Vignettes from recovery work in New Orleans
Henderson, Elizabeth
AS OUR PLANE circled over New Orleans, I fixed my eyes on the window. I wanted a perspective on the damage below that did not come secondhand from television or the papers. Soon our group from...
...He picked up a piece of framed artwork, thoughtfully looked at it, and then let it fall back onto the pile...
...I had stepped on a paintbrush...
...ACORN's gutting efforts were part of its "No Bulldozing" campaign to save structurally sound houses by gutting them to remove mold damage...
...I thought that they were swimming pools...
...The men wanted to be understood, and we wanted to comprehend what they were saying so that they could get the help they needed...
...Almost no one had returned...
...Our picket line suddenly dissolved...
...After a moment of silence, one of the men said, "I need three things...
...It reminded me of the ruins of Pompeii and the ash-preserved bodies I saw in a museum there of people clutching their heads and bracing themselves against the volcano's poisonous gases...
...The group included a tall black woman who was visibly upset yet trying to keep her emotions together...
...The Lower Ninth was equally frozen in time...
...I noticed a clump of people standing to my right...
...They had little food and water...
...His son chimed in, "Though there really hasn't been any of that since the hurricane...
...Later I found out that what I had seen were blue tarps put on houses to protect them from the wind...
...After the storm we thought the water was going to go down, and instead of going down, the water was going up, up, and up," she recalled...
...Motel workers carried mattresses across the street and propped them next to a dumpster...
...It was difficult to walk away...
...The pile of debris reached my waist...
...Money, money, and more money," counting off each "money" on a different finger...
...One was short and wiry, and the other was tall and heavy and smelled of alcohol...
...She kept saying, "I'm ok, I'm ok...
...We watched as people carried all of their belongings onto the sidewalk...
...Despite having heard reports that even as late as November FEMA had yet to check all the houses in the Lower Ninth for bodies, I was not prepared for what I would see...
...As I reached the corner of the street, I heard a crunch under my feet...
...I optimistically pointed out the option of getting his house gutted, and he told me he didn't have any house to go back to...
...I was slightly skeptical...
...Two Neighborhoods During canvassing, I came across three elderly African American men talking in the backyard of one of their homes, near a FEMA trailer...
...There were about ten of them, and the stench of rotting food and mold was overpowering...
...The quality of the air in the neighborhood was different from the area we had canvassed in the day before...
...He gave me a tight-lipped smile, "There are shootings and rapes there all the time," he said...
...Her children and sixteen grandchildren are spread across the country, and she hopes for their return...
...She had just returned to New Orleans for the first time since the storm and was looking forward to the release of her church group's gospel CD...
...We quickly realized that he was not interested in any of the things that ACORN was doing...
...We came across a white man standing outside of his house with his young adult son...
...Charles Avenue would be kicked to the curb...
...The area this man was describing was where we had been for the last three days...
...Bits of people's lives were scattered everywhere, and in many places the rubble was so deep that traditional boundaries, such as those between lawns or between a road and a sidewalk, were indiscernible...
...At the front of the house, workers were using wheelbarrows to take the remains of the homeowner's belongings to the curb...
...I was told that she was the owner of the house...
...In some yards, there were boats, and in others, cars with water lines to the middle of their windows...
...the box with accompanying supplies lay nearby...
...FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had paid for the rooms through February 7, but the hotel owners wanted them out so that they could charge tourists in town for Mardi Gras twice what FEMA was paying...
...I could not, I realized, change his mind...
...I played innocent, "What do you mean the ghetto...
...An array of housedresses hung on the fence in front of one house...
...We could smell the mold in the air and feel the particles in our lungs...
...In New Orleans, we would be assigned one of two jobs: to go into neighborhoods to report on what 6 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 people needed in order to get back into New Orleans or to work on housing reclamation...
...All thirty-five of the people who were displaced by the hurricane and staying at the Quality Inn on St...
...I tried to tell them about ACORN's efforts to get people to come back to New Orleans, everything from gutting houses to helping people with their tax forms...
...For the rest of the day, activist groups tried to obtain a temporary restraining order to halt the evictions...
...Just before we left, a truck pulled up with salvaged refrigerators on its bed...
...But he did give us a bit of advice: "Don't go down this road too far...
...As the noon deadline drew closer, our chanting became more fervent: "FEMA, FEMA, you can't hide...
...The previous day, waiting in line at Wendy's, I overheard a conversation that a young white man was having on his cell phone...
...She had been evacuated by helicopter from the second-story balcony of her daughter's home in the projects...
...She pointed to the attic window, a tiny portal too small for an adult to shimmy through and escape...
...I touched her arm and told her that we could stop the interview at any time...
...It was the first time she'd ever flown...
...When I asked her how she felt about the government after Hurricane Katrina, she said that she was disgusted, and that the government could have done a better job of getting people out of the city...
...ACORN wanted the government and developers to see that people wanted to return to New Orleans and were invested in rebuilding...
...On another day, as we left Mary Solomon's house, two Spanish-speaking men motioned for us to come over...
...Instead, I saw endless bits of blue...
...She remained in the attic for three days until she was rescued...
...Her tears were dignified and restrained...
...House #200 We visited the two hundredth house that ACORN was gutting...
...Hannah Price, an African American, was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt...
...One of the volunteers paused by the pile, sighting an object of interest...
...When I asked her if the relief services provided in the wake of the storm were sufficient, she said that everyone did the best they could...
...That's the ghetto...
...I followed her gaze as she watched the ACORN crew empty out her house...
...In the Bronx, we had trained for a day for work as community organizers...
...Ruins The Lower Ninth Ward seemed untouched by the cleanup efforts...
...I expected utter devastation—miles and miles of storm-ravaged homes and communities...
...In one backyard, children's bikes were twisted together, and string lights shaped like footballs were rooted into the side yard...
...It was as if nature had played a hateful prank, throwing boats and cars on houses, exchanging the roof of one house for another...
...While we were talking, she began to cry...
...I went to the Lower Ninth," he said, "It looks like the hurricane just happened...
...COMMENTS & OPINIONS House #200 was in one of the harder-hit areas...
...ELIZABETH HENDERSON is a junior at Sarah Lawrence College and is editor in chief of the school's student newspaper, The Phoenix...
...8 n DISSENT / Spring 2006...
...Homecoming Mary Solomon is an African American in her early sixties, short, with soft brown eyes and DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 7 COMMENTS & OPINIONS no gray in her hair...
...I was stumped until I realized that they were the license plate numbers of contractors who had picked them up for work but had not paid them...
...Then, we could see residents bringing their belongings down to the sidewalk on luggage carts...
...Soon our group from Sarah Lawrence College—a professor, a dean, nine students, and two alumnae—would be landing...
...The only safe area of her house was the attic...
...She frequently mentioned her faith in God and the strength and optimism that she gained from her religion...
...The shorter man took out a small notebook, pointing passionately to three different lines he had written on the back cover, each was a combination of letters and numbers...
...By the end of the day, they had succeeded...
...Piles of debris still lined the streets...
...We handed them an ACORN flyer and tried to explain in our fractured Spanish that if they called the number on the sheet they would be able to get in contact with people who could help them...
...It was not so much what had been done to the neighborhood, but what had not been done in the wake of the storm...
...She stayed along with others until all of the patients had been evacuated...
...The generator went out early on, and she and others had to wheel the dead into the crammed hospital morgue...
...Inequality at the Quality Inn They were going to be evicted at noon...
...Standing on the sidewalk in front of her damaged home, she told us how she had been stuck in the hospital where she worked for a whole week after the storm hit...
...On our final day, several of us walked through the Garden District, frustrated by the lack of response to ACORN in this affluent, white community...
...It was January 5. We had come for a nine-day stay to work with ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now...
...But what dismayed me was how this man, in many ways, embodied the New Orleans that the government envisions as a result of its rebuilding efforts—a gentrified, white community with no room for a population that is either black or poor...
...She said that she cried every day, and joked that now she was done for the day...
...A woman sat on a box on the sidewalk, looking defeated and tired...
...You've got rooms right inside...
...The judge ruled that those who had been evicted must be let back in "immediately...
...The homeowner described to us how the flood waters rapidly rose to the height of her shoulders, forcing her to navigate the murky waters in her main-level family room with her pocketbook on top of her head...
Vol. 53 • April 2006 • No. 2
