Horror and Hope in New Orleans

I’ve been living for three months in New Orleans with my partner Lisa and our two children: Gabriel, 2, and Dominic, now 7 months. Before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, we had already planned to travel from our home in Ithaca, NY to spend the fall and winter months in New Orleans, scoping out the possibilities for forming a Catholic Worker-style community there. By late October/early November, we decided that the situation had stabilized enough for us to try going to New Orleans with our children. In the three months since we arrived, I’ve felt more challenged than ever before in my life by the job of confronting injustice and undoing the racism of our society and in my own life. Almost every time I ride the bus I hear a story of someone who lost family in the storm. The conversations crop up quickly and unexpectedly.

Just as quickly and unexpectedly come horrifying statements of unabashed racism from the parents of our Gabe’s playmates at the playground or playgroup. Last month, I found myself suddenly mute when a white, middle class, pastor’s wife launched into a tirade against “black people” in this city and asserted that they “should just be happy in Houston” with their FEMA money and “bloom where they’re planted”. Yesterday, a very nice man from the local gay parents group commented how “things are so much nicer since the storm” because all the ‘bad people’ aren’t here.

Often I feel like we are struggling to live and organize in a world where all priorities are backwards. Last week, on the day before Valentine’s day there was a court hearing to extend FEMA payments for hotel rooms for homeless New Orleanians with nowhere else to go. In stating his decision to let FEMA stop paying for rooms, the judge, Stanwood Duval, commented: “I am not sure I am doing justice, but I know I’m following the law.” With that blithe comment he sent thousands of families onto the streets during one of the coldest nights of the year in New Orleans. Among those displaced were teenage mothers, city bus drivers, schoolteachers, and at least one 85-year-old man, still employed but now homeless.

Three weeks ago, the front page of the local paper carried a story about the archdiocesan decision to close historic St. Augustine Church. St. Augustine is the oldest black catholic church in the country. The Sunday mass at St. Augustine is a joyful 2-hour experience filled with song in which the “kiss of peace” alone usually lasts about 15 minutes as the entire congregation circulates through the church hugging and catching up. Father LeDoux walks through the aisles blessing babies and hugging every single parishioner. The church provides spaces for community gatherings, meetings, and events of all kinds. On the day that the closure article appeared, I was part of an attempt to reach out to unflooded churches, mostly in well-off areas, to find emergency housing for the hotel evictees. Out of about 50 churches we contacted, only one offered any assistance. The others responded with comments such as, “I’m sure that is something we’re not interested in doing.” In many cases, we were not even able to get past the secretary to even discuss our ideas with a pastor or church decision maker. The denials were full of excuses about insurance limitations or concerns that people would overstay their welcome. No room at the inn.

In another instance of backward priorities, we learn more, daily, of the horrors that Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) inmates suffered during the storm and during evacuation. In my first few weeks here, I interviewed a man who was arrested on August 27 for assisting in the theft of 2 plums and a pound of chicken salad from a local grocery store. He was not actually accused of shoplifting, but merely being with someone who was shoplifting. This man ended up being evacuated from OPP only after the water had risen chest deep in his cell; and then spending over 2 months in a jail in Bossier Parish. At the time of his arrest, he had been successfully living with HIV for 8 years and had a T cell count of over 1000. He did not receive any medications during his incarceration and by the time I met with him his T cell count had dropped to 25. He is one of over 8,000 inmates who were in local jails and prisons when the storm hit.

Currently the fate of the public defender’s office is being debated. There are only 7 of 42 pre-storm public defenders now working. For the 85% of New Orleans defendants who rely on public defenders to represent them in court, this is disastrous. They are forced to rely on a lawyer who is juggling their case with about 1600 other cases-essentially no representation at all. I attended court on Ash Wednesday. The municipal court was actually housed in part of the jail, apparently the room that the police van would drive into to unload prisoners. The judge sat on a desk put on a loading dock to raise him above everyone else. There was no sign of anything resembling a “defense table” or even a public defender. Everyone I saw appeared unrepresented. In the few instances when people tried to speak for themselves rather than stand silently while their sentence was imposed, they were chastised and threatened with more jail time or a higher fine. I saw several instances where men who clearly did not understand even minimal English said “plead guilty” and were sentenced without seeming to understand any of the process. In one case, the man remained standing in front of the judge for several minutes seeming to wait for more information after he had been sentenced. Finally, someone who seemed to be a secretary yelled loudly, “You’re done! Go that way!” while pointing to the door. He slowly walked away with a baffled look. A few minutes later, a woman came before the court charged with disturbing the peace. When she opted not to plead guilty and asked for a trial date, the judge increased her bond from $300 to $2500. Not having $2200 dollars hanging around in her pocket, she was taken into custody.

Mixed in with these horror stories are beautiful stories of resistance and resilience. Small neighborhood groups are meeting all over the city to strategize and plan the rebuilding of their communities. I have been attending meetings with a group of Lower 9th Ward residents who plan to rebuild and return. Most of their homes were either washed away when the levees failed or took on 9 to 10 feet of water. They are older people, college students, and young moms with babies, who show up faithfully each week to fight for their homes. Many have moved back to their communities in spite of having to live 6 or 8 to a hotel room, or in houses with no electricity. Some have been living in their cars for weeks. Others work all week in Baton Rouge, Houston, or Atlanta, and return on the weekends, sleep in their cars or on relatives’ floors, and work on their houses. They have organized community work days, pressured the local energy company to begin restoring power, and fought hard against plans to turn their neighborhood into warehouses or greenspace.

Volunteers continue to pour in from around the country as well. Common Ground, a local post-Katrina community effort, continues to operate medical clinics in Algiers and the 9th ward. They operate distribution centers stocked with water, clothing, bleach, cleaning supplies, food and baby needs in both the upper and lower 9th Ward as well as Houma, LA, St. Bernard Parish, and Algiers. Common Ground also has a women’s center for returning women and children seeking safe, free housing,

People’s Hurricane Relief Fund continues to work with both local residents and out-of-town volunteers to fight for a just rebuilding. They have been involved in organizing resident meetings, fighting demolitions in the lower 9th Ward, supporting reconstruction workers who are trying to organize, hosting and plugging-in over 100 visiting law students, and engaging in too many other activities to name. They’ve been instrumental in bringing to the forefront the voices of the most severely affected and most disenfranchised communities in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast.

For the time being, we have rented a tiny apartment here in New Orleans and will stay for several more months. Our hope is that we can be supporters and allies to the hardest hit communities as they struggle to rebuild.