My husband and I recently spent a week in the Crescent City, the Big Easy, the City that Care Forgot and that Katrina changed forever. Newlyweds, we had started out there after grad school 30 years ago. I had been drawn to it because of its French history, one of my passions. What Francophile wouldn’t love a city that has its own death mask of Napoleon?
If the breeze was right, we could hear the lion at the Audubon Zoo roar in the early morning through our bedroom window and the soothing hum of the trolley on St. Charles Avenue just a half block away. Our first child was born in a hospital on the levee.
When we left for higher ground in Colorado after just four years, I wept. There were all the standard reasons that our colleagues used when they decided to leave – the schools, the crime, the heat. But I had come to love New Orleans, a tired old city so poor yet so rich in charm and culture.
A year after Katrina, it is shocking to still see widespread devastation. Up and down the streets there is no one, just piles of garbage and debris. Here and there a lonely FEMA trailer sits where someone is making an effort, likely on their own dime. The water did not discriminate. In the very poorest areas and the affluent, the mold grows just as thick.
After gorging ourselves on beignets one morning, we stopped at the Tourist Booth outside the Café du Monde. The greeter said she had left on Aug. 29, 2005, thinking she would be gone for three or four days. It was eight months.
To add insult to injury, her home was slammed by an oil spill, which coated her house and yard with mixed crude. Nothing remains of her belongings, and she still doesn’t know about the status of her house.
We mentioned we were in town for an EPA conference and she asked if we knew whom to call to find out if it would ever be safe for children to play in the yards in her neighborhood. She said she thought the people from the EPA were good people, that they really care – but “those FEMA people … .” She left the sentence for us to finish. She had been studying the jobs section of the Times Picayune when we walked up. At 76, she needs to work more hours.
“When did you reopen?” we asked many people. Out poured the stories. People were starved to tell stories that were hard to fathom. A shopkeeper at the Riverwalk told us that her hairdresser’s house was “lost.” So many of them were, I said. No, you don’t understand. She can’t find her house and until the insurance company can determine whether it was destroyed by water or by wind, they won’t settle up. They’re good people, she added, and they’re rebuilding on their own dime. Her husband works at Walgreens.
Rose is 86. Her home, five blocks from the 17th Street Canal breach, had more than 9 feet of floodwater. She’s alone but has already returned, having paid for reconstruction herself. She’s the only person around for several blocks. Friends of ours stop in to check on her from time to time. Katrina continues to claim victims as the elderly eventually just give up, unable to cope with their loss. Thankfully, Rose is independent and determined.
The nation moved on to the next crisis and the next, and New Orleans waits. In spite of an inadequate and excruciatingly slow federal response, I have confidence that the city will heal, one person at a time. The image that most vividly defined Katrina for the world was the heart-wrenching misery we all witnessed at the Superdome, live and in high definition.
Fittingly, our last picture of the city was of a work crew tethered to the center of the dome painting the roof yellow. Below them a huge banner announced, “We’re Back – Opening Game September 25th – GO SAINTS.” Garbage and mold be damned. How ’bout dem Saints?
Barbara O’Grady is a Littleton writer.
