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http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051003fa_fact LETTER FROM LOUISIANA: HIGH WATER How Presidents and citizens react to disaster. by DAVID REMNICK, The New Yorker continued... Like so many other news people in town, Dave Cohen had been preparing forty-years-later reports on Hurricane Betsy when Katrina hit. Although L.B.J. and the local officials of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana responded to their crisis with far greater coördination and speed than their successors in 2005, the memories of Betsy remain bitter, and not only because of the suffering and destruction it caused. As Edward Haas has made clear, Betsy was followed within days by widespread rumors that Mayor Schiro had ordered floodwater pumped out of his own well-to-do subdivision, Lake Vista, and into the Ninth Ward. At the time of the flood, Schiro was in a race for reëlection with another Democrat, the city council president, James E. Fitzmorris, Jr. There were also stories that he had ordered the levees breached. Thomas E. Allen, of Hunt Foods & Industries, an ally of the Mayors, wrote to him to say that two of his African-American servants brought this tale to my wife yesterday and said that all of the Negroes were talking about it and were angry with you about it. Haas quotes Schiros secretary, Marguerite Guette, who told the Mayor, An old 71-years of age colored man by the name of Williams, who says you have helped him all of his life and who lives at 2630 Republic Street, called to say that he is very concerned about a rumor that is going around that may ruin you with colored voters. The rumor is that you cut the Industrial Canal to drown the colored people so that they would not vote in the coming election. An aide to the Mayor later reported that people claiming to be relief workers and Schiro supporters delivered bags of supplies to flood victims in the Ninth Ward. People opened the bags only to find spoiled food and soiled, useless clothing. Four years ago, a play staged in New Orleans called An Evening with Betsy explored the old conspiracy rumors. And although among historians Schiro earns high marks for his handling of the flood (if not for his obstinate views on race), the rumors persist. That theory is why older people in the Ninth Ward still keep hatchets in their attics, Dave Cohen had told me. They remember what it was like to be trapped, with the water rising and no way to get to the roof. The pattern in Katrinas wake is similar. Everywhere I went in Louisiana and Texas to talk to evacuees, many of the poorest among them were not only furiousfurious at the President and local officials, furious at being ignored for daysbut inclined to believe, as many did after Betsy, that the flooding of the city was, or could have been, a deliberate act. In the town of New Iberia, south of Lafayette, a few hundred New Orleanians, nearly all of them African-American, were staying at a gym on the grounds of West End Park. It was dusk when I arrived, and people were wandering around the athletic field, shooing away clouds of mosquitoes, drinking bottles of cold water provided by the Red Cross, and recounting for each other, yet again, their exodus stories. Biblical proportionseveryone used that phrase, and why not? I went inside and noticed a couple of signs: This is Our Home. Please Respect Us. Evacuees and Volunteers Only Beyond This Point: Curfew 730, Lights Out 10, TV off at 10:30. Two of the Red Cross volunteers who had organized the shelter and were keeping it running told me that they had been at Ground Zero in New York four years ago and that, in many ways, this was worse. A whole city ruined, one said. More than a million people leaving their homes. Biblical proportions, the other said. A friendly man in his late thirties named Walter Hays sat down to talk. Hays is African-American, a Navy veteran who had been working as a fitter at Northrop Grumman. People had painful and fantastical stories to tellfloating a family to safety in an inflatable kiddie pool, nights in the Superdome or on the street, helicopter escapes in the arms of a soldierand Walter Hays wanted to tell his. He was in New Iberia with a group of twenty-eight close family and friends, including three infants and several small children. The adults had vowed to bring everyone out together. He talked of the beautiful weather the day after the storm, and then, the next day, he said, the water started coming out of the ground, rolling down the streets, streaming through the floorboards. In three hours, the water was at chest level. Hays filled an ice chest with papers and the group started out, halting for two days and nights, along with two thousand other souls, on the sweltering Claiborne Avenue overpass, near the Superdome. We had with us three-month-old twins, a two-month-old, no water, he said. People were pulling guns. What we saw on that overpass was beyond imagining: there were suicides, people jumping off the bridge, older people who couldnt take it, there were dead bodies floating underneath, the whole overpass reeked of feces and urine. Fights broke out all the time. People tried to jump on whatever military vehicles went by, but of course they wouldnt let anyone on. There were choppers over our heads. We could see the touch-and-gos of the helicoptersit went on all night long, and no one got any sleep. It was so hot and humid. And the one thing Ill never forget is that the sky was so clear and full of stars. So clear because there werent any lights from the city. And all night long the kids were crying, the adults were crying, old people crying. In the days that followed, they made their way to higher ground. A heroin addict they met had been looting, and he gave them water, food, Pampers. He even let them bathe in his house. And he went on looting, Hays said. I cant really argue. If youre dealt lemons, you make lemonade. Walter Hays and the others knew they had to get out of town, but there was still no transport. A police officer told them they should break into cars and see if they could steal one. Hays and his best friend, a grocery-store manager named Chester Pye, went to a nearby bus barn. A guy there showed me how to hot-wire a school bus. We got our hands all slashed up from pulling wires, and it seemed like all the batteries were dead. Finally, Chester finds a good battery, and we went looking for keys. They found one that fit bus No. 9322 and picked up the rest of the extended family and headed out of town. Along the way, near the Fisher housing project, in Algiers, someone shot at the bus and demanded to be let on, but there was no room. They kept going west on Route 90, getting as far as Houma, Louisiana. On the road to New Iberia, a police officer pulled them over. I was scared, Hays went on. After all, wed boosted the bus. The cop, a white guy, looked inside and saw it wasnt hot-wired. There was a key. And what did he do? He gave us a police escort and called another police escort as we left Raceland and we got the escort all the way to New Iberia. And in New Iberia an officer said to me, and I will remember this forever, he said, I want you to understand something. You think this is the end of life as you know it for you. But this is a new beginning. You have a lot of people pulling for you. Walter Hays had been telling his story for a couple of hours, with many other details of disasters averted and kindnesses provided. By now many of his friends had gathered around him, adding clarifications and saying that, all in all, they were blessed. All along the way, things were strategically placed in our way by the Lord, Hays said, in agreement. The dopehead who helped us, the bus key, the people in Houma, wading through the water, the bodies, the tiny infants who made it out, sleeping on the bridge, like it was a terrible desert. Its Biblical, isnt it? After everything weve been through, if you arent changed morally, spiritually, then you are dead inside. And then, just at the point where the story seemed over, with a flourish of amens and thank-the-Lords, Tyrell Pye, Chesters nephew, said, Now, just remember. He paused and lowered his gaze at me. Remember, he said, this was a premeditated disaster. They flooded the city. It happened on a pretty, sunshiny day, two days of rising water. You tell me: where the rich people at? And Chester Pye said, How come the Seventeenth Street levee broke? Its a totally poor area. And once the water started coming to St. Bernard Parish it was Oops, maybe we should start doing something? The others nodded. They agreed with this no less than they agreed on the saving grace of God. Except Walter Hays. He was unsure. I just dont know about any of that, he said. When I asked Chester Pye if he and his family would return to New Orleans, he said, Theres no reason to go back now. Back to what? Back as a tourist? The new New Orleans is going to be like Six Flags Bourbon Street, you know what I mean? The link between conspiracy theories and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the white power structure had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the higher powers of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was the silver-lining scenario. For most, it hardly seemed to matter that some wealthier neighborhoods in New Orleans, particularly Lakeview, did not escape damage. At the Houston Astrodome, for instance, people made statements and asked questions that mixed the logical with the conspiratorial. Where were the buses? Why is it, do you think, that the French Quarter and the Garden District are high and dry and the Ninth is flooded and gonna get bulldozed? In Betsy I know the mayor blew up the levee to save those big homes on the lakefront. A lot of people believe that, especially the people who were on their roofs! I couldnt leave. I was terrified. I didnt have any money, no car, nothing. Where was I supposed to go? They shoulda had some buses. Its me and my five kids. I live in Desire, the Ninth Ward. I think it was a setup to get black folks out of New Orleans forever. Look around. Whos here? Nobody but the black and the poor. They aint got but ten white families in the whole Astrodome. This came from a higher power, the alpha and the omega. At the Reliant Center, in Houston, Patricia Valentine, a fifty-four-year-old woman from Treme, a black neighborhood near the French Quarter, told me that her area was waist high in water and the restaurants down the street got nothing. She was sitting in a wheelchair and said that she had no intention of returning home. They can have New Orleans, she said. Its a toxic-waste dump now. I was in Betsy forty years ago: September, 1965. And the levee broke. What are we, stupid? Born yesterday? Its the same people drowning today as back then. They were trying to move us out anyway. They want a bigger tourist attraction, and we black folks aint no tourist attraction. The best-known writer to come from the Ninth Ward is Kalamu ya Salaam. A poet, playwright, and civil-rights activist, Salaam used to go by the name of Val Ferdinand. When I told Salaam what I was hearing in New Iberia and Houston, he laughed, but not dismissively. He said, The real question is why not? He recalled that in 1927, in the midst of the worst flooding of the Mississippi River in recorded history, the white city fathers of New Orleansthe men of the Louisiana Club, the Boston Club, and the Pickwick Clubwon permission from the federal government to dynamite the Caernarvon levee, downriver from the city, to keep their interests dry. But destroying the levee also insured that the surrounding poorer St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes would flood. Thousands of the trappers who lived there lost their homes and their livelihoods. The promise of compensation was never fulfilled. That, plus the persistent rumors of what may or may not have happened during Hurricane Betsy, Salaam said, has had a lingering effect. So when I heard on TV that there was a breach at the Seventeenth Street levee, I figured theyd done it again, he said. Or, lets just say, I didnt automatically assume that it was accidental. Lolis Eric Elie, an African-American columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, told me he didnt believe that the levees were blown deliberatelyand most black folks with some education or money dont, eitherbut he could easily understand why so many were suspicious. Blacks, in a state of essential slavery, built those very levees that were blown up in 1927. When the ships came to rescue people, whites made damn sure not to rescue blacks in Mississippi because of their fear that the blacks wouldnt return to work the farms. If black life is not valuedand isnt that what you were seeing for days in New Orleans?then the specifics of the explanations are irrelevant. You begin to say to yourself, How do you aid tsunami victims instantly and only three or four days later get to New Orleans? What explanation other than race can there be? I believe the real explanation is manifold, but I can understand how people start believing these things. In Washington, whites dismissed The Plan as part of the pathology of poverty. Nevertheless, in D.C. and other cities, legends of conspiracy persisted as the counter-narrative to the conventional view of inexorable progress and the growing black middle class. Many in the population left behind could believe almost anything: that aids had been concocted in government laboratories as part of an anti-black conspiracy; that the government distributed crack in black neighborhoods as a genocidal practice; that the Klan has ownership interests in Churchs Chicken, Kool cigarettes, and Tropical Fantasy soft drinks and uses them all to damage the health, and even sterilize, African-Americans; that between 1979 and 1981 the F.B.I. took part in a string of murders of black children in Atlanta. Scholars such as Patricia Turner, at the University of California, the author of I Heard It Through the Grapevine, have written extensively on the role of rumor and conspiracy theory in the African-American community, especially among the poor (and also on the phenomenon of wild rumors about blacks among whites), and they make a convincing case that these counter-narratives emerge from decades of institutional racism and from particular episodes in American history, such as the use of hundreds of poor African-Americans, between 1932 and 1972, as lab rats in U.S. government trials, known as the Tuskegee experiments, on the effects of syphilis. John Barry, in Rising Tide, his book about the 1927 flood, quotes a New York Times account of a levee breach in Washington County, Mississippi, in 1912. An engineer who had run out of sandbags ordered . . . several hundred negroes . . . to lie on top of the levee and as close together as possible. The black men obeyed, and although the spray frequently dashed over them, they prevented the overflow that might have developed into an ugly crevasse. For an hour and a half this lasted, until the additional sandbags arrived. The Times called the idea brilliant. New Orleans was sixty-seven per cent African-American at the time of Katrina. It always had a substantial black populationit was one of the leading slave marketsand decades of migration starting at the time of Reconstruction made it even larger. The city was, in per-capita terms, the wealthiest in America before the Civil War and the wealthiest in the South until the nineteen-twenties. No more. Few of the improvements in urban Americathe growth of the black middle class, the decline of the murder rate, greater attention to inner-city schoolshave taken firm hold in New Orleans. There is hardly any industrial base, no major corporate headquarters, no home-grown businesses on the scale of FedEx in Memphis, Coca-Cola in Atlanta, the Hospital Corporation of America in Nashville. Colonel Terry Ebbert, the head of Homeland Security in the city, told me, Drugs are the biggest business in town, bigger than tourism. Small wonder that at school-board meetings of Orleans Parish parents may think the worstfor example, that magnet schools are part of an over-all plan of educational disenfranchisement. Small wonder that they might believe that the break in the levees was a plot. Perception is reality, and their reality is terrible, Jim Amoss, the editor of the Times-Picayune, said. We are talking about people who are very poor and have a precondition to accept this belief. Lots are cut off from mainstream news and information. They are isolated in shelters and they know a thing or two about victimization. It fits well into a system of belief. In 1900, after a hurricane killed thousands in Galveston, Texas, the city died as a port and the rise of the port of Houston began. After the floods of 1927, John Barry writes, the city fathers of New Orleans began their long decline into insular stagnation, Huey Long rose to power as governor of Louisiana, and Herbert Hoover, who led the rescue program, was elected President. Catastrophe and displacement is not a subject only for the history books. The fate of a city can change in a single turn of the weather. According to polls, huge numbers of people now living in shelters say they will not go back to New Orleans. Few have insurance policies or even bank accounts, credit cards, or savings sufficient to start over. Many of them are sick or unemployed. As Hurricane Rita bore down on Texas last week, there were still roughly a hundred and fifty thousand evacuees in Houston alone. A poll conducted jointly by the Washington Post, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation showed that fewer than half the evacuees in shelters will move back, and there was nothing in my days of conversations in Houston, New Iberia, Lafayette, and elsewhere that made that figure seem exaggerated. Kalamu ya Salaam told me that he thought the suffering was far from over. Hurricane Rita has made recovery even more difficult. For the moment, people are focussed on the grace of their own survival, and are grateful for the small and large acts of compassion that have come their way. And yet, he said, you are going to see a lot of suicides this winter. A lot of poor people depend entirely on their extended family and their friends who share their condition to be a buffer against the pain of that condition. By winter, a lot of the generosity and aid thats been so palpable lately will begin to slow down and the reality of not going home again will hit people hard. They will be very alone. People forget how important all those Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs are for people. Its a community for a lot of folks who have nothing. Some people have never left New Orleans. Some have never seen snow. So you wake up and you find yourself beyond the reach of friends, beyond the reach of members of your family, and you are working in a fast-food restaurant in Utah somewhere and there is no conceivable way for you to get back to the city you love. 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