Everything (A Reposted Jam)
This is a piece that was featured in The Frick Pittsburgh. It feels equally unfinished and complete, but I’m posting as is. The people of New Orleans deserve more. The people of New Orleans East still fight for the basics. Imagine living in a food capital and your neighborhood is a food desert. My life is unrecognizable from even just two years ago when I completed this piece. I went from searching for my voice to finding and using it. I have a career now where I can highlight system inadequacies AND work with people who can effect change. I also use my voice to amplify others, which is a lifelong dream. (If you’re not familiar with Resistbot, change that pronto.) That’s what community is; using your strengths to the benefit of those around you, then they do the same, and so on.
Today, I’m reposting this, sitting in a Pigeon Town AirBnB, with coffee and cinnamon beckoning me into the kitchen. I am not the young woman who packed up Big Pimpin and hoped for the best in 2005. Resilience takes a toll. My second Katrina anniversary as a repatriated New Orleanian finds me again in a bed that is not mine. I cry less because sadness more often than not rests in my body now. This year, holding the desire to stay alive has been its own fight. There are days I thought I would lose. Today, I remember the young woman with two babies and no plan who employed her gifts of alchemy and re-creation, rebuilding life as often as it was destroyed. Today, I remember that I’ve done far more with much less. As I plan for what comes next, looking at how far I’ve come makes looking at how far I have to go a little less daunting.
“I’m from Louisiana,” I would say, hoping that would satisfy their question. More definitive than “the South,” yet less specific than the real answer; the answer that automatically contorted faces into masks of sympathy. I often found myself imprisoned in a well-intentioned conversation that would unearth all the things I buried just so that I could make it out of bed in the morning. Saying “I’m from Louisiana,” gave me a shot at being seen as Melanie: a normal person participating in a normal conversation. They could love me, or hate me, or even forget me the way normal people forget other normal people. It was a fragile peace that one probing question could shatter. “What part of Louisiana?” The lumps of lead forming simultaneously in my throat and my belly would go ignored as I answered in my cheeriest voice, “New Orleans.” I’m no longer just some girl they met and could forget. Now, I’m a resilient Katrina victim.
The Times-Picayune said of August 29, 2005, “New Orleans will forever exist as two cities: the one that existed before that date, and the one after.”
The storm became the nucleus around which everything in my life formed. What was I like before? Where did I go after? Who did I become? And the question everyone wants to know: “What did you lose in Hurricane Katrina?”
I pause.
Katrina left over $100 billion in damages in its wake, so obviously I lost possessions. I left New Orleans with three changes of clothes, my vital records, and an overdrawn bank account due to filling up my gas tank.
“Everything,” I answer. This word stops me and sits in my mouth so weightily, I fear it will break my jaw. I can’t cast it out into the universe and move on. It rests with me even now, because my mind replays what losing everything means.
Katrina took everything that matters.
The material chunks it took were bearable. But how often does tragedy stop with the tangible and replaceable? It took Gina,* a girl whose laugh was a rumble, who always scratched her chin before she mumbled something off-the-wall funny. Gina who battled addiction, intermittently winning and losing. She resorted to what she knew would drive out the image of the woman walking next to her through flood waters disappearing into an open manhole cover. It took mama’s crepe myrtle tree.** The one she spent years begging her mother for just a branch. That branch that sat year after year in the middle of our lawn, a laughable twig, finally blooming in its fourth spring. It took my certainty that my mother’s body, long buried, remained in the place that we left her.
The federal government estimated the cost of my old life to be $10,236. It was obviously enough for a life in Silver Spring, Maryland and replacing my material things. Ten thousand. Two hundred. Thirty-six. This was more money than I’d ever had in my possession at one time in my life. My bank account, which should have been an answer, was a huge question: Does this mean that it didn’t happen? I buy a new sofa and all is well?
“To remove from the proper or usual place,” is one definition of displacement. Mama would have just called it good old homesickness. “One day, you wake up and just feel like sitting in a corner with your knees over your shoulders until it gets better, and you don’t know why. You want to go home.” Her words didn’t make sense to me until the following year. The more homesick I became, the more I found myself performing wellness rather than actually being well, in a place that was objectively lovely, but not quite “proper.” Maryland was the ’72 Dolphins on paper, but I’m a Saints fan.
Home was, and always will be New Orleans, the place I spoke intentionally of leaving. It was a place that people didn’t leave. When they did, they always found their way back, because no place on earth like New Orleans. My search wasn’t for a better life, I wanted a different life. My heart desired, as the quote goes, “to drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds.” How would I respond to “the warmth of other suns?”
We leave home. Home as it exists in our hearts doesn’t just disappear beneath rushing, murky uncertainty. I left home in my rearview mirror on an August evening, with all brake lights on both sides of I-10 leading out. I didn’t even know I was saying good-bye.
New Orleans has dodged hurricanes for decades, and 2004’s Ivan scare did little more than prove how ill equipped we were for disaster. So when people ask, “Why didn’t they evacuate?” I counter, “Why would they?” Of course you leave when a hurricane looms because nature is a beautiful, unpredictable terror, but why would this group of people evacuate?
New Orleans is a city that thrives on the service industry, which is predominately the black, working class. The people who can least afford a blank trip to a hotel, only to get a full night’s sleep and prepare for the trek back. In 2021, as we still push for livable wages, we can only imagine the type of decisions our janitors and waitstaff had to make in counting the cost of evacuation. Of course, we had the proud New Orleanians who lived through Betsey, who no amount of coercing could convince. But the thousands of generationally poor New Orleanians had no true options. They could only hope for the best and prepare as they could for the worst.
Home, I learned, was yet another spoil of the privileged. New Orleans’ poor, often the ones who keep the cogs of tourism turning, even those who tried to stay, quickly learned that they were no longer welcomed. The levees broke and washed away New Orleans’ defining element: her people. As the saying goes, “Everything you love about New Orleans is because of Black people.”
Everything that makes New Orleans worth visiting is created by working class New Orleanians. Millions visit annually, yet only a fraction speak of New Orleans as a living, breathing organism powered by people who have little and offer everything. Tourists loved New Orleans culture and what we could do for them when they visited. Yet the same people who adored our culture as long as they could drink, flash body parts, and piss in our streets, were suddenly repelled by us.
If we were white, we would have been something cute, like expatriates. But since we’re not, we had the pleasure of being called refugees. Americans, from a destroyed American city, were called refugees by other American cities. We sat on bridges waiting for rescue and in hotel rooms, counting pennies to ensure we had enough to stay a few more nights. We were refugees. We were looters. We were lawless savages who by more hysterical accounts had turned the Superdome into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Our children were criticized as wild. We were all characterized as angry and aggressive. I found myself being more conversation piece than person, answering for the behavior of every New Orleanian my conversation companion had ever encountered. I don’t know Debra, the well-meaning housing authority worker. Why would a single mother who lost everything she owned and was afraid that her brother’s body would still be in her house when she goes back not be a great housekeeper? We were labeled everything except what we actually were: tax paying citizens traumatized by governmental failure. Fifteen years later, many of us remain open wounds, neglecting treatment of mind and body, in desperate need of healing. And the media couldn’t get enough of the imagery.
Pornographic in its tragedy, I could not turn on the television without seeing people who looked like me, baking in the August New Orleans sun, begging for food, for water. Begging, screaming, chanting, for help. It breaks my heart, the consistency in which poor black people in crisis must be indefinitely displaced by virtue of the denial of basic health and safety needs like clean water, whether it’s 2005 New Orleans, Louisiana or 2018 Flint, Michigan, or 2020 Lake Charles, Louisiana; brown people in 2017 Puerto Rico.
People ask how different New Orleans is in The After. After Katrina? We speak, we mourn, we live in its shadow. We do everything but seek counseling and heal. People know us and lift us up. But we aren’t the only people affected by Hurricane Katrina. Katrina was terrible in the fury it wreaked on the coast and every state it hit on the way to Louisiana, including our neighboring state of Mississippi, with the highest percentage of black residents. Before New Orleans was punished, my mama’s hometown of Sunrise was uninhabitable. Each of these places are also full of poor black Americans, displaced and suffering immeasurable loss. Why don’t we hear about them?
Because then you have to tell the story of the two Hurricane Katrinas. There’s Mississippi’s Hurricane Katrina, the terrible act of nature that left $30 billion damages on the Gulf Coast; the storm that cleared my mama’s birthplace in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana out. There’s also New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina, which was the storm, plus a municipal failure that unearthed widespread corruption that led to the prosecution, and for many plea deals, of some of New Orleans most well known political names. All these years later, witnessing the commodification and compromising of my culture is still jarring. It drips off hipster lips because everyone just has to visit. But New Orleans isn’t something that you co-opt.
New Orleans begins in the bones. It’s hard drinking and hard loving. It’s knowing what at least half your neighborhood is eating because it’s Monday and red beans are sacrament. It’s chanting girls with brightly adorned ponytails walking to the candy lady’s house for a frozen cup and boys racing barefoot on concrete. Being a New Orleanian means having an allure that is seen by everyone and explainable by no one. It’s resilience and survival and taking New Orleans wherever you go. My gumbo was still bomb in Rockville and Pittsburgh. But my home, my hood, my blackness deserved so much more than just knowing everything would bounce back. We deserved more.
Whenever I talk about going back (I always talk about going back), the people who remain discourage me. “Girl, you trippin. Ain’t nothing here.” They’re right to a point. I lost Mama in 1994. Daddy said goodbye and closed his eyes this year. Joan, my mama of the last 25 years, doesn’t want to be there anymore. New Orleans has a way of holding you in debt, and she always collects everything that matters when you least expect it.
*Name changed for privacy.
**I moved back home January 1, 2021. There are now three crepe myrtle trees on my block, where before there were none. I’ve often internally debated asking for a cutting, yet something about my mama taking up space on my entire block feels like everything I need.
