New Orleans and Mississippi, Like never before
| -- Nancy Larraine Hoffmann Founder, Civil Rights Connection |
| Everyone said it: “You have to see it for yourself. The pictures just can’t show the devastation.”
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| They were Right. |
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I love New Orleans, and I love Mississippi. Deep South is defined by Mississippi, warmed by the people more than by the sun. The Welcome Centers on the Interstate feature rocking chairs and soft-spoken ladies who really do want you to feel welcome as they offer you sweet tea. Then there is quirky, funky and French-in-our-own-special way world of New Orleans, a place dressed up for a party like no other city. Never in my wildest hurricane fantasies did I imagine I would see those beautiful places torn apart and so cruelly strewn about by the forces of nature. They didn’t deserve it. |
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Because Mardi Gras so defines the City of New Orleans, Mardi Gras had to happen this year. People who live there wanted to prove that they could do it. As one young woman said while catching beads thrown from floats in the Endymion parade as it rolled down St.Charles, “I haven’t been able to live in my house since the storm, but it feels so good to smile again.” Then, like so many others, she said “Thank ya’ll for coming down here. We’re so glad to have you back.” Everyone knows that visitors’ dollars are needed, and will be scarce for a long time. |
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| To people I met along the way I would say “I am so sorry for all the damage to your lovely city. I hope that your family was spared.” The response I heard most often was “I lost everything.” Sometimes those worlds would follow quickly with “But I’m still here.” Or “We never had much before, and we know God will show us the way.” It is hard not to admire people with resiliency that strong, and it makes their losses seem so much more unfair. |
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| THE LOWER 9th |
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After Mardi Gras, on Ash Wednesday, I ventured into the 9th Ward. At first the streets were lined with debris, and the houses damaged, with porches ripped off. Flooded out cars were everywhere. Further down the waterlines on the houses began to rise. They moved from below the windows, to level with the roof. After a few blocks all the houses were vacant. Signs spray painted on the front told the story of the rescue teams visits. |
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| Dates, initials and numbers indicated people, pets, and the names of rescue units who saved people by boat during the days of the flood. The placement of the numbers showed if there were dead inside. Sometimes instructions were left for SPCA volunteers. "Two dogs. One friendly." The Search and Rescue units were from all over the United States. Some of the animal rescue groups still going into New Orleans are from Canada. |
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| As the water lines got higher, the damage was more severe. The houses were no longer in the lower 9th Ward. They had been battered apart by all things floating, and the houses themselves had sometimes floated away, stopping against another house down the street, around the block, or on top of cars. Block after block looked more like those awful pictures of a city which had taken a direct hit from a bomb. It was hard to imagine anyone surviving the flood of the lower 9th Ward. The people all know a neighbor or loved one who did not make it. |
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| I stopped to ask a man who was moving debris out of a building if I could take a picture, and was that his home? |
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| Sherman Griffin, lived at 3729 N. Rampart Street, but since Katrina he now stays in Oklahoma. He was back to clean out. I asked him about the shirt he was wearing. His brother-in-law, he told me "Lost in the storm. They found him on Galvez Street. He was a big man, and he could swim, but he wasn't strong enough for that storm." |
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Nathaniel Solomon 3rd of 6007 Dauphine Street is staying with his father in Kennar, Louisiana, but along with his friend U.Z. Bridges, who is staying in Baton Rouge, he was spending March 1 trying to make some sense of the damage to his Dauphine Street home. |
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Together the two good friends paused for lunch, and struck up conversation with a columnist from Newsday. Katti Gray chatted with Mr Solomon and Mr. Bridges, who seemed to be able to find all kinds of things to laugh about, even while recounting how the piano in his house had "just floated away." They became somber only when discussing how Mr. Bridges' wife wants to move farther north, away from hurricane country. When I said that I planned to bring students down to help, Mr. Bridges asked if there would be any carpenters. He was just a little disappointed that we would only have laborers. I made a note to myself to check with the Building Trades to see if any carpenters would like to join us as chaperones with the Civil Rights Connection this May when we pay a visit to the land of Katrina. |
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Ms. Gray was the first member of the press I was to meet that day, but not the last. March 1 was the 6 month anniversary of the hurricane, and the major networks were setting up their shots for the evening news. ABC World News and Nightline broadcast live from the lower 9th Ward. On CNN I watched Anderson Cooper walk back and forth between houses which had landed on top of cars. I photographed them only hours before. |
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I saw the place where the barge came over or through the levee. No one quite knows which happened first. Did the storm push the barge through the levee? Did the levee break and the the barge float on down into the Ward? How many tons of force did it exert as it pushed house into house before the waters receded? |
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New Orleans Police Captain Mark Willow lost his home in Lakeview, near the 17th Street Canal, site of another breach in the levee. He suggested that we not go beyond the safety cones where the barge was in the process of being cut up. Torches were turning the huge hull into scrap metal. But there were no safety cones around the thousands of piles of debris where homes once stood. Here and there a toy or a trinket defied Katrina. I wondered about all the missing New Orleanians. How was it possible that, after 6 months, those piles of rubble which once were homes had not been lifted, sifted, checked? Later, Anderson Cooper wondered too for the CNN audience. |
| As I left the lower 9th March 1, I saw two uniformed officers unload a pair of dogs. Somehow it seemed too ghoulish to stop to take their picture. I suspected that cadaver dogs would have much to do. Demolition was about to begin and finally there would be a thorough search for people still missing. "More than 1,000 are unaccounted for, but many of those have just gone off to live somewhere else. Maybe only a few hundred are really still missing," Captain Willow speculated. |
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| PEARLINGTON, MISSISSIPPI HIGHWAY 90, LOUISIANA |
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| The students I bring down on the Civil Rights Connection journey this spring will have work to do. Every year our group performs a Service Project as part of their experience, and invariably students write in their journals how fulfilling the was the opportunity to help paint a food pantry, sort clothes at an orphanage, tear down a tool shed, clear brush at a remote cemetery, or organize books in an African American museum. |
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| This year, they will be performing a much larger and considerably more challenging Service Project when they tackle clean up on the Gulf Coast. They will stay overnight in a blue "Tent City" operated by the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance program. Seven tent cities and hundreds of volunteers have volunteered through the Presbyterian program, which currently has 7 tent cities on the coast. http://www.pcusa.org/katrina The Civil Rights Connection will be in Pearlington, Mississippi, where the eye of Hurricane Katrina swept over with a 24 foot wall of |
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| water. The houses that are left must have all contents removed, then they are gutted. I was invited to inspect the days' work of a newly-arrived team from Havertown, Pennsylvania. Wes Blake, one of 12 people from the Manoa United Presbyterian Church who "came with tools" showed off the front rooms which had been stripped to their studs in 7 hours. The back room was still waist high in places with sodden debris. They would tackle that tomorrow. |
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"Look at this great pile! None of this was here this morning. We did this all in a day!" Wes exclaimed. I hope my students are as excited when they get the opportunity to haul out tons of moldy stuff and pile it on the side of a road. There are stories of great creativity in the path of destruction. Wes also showed a home which was being rebuilt "all with material scavenged after the storm." Two by fours and planks from houses long gone are strewn about everywhere.. Sometimes the best boards are lodged 10 feet up in trees. The People with Tools from Pennsylvania were clearly taking immense satisfaction in the rebirth of a home in Pearlington. After the Pearlington site visit, Wes suggested we ride on out along coastal Highway 90. I found it hard to believe my eyes. The narrow spit of land which connects barrier islands had been |
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| washed over by Katrina, and homes built correctly, up on pilings were gone. For miles on end, only the stark vertical lines of pilings from homes and pilings from docks colored the landscape. A few places part of a house remained. And several had been rebuilt, making the contrast to the emptiness all the more startling. |
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| Houses just stood once on these pilings on Highway 90. Two or three times I fought back tears when I saw an American flag flying on an empty lot. Sometimes a FEMA trailer was parked in the yard, indicating that the family has decided to stay. Maybe they will rebuild, but so many have not yet figured out if they can afford to rebuild, or if that is what they want. Insurance claims and government assistance are far from settled, and the sense of loss is only made worse by not knowing what comes next, and when. But the flags help. ******************************* |
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Back in the Lower 9th Ward New Orleans |
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Tuesday, March 7, the New Orleans Times Picayune headline read "Lower 9th, Lakeview Houses Demolished-Cadaver Dogs Go In First - One Last Search For Bodies".  All 1,975 houses declared "in imminent danger of collapse" would be bulldozed. The Times Pacayune told how the house where Herbert and Mary Warren raised eight children wound up ". a block and a half from its original site - yanked off its foundation and sent spinning through the neighborhood by a wall of water loosed by the collapse of the Industrial Canal levee almost a mile away." The Warren family home was the first to fall to the wrecking ball. Herbert and Mary Warren had paid off their house, but had no flood insurance. They are living in a FEMA trailer on the other side of New Orleans. After meetings about the Civil Rights Connection visit to New Orleans, I had a few hours left before my flight back north. The weather was beautiful. High 70's and blossoms in bloom. |
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| I went looking for a friend who lives in the upper 9th, and, miraculously, had relatively little damage. Her house is at the end of a street which dead ends into the levee, which makes for a nice grassy yard. Despite the minimal damage she sustained, the lack of water, electricity and other services has made it difficult to move back home. Plus, some of the streets are still impassable. Between the huge holes in the streets and the debris, people driving in New Orleans are buying lots of new tires these days. |
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A group of students from Maryville University in St. Louis were hauling out the ruined contents of a house as I searched for Deslonde Street. "We are here on Spring Break!" They showed off their huge pile with great pride. It would become much bigger before they finished. Then the building would be sprayed down and treated for mold, and eventually rebuilt. |
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At the First Thessalonians Missionary Baptist Church I found a second group of Spring Breakers. I assumed they were from a salvage company, because Paul Turco and Adrian Manriquez sported very professional-looking jumpsuits and respirator masks as they dumped water-soaked hymnals and Bibles on the side walk. Their group was from Regis University, a Jesuit school in Denver. Paul and Adrian seemed to take a special satisfaction in helping a church toward recovery. |
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 Willie Jones, Evangalist and Youth Minister, and some strong parishioners from the "Trumpet of Truth" Church were struggling to put up a heavy tent on Bartholomew Street. I stopped again, looking for directions to Deslonde Street. Willie Jones, Evangalist and Youth Minister, and some strong parishioners from the "Timothy Trumpet of Truth" Church were struggling to put up a heavy tent on Bartholomew Street. I stopped again, looking for directions to Deslonde Street, and we stuck up a conversation in between tugging on the ropes and pounding the stakes. |
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 "Our church at Tupelo and St. Claude in the lower 9th was destroyed, but we are ok. The Lord's got bigger things for us to do. We took 12 feet of water the first time (Katrina) and 8 feet the second (Rita). We're putting up this tent so we can give out stuff to the people who are trying to come back." Brother Jones told me with a broad smile. "We give out food, clothes, and water.you can't drink the water in New Orleans yet and that is a big problem for people trying to come back. We give them cleaning supplies too. They really need those." When I called later from Syracuse, Mrs. Yolanda Jones spoke about ways that people could help. To learn more, drop a line at the church email at trumpetoftruth@bellsouth.net. I know that Brother and Sister Jones will be pleased to hear from you. |
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| St. Luke's Episcopal Church, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana has a trailer farther up on Bartholomew which is handing out water and energy bars for the workers coming into New Orleans. Deacon P. Quin Bates thought I needed a bottle of water when I stopped to ask directions. I am sure that I did. He, too, will be pleased to facilitate offers of assistance, working with churches throughout the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana. You may contact him via email at pqbates@jpjc.org. When I finally found my friend's home on Deslonde Street she was not there. I took a few pictures, and thought I'd walk up on the levee to get a better vantage point. That is where I found Wayne Buford. |
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Wayne is the Director of the Search and Rescue Council of Missouri, and came over with his dogs back in October. That month Wayne said he recovered a hundred bodies. He has stayed pretty much through during the past 6 months. |
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| "This is a peaceful spot. I like to come up here to give the dogs a break," Wayne told me. He introduced me to Rusty, an Australian Shepherd, and the "Lead Dog." |
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| I told Wayne I'd read the paper, and I guessed it was a tough job he had. After visiting with him for only a short while, I am convinced it is even more difficult than I imagined. Six months is a long time to be recovering bodies. "I hope our one little part of the recovery effort is making a difference," Wayne said. "I hope we can ease the pain and suffering of the families that have lost loved ones so they can gain closure, and move on this life." Closure looks a long way off down in the lower 9th Ward, in Pearlington, and the Gulf Coast. Standing there on the levee, however, is peaceful. It also seemed ok to take a photo of Wayne and Rusty. |
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