Remembrance: New Orleans after the storm

Pulling the insides out of a flooded, post-Katrina house in New Orleans has one huge saving grace: It helps someone free themselves from the mire of an ocean bed and move on. It helps them breathe again.

Our group of nine had driven down to the city from Asheville, a motley collection of men and women, young and old, many of us drawn to New Orleans because of some prior connection or distant memory.

At our first house project, in Chef Menteur, we waded into a home that hadn’t been touched since the storm--a daughter’s bedroom of gritty stuffed animals, warped cassette tapes and fused vinyls, a corroded trumpet and academic books about music; a father’s study of do-it-yourself manuals, records and files, a band saw, rusted handguns, chairs and desk lamps—in other words, everything in exactly the same place it was in the day before the water rose.

I couldn’t help but imagine the kind of people who lived there, their loves and ambitions; how they were with each other; what it was like to be in the house from dozens of loose photographs; the tides of conversation that ebbed and flowed there.

We separated out all the interesting, salvageable pieces, things that could live through a flood, and a brother of the owner came by with his wife and sorted the stack wearing rubber gloves, as if on an Egyptian dig. He poured over documents and memorabilia--army medals, plaques and certificates and old, typed letters, and at one point shrugged, “My God—they never threw out anything.”

We knew that some of the pieces we were saving out of the grunge would wind up in the hands of family. So, from that perspective, we felt like we were wresting treasures from a sea bottom, combined with a kind of last rites for all the stuff that had laid around in the soup too long, not only physically but in the psyches of those who knew it was in there.

We never, by the way, found a wedding band we were told was left behind, somewhere in the acrid coffers of all things Katrina.

On another day, in Lakeview, the owner of a second project house stopped in to buy us lunch. Stuttering with emotion, she talked about how she’d spent 39 summers teaching kids how to swim in her backyard.

We flushed out her pool water, dark like coffee, with a sump pump, watching fish (stocked by the city to cut down on mosquitos) rise in scatters to the surface. It was easy to envision the children who had also skittered across that same pool--all those lives in some way altered by the path of the storm, even if they’d long since left the street and moved to Portland or Little Rock or just to the other side of Lake Ponchartrain.

The owner, herself 83, had been staying with a sister in some far western sun state, apparently too long. For despite the gappy, unsteady state of New Orleans’ piecemeal neighborhoods, she could hardly wait to get back. “Everything was too perfect out there—I was bored out of my head,” she said. “And this—this was a happy house—ooh, such a happy house.”

On our last work day, in the Lower Ninth Ward, we pulled down ceilings and jerked out wall board, rolled up carpets and scooped out debris, tossed mattresses and headboards, curtains and clothes. The house to the immediate right leaned to the side; another had no front. The very fact that the cottage we were working in didn’t buckle or cave seemed like a small miracle in such a battered, storm-soaked neighborhood now dotted with white FEMA trailors. We found a few treasures in the rubble, but only a few; mostly albums with pictures of children growing up and smiling into the camera a long time ago, before the levees broke and everything changed.


I still see New Orleans from the eyes of a 14-year-old when I traveled down there from Tennessee to stay with my aunt and uncle and four kids for two weeks. Pete Fountain had his own club and Al Hirt was a god. At Preservation Hall, a fabulous black woman would play keyboard with her hands and bells with her toes.

I remember riding the trolley into Jackson Square and having my face sketched in charcoals. The streets were green and lush. The city moved in song. One day, I rounded a corner in the house and bumped into my aunt getting out of a shower. My whole life congealed on the spot: the music of New Orleans, the tropical beauty, the amazements of a full-grown naked woman.

And food. Food that seemed to have a crazy dignity about it. Jambalaya. Etouffée. Beignet. Muffaletta. The resident language of yum.

To come back, now, to such devastation made me look for existing portals to the place I knew.

I found them. I found them one night at St. Anna’s parish church, which has a mission of serving free food to New Orleans musicians, who are making half their former incomes. I found them in the music of the Jazz Vipers, a sextet playing free that evening, riffing on Cole Porter pieces and the music of Hoagy Carmichael and Irving Berlin.

I found them in a generosity of spirit: one day we went to pay for lunch at a corner sandwich shop only to find that someone had anonymously picked up our tab.

And I found even more. I found that there actually is a New Orleans underneath the flooded bedrooms and kitchens; behind the houses still marked with dates and patrol abbreviations and numbers for known bodies, behind the paperwork and postponements, behind the politics, absurdities and disappointments.

It’s down there, it’s cooking and it will be back.