“Some
people got lost in the flood, some people got away alright.” — Randy Newman,
“Louisiana 1927.”
New Orleans is gone.
I
left it behind me on Saturday, with my two kids in the back seat, the
soundtrack to Shrek on the CD player. My wife, a pediatrician, was on call for the weekend and
stayed behind.
She
joined us in a town just outside Lafayette, Louisiana, Sunday
evening after a harrowing odyssey along the southern route of Highway 90,
driving without her glasses or a cell phone, our three cats roaming in the back
of a shaky Volvo.
Together
that night, we watched the same show that all who’d gotten
out were watching. The straight line for our city.The familiar “Cat-4” and “Cat-5.”
And for those of us who thought we’d seen this before, the much-hoped-for right
turn.
It
didn’t matter. It hit. Even those who could read the tea leaves in John McPhee’sThe Control
of Nature or John Barry’s Rising Tide,
or who had seen the diagrams of a bowl-shaped city, are in disbelief. New
Orleans is gone, along with the newspaper where I work, the home where I live,
my kids’ beloved school, my neighborhood sno-ball
stand, my neighborhood anything.
On
the Times-Picayune’s Web site and on cable news, I see my former home’s dark and distorted
reflection: submerged rooftops; a battered Superdome filled with the desperate;
looters grabbing guns and VCRs and racks of shirts; a house scrawled in red
with “diabetic inside”; the breach in the levee.
The
future is recited: a bowl of toxic stew. The gas, the sewage,
the dead.
On
the local news shows in south Louisiana, the crawl beneath the picture lists
statewide evacuation centers in Rayne and Opelousas, and announces that
“evacuees in need of dialysis should call ….” Above these details
are shots of aerial superheroes in short red jumpsuits or head-to-toe military
green, alighting on rooftops and loading old women and little boys into wire
baskets for their ride out.
Scan
along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and it’s tragedy and
timber. A man holds his two boys. “I can’t find my wife,” he tells
the reporter. “Our house split in two.”
This
is all via TV. Direct information is harder to come by. Cell phones aren’t
working; contact with others is haphazard. I haven’t been able to talk with my
publisher yet. But this morning, my wife reached her boss. This is a man who
embodies the New Orleans peculiarly dark joie de vivre to such an extent that
he dressed as the tsunami for this year’s Mardi Gras.
On
the phone, he was blunt. “I don’t know if we’re going to have a practice
to come back to,” he said. “What families will return to the city
with their children?”
Other cities
are mightier.Los Angeles, Chicago, New York.
But New Orleans is where I wanted to make my home.
I
first hitchhiked to the city as a college dropout who wanted to hear jazz and
see Mardi Gras. The ride I got was with a preacher who
warned me about sin and temptation. Just like every drunk tourist on Bourbon Street,
that’s exactly what I was looking for.
Soon
after, I heard zydeco and followed the blast of brass
bands on the streets, and started writing about musicians who seemed like
magicians, the way they could conjure a mood. I even covered Hurricane Andrew,
drove straight toward it, fueled by recklessness and a
USA Today day rate.
For
the past 20 years, I have moved in and out of New Orleans. This last time, the
roots buried deep: job, house, family, school. Early notions of the city of
good times were tempered by the closer looks at poverty, illiteracy, and crime
I obtained as editor of the city’s alternative weekly. Being a parent in the
public school system brought me even closer. Long before the rain started, New
Orleans was a troubled city.
But
it’s still the hallowed ground of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, of
Mardi Gras and jazz funerals that send off the dead
with “Didn’t He Ramble?” Of lesser-known purveyors
of high spirits in bleak houses. I love New Orleans more than I’ve ever
loved a particular place.
Most
recently, I loved my neighborhood. Every morning, friends
passed by our corner on their way to school. We’d hurry up tying our
shoes to join them.
Of
the thousands who evacuated to the towns surrounding Lafayette, a handful are from my street. We fled on the buddy system
and hooked up when we got here. We’ve met for pizza and seen ourselves in each
other, and we’ve drawn some comfort from that.
Now,
as the TV news reports rising floodwaters and worse, it is becoming more
difficult to speak to each other about our plans and how long we can hold on.
I haven’t told
you about Katy Reckdahl. She’s a staff
writer I hired a couple of years back, and she writes about the hardest-hit
citizens of New Orleans, including those who put
themselves on the trigger side of a gun. She cares about all kinds of people.
She knows this city better than most, and I am better for having worked with
her.
On
Saturday, when I was driving my kids out, she was having her first child, a
boy, in Touro Infirmary.
Last
I heard, they were moving people from floor to floor in Touro,
and will now be evacuating them, along with others stranded in hospitals with
no air conditioning and sealed windows, generators running out of gas.
Where
is Katy?
At
the Times-Picayune’s Web site, stories like mine pile on top of each other. Looking
for grandfather. Want to hear from my friend. What do you know?
It’s
harder to access pleas that aren’t online.
Meanwhile,
the TV stations traffic in comparisons: a war zone, Hiroshima, the tsunami, a
third-world refugee camp, 9/11. I try not to think like that, but Woody
Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads keep coming to mind. He wrote them about another
time when the forces of man and nature sent refugees into America: “So
long, it’s been good to know you.”
As
I write, what’s left of New Orleans is being swallowed up. Governor Kathleen
Blanco — whose maternal concern has helped me through each day — is
removing the last of us from the flooding city. The next journey belongs to the
tens of thousands in the Superdome, now on to the Astrodome in a fleet of
buses.
A
couple of hundred miles away, we have new household decisions to make.
“I’m getting pretty bored of not having school,” my 7-year-old daughter
announced today. A little over a week ago, her life was filled with
first-day-of-school excitement. Now, there’s maybe a Catholic girl’s academy.
The public schools are also taking in the children of New Orleans. My wife
returned from a registration session, speaking through tears about the warmth
and efficiency.
We’re
staying with friends who just keep saying “as long as it takes.” Last
night, one of their neighbors showed up with smothered steak, rice and gravy,
cabbage and sausage, and bread pudding. Another showed up with margaritas.
Decisions. Maybe we’ll call my daughter’s
first-grade teacher, who evacuated to a nearby town, and we’ll set up a home
school. The Saturday we left, my daughter was in his classroom a block up the
street, playing on the computers while he put together lesson plans. “I
want to go to Mr. Reynaud’s,” she’d beg every
week until we relented. That’s one of those memories that seems
untraceable now. It leads nowhere.
I
also have a 4-year-old son. Last night, we were unfolding our hide-a-bed and
putting blankets on the floor. “Did you see this?” my wife said,
holding a book he’d made last month, before this hurricane had begun to form.
He had drawn the pictures and recited the story, and my wife had taken his
dictation. It was titled “Miles and the Sun!” and it goes like this:
“One
spring day, Miles came out of his house in New Orleans. The sun was happy to
see Miles. The sun was wearing sunglasses. Miles moved to his new house and the
sun got very very hot. Now it was even hotter! A
fearful wild storm came with lots of monsters. Luckily Miles wasn’t in it. The
water splashed all over it.”
The
drawing for that last page was all deep, hard-pressed scribbles.
Last
night, he sat on my lap and looked at the TV and the people walking through the
water. “Are those the people who didn’t evacuate?” he asked,
carefully enunciating his new word.
New
Orleans is gone and I can’t say when it will come back. My neighborhood, my
job, all of it might somehow return.
Yet
I don’t know what a rebuilt New Orleans will look like and I don’t know if I’ll
be there for it. For now, we’re living on the generosity of others.
That’s
what it’s like to be a refugee. You never know what’s next.
Michael Tisserand is editor of Gambit, New Orleans’ alternative
newsweekly. He is currently living in Carencro, Louisiana, at the home of Scott
Jordan, the editor of Lafayette’s Independent Weekly. He can be reached at
michaeltisserand@yahoo.com.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2005.
