Ode or Eulogy: New Orleans After Katrina (cont.)

A thousand people are packed into the jazz tent, hot as a cane cutters crotch, listening to violinist Michael Ward and his band sweat and propel the music out into the vast space.

Fingers dancing, bow sawing, Ward’s whole body convulses into music. Then a roar beyond the song fills the tent, and a Louisiana rainstorm pounds the canvas. Hail and thunder, and you’re sure Mr. Ward’s bow strikes lightening.

God may delay, but He never forgets.
                      Sign outside a church in Coden, Alabama
 
Stepping over a pile of rotting books, photo albums and a painting of Jesus, I enter T.T. Williams’ home. Lungs tighten in the mould-laden air. “I was born in this room sixty-five years ago,” this woman explains, tears furrowing down her dark face. “And in this room over here I watched my grandfather die.”

Although Katrina is forever wed to New Orleans, she also affected an area close to the size of the United Kingdom, displacing about 1.5 million people. Here in this small fishing village of Coden, Alabama, three hours east of New Orleans, Katrina’s storm surge rushed miles inland, flooding most of the houses.

Ironically, a hurricane’s destructive ally is the humble mold spore. When the floodwater receded, this insatiable little organism found the perfect habitat to flourish in the warm, damp places behind walls and under floors. Within days homes became biohazard chambers. Months ago, church volunteers stripped out some of the mould-infested insulation, wallboards, and ceilings in T.T’s home. But the river of disaster compassion has long run dry, the knot of governmental or insurance help too tight to untie. Now the house stands half-gutted and rotting, the poor of Coden forgotten.

T.T lives in a white FEMA trailer parked out front. She invites me inside, pours iced tea. “How can the government spend billions in Iraq,” T.T. asks, “when eight months after Katrina, so many of us still live like refugees in our own country?”

But she is determined to stay and rebuild. “I have to,” she says. “I can’t abandon my ancestors.”

“… the Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm…”
           Bible:  Nahum 1:2

On a street corner in New Orleans East, where whites seldom go, Mr. Ollie, 88 years old, describes how his house flooded in a surge of water fourteen feet high. All his life he has worked, picking cotton at six, then building bridges over the Mississippi River. Now he lives in the back of an abandoned store where a spray-painted sign over the door warns: Do Not Enter. Toxins Inside. Hundreds of people drowned in this neighborhood, some of their rotting bodies found only weeks later by cadaver dogs sniffing through piles of rubble. “In order to get the bad guys,” Mr. Ollie says, “God had to take some of the good people too.”

Johnny Ray Turner, a construction worker with hands like worn leather, nods his agreement. Two weeks before Katrina, he dreamt a big storm hit and he had to swim for his life. “I could feel every splash of my arms and how the water tried to suck me under.” It disturbed him so much, he told his preacher. The preacher said, it’s just a dream, don’t worry.

Now his prophetic dreams frighten him. Two weeks ago he dreamt that a storm even bigger than Katrina would strike the Gulf Coast this summer. “And New Orleans will be no more,” he says.

“But why are you still here?” I ask.

“When I see all the birds flying north again, I’ll know it’s time to leave. The rest I just put in the hands of the Lord.”

Two young men pull up in an SUV and offer to sell us crack.

“Remember,” Mr. Ollie says, as we shake hands goodbye, “God told us to be ready for when He comes.”

Baghdad on the Bayou.
          T-shirt

At the end of my last day in this city, Father Dung Nguyen of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church shows where Mayor Nagin ordered a dump to be built for all the Katrina trash. Swatting mosquitoes, we stand on a spit of land between the Bayou Sauvage and the proposed site. The good Father describe how, when the next storm comes, it will wash the 80-foot high pile of Katrina toxins back into the Vietnamese community. Tomorrow they will march to City Hall to protest the dump. Father Nguyen admits it’s going to be a tough fight. As he talks on, already late for his evening Mass, I just can’t take in any more. I want drive away from the sadness, fly away from this madness tomorrow.

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