After the Flood
Roderick, Anne Marie
PARTY OF THE FUTURE After the Flood ANNE MARIE RODERICK I flew to post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans on July 1, 2006, one week after my eighteenth birthday, where, except for a few weeks...
...there were so many more people, people who seemed completely unaware of the injustice around them...
...The front room served as an office...
...They may be right...
...I had never spent more than a month or two of the summer away from home...
...As an eighteenyearold with no experience in office work or finances, I was excited to have so many responsibilities...
...I went to New Orleans expecting to help bring about dramatic political change...
...Early on I became close friends with Collin, one of the younger men in our organization...
...Unfortunately, we couldn’t always help residents with the practical problems affecting their daily lives...
...my first experience living and working on my own made me feel I had become an adult...
...About a year and a half after I left, the People’s Organizing Committee disbanded...
...As the only woman living in the house, and the youngest, I had the nicest and most private living space on the property, but I was often protected more than the other volunteers...
...We too had long conversations about our visions for the world and the work we were doing...
...I began a faith journey I am still on today, and I got to see the complexity of bottomup organizing...
...I remember going to bed on the nights after these conversations with my mind racing with excitement about this friendship and the important work we were a part of...
...Although David was black and religious, I felt as if I had more in common with him than with anyone else in the organization...
...I had always heard these songs as freedom songs, not religious songs, but I soon realized that for many of the residents, faith and freedom were bound together...
...Many times with volunteers or in staff and Survivor Council meetings we held hands and sang secular versions of, “O Freedom,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” or “I Don’t Want to Run This Race in Vain...
...I deferred going to college...
...We rarely left the house except to do organizing work or take volunteers around the city...
...The more time I spent with David the more curious I became about his religious background...
...Then they’re welcome” he said, smiling, and he shook my hand...
...he asked...
...Names of some of the people in this essay have been changed...
...I had been raised in a liberal Protestant church and had decided as a young teen that organized religion and faith in God were not for me...
...Leaving I left New Orleans in March of 2007...
...That did not happen, although I learned a lot...
...Our vision for New Orleans was not always the vision of the residents, who were more concerned with returning to their homes and reconnecting with their families...
...Curtis was not religious himself, but he often adapted church songs into his organizing work...
...And can they work hard...
...The House POC’s headquarters was Curtis’s house—a big, blue, double shotgun, what New Yorkers would call a railroad flat, with two addons in the back...
...Come on down...
...I couldn’t drive any of the cars because I was too young to be on the insurance, and the men often insisted on coming along whenever I wanted to go for a walk or do laundry or pick up a few things at the corner store...
...While we were there, Curtis and others who were working closely with us split away from the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and formed a new organization, the People’s Organizing Committee (POC), to continue the work of the survivors’ councils...
...I sometimes accompanied him on organizing trips and got to see firsthand the grassroots organizing that we were doing with residents, not just the results of our work in the Survivor Council meetings...
...Curtis had been living in New Orleans for many years and, with others, had founded the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF), an organization designed to empower those New Orleans residents who had suffered the most from the effects of the storm but who had very little political clout of their own...
...They were all older than I—between the ages of twentysix and fortyfive—and came from mostly workingclass backgrounds...
...She is a thirdyear student at Earlham College, majoring in religion and minoring in creative writing...
...I wanted other women friends whom I could relate to and talk to about all that was happening in my life...
...I became close friends with David, a soontobe law student and the son of two Baptist ministers...
...I thought about the 34 DISSENT SPRING 2010 PARTY OF THE FUTURE Upper West Side teenagers at my New York City high school...
...But as I observed David’s faith, I began to observe faith all around me...
...Yes, definitely,” I replied...
...I went on to study at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where I am currently a thirdyear religion major...
...We used his kitchen to cook communal meals and occasionally had meetings or gettogethers in his living room...
...Yes, of course,” I said, knowing full well that we weren’t...
...PARTY OF THE FUTURE After the Flood ANNE MARIE RODERICK I flew to post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans on July 1, 2006, one week after my eighteenth birthday, where, except for a few weeks of visits home, I would live for the next eight months...
...I also worked on fundraising, and for several months I managed all of the finances for the organization, including administering payroll stipends to longterm volunteers when there was enough money to do so...
...I gained a deep appreciation for the importance of blackled organizing efforts that I had only understood philosophically before...
...He believed that although the principles of POC were still in line with his own political philosophy, he didn’t see our words being put into action...
...I still do...
...My parents and friends their age tell me that realizing the difficulty of political change is a good thing, a sign of maturity...
...The decision was not easy...
...Curtis looked down at me and said, “Are they humble...
...After work was over, we would buy daiquiris or cheap beer and sit on the porch or in my living room and play card games like Spades or Rummy 500...
...I found myself falling into roles of traditional domesticity I had never participated in growing up...
...I held the same vision for a transformed world that had brought me down to New Orleans in the first place, but the challenges of the organization and of our work had become too overwhelming...
...Well, we can’t promise you any money, but we can give you a roof over your head and a cot to sleep on,” he said...
...When the meetings seemed to be thriving and a steady Survivor Council member would agree to take on more leadership, the goals or methods of the residents always clashed with the goals and methods of our organization, and SPRING 2010 DISSENT 35 PARTY OF THE FUTURE none of the residents stayed long...
...The streets in New York City seemed so huge...
...I needed space to renew my perspective...
...On my most recent visit there with a work brigade of Earlham students in October, I could see that not much has changed...
...Almost every resident I spoke with talked about God’s role in the storm and in his or her life...
...Although I was definitely underqualified, and in some cases unable to do the work, I felt empowered by the tasks I was assigned...
...Through David I saw the challenges of bottomup organizing...
...But going back to New Orleans was not an alternative...
...We were not divided by race or background when it came to hanging out...
...After Collin left, I struggled to hold onto my inspiration and sense of purpose...
...All this has left me with mixed feelings...
...I was confused about the progress of the work we were doing—I knew that revolutions didn’t happen overnight, but I wasn’t sure that we had moved much at all since I had come to New Orleans...
...I thought I was going to build the revolution...
...When I returned home, everything moved quickly...
...Longterm volunteers lived on the left side of the house and in the addons...
...Every first and third Saturday of the month, we hosted Survivor Council meetings to receive direction from New Orleans residents...
...But New Orleans is still on my mind...
...I answered phones and took messages, responded to emails, coordinated volunteer brigades, kept track of resident contacts, and coordinated phonebanking projects...
...AMR was born in 1988 in New York City...
...I missed my friends and family at home...
...If shortterm volunteer groups came, we would pack up our things, lay out cots in all of the rooms, and live with the new volunteers...
...I felt a huge sense of relief...
...SPRING 2010 DISSENT 37...
...While tourists and PARTY OF THE FUTURE partygoers fill the French Quarter, abandoned homes disfigure the streets of the poorest neighborhoods...
...I couldn’t relate to my friends who were in college...
...My journey had begun six months earlier at the 2006 World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, where I attended a workshop about bottomup organizing in post–Katrina New Orleans led by Curtis Muhammad, a prominent civil rights organizer who worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the sixties...
...When I arrived, there were six male volunteers living in the left half of the shotgun and one living in a small addon in the back...
...Curtis moved to Jamaica to start an organizing school, David had entered law school as planned, and others had left to pursue different paths...
...Even though they had an impact, age and gender were rarely mentioned, though race was discussed frequently as we worked to preserve the blackled vision for the organization...
...I was deeply impressed by Curtis, and after the workshop I asked him if I could organize a group of students from my high school, The Beacon School in New York, to work with him in New Orleans...
...I loved the people I was living with, but the excessive drinking and our isolation were wearing me down...
...On busy days we would work from the morning until after dark, sometimes until nine or ten at night...
...We had some steady members who attended all of our meetings, but for the most part the group changed every two weeks...
...The intentions of the organization were sincere, but we quickly realized that not all Katrina survivors saw themselves as revolutionaries...
...The excitement of having so many responsibilities began to dissipate, and I often felt as if I had little energy or motivation to get done what I needed to do...
...He eventually left the organization on bad terms...
...The right side of the house was Curtis’s space...
...I can only experience it in sections...
...Work Most of my work was in the office...
...The new group seemed even more committed to helping Katrina’s poorest victims...
...I had hoped for more...
...I soon began to experience this connection in my own life...
...We would stay up late at night to talk about revolutionary politics, oppression, and all of the things that were happening around us...
...I returned home convinced that New Orleans was where I wanted to be, and a few weeks before graduation, I called up Curtis to ask if there was space for me to come and live with the group for a few months...
...I cared deeply about the organization and my relationships with other staff members...
...But I still want to recapture some of the excitement and enthusiasm that first led me to New Orleans...
...Friends Those of us under the age of thirty at POC became friends...
...But over time tensions grew between Collin and others in the organization...
...36 DISSENT SPRING 2010 Whenever I returned home from New Orleans, I was shocked...
...sometimes very few people came, and sometimes nobody came at all...
...Now, three years later, it’s hard for me to process everything that happened as one experience...
...Sometimes I went to the trailer parks in Baker, Louisiana, to support the organizing work going on there if we were short on organizers...
...As a white male, he often felt that people talked down to him and treated him unfairly...
...The world looked different to me, darker, bigger...
...Soon we had a group of fiftyfive parents, students, and teachers heading for New Orleans on spring break...
...In my eyes the change was all to the good...
...I didn’t know that the biggest change would be in me...
Vol. 57 • March 2010 • No. 2
