The Last Page
Phillips, Maxine
SIGNS AND PORTENTS abounded that Good Friday in New Orleans as our group of New York City high school students, parents, and teachers rolled in to spend the spring break doing "relief" work....
...The floods came...
...Everything has changed...
...would be raised toward the government by residents we met...
...No triumphant icon here...
...Throughout the week, the Good Friday cry of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me...
...And a new hurricane season is upon us...
...Houses displayed signs for the twentytwo would-be mayors and numerous City Council wannabes...
...This turned out to be a monument called the "Tomb of the Unknown Slave...
...Manacles hung from its crossbeam, and smaller crosses were planted in the ground below...
...The religious right sees apocalyptic judgment on a city of sin...
...Burger King, despite offering a $6,000 signing bonus, couldn't find enough workers to stay open twelve, much less twenty-four hours...
...In the triangles were notations: the date of the search, the initials of the crew, and the number of casualties, if any...
...The waters receded...
...and unrelenting racism...
...Block after block of unoccupied homes and shuttered businesses made finding food and supplies a challenge...
...Augustine's Church, founded by freed slaves in 1842, where the fifty-five of us would sleep, a large, black iron cross affixed to the side wall confronted us...
...The catastrophe, as more than one writer has noted, inspires biblical imagery...
...Lawns and green median strips sprouted campaign posters for the upcoming primary...
...political corruption...
...We recognized similarities to our post—September 11 experience: the outpouring of aid, the volunteers from around the country who had dropped their normal lives to come to help, the grief always just below the surface, the tenderness toward each other...
...That anyone would want to be mayor of a soon-to-be-bankrupt city should have been a sign of hope...
...And there was no doubt then, or now, who was bearing the cross...
...not much is different...
...incredible ineptitude, callousness, and cowardice by all levels of government...
...For despite the crowded bars and restaurants in the French Quarter, the people to whom we spoke felt abandoned...
...Those parts, we were told, were where "they don't want poor people moving back...
...They" had also bombed the levee that flooded the Lower Ninth...
...Parts of the city lacked electricity and water...
...But it was the other signs during this Passover week that reminded us why we were there...
...As we approached St...
...At times, they overwhelmed the lush magnolias, honeysuckle, and azaleas flowering even as the city struggled for new life...
...The city, once home to 500,000, now had fewer than half its residents...
...A look at the flimsy levee convinced me that one didn't need bombs to explain the breach, but history (1927, when levees outside of town were dynamited to save the business section of New Orleans, and the persistent belief that levees had been dynamited during Hurricane Betsy in 1965) weighed on modern-day interpretations of events...
...None of us had actually been in a war zone, but most of us had been in a city under attack...
...It leaned at an angle, as if being dragged by someone...
...Larger relief efforts had literally folded their tents and left...
...Those so inclined on the religious left see the "wages of sin" in ruined wetlands...
...Most of the time there was a zero, but sometimes a number stood as a memorial...
...Piles of uncollected refuse from damaged houses (FEMA contracts had ended that week, we were told, and residents would now have to pay for pick-up), miles of flattened and splintered houses, the absence of children (only 20 percent of New Orleans public schools survived destruction) brought comparisons to a war zone...
...Each house searched by rescue crews carried an X with a circle around it...
...Still, this was seven months after the event...
...MAXINE PHILLIPS 128 DISSENT / Summer 2006...
Vol. 53 • July 2006 • No. 3
