New Orleans – Above the din, a woman is screaming the Lord’s Prayer as if heaven can no longer hear silent pleas.
“And lead us not into temptation,” she bellows hoarsely, “but deliver us from evil.”
But temptation is everywhere in this crippled city. And so, it seems, is evil.
Five days after Hurricane Katrina, necessity has forced police officers to become looters; gangs hijack the boats of volunteers who have come to rescue them. Naked babies wail for food as men get drunk on stolen liquor.
A walk through New Orleans is a walk through hell – punctuated, it must be said, by moments of grace.
Along the debris-choked Mississippi River, pharmacist Jason Dove watches as people scramble in the parking lot of the downtown convention center for cases of airlifted water and shakes his head.
“We created this Frankenstein,” he says. “It’s showing how fragile this society is.”
In the world-renowned French Quarter, armed residents hide behind ornate iron gates like prisoners in a frilly jail. Historic markers on Napoleonic-era houses share billing with signs that warn: “You loot, we shoot!”
When water began rising in predominantly black neighborhoods, many jumped to the conclusion that the levee had been purposely breached to preserve the old city and its hotels.
Katrina’s winds have left behind an information vacuum. And that vacuum has been filled by rumor.
There is nothing to correct wild reports that armed gangs have taken over the convention center. That two babies’ throats were slit in the night. That a 7-year-old girl was raped and killed at the Superdome.
One officer calls these human cattle yards “lawless countries unto themselves.”
After several days in the street with little water and less food, people around the convention center began imagining that the storm was somehow a vehicle for ethnic cleansing.
One black man insists that authorities want everyone corraled into the convention center – so police can ignite the gas and blow them up.
Police point their guns at the crowds and tell them to back off. The people take it as aggression. But when you look into these officers’ eyes, there is real fear.
Officer Kirk LeBranche cowered on the roof of his flooded hotel for three days as the nighttime hours became a shooting gallery.
“Anarchy and chaos,” he says. “People are desperate.”
Officers deserted their posts.
Many of them lost everything but their lives to the storm, and they refuse to gamble those on a seemingly lost city.
Katrina has not just robbed people of their homes. It has taken their dignity.
On a sidewalk crowded with children and the elderly, a woman pulls down her pants and squats behind a potted plant. A passing man averts his eyes.
“Thank you,” she says. “I’m just doing what I’ve got to do.”
At the convention center, the despair feeds on itself like a voracious beast.
When National Guard helicopters attempt to land supplies in the parking lot, waiter Bob Vineyard joins a self-appointed ground crew to set up a safe perimeter. The crowd surges past them with an almost feral intensity, and the chopper is forced to take off.
The soldiers drop cases of water and self-heating meals from 10 feet in the air. Many of the bottles burst on impact, the precious water left to evaporate in the hot sun.
Carl Davis wonders why someone can’t just truck the food in and hand it out in an orderly fashion. He finds the process insulting, demeaning.
“They’re giving it to us like we’re in the Third World,” he spits. “This should never have happened. It didn’t happen in Iraq, and it didn’t happen in the tsunami.”
Down the street, anxious tourists idle on a bandstand across from Harrah’s casino, which has become a National Guard and police staging area. Jill Johnson of Saskatchewan says police don’t want them there, but she and others worry that they would be easy prey at the convention center.
Nearby, Cassandra Robinson huddles in the loading area of a local store where a small community has formed. Her niece, Heavenly, who turned 1 year old the day before the storm, dozes in her arms, weakened by a diet of water and mashed-up potato chips.
Robinson says people are behaving like animals because they are being treated as animals.
“We’re not born thieves,” she says, as neighbors heat food over a trash-can fire. “We were born Christians.”
