(A quick definition is in order: as countless people pointed out, the hurricane itself was not the primary cause of the atrocities that befell New Orleans. It was when the man-made, US Army Corps of Engineers-constructed levees gave way, so know that “Katrina” is shorthand for a hell of a lot more than a natural disaster.)
Were you aware there is a Vietnamese community in New Orleans East that was flooded out? Or that the community is in a legal battle over whether an emergency landfill that was opened in their neighborhood without the proper zoning or protective liner should be reopened while residents rebuild their homes? Or that if the landfill remains closed the estimated 20 million cubic yards of debris (from the impending demolition of some 30,000 homes) will have to be taken twenty miles away across the Mississippi River further hindering the massive clean-up?
Neither was I. And that’s just one of hundreds or thousands of problems the city is facing, few of which seem to make national news, especially since Anderson Cooper found out about Lebanon. It would be ridiculous for anyone to try and encapsulate where New Orleans is at since Katrina, especially by an outsider who visited the city for only the third time during the first weekend of Jazz Fest. However, I do feel compelled to adhere to the request of more than one New Orleanian (including the terrific Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose) to bear witness to the Katrina aftermath for anyone who hasn’t seen it. I remember a post-9/11 controversy about whether people should be visiting Ground Zero, but that is not the vibe in New Orleans. It is almost a civic mandate that visitors take the “misery tour,” even if all they're really after is a lost weekend in the French Quarter. I went in late April and many locals were already feeling abandoned, so seeing the unending damage done first-hand wasn’t considered exploitative.
It was imperative.
Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?: Part of the reason, Kim and I went to Jazz Fest in 2006 was to spend some time with our close friends Aimee and Eric Schnabel, who had left New York to raise a family in the quieter, greener pastures on the north side of Chicago. They know the lay of the land: Aimee has family in Lafayette, and music geek Eric has been to Jazz Fest nine years running. We had dinner with the Schnabels at The Marigny Brasserie, a throwback to the days of fat sweaty guys in linen suits sipping bourbon, smoking cigars and wolfing down plies of gulf shrimp (which were in short supply thanks to you-know-who, so I went with red snapper. Close enough for government work, no?) Eric invited a former co-worker, Marc, who along with his wife, Bridget, had returned to his hometown to work in the family PR shop. And this is where it becomes their story.
Over dinner, they told us all about fleeing to Baton Rouge and how they couldn’t wait to get into the second house they had purchased in the Lakeview neighborhood. Their first house was destroyed, but Marc was lamenting that it might not have been destroyed enough for all the insurance policies to kick in. If only the roof had caved in…damned Katrina and its random wrath of destruction. Marc admitted they were fortunate, because last August, he’d been a pigheaded local and only decided to get out of town because Bridget was nine months pregnant. It’s a life story evolving in dog years, but the couple didn’t seem to carry the weariness and resignation that was palatable in the faces of those we later saw shedding tears to We Shall Overcome. Marc and Bridget were lively and animated, scientifically proving that even in the eye of the storm, new parents are always ecstatic to leave the baby with the grandparents for a few glasses of wine, conversation and Chicken Roulade.
As a liaison to the national media, Marc was used to talking New Orleans and guiding the “misery tour,” but he believes in taking the skeletons out of the mausoleums and letting them dance. Marc was more than happy to take us on his personal excursion the following morning. After Eric finished up his after-dinner “Mint Kiss” cocktail (that’s coffee, peppermint schnapps, Starbucks liqueur and whipped crème, try ordering that at the Billy Goat), we headed back to the Creole Gardens in a driving rainstorm…wondering what daybreak would bring.
Driving Through New Orleans: If you decide to bear witness for yourself, I suggest soliciting a local to serve as tour guide, preferably one as well-versed in New Orleans history, culture and politics as Marc. We started by taking in Lakeview, a middle-to-upper class neighborhood that took the brunt of Lake Pontchartrain, thus bringing the view of the lake right into the living room. Bridget opted not to join us, she still refused to set foot in the
house…which worked in our favor because the car only seated five. Marc explained how a 1927 flood destroyed New Orleans, alienated thousands of poor African-Americans and kick-started the New Deal. (He even cited his source material, Rising Tide by John M. Barry.) Marc drove us up near the breech of the Seventeenth St. Canal levee, which was under the watchful eye of giant cranes doing repair work. From a distance, the red replacement walls looked minor, like random pieces plucked from a Lego set and not the entryway to Hades, Louisiana.
Marc explained what the neon orange code on all the abandoned houses meant. Basically, the Army went through each house and detailed the date it was checked, how many dead bodies were found and whether it was hazardous. Thankfully, PETA did the same for animals. (As if rescue workers didn’t have enough to worry about, one house noted “Missing. One large snake.”) Spray-painted messages were a common method of getting out frustrations. Messages ran the emotional gamut, from “Looters shot,” to “Hold the Corps Accountable,” to “Jean Will Be Back,” to “Fuck FEMA, Bring Beer.”
Piles of debris were omnipresent and some streets appeared to be completely vacant. What looked to me like a voodoo town, looked to Marc like progress. When we’d drive down streets with abandoned cars on the lawn, shattered glass everywhere, mounds of garbage and houses permanently stained with rust-colored water lines as high as the front door…I kept reminding myself, Marc knows best. At one point, we parked the car in front of a “Florist & Formal Wear” that had probably outfitted Lakeview teens for Lakeview proms for all the years that surviving hurricanes meant not puking on your tuxedo. Peeking inside, the store was still in tact to some degree with ribbons, wicker baskets, chairs, Christmas ornaments and assorted detritus spread about the place like the drunken climax to a Tennessee Williams play.
A woman was out walking her dog and she and Marc started talking in a shorthand I recognized from after 9/11, quick questions without a lot of unnecessary details to establish that (ideally) you and your family are all right. The woman pointed to her house across the street and said that she, her husband (a firefighter, I believe) and their two children were living upstairs and using the FEMA trailer on the front lawn as a kitchen. The woman said her family was the only one currently living on the block and then gave us the neighborhood gossip update, pointing out house-by-house who was returning, who was leaving and who was AWOL. She and Marc exchanged pleasantries and the woman went back inside. Fortunately, Marc said what we were all thinking: “could you imagine living upstairs with no electricity and all that fetid water...and those smells...downstairs…this seems crazy to me.”
Later, we crossed the Claiborne Avenue Bridge and entered the infamous Lower Ninth Ward. Like everyone with a working television set, I saw the loop of black people waving S.O.S, flags while baking in the hot sun as the water rose to the rooftops, but it in no way prepared me. Eight months after the levees popped and the streets looked like downtown Baghdad. Just across the bridge there was the shattered remnants of a house that had been lifted off its foundation to rest in an intersection. Eight months after the fact and there were still cars and boats in trees, mountains of trash and no sense that anyone was paying attention. Even Fats Domino’s bright yellow pad with its FD monogram wasn’t the cheerful respite it should have been. The Lower Ninth Ward was overwhelming. I walked around the quiet streets in a daze, shocked at the reality and glad that I could get the hell out of there.
It’s worth mentioning that the biggest topic of civic conversation is the demolition of homes. Marc is a proponent (he told me recently that the insurance business is taken care of and the steamroller is on its way) but there are many, many citizens who don’t want anyone touching their property. It doesn’t matter if their home is an uninhabitable swamp of muck, refuse and waterlogged 2X4s, people want what they got. In the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it Lower Ninth Ward (where I was surprised to learn 60% of people owned their homes according to the New Yorker), there were more “No Bulldozing” signs than anywhere else in the city.
Home sweet home.
My Hometown: Entering Marc’s first home was an odd experience, and not just because he pointed out the
mattress stacked against a wall, saying, “we don’t usually keep our bed there.” I had known the man less than 24 hours, but seeing the inside of the home he and Bridget bought to start a family together was heart-wrenching, an elegiac taste of Katrina stripped down to its essence. I saw miles upon miles of wasteland, but nothing brought it to life in the same way as seeing the nursery that never was. Its toys, dolls, blankets, unused Huggies and a tyke-sized light-green bureau covered in animal paintings brought shades of the apocryphal “shortest” story Hemingway wrote to win a bar bet: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
Thankfully, it was nothing of that extreme, and I knew that Marc had already purchased another house. But something about staring into that muck-filled nursery gave face to all those other houses, owned by all those other families, lying still on a New Orleans spring morning.
Fortunately, Marc snapped us out of it by showing the one amusingly intractable situation he had at the moment. A tree had crushed his carport, underneath which sat an actual World War II army jeep that he and his father had purchased at a charity auction. They had both worked on the campaign for the opening on the D-Day Museum (and Marc had the remains of fading, crusty, pictures of Bridget with Hanks and Spielberg to prove it. Until the bulldozer anyway.) Father and son thought it would be a fun heirloom to own, never imaging that the jeep would’ve suffered less careening through the Battle of the Bulge.
As we were leaving, Marc pointed to a ruined copy of Rising Tide on the floor and said, “Well, now there’s five pounds of irony staring us right in the face.”
We ended our Sunday drive on a high note. Marc took us to the new home he’d closed on, giving us, “ the complete circle of life.” He took us through the filthy rooms, showing us where the new nursery is going to be and proudly pointing out all the renovations the new homeowner had in store. The coup de grace is that the backyard inexplicably includes a former potato chip factory that Marc plans on turning into a smoker. I hope that years from now, neighbors will drop in for barbecue, Abitas and hyperbolic tales from granddad about fleeing Katrina during the ninth month of grandmom's pregnancy.
After the misery tour, I wanted only one thing, to toast my own good fortune over a ridiculously indulgent New Orleans meal.
The City of New Orleans: It’s oft-repated that the French Quarter (and the Garden District) came through Katrina in relatively good shape. Compared to the rest of New Orleans that’s true, but a tourism-based economy relies on tourists, so it’s not like it was all systems go in the Big Easy. Staff and supplies are hard to come by, so many restaurants are open sporadically, even on Bourbon Street. Kim and I ate brunch at the legendary Galatoire's where coats are required and, as a guy at the Seafood Jubilee Company in Alabama told us, “last time I ate there, we kept it short…only four hours.” Kim and I didn’t have quite that much leisure time, but there was enough to enjoy a brunch of Brandy Milk Punch (crème & booze), Crab Sardou (crabmeat, artichoke hearts and spinach smothered in hollandaise) and Banana Bread Pudding (soaked in praline liquor sauce). At Galatoire’s, it was business as usual, but it seemed odd that there was no wait on a Sunday at noon during Jazz Fest.
After the 8,000-calorie breakfast, we needed a nap, but Bruce Springsteen beckoned. Before getting to the Boss, there are a few more New Orleans snapshots I would like to share. Mersi.
***I moved to New York City in 1993 and race coded every conversation -- especially living in the Bronx during the David Dinkins/Rudy Giuiiani mayoral race – but it was much more pronounced in New Orleans. More than one resident told me that Katrina could have a needed cleansing effect and that “we don’t want the criminal element to come back.” On one hand, this is patently obvious. On the other, one man’s “criminal element” is another man’s black person. Even if said with only the best intentions for the rebirth of the city (and that wasn’t the inference I was getting), it’s callow. As Marc angrily stated, “I hate that shit, anyone who says this was good for New Orleans didn’t lose their home.”
***Speaking of race, there is a strange argument going on in New Orleans about whether the “Mexicans” who have showed up to work are a good thing. Latino laborers descended upon the city, and many of them are living out of tents in city parks. It was quite a change from the rest of our Southern travels to hear white people proclaim their excitement for what legal and illegal Mexican immigrants bring to the fiesta. I have no idea what to make of this, other than to say it was stomach-turning to hear some jackass developer in his khakis and Izod polo announcing in between drags off a cigarette that, “I love that the Mexicans are hear to rebuild and I can’t wait until they bring their wives to clean hotel rooms because they’ll do a much better job if it.”
***New Orleans was as friendly as ever, maybe even more so, but this is still the South and there is always that one guy…
At a bar in the wee hours, a dude in an American flag shirt I’ll call Captain America asked me where I was from.
“New York City, “ I said.
“I hate new York,” Captain America replied, “I had to drop off one of my Army buddies in Times Square and there was so much traffic.”
“That’s not New York,” I said, “it’s always crowded and awful. You should go back and check out the rest of the city. I'm sure you could find a good time.”
On a dime, the liquored-to-the-gills stranger explained the subtext of his argument.
“I hate New York City because some guy was checking me out. My friend pointed him out and asked me, ‘don’t you feel violated?’" Captain America stepped right into my face, adding, “I hate that faggoty shit. Are you a faggot?”
“Um, no…this is my wife, Kim.”
At that point, Eric made the grave mistake of trying to talk smile-on-your-brother, live-and-let-live, to Captain America. And of course, Eric was across the bar and wouldn't have taken the brunt of Captain America's righteous fight against homosexuals and their renowned Times Sqaure "faggoty shit."
Fortunately for my orthodontic work, Captain America's taxi arrived and the night came to a peaceful close.
***The Garden District is still one of the best places in the country for a stroll. We started our weekend off with cocktails on the expansive porch of the Columns Hotel and then took a self-guiding walk through the amazing Gothic and Victorian mansions relaxing under the Spanish moss. The walkabout took us by the boyhood home of the Manning clan, where a plaque has been erected noting the first time Peyton choked in the annual family Thanksgiving day football game.
***Who dat say they gonna' beat dem Saints? Whomever that is, they weren't in New Orleans during the NFL draft. Saints fans are fired up to have legendary USC Heisman-trophy-winning, 513-yards against Fresno State, do-it-all back Reggie Bush. I saw a jersey within 24 hours of the selection and there were chants of 
“Reg-gie Bush” on line at Jazz Fest. On a city bus, one black teenager told his unaware buddy that, “helllll, yeah, we got Reggie Bush. I ‘spect Saints gonna’ do somethin’ this year now that we got Reggie Bush.”
***For the record, I did not see a single pair of flashed boobs in New Orleans. C’mon ladies, we need to get the city back on its feet, back to being the Big Easy.
***Clancy’s was the best place we dined, and that's saying something. If it’s packed, sit at the bar and get the softshell crabs. If Katrina had left nothing but Clancy’s standing in its wake, it would be reason enough to pour billions into the reconstruction.
***Rock And Bowl rules. It’s bowling, it’s live music from the Rebirth Jazz band, it's beers served in bottles shaped like pins, it's red beans & rice, it's utopia.
***Call me a novice, but I had no idea how many ways one can prepare crawfish. On the menu at Jazz Fest: crawfish etouffe, crawfish bread, crawfish sausage po-boy, crawfish stuffed puff, crawfish Cajun pie, crawfish Monica, crawfish, spinach and zucchini bisque, crawfish sack, crawfish sushi roll, crawfish remoulade, crawfish strudel and plain ole’ raw crawfish. As the dude living out of a FEMA trailer in a parking lot across from our hotel with a three-foot high pile of shells and heads in front of him said, “crawfish is good eatin’, and I ain’t got nothin’ but time…”
***And don’t forget the alligator bits. Mmmmmm…alligator bits.
The Rising: I’m guessing there aren’t many places in the country where one can walk 500 feet and get from Etta James to Juvenile, but we took in At Last and Get Ya Hustle On in the span of five minutes. Eric said hip-hop has never had a home at Jazz Fest, but angry Ninth Ward rapper Juvenile worked the young, diverse crowd into a frenzy. “That’s new…and good to see,” Eric said.
We also took in the performance of local legend Allen Toussiant and foreigner Elvis Costello who collaborated on an album, The River in Reverse, in honor of the former's hometown. It was a classy, spirited performance in which Toussiant sang a twenty-minute plea of a tune with a chorus of "Come..Back...Home..." that gave shout-outs to all things New Orleans including the Zephyrs, the Audubon Zoo and the muffuletta sandwich.
I would be bereft in not mentioning the parade of Mardi Gras Indians, hippies, lookee-loos, kids, shirtless drunk dudes and horn players all following a guy in clown make-up carrying a sacrificial watermelon above his head. The crowd chanted "wah-tah-melon, wah-tah-melon" for about twenty minutes, before congregating in a circle, where upon everyone crouched down, chanted some more, exploded into the air while the watermelon was smashed as an offering to the fruit gods. Kids dived in and licked the watermelon carcass clean.
It was filled with vodka.
Ahhhhh, New Orleans.
And finally, Springsteen.
When it was announced that Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions band was going to close the first weekend of Jazz Fest, it probably seemed like an odd choice. The Bard of blue-collar Jersey isn’t exactly a jazz cat -- you dig – and his new band hadn’t even played together in public. That didn’t stop the massive crowds from swarming to the party (some reports claimed record Jazz Fest attendance), and it turns out that Bruce and Patti used to hide out in Big Easy bars during their on-the-down-low courting phase, he told us so. The new album of Americana dirges by the likes of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie turned out to be just what Dr. John ordered. 
I am not religious by nature, but if church was as moving as this two-hour celebration, I’d go every week. The 15-piece Seeger Sessions band was sharp -- a peppery mix of banjo, fiddle, accordian, washboard, Dixieland brass, acoustic guitar and even featuring a "where have you been all my life" tuba solo. Bruce got a big response when he dedicated a song to “President Bystander,” when he sang that his home got “blow’d away” in My Oklahoma Home and when he slowly, pointedly, spit the Mrs. McGrath lyric, “All foreign wars I do proclaim, live on blood an a mothers pain. I'd rather have my son as he used to be, than the King of America and his whole Navy.”
During We Shall Overcome and The Rising, hands were held and raised in an honest moment of solidarity. It was the only time I've ever had any semblance of what the civil rights movement must've been like. All assembled were loving thy neighbor. A well-dressed, well-heeled man next to me hugged and cried with the fat, unkempt, probably-from-a-different-strata woman to his side. A police officer was openly weeping and I'll be damned if it wasn't hard to keep the dust out of my own eyes while soaking in the spirit of survival. As Springsteen and Chocolate Genuis closed out the set with When the Saints Go Marching In, Eric gleefully shouted, “they never let the bands go past curfew, without question, this is the best show I have ever seen at Jazz Fest”
Leaving the fairgrounds, it was possible to believe that the Big Easy will overcome. Leaving town the following morning, that hopeful feeling was already waning in this national disgrace of a recovery effort (2/3rds of the population still hasn't returned.) On our way out, we stopped for the classic beignets and chicory coffee breakfast at Cafe Du Monde. It's just down from Jackson Square, the spot where George W. Bush promised that, "We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."
In that spirit of reconciliation and reconstruction, I will leave the last word to a cabbie we had who asked us to do him one simple favor.
“You go out on the town and have yourselves some fun tonight. And then please, go back home to where you're from and let everyone know that New Orleans is open for business.”
(Photographs by Kimberly Sauer).
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