Tuesday, November 13, 2012

My New Orleans Vertigo: Post-Katrina New Orleans


 Jackson Street, New Orleans October, 2005
 Jackson Street, New Orleans October, 2005
 Jackson Street, NOLA 2005, cars left near Claiborne were flooded
 Many of the homes on Jackson were dilapidated before 2005.  After the storm murders reached record levels as people came back to few schools, fewer jobs, and little support.  
Jackson Street and St. Charles near the Garden District, NOLA 2005
 Jackson Street and St. Charles near Garden District, NOLA 2005.  This hotel later closed.

 Eerie reminders of the national media's failure before the storm.
 Mold and mildew contaminated dozens of rooms.

 Vigilantism and overt forms of racism became the norm as "roving bands" of New Orleanians looked for food, water, and of course, goods they could sell.  The much publicized thievery did not compared to the threats of individual violence by gun-carrying whites.  NOPD police chief notoriously told the police to "take back" the city, encouraging extreme brutality.  

 St. Charles Avenue, NOLA October 2005
  St. Charles Avenue, NOLA October 2005
 St. Charles Avenue, NOLA October 2005
  St. Charles Avenue neutral ground, NOLA October 2005
  Even neutral ground cars were not spared NOLA October 2005
 Even neutral ground cars were not spared, NOLA October 2005
 Dillard University's makeshift barrier, NOLA October 2005
 Boats near City Park, NOLA October 2005
Homes near City Park, NOLA October 2005
 The day before the false pageantry and calm of President Bush's speech at St. Louis Cathedral, one of the few spaces in New Orleans with power--run, I think, by generators.  
 Former 12th grade student of mine, Kristen.  With little help from her family, she raised her sisters and brothers independently and sacrificed her own education.  I don't have her last name.  If you know her, tell her I miss her very much and send me her contact information.
Jackson Street, NOLA October 2005
Jackson Street near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
Jackson Street near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005 
 The Magnolia Projects, since demolished, near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  The Magnolia Projects, since demolished, near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  The Magnolia Projects, since demolished, near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  The Magnolia Projects, since demolished, near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  The Magnolia Projects, since demolished, near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005


 Near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005

  Near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
 Near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  Near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  Near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  Near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  Near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  Near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  Near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
  Near Claiborne, NOLA October 2005
 Central City, NOLA October 2005
Central City, NOLA October 2005
 Homes were tattooed with ASPCA and those searching for human remains Central City, NOLA October 2005
 Uptown, NOLA October 2005
 Uptown, NOLA October 2005 
 Uptown, NOLA October 2005 
Uptown, NOLA October 2005
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My New Orleans Vertigo
After the authorities had unlocked the drowned city, I drove around the detritus—what remained of my new home.  The water sat for days, marinating the city in toxic sludge, like an abandoned half-filled aquarium scorched by the summer sun.  The horizontal stains upon each home’s face resembled scars from a rusted rake.   The striped corpses of vehicles littered yards like locust skins or leaned precariously against collapsed garages.  Repeatedly, near felled road signs, I saw the red hooks of “The Club” Pyrrhically guarding forsaken cars.  Peppered atop the surfaces of trucks and refrigerators and bikes and animals was an unearthly dust, as if blasted from some terrible nebula beyond the sun.  This was my home: New Orleans, October 2005.
It’s far easier than you think watching a city die.  My hometown leans against Lake Michigan near the remnants of Gary and my father worked in what’s left of Detroit.  I found Bernard Henri Levy’s descriptions in American Vertigo quite chilling.  He traveled around Buffalo, Lackawanna, Cleveland and asked a great question: How is it that America lets its cities die?  We are a nation obsessed with beauty but whose very face is scarred with urban cavities.  From our ghost towns in the gold-squeezed West to the brick ruins of Hadley, Massachussetts, these scars, like all scars, tell a story.  After Katrina I saw books like “Why New Orleans Matters” as well as serious debate about the “feasibility” of saving New Orleans.  For me, it was déjà vu all over again.  In the aftermath of the storm I watched as houses were destroyed or abandoned or sold.  I was reminded of my Dad and the disorientation we felt, driving around my shrinking hometown and seeing ‘For Sale’ signs and neglected properties where our town once boomed.  “There’s nothing left here,” he would say.  His words were mixed with pride in me and sadness as he looked at the now unfamiliar town, “Nothing left for you here.” 
I had moved to New Orleans because it was timeless, unsolved.  I hadn’t consciously traveled to New Orleans to “save” the city nor was I hoping to “get lost” in its mysteries.  The city, older than the nation, simply intrigued me.  Granted, the city was imploding before the storm.  In the schools, ½ boys would drop out and the kids who graduated rarely surpassed an 8th grade reading level.   Louisiana’s prisons had become vast warehouses for young black males.  Yet the city itself was indomitable.  Surviving floods and unemployment and fires and wars and epidemics over the years, it was also, I thought, a city unbleached by modernity.  I was fascinated with this place without watches or rules: “the city that care forgot.” 
A thrilling escape or feverish escapade, I don’t remember—Katrina has smeared my memory like a wet photograph—but I do recall leaving Chicagoland in 2005 for the Crescent City.  Few options and a head soaked in 22-year old idealism sent me to the Gulf.  I remembered Yeats’s airman as I traveled south:  “No law nor sense of duty bade me fight/No public men nor cheering crowds,A lonely impulse of delight/Drove me to this tumult in the clouds.”  I little knew then that in the next 10 weeks I would travel from my teaching induction in New Orleans, teach summer school in Houston, return for a position in Orleans Parish, evacuate to Western Louisiana before Hurricane Rita, rest in Bloomington, IN, wait idle in my hometown, return to discover a destroyed and barricaded New Orleans, and be re-hired in St. John the Baptist Parish 20 miles outside the city.  Those dizzying first weeks still linger in my mind. 
These are disorienting times.  It is an age when, being lost is much more understandable to me than having a well-whittled niche.  Today, a round, smiling word like “home” or “community” is off-putting to me because what once seemed so stable quickly evaporated.  Not that homes and communities are undesirable or undesired, but at present, my sense of place feels ephemeral and protean.  Am I alone?  Perhaps that’s why I fell in love with New Orleans, a city of once-cemented communities now fractured and reconstituted by circumstance.  This desire after the storm to remake the broken cross of the city and its homes and communities was pervasive.  But how do you make it like it was but make it new? 
My poetic fervor on the highway was one thing.  But being lost for the first time in the labyrinthine roads roping the Crescent City was another.  Everything was frighteningly close but anonymously distant, I felt like being a myopic pigeon in a Chicago blizzard.  Looking around I thought, where am I?  There is consolation in characterizing new surroundings.  To the clever scribblers who glibly typify cities, it evokes a sense of ownership, like naming the rusty lemon who housed your teenage years’ sticky fumblings.  While Capote said New Orleans was a city where time stopped “to take a rest,” Twain called it “an upholstered sewer,” while Faulkner described it as “an aging courtesan in a smoke-filled room.”   A girl I met on that traffic-crushed day, Shameka, characterized New Orleans not with clever metaphors, but with honest pride:  “N’Awlins: they aint nothing like my city nowhere.” 
I met Shameka in a gas station.  Hours of bumper-to-bumper had taken its toll.  I had been to proud to pull over, but relented in a rather uninviting patch of Central City.  After the storm I learned that a majority of those living in Orleans Parish, like others manacled by poverty, had rarely if ever left their neighborhoods or the city.  I gazed around and the trunks rattled forbidding bass and the glassy eyes of hunched low-riders stared warnings.  Feeling only inches away, the merciless sun eclipsed all concerns.  My body was lacquered with sweat after only a few steps towards the gas station door.
Entering the wrong door (the office) I reattempted through the proper entrance with a sunny smile and requested a proper course to Dillard University—for training—while lamenting the lack of road signs and the inability to ever take a left!  Portly and with a golden grill, Shameka yawned.  She plucked briefly at her nametag which emitted an air pulse over her sweaty torso:   “You in N’Awlins, nah.  Ain nuhtin’ like my city nowhere.  Git own dat road over de’h.  Drive bout, hmmmm, tree, fow lights.  You see da Lafitte Projek[1], den you gown to fah.”  The monologue continued, though not for my benefit.  Shameka’s friend shook his head and mopped beside me as if trying to wash me away.  My face probably resembled an unwrapped gift.  But empty.  I didn’t understand.  I didn’t understand much then. 
It’s strange how the tear ducts can hijack a man.  Stall him.  Catch him, like a snowman in the sun.  I smiled, weakly, and nodding, exited towards my car. Lost.  Crying.  Feeling extraneous, vanquished, and isolated already:  How could I teach English if I could not even understand student responses?
Yes, it was the language.   I had read that after L’Overture’s capture by the French, hundreds of Haitian exiles poured into New Orleans, many of them bringing their own slaves.  But the additional influence of Irish immigrants, an open port, the French and Spanish colonial legacy, and the rise of the Creole class, gave New Orleans a unique if not unintelligible sound for newcomers, or at least me.  It was sonorous and sinewy.  Caribbean in its rolling eurythmics.  The accent was aurally arresting, like listening to a street scat, it had a fevered control.  A Pollock painting of words.  At any moment a sentence could end with a fruity chuckle or a trailing curse and both so amazingly heartfelt that you almost anticipated a bow.  My Midwestern tones were quite different—the rhythms of language were atonal and flat, a colorless canvas in comparison.  Language for me back home was pragmatic, a means to an end.  In New Orleans, however, words were musical and emotive. 
The vocabularies of New Orleans’s urban youth were small; in fact they were thousands of words smaller than those of their affluent peers.  One teacher told me that even my pronunciation of known words like “chair” would be discomfiting to young kids.  Students would have grown up hearing “Cheh.”  Known words were rich with hidden meanings.  “Messy” could mean unclean or invidious.  “Triflin’” could mean devious, obfuscating, snitching, teasing, or just being a wet blanket.  Reading a transcribed conversation between my students would yield little.  All depended on the context and intonation.  I began teaching and—almost as if the kids’ verbal ink mixed with mine—I slowly began speaking in inverted sentences, acquiring dramatic pauses, “baby” endearments, and “cuttin’ up” slang.  Even more intriguing were the “Yeah” or “No” additions which, anchored to a sentence’s stern, brought a Frenchy emphasis:  “I been done that, (ch)yeah” or “I never stay up in that there place, no.”  Slowly, very slowly, the reef between my language and theirs dissolved.
True, each new home takes acclamation.  And any move is disorienting.  Language, customs—the rhythms and beat of the street are different in each ZIP code.  But New Orleans deserves more than a word on this point.  When I moved to New York City I thought of Blake’s lonely roaming in his poem “London”:  “I walk along each chartered street/Near where the chartered Thames doth flow/And find in every face I meet/Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”  Okay, this took minutes to comprehend in New York:  Disgruntled urban creatures (in Kempton’s phrase) looking like they had played a game and lost.  All of them rampaging down ordered streets with the ferocity of wildebeests.  Check.  I got it. 
But to enter New Orleans was to enter some absurd adolescent dream.  A sense of displacement I simply wasn’t quite prepared to tackle.  In one day you could walk by a Mardi Gras Indian dancing alone on an abandoned street, or a man pissing while walking toward you, or a man mowing his lawn in a Spider Man outfit, or a man dressed like a nun leaning unconscious against a fire hydrant, or a couple fighting in a city street with fried chicken skins.  I detail the city’s excess because in the traumatic wake of the storm my first year teaching, as I tried to gain a toehold of “normalcy” and “community” and “routine,” I discovered all my efforts undercut.  Thousands of displaced students became “Katrina kids” in their adopted schools after the storm.  I, too, was lost and labeled a “Katrina teacher.”  We were all children of the flood before we even understood the label or identified where we were.    
Before the storm, in mid-August 2005, I entered Read High School in Orleans Parish.  I was so tense that first day I could squeak.  I had spent the previous weekend in the Orleans Parish school board office, waiting six hours (with 45 other teachers) aiming to get a placement in the nation’s worst school district.  Imagine the bemused faces at personnel: dozens of mostly white bourgeois Teach for America liberal arts majors—many of them Ivy Leaguers, shining and pressed, loitering in the Orleans Parish School Board office—all begging to be given slots the parish couldn’t give away! 
Read High School opened on Monday with a large teacher meeting.  The principal, Mr. Coleman, had oozing processed hair and “high yellow” Creole skin.  I later learned to my dismay that in the old days of segregation, using the “paper bag rule” at Creole bars used the, owners declared if your skin was darker than the bag you couldn’t enter.  Mr. Coleman would be called “black” in Chicago, but in New Orleans, he would point to his blue eyes and say that he had “Indian blood.”  In a 2-hour meeting with Chief Coleman nothing was accomplished because nothing was planned.  But orders were given:  “Pass out dem books, y’all.  Jus’ pass ‘em out.  Parents wonna see dey students with books.”  These books were outdated, abused by time and misuse.  I raised my hand: “Mr. Coleman.  You want teachers to pass out books we know the students won’t be using?  What if they lose them?” “All the better,“ he said, “They old books anyways.”  This was clearly a high-powered lesson in teaching the students responsibility and follow-through.  Modeling:  a concept not yet practiced in New Orleans Public Schools, I thought. 
I discovered my classroom tucked away, an uninhabited island, visible but hard to reach.  It was unmarked on the back end of a twisted hallway.  It had no door, a broken window—through which, it is said, the previous year’s students had escaped when their teacher was preoccupied—and was attached to three other classes by temporary walls one could peer through.  Of three classes, first period had 35 students, second had only one disabled student with an aid and a wheelchair, and third had 25.  The school had not made the schedules.  What I mean is:  When the students entered the school, they had nowhere to go and teachers had nothing to teach them.  Not many arrived and the majority of those students who did show up were sitting in courses they’d passed or failed already.  The majority of students would not show up until after Labor Day, two weeks later.  This was an Orleans Parish tradition.  From the student’s point of view, what was the school going to do, punish them?  What could Orleans Parish Schools do that society and history hadn’t done already? 
The clocks in the halls were broken, the hallway lights half-illuminated.  Students who arrived two rooms down the hall from me would discover a narcoleptic teacher who would fall asleep during class, loosing his students into the hallways like forsaken spirits.  With no door, I of course was blessed with visitors.  I noticed the dumpy narcoleptic standing in the parking lot after school on that first day.  Curious, I asked a security officer nearby (holding a forbidding 2x4 John Henry style), “Why does he stand there waiting like that?”  His voice hammered:  “That man can’t drive!  Not with the medication he takes!  He’s got to be picked up here e’reday. ”    
My roommate, little more than a stranger, taught at Read as well.  A bony suburban Texan who could speak in four languages (but had little to say to me), he was placed as a Geometry teacher in a computer lab in which students could not use the computers.  After the first day of school we discovered one broken copy machine and no student rosters or phone numbers.  “How can we discipline students if we don’t know who they are or what year they are in!?” I implored.  “You got to earn dey respect,” said the secretary.  Grinning like an overfed cat she continued, “You got to put the fear of da Lawd in ‘em.”  No books, no copies, no rosters, and in one case, no class.  And I should scare the kids?  They and the school were doing quite well scaring me.  A security guard walked out of the office as I exited the door.  Though I darted for the parking lot, he threw me a roll of bus tickets and an envelope.  Many New Orleanians are great at investing you in their work.  “Here now.  Pass dese tickets out, Teach’.  Make sure you get ‘xact change, y’erd me?”  Over three dozen students instantly rushed me.  I quickly doled out the tickets, but it wasn’t fast enough.  “You new, here aint chu?” a young boy snidely croaked.  I was.  I was very new here.
                Even the hollow exhausted drive home was disorienting.  Read was located in New Orleans East, an area of concrete sprawl paved over swampland.  A black middle-class escape for hopeful suburbanites after WWII which had decayed over time, captured glibly in a cynical quip at my school, “Read High School: The Best of the Worst.”  In those first weeks, I would start out travelling from my Uptown hovel, where homes dated from ante-bellum’s porch-days, through blighted downtown.  The highways ripped Robert Moses-style through the middle of town and wound around the city in a congested necklace.  The great mansions uptown stood beside crumbling shotguns discarded during the “white flight” years.  The streets were so Balkanized economically that the nickname “The Northernmost Caribbean City” became a comforting comparison.  In my first week living on Jackson Avenue (which boasts the most arrests per-capita in the city) we met our neighbor priests who lived next to pornographer white-supremacists adjacent to the site of a recent murder.  The first school week’s sleep wouldn’t have been so bad if the homeless men hadn’t broken in to sleep on our couch or if the supremacists hadn’t incessantly hinted to my roommates and me about the white man “sticking together” in the face of the encroaching “mud people.”  Nights at “home” were little escape from the wild days at Read.    
                I had evacuated west with some friends of Teach for America—now my closest acquaintances in New Orleans.  Calamity can facilitate friendships.  What can I say about the storm?  It happened.  It ripped across the city and tore off patches of Superdome’s rooftop.  Enormous shafts of light dropped into the Dome over the tired faces huddled inside.  Exposed.  Those left in New Orleans were now exposed to the world and the elements.  Since my school was in the now drowned New Orleans East I looked for my kids’ faces on the news.  Where were my kids?  One student gave me a TLC medallion he wore with his name etched on the back.  I made the students trade something with me if I permitted them to go to the bathroom.  He never came back to class.  I held it as I watched the news.  
                After the storm, thousands of the displaced traveled across the country in search of temporary housing with dizzying speed, flummoxing principals and teachers alike.  The majority, including myself, landed in the River Parishes outside the city.  As if admitting in hundreds of students from the pre and post-Katrina mess of New Orleans and taking the academic hit for their abysmally low scores were not enough for a parish, the next hurdles were personal.  They were the matter of bewildering classroom logistics:  What could I do with 40 students and 20 desks?  How could I teach those 40 students in 20 desks when the students’ varied abilities ranged from second grade literacy to post-high school?  How do I live with myself, failing over and over again a student like Kristen, who misses class in this, her senior year, because she has to raise her brother and sister after her parents vanished after the flood?  Or if a senior who read on a third-grade level said he had all his credits—Orleans parish only had paper files, no digital—who could argue otherwise?
I borrowed classrooms to teach in.  As if adding insult to injury as a “Katrina teacher,” I “floated” to different classes each period.  Sleeping on a couch in the living room of a rented house wasn’t too bad.  I was the last hired and I knew dozens of my students had been going through much worse.  But the borrowed clothing, lack of textbooks, teaching two different subjects, and the state-mandated bi-weekly 90-minute Monday drive to a three-hour Baton Rouge class caused more than a few drinks to be poured. 
                Of the 400 and more students displaced after the storm the majority returned to New Orleans.  Again and again I heard:  “I ain’ never goin back deh.   Them niggas was killin’ one another.  I ain tryin to git shot, no.”  But return they did, hundreds, and thousands of them.  “Home” and “Community” do mean something.  The time of loss seemed only to reaffirm the irrational love for a place that had yielded these families nothing.  Sam Harris quoted recently a study saying that 98% of people in Orleans Parish believed in a personal God and the statistics after Katrina only reaffirmed faith in the Lord’s mercy.  Roads still resembled the rough side of the Khyber Pass, schools opened and shut like night blooms, and the city’s corruption would make the Duvaliers wince.  The wards’ tribal mentality runs deep and schools like Read, which now had fixed-up walls and classes, re-opened in 2006 without much systemic change.  I never returned for my materials in my room.  It was just one of a series of stops between a new “here” and “there” that I left behind. 
In truth, my troubles adapting to others’ poverty and adversity are pygmy in scale next to the elephantine hardships dozens of my students like Kristen survived and are still enduring.  I remember Ezra, a quiet kid, with dark eyes and a dark mood.  I think of him sitting on a bench at lunch, knowing no one, saying nothing, looking nowhere, and failing my English class.  He always shook his head with pity and smiled at me, my antics to induce his laughter and engagement was fruitless.  I remember him there on that forlorn bench because he never spoke to anyone, ever.  Day after day he would brood in the shadowy corner.  One day after suggesting counselors, I called his mother and asked, “What’s the deal with Ezra?”  Before the storm, his father died of a heart attack.  After his house flooded, Ezra made his way uptown with his mother to Carrolton Avenue—famous for its palm trees and department stores, where the white Mommas would shop in the 1950s wearing white gloves.  But the water never stopped and Ezra hid in a car that sank before he escaped towards the Superdome.  Ezra was 15 and living in a trailer. 
                Maybe humans adapt to anything.  Maybe kids like Ezra will move into homes and will be unaffected years to come.  Perhaps they will live thanking the good Lord for the little they have left and decidedly work with their families to be “economically viable” with the new faces in their reformed communities.  Maybe.  Maybe all of these memories are just idle scribbling, a form of hiding.   Observing the fragility of my recent communities, the temporality of a “home”, even those considered the most aged and supposedly secure, has been like an invisible hand drawing back the veil of security around comforting illusions—the truth that we are safe and valued and free, or that we are part of a secure and stable community of people that will long endure.  The world of the sons will not be the world of their fathers.  If the nightmare of New Orleans has taught us anything, it has been to abandon the comfort of such illusions. 



[1] Lafitte Projects:  Housing projects of 6th ward.  Destroyed during post-Katrina flood.  Named for Jean Lafitte (ca. 1776 – ca. 1823) a pirate and privateer in the Gulf of Mexico in the early 19th century;

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