Watching Katrina Strike: A Personal Story

Fall 2005

by Martyn Smith

We passed a succession of casino billboards at Biloxi, Mississippi advertising star performers. Wayne Newton, Merle Haggard, and others on the casino circuit loomed above, one after another. In Gulfport, Missisippi, a few miles before crossing into Louisiana, we stopped at a gas station to fill up and called ahead to New Orleans to check on the arrangements at Dillard University.. Where could we pick up the key to our on campus house? What entrance should we use? Looking around, Gulfport seemed like an extension of the Florida panhandle, with pick-up trucks and dirty t-shirts. We trusted that the cultural landscape would soon change. We had not signed up to teach in Pensacola or Mobile, but in New Orleans, a city that neither my wife nor myself had ever visited, but which stood in our imaginations as a rare cultural capital in our United States, a city which did not import has-beens but reveled in its own native musical heritage.

Coming into New Orleans from the east on Interstate 10 meant crossing a long flat bridge cutting across Lake Pontchartrain, the last and longest of many bridges spanning swamps and tidal flows along the Mississippi coast. From a short crest the cityscape of New Orleans soon stood before us.. different than anything in the miles and miles of South that lay behind, stretching back to Atlanta. In short order we made a mistake, getting off the highway at an exit in East New Orleans. It was not the kind of neighborhood in which we expected to live—adult bookstores, cheap motels, and fast food pit-stops lined the street; graffiti and gates made jogging or walking here unlikely. When nothing resembling Dillard University appeared and the streets did not tally with the map, we realized we had exited a few miles too early and that highway 90 doubled back and re-crossed the Interstate. We breathed a little easier, but had gotten our glimpse of poverty in New Orleans—poverty brutally aligned with race. In just two and half weeks television commentators would incredulously refer to the “third-world” scene that confronted them after the destruction of hurricane Katrina, but that scene was already there for anyone who cared to see.. or who got off at the wrong exit.

Dillard University—an historically black college—was set in mid-city New Orleans, perhaps a mile away from the generous City Park. Its campus was a triangle of whitewashed brick buildings with a white levee-wall serving as background. Old and columned buildings lay back comfortably from Gentilly Avenue, separated from the road by an iron fence and acres of green academic lawn. It resembled some imagined southern plantation, one of those antebellum houses that lay further north along the flow of the Mississippi . We waited out a couple of days in temporary housing, but soon enough we were sitting in our permanent on-campus apartment, in a pretty court of joined dwellings on tiny Virgil Boulevard .

Plenty was unfamiliar. The neighborhoods of New Orleans had a wily way of turning dangerous on a sudden. Daily murder reports in the Times-Picayune confirmed that there were indeed neighborhoods to be wary about visiting, and we anticipated that it would take some time to feel at home in this new space, but we had our island, our home at Dillard University, and from there we would slowly venture out into the sweltering city. Time stretched out ahead of us, a whole school year. No need to rush the experience. No need to push into the thick heat when in a couple of months fall would cool the city down.

Our first Sunday in New Orleans we caught the bright red streetcar from City Park down Canal Street and on into the French Quarter. It was a little before noon as we walked around Bourbon Street, empty but for a surreal lone girl turning and playing her accordion with its slow pushing and pulling motion. Visitors were crowded into restaurants, sitting behind clear windows, but occasionally spilling onto tables set up on a shady sidewalk. The doors of the tourist shops dotting the French Quarter were wide open, ready to sell postcards, bright shirts and hats commemorating a visit to the lively heart of New Orleans. Mardi Gras was a long way off, but feathered masks and shiny beads hung on shop walls, offering, perhaps, some consolation to visitors attending an August conference. The streets were not filled with crowds and peels of music—but we would hear all that later. New Orleans had still to be deliciously imagined.

We unpacked a small lunch and ate in Jackson Square, watching as churchgoers filed into the iconic building. Looking back now at my pictures of the Cathedral, they seem darker than I recalled, haunted by threatening clouds.. like old black and white photographs in which the image of a ghost shows up unexpectedly. We walked a little further after that, mounting the stairs of the thick levy that runs along the Mississippi. A huge freighter was quietly passing, and I hurried to snap a picture capturing the long bright ship sliding down the curving Mississippi .

The following Sunday we made it down to Audubon Park and Tulane University. Along St. Charles the older olive-green street cars passed us regularly, tourists leaning out the windows. We did not have much to do, really. It was hot and we just wanted to see what was out there. We sat on a bench as a lone and disheveled black man came walking down the path, singing with a deep and slow jazz lilt the words we know from childhood: “Jesus loves me this I know/ For the Bible tells me so/ Little ones to him belong/ They are weak but he is strong.” The words seemed appropriate for that easy Sunday moment, and it was easy enough to believe that someone was watching over all, little ones and weak ones had a place to go. The singer passed and we too walked along the path, eerie Spanish moss hanging from the branches of old trees. Perhaps we could make a habit in our new year of coming down to the park on Sunday afternoon? We adopted that as our plan.

Both my wife and I had a class to teach at Dillard.. and I had a dissertation to finish. After a few faculty meetings, the school year had begun and student faces filled out the names on the printed roster. One girl in my class was from Kenner, another from Algiers. As yet I had no real sense of the geography of New Orleans, or in what order its satellite communities ranged around the downtown.. It was not until the following week, as reporters logged their televised breaking news, that I learned how Kenner was the flooded neighborhood near the Louis Armstrong International Airport, and how Algiers was on the other side of the Mississippi, relatively unscathed, but unruly as order broke down. These news reports formed my tardy geography lesson.

My other students were from further away, one from St. Louis, one from Miami, and another from somewhere in Oklahoma. A shy girl in her junior year was from Shreveport, Louisiana. As I let out class on Thursday—the close of the first week of the semester—I mentioned the hurricane out there in the Gulf.. Katrina had just passed over southern Florida. In the unlikely event that class was cancelled I would post the news electronically on our class site. But they knew the drill better than I did, and smiled as they left. And then they were gone. And I never posted anything on any site. The web site was down relatively early, and it all seemed pointlessly obvious anyways. We would have no further classes.

Saturday morning at 5:30 am my wife’s father called, letting us know that he had been watching the news and felt that we really ought to consider leaving soon. Over the next couple of weeks he would explain that he would not have been worried had he not visited a week earlier and seen the levees.. especially the long levee about two miles north holding back the shallow expanse of Lake Pontchartrain. We took his early morning advice in stride and a couple of hours later turned on the television to see what the local news reports were saying. Sure enough, the forecasters—who the day before were guessing that Katrina would veer north into the Florida panhandle—were now drawing a red line that went right through New Orleans.

By lunchtime there was no question but that we would be leaving soon. Mayor Ray Nagin and governor Kathleen Blanco were appearing on the local stations describing in strong terms the danger of Katrina. We also owed an odd debt to the Bell South repair man that came by the apartment to turn on our internet service. He asked, oddly, how old I was, and then asked if I had ever been through a hurricane. A hurricane, he said in a hushed and serious tone, would sound like a freight train coming through the house. “You should go”, and waving at the electronic stuff sitting on my desk mumbled, “..and take all this.” But no need to panic and we still went to Whole Foods, although with a new emphasis on canned goods and things we could transport. Cars were lining up at gas stations, stretching up to two blocks, and as I turned on the television back home there was a representative from Shell calmly assuring the public that there would be no lack of gas the next day.

Soon we were moving books and other possessions upstairs.. fitting printer, phone, and speakers were set into a secure feeling linen closet. Books were fit into the clothes closet of the spare bedroom; our Oxford English Dictionary fit snugly into an empty drawer of our dresser. We still had no thought that we were weathering some once-in-a-century storm, only imagined there was bound to be some flooding and that with high winds there could be some leakage too. Into the back of the car we packed our computers, two changes of clothes, and the books we might need during an enforced long weekend. A few days later what we packed into our little Volkswagen Bug would seem humorous. Why did we bring this insignificant thing, and leave that important thing? All those random decisions made, hustling to get out before Interstate 10.. that single bridge over Lake Pontchartrain .. got jammed with cars.

It was all unlike any conception I had of hurricane preparations. All I knew about that were those clips you see on the news of home and business owners boarding up their windows with plywood.. there was none of that for us, and nobody around us was boarding up yet.

Hurricanes are a strange sort of disaster. Unlike earthquakes that strike some fresh normal morning, hurricanes are lumbering destroyers we watch for days as they stumble onwards. When they hit most people have left.. few are there to hear the barreling rushing train of its winds. My wife and I went through hurricane Katrina.. I think I can say that fairly enough. Like hundreds of thousands of others we evacuated and left many possessions—which are still there upstairs, so far as we know. Yet we saw nothing but blue skies.. It was a clear sunny day when we left, and had only clear sunny days in Atlanta afterwards. We saw and felt less of Katrina than, say, the Canadians days later who felt the worn out remnants of the storm far in the north.

My great regret is simply that we did not walk around the campus of Dillard on that muggy Saturday. I even voiced that desire, but was vetoed by my wife, who was feeling anxious about the traffic.. the afternoon was already getting late. So we put the camera in the car, and drove away, leaving unrecorded the oak-lined campus vistas. It had been a beautiful first week of school. Great blue banners hung between the columns of the administration building, welcoming students back to Dillard; small groups of students ambled along the long sidewalks.. The security guards were still in the forgiving mode and waved cars past even without the new parking decals. But aside from a few pictures I took during a brief walk, it was gone.. Dillard will simply be a place living unfinished in my memory. Fair Dillard, before Katrina..

I feel like that about all of New Orleans, not just Dillard. I found myself jealous of people I met who had already had their year or two in New Orleans, who could at least speak of the loss as something known and tangible.. for us it was a year, and all the experiences of a new place, interrupted and lost. I know in the scale of things that is a small thing.. but on reflection I also believe that is the dirty trick of a catastrophe.. next to the monumental total loss to feel like your own loss is nothing, and as a consequence to lose one’s voice. The temptation for both my wife and I is to say over and over, “Really, we were lucky.. We came out OK compared to so many others.” But it was a loss.. our special year.

***

A multitude of writers have penned their versions of New Orleans, but one of the most beautiful recent evocations of the city is found in Bob Dylan’s memoir Chronicles, Volume 1. It was to New Orleans that Dylan headed to record Oh Mercy! with the producer Daniel Lanois. He describes the city I lost.

It was autumn in New Orleans and I was staying at the Marie Antoinette Hotel , sitting around by the pool in the courtyard with G.E. Smith, the guitar player in my band. I was waiting for the arrival of Daniel Lanois. The air was sticky humid. Branches of trees hung overhead near a wooden trellis that climbed a garden wall. Water lilies floated in the dark squared fountain and the stone floor was inlaid with swirling marble squares. [177]

The situation does need not be imagined only, look up the St. Ann Marie Antoinette Hotel on the internet and take the 360° virtual tour of that courtyard. There is a small pool in a corner of the small courtyard and formal chairs and tables arranged nearby.. one can imagine Dylan sitting there patiently and quietly. Green branches reach over the low walls. The hotel is located in the heart of the French Quarter and the website now posts on its opening page an urgent message:

Dear Friends & Family of The Saint Anne Marie Antoinette,

Please click here to ask any questions that you may have; I will respond ASAP. We would like to know where you are & that you are safe. We are currently retrieving records so that we can complete the payroll. Please leave any contact information and addresses so that we may deliver these once they are available.

Being located in the French Quarter—and therefore on that slightly higher original crescent—it is likely that guests will be arriving again before too long.

This opening description of New Orleans in Chronicles oddly mimics the ending of Dylan’s song “Blind Willie McTell”:

Well, God is in heaven
And we all want what’s his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I’m gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel

The St. James Hotel is yet another hotel located in the heart of the French Quarter, this one on magazine Street, a little closer to the Mississippi. The website for the St. James Hotel notes: “Located in the Banks Arcade, a 19th century landmark once the center of the Caribbean sugar and coffee trade, each of the 86 guestrooms celebrates this intimate connection with elegant West Indies I.” Dylan, having sung the lines “See them big plantations burning/ Hear the cracking of the whips”, but now localized at the end of the song in the historic but modernized St. James Hotel, seems to be so close yet immeasurably far from the reality of the past. The chorus follows naturally: “And I know no one can sing the blues/ Like Blind Willie McTell.”

The opening of the “Blind Willie McTell” sounds like it is describing the images we see today:

Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, “This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem .

With bright search signs being spray-painted onto homes in New Orleans—homes soon to be bulldozed—, and with Israeli settlers being cleared out of Gaza, these two sacred cities take on a renewed symbolic cast.

Dylan’s admiration for New Orleans is hardly hidden. In a book fronted by a black and white nighttime street scene of New York from the early 60s, and inhabited with stories of his crucial early breaks in that larger American city, New Orleans becomes a surprisingly vivid presence.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There’s a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. [180]

The makeshift studio where he would record Oh Mercy! with Daniel Lanois was a rented house along St. Charles Avenue, the street along which those historic olive-green streetcars move. Dylan tells us that he lived in “a large rented house near Audubon Park.” This allows for the possibility that Dylan moved along the same walking path that my wife and I did in Audubon Park, across the street from Tulane University.. but maybe not, it is a large park. But he sure has the feel: “Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you’re in a wax museum below crimson clouds” (181). This passage starts to illumine the place of the city in Dylan’s imagination. New York might be the perfect place for a young man to find his ground and his way forward, but 40 years later, where does that man go? To New Orleans, where like a ghost from the haunted past he can wander into a studio and record until the early morning hours. Something has certainly been lost, but whatever can be regained is in New Orleans.

Many of the songs recorded in New Orleans for Oh Mercy! had already been written by the time Dylan showed up at the Marie Antoinette Hotel . But one of the two exceptions to this was the song “Shooting Star”:

Once I rode the bike over to the Spanish Plaza and parked it at the front of Canal Street . Nearby, a paddle wheeler was moored on the river, the chinka-chinka beat of a Cajun band on the boat sounded almost hysterical. Under the southernmost magnolia I started feeling something about a song called “Shooting Star,” a song I hadn’t written yet. [198]

It is of course a digest of pure New Orleans experience—paddle-boat, Cajun band, magnolia tree, and everything else. “Shooting Star” is itself a song of loss:

Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip Away.
Tomorrow will be another day.
Guess it’s too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say.

Lines that serve to remind me that New Orleans was someone else’s experience, not mine. A shooting star that slipped away before I could say the things I needed to say, or feel the things I needed to feel.. to hear jazz in Preservation Hall, to see Bourbon Street crowded with revelers, to spend enough Sundays walking in Audubon Park to count it a habit. There in the middle of New Orleans, he wrote a song that sounds like my loss of that city.

***

Tomorrow will be another day, and now that the water is receding.. indeed almost gone.. and it cannot be too long before Dillard University is cleared and my wife and I can return and see what of ours is left on the second floor. From an article about Dillard in The Chronicle of Higher Education we saw a picture of our apartment, the church and library standing nearby in the dark water that takes the place of criss-crossing sidewalks and green grass.

Although it was relatively easy to figure out that we were part of the 80% of New Orleans that was flooded, it was a real question as to just how deep the water would be.. and a few feet would of course make quite a difference. For days after the hurricane we struggled to get news about Dillard and the Gentilly neighborhood. Cable news programs loved to show pictures of submerged roofs and people waving towels for help, but it was devilishly hard to get any real information about the city and its neighborhoods. I turned relatively soon to a few popular internet blogging sites and found that many people were in the same situation, struggling to get hard facts about their home and neighborhood. Understandable, I guess, since most of the reporters were not New Orleans natives, nor could be expected to differentiate and specify sections of the city.

A large percentage of the population heeded the early warnings and got out, fanning out all over the south. It is a safe bet that, like us, most of these were watching a television somewhere as the hurricane barreled into southeastern Louisiana and the Mississippi gulf coast. Under sunny skies we experienced the hurricane vicariously through cable news anchors and footmen, set up outside some cheap motel just beyond the possible reach of a storm surge and talking their way through the storm, as if the hurricane was about just how strong the winds could blow, about the personal heroism of a reporter who could speak into a microphone and not get blown away.

For all the saturated media coverage all the big events were invisible and still mostly guessed at. The wave surge that simply obliterated the houses and businesses of Gulfport and Bay Saint Louis might as well have happened on the other side of the world, for all we had access to it. The levee breaks that did so much damage happened out of the reach of cameras, and only hours later as the tell-tale water started to rise did the media start to play catch up and give us those aerial shots of the block-long break along the 17th Street canal. And this is not to mention the human events within the Superdome and the Convention Center and on the unseen streets of New Orleans. In the absence of cameras stories of sharks, alligators, and witches brews of chemicals began to emerge, as if the levees of the American imagination had been breeched along with those physical canals. A hurricane like Katrina is a giant white-out of human experience, a stultifying blanket smothering its first landfall with chaos and leaving people guessing at a distance about what really happened.

The losses are inevitably stated in dollars.. But the greatest losses will be those of memory. The most heartbreaking news photos following the hurricane were those of empty livings rooms with ruined family photos still hanging on walls. But it is not just photos that are lost, since all those family events occurred in a place.. a home, a neighborhood, a city.. and those holders of memory are gone, or soon will be. A writer for the New Yorker recorded a boat trip with an evacuee leaving his house:

As we travelled slowly back toward Interstate 10… Petrie began calling out landmarks. He had lived in the neighborhood his entire life. As a child, he had lived on Louisa Street . He pointed to a building that he said was the primary school he had attended from kindergarten through eighth grade.

That lived past will shortly be erased.

Watching news of the hurricane I found it difficult to concentrate on anything else.. even though the images and reports quickly grew repetitive. On Tuesday as the flooding became widespread and hopes of returning to New Orleans looked distant, we made our way to a nearby Borders Bookstore. As we ordered a drink, a man wearing a black beret was asking the girl at the cafe counter about the whereabouts of a public library. We were now on my wife’s home territory.. where she grew up.. and she tried to explain to him how to get to the library. A few minutes later he came over to our table and asked some more questions about the area, explaining that he had evacuated New Orleans and come back to the Atlanta area to stay with his mother. We fell quickly into a conversation about New Orleans—one in which our ignorance of the area shone clearly. After a few sentences we had to explain how we had just moved there and knew nothing, really, about the neighborhoods and streets he was mentioning, nor about clubs and hot spots. (The Saturday we evacuated was to be our first outing to a jazz club.) We shared the central experience of evacuation, which made for an immediate connection, but then we were empty of the intimate associations that made the loss real and palpable.

Right then was my first pang of deep jealousy.. this guy could talk of leaving, of never going back to New Orleans . but he knew the city. Whereas for us it would always be a pain felt for memories not actually there. He recommended a couple of books on New Orleans that we duly noted, one named Frenchmen, Desire and God’s Children, a good book for learning something about the stories that lay behind the odd street names. I later added that and other books to my Amazon.com electronic shopping cart. If I listed all the books it would appear an odd assortment, a group of purchases more fitting for someone just about to visit New Orleans than for an evacuee trying to imagine a city he never inhabited.