It has been four years since Hurricane Katrina, and I find myself grasping for words. Many good things have happened since the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast — and many not so good. If you were to go back to New Orleans now, you could travel quite a bit around town and never see a trace of the storm. Businesses and restaurants are open everywhere, schools are up and running, hospital emergency rooms bursting as usual. You have to go to the eastern part of town, to the area I used to live and practice in, to see the scars.
Where I used to live, St. Bernard Parish, about a quarter of the population is back. My old house was razed two years ago, and a year after that, we sold the bare slab to a neighbor.
The sad legacy of Katrina is that the poor of New Orleans, the inhabitants of the eastern side of the city, are the ones who have not been able to return. For New Orleans this a particularly grievous injury; I do not know of a city in America that has so consistently drawn from the creativity of its poorest citizens. Jazz, the jazz funeral, Mardi Gras Indians, much of the city’s unique cuisine, its folk art, even its manner of speaking come from the poor folk. It is an irony that New Orleans always sought to expand its middle and upper class, but it was the people who had nothing who gave the city the most.
(An example: in New Orleans, blue collar natives are sometimes called "Y'ats," a diminutive of a greeting originally used in the Lower Ninth ward and in St. Bernard. When two middle or lower class New Orleanians meet, one will say "Where y'at?" -- that is, "where are you at?" -- which means "how are you doing?" Though many people still greet each other this way, the orginal Y'ats now live in other cities.)
A year after the storm, I read New Orleans, Mon Amour, a book of essays by Andre Codrescu, a New Orleans immigrant who wrote movingly about the city in a series of audio essays on NPR in Katrina’s aftermath. In the book, Coudreseu said of these essays:
I wrote several radio reports and poetic essays after the Katrina apocalypse….They are not meant to signal the end of the city itself … but they are eulogies nonetheless, for something that was and will not be ever again, no matter how many commissions meet and how far the price of real estate soars. You can rebuild a house, but you can’t restore a soul.
When I first read those words I was unable to get my mind around them. It didn’t seem possible that the old city was truly gone. But it turned out to be true. Much of the city is back the way it was, but hidden parts of it, both physically and spiritually, are ruined and hidden from sight. As the city recovers it is reinventing itself, but it is not the place that it was. I am not sure I can explain the difference. I can only suggest that you read Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children by John Chase, a book written long before the storm, and then Condrescu’s elegaic Mon Amour and try to taste the subtle change in spirit.
New Orleans has always been a city buried in its past, so much so it was often hard to tell if time was moving forward. This was exasperating and endearing in equal portions. Now, the city has to look forward. Recovery demands that. As the people who live there turn their eyes towards the sun for the first time, they are creating a new city but at the same time are letting part of the old disappear.
The Islanos community of St. Bernard, the murky neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth, large swaths of stately dilapidated Mid City, the remnants of the Creoles of Color culture are all gone. And that’s that.
It will be all right. It has been all right, sort of. What saddens me, though, it that New Orleans always was, beneath the surface, an atypical American city. What is likely to happen is that the lost parts of the city will return as replicas of America elsewhere. Our country seems to be gradually homogenizing, and it is a tragedy that a little sliver of difference has become slightly more like the rest, all because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers can’t build a decent levee.