New Orleans – Ray Heisser says most people want to rebuild, eventually. But no one can quite imagine the day when their houses will be livable again, and now the glue of their lives is gone – their neighbors, local businesses, social clubs.
Just about every black institution in town is struggling or has disappeared.
What is any school or church or company without its people?
“The culture is all about the people,” Heisser, 66, says. “That’s a big part of New Orleans.”
Even if everyone came back tomorrow, the scars would last a long time.
But let’s face it – not everyone’s coming back. Barely 200,000 people are living in the city today.
Before Katrina, there were 465,000 residents, seven in 10 of them black.
Experts, including the Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank, agree it’ll stay smaller than it was for years. It will almost surely be less black.
A Gallup Poll telephoned people who were back as of February and found that 52 percent were white and 37 percent were black.
Many more blacks than whites said they were struggling to get back to work, jump-start their social lives and find someone to rebuild their homes.
No surprise for the people who once worshiped at St. Augustine, a 19th-century Roman Catholic church whose gleaming, newly repaired bell tower looms over wooden cottages in the Treme neighborhood.
It was one of the nation’s oldest black Catholic parishes, where jazz saxophones spiced up Mass and the parish priest wore robes embellished with African kente cloth.
Even though the building didn’t flood in Katrina, the archdiocese closed the parish and removed the priest in mid- March, saying membership was too low. The protests were long and loud.
Some parish supporters barricaded themselves in the rectory.
“This community has drawn the line here,” said Jacques Morial, whose family has been part of the church for generations. For him, losing St. Augustine means losing a hub of friendships – and a cornerstone of black New Orleans.
“Black people of modest income define the social fabric and culture here,” he said, standing near St. Augustine’s Tomb of the Unknown Slave, a 15-foot iron cross made of fist-sized chain links dredged from the bottom of the Mississippi River.
If that changes, he said, the city will becomes little more than a tourist attraction.
“It becomes a Disneyland, approaching contrivance,” he said. “It was happening before, and it’s accelerating now.”
You can see it everywhere.
A mile from St. Augustine, Dooky Chase’s restaurant on Orleans Avenue is still closed after being flooded and looted. The 65-year-old restaurant where the gumbo was cooked with fresh filé and the paneed meat – veal to non-New Orleanians – was perfectly tender.
“Dooky Chase’s stuffed shrimp – I don’t know what it’s stuffed with, maybe some kind of meat, but it’s shrimp and it’s stuffed and it’s big and it’s very good,” said Keith Weldon Medley, once a regular customer. “We met there every month.”
“We” was his social club, The Bunch, an 89-year-old black group with about 50 members. They’ve barely caught up with one another since Katrina. Their annual Mardi Gras dance was canceled for the first time in decades.
“There was not one black ball this Mardi Gras season. Usually there are 20 or 30,” said Medley, a lifelong city resident and an expert on black history.
