granddaughter who is 15. It's going to
come back, but I ain't going to see it." He looks out into the distance
again, taking it all in. "It's going to come back."
