The Kindness of Strangers

A Letter to My Friend Henry

2007-08-26T20:43:00.000-04:00

Dear Henry:

It was great talking to you today, and congratulations on your new job teaching at the local university-- all the better that you didn’t have to go to grad school to land the gig. I have so much respect for you and all the people, including our good friend Kelly McClure, who have stayed or come back to New Orleans to make it a better place.

Yet, I was struck by the divide between your sense of the recovery as someone living it on a daily basis and mine, a former resident, who recently visited for another post-flood look around. Your cheerful rendition of progress and hope, including the ten-year perspective when everything will be better, the levees repaired and the city improved, didn’t jive with my experience, reading or gut instinct. I hope and pray you’re right, but fear that neither hope nor prayer is enough in this situation.

Since Katrina, dialogue can be easily strained between those who are there like you, doing the Lord’s work, and the rest of us like me watching on safely from the sidelines. But then talking about New Orleans is never simple. It’s a place whose insiders cling passionately to her charms and take a historically laissez faire attitude to her many challenges. As you said today, it’s not for everybody, certainly not in the city’s present condition. Sadly, it’s not for me.

I am afraid for New Orleans, but probably more to the point I am afraid of New Orleans despite a deep love for the place. That was true before Katrina, and I left in 1998, slightly heartbroken and feeling a little like Lot leaving Sodom. Death and decay linger over every aspect of the joy-filled life there. My fear is only amplified by crime, a seeming lack of progress in rebuilding and what looks from the outside like an unwillingness to demand more from local leaders and the outside world. New Orleans deserves more than what it can muster on its own – better levees than the ones the Corps is currently building, safer streets, a true and sincere approach to Wetlands renewal and a more progressive and tax/regulation friendly environment for would-be entrepreneurs and adventurous business people looking to stake their claim and help grow the city into something new and vibrant.

New Orleans’ unique culture including its music, food and street traditions is near and dear to my heart, as I know it is to yours. I was glad to hear you talk about its revival, hopefully ensuring the heritage of the city’s arts from high to low. But powerful hurricanes care nothing for the things man creates, and longstanding local bravado aside it’s really only a matter of time before the real Big One hits home. The levees that are being rebuilt today will offer little protection when that happens. As LSU’s Ivor van Heerden says: “Katrina wasn’t even close to being the big one.”

I realized today, after we talked and as I was sitting in the suburban shopping Mecca of Austin’s Arboretum having ice cream with my kids, that I wasn’t willing to pay the price necessary to come back to the New Orleans that remains today, making my sense of loss all the more poignant. Frankly, it’s the New Orleans that was, if only in my memory banks, that I miss, not the place that it is today. That’s OK. New Orleans will move on with or without me, and my talents are better suited to that of memoirist than post-storm polemicist.

Some people will fight to the death to stay in New Orleans even as catastrophe looms, making their way through the wreckage to have yet another party. To expect otherwise, is to miss the point. Maybe I’m just relieved that my curfew forced me to leave the fete before things got really wild!

I look forward to seeing you the next time I come through town. Hopefully we can have dinner at Galatoires, again.

Yours truly,
Steve

Home to Katrina-Land

2007-08-24T17:48:00.001-04:00

"Nature does not like to be anticipated but loves to surprise; in fact seems to justify itself to man in that way, restoring his youth to him each time, the true fountain of youth."

Artist and naturalist Walter Anderson

By Steve White

We just got back from a trip home, and life in Katrina-land seems worse in some ways than it did a year ago: the novelty of calamity has worn off and post-storm struggle has simply become a way of life for many. Rising crime, rising taxes and rising insurance rates all followed the rising waters that took so much from so many. The result: a simmering sense of malaise for many that can easily accelerate into rage or depression for locals who continue to dig out – two years later!

As a native son, I am torn between the urge to be positive and say things are getting better, which they are on many fronts, and to objectively report that the communities along the Gulf are still badly broken, which they are. Unexpectedly, my love for home is re-energized through the sadness of seeing her suffer so. This visit home, uncluttered by the emotional blow of seeing the devastating wreckage that was still present on my last trip, allowed me to more fully connect my past there with its troubled present and, more hopefully, all the possibilities it holds for the future. All those open fields, barren lots and empty houses are just waiting to come alive, again.

The Gulf Coast region is a luminous place like no other. It’s not surprising that Sissy Anderson titled the memoir about her brilliant but mad husband, artist and naturalist Walter Anderson, who made his home on the Coast and the barrier islands that surround it, “Approaching the Magic Hour.”

When will the magic hour come again? The question looms large, as I begin again to pore over Google maps of the region, trying to grasp the enormity of what happened there two years ago and imagine what can or will emerge.

Last year, survivors proclaimed their manifest destiny – to rebuild the flooded neighborhoods as the Corps of Engineers shored up the wounded levees. Today, New Orleans is open for business on the higher ground within the boundaries of its centuries old footprint while the modern neighborhoods born from drained swampland (Gentilly, Lakeview and New Orleans East) remain sparsely populated or in redevelopment turmoil. Likewise, on the Gulf Coast the beachfront is empty, devoid of redevelopment, as businesses and homeowners have moved north to relocate along Interstate 10.

Mother Nature giveth, but she also taketh away.

Even the historic French Quarter, which sits on high ground and remained dry throughout, appears to be ailing, despite what some boosters say. The streets were empty of tourists the night we spent there. In fact, the only people we met on the street were panhandlers, some more ominous than others. While not uncommon for the Quarter, we were left to fend for ourselves without strength in numbers from the usual drunken throngs of tourists or T-shirt shopkeepers who have since pulled up stakes from the many empty storefronts.

This month, Americans are being reminded that Katrina remains present, particularly by Time Inc., which hosted a group of editors in the Crescent City and unleashed its impressive journalist powers on the subject in a series of pieces for its various publications. Along with an equally impressive article in the current issue of National Geographic, hopefully this coverage will remind the rest of the world that Katrina was as much a reaction to man’s attempt to control nature as it was an act of nature in its own right. In a tragic moment of cosmic irony, the levees that failed to protect New Orleans from the rising tides are responsible for the ferocity of the waves that breeched them.

“Protecting people from floods and improving local economies as far away as Montana and Pennsylvania actually makes life more dangerous in Louisiana,” explained author John Barry to Time Magazine. Barry’s book “Rising Tide” about the 1927 Mississippi River flood laid out the ominous groundwork for what was to come in 2005. “The nation as a whole is getting most of the benefits of all this engineering, while Louisiana and part of coastal Mississippi pay 100% of the price,” he continued. “Nothing demonstrates that as well as New Orleans East, the lower Ninth Ward, and most of St. Bernard Parish, where 175,000 people were flooded by three man-made shipping canals that create almost no jobs there but carry barge traffic from Houston to Florida, or ocean shipping from the entire river valley to and from the rest of the world. Think about that when you think about New Orleans.”

In other words, man’s attempt to control nature has backfired, big time. The solution to one problem, flooding along the Mississippi River Valley, caused an even greater one, the loss of wetlands and barrier islands. Coupled with global warming, the Corps’ increasing obsession with control through more levees, floodwalls and navigation canals and encroachment by big energy interests, and we realize that the fun has only just begun. Wait until a storm actually hits New Orleans if you really want to see the wreckage of our past actions. All the experts say it’s simply of matter of when, not if, it happens.

Meanwhile, people persevere, as people tend to do. A great example of that is seen in the videos posted by This Old House of locals struggling to get their houses back in order. These are real people celebrating the life and architectural legacy of New Orleans!

Interestingly, the answer to this conundrum is to simply let go: unleash the river to do what it does best, overflow its banks, creating land farther downstream that in turns buffets the force of a hurricane’s tidal surge. Surely, it’s a little more complicated to manage a massive river diversion, but that’s the general idea. These days, there’s activity a plenty in Baton Rouge and on Capitol Hill, but sources like Time Magazine are skeptical that such measures are anything more than old thinking in new, alarmist clothing.

Yet, some experts remain hopeful. According to National Geographic, Tulane scientist Torbjorn Tornqvist sees New Orleans at the vanguard of something many other coastal cities will face as the planet’s oceans continue to warm. “The situation here is a huge opportunity for the city and the nation,” Tornqvist told NG. “If we walk away, we’ll miss a fantastic opportunity to learn things that will be useful in Miami, or Boston, or New York in 50 years.”

Maybe the magic hour for the rest of us is just around the corner in New Orleans. Through their suffering, they will show us the way to deal with the coming challenges of climate change, just as that fine old city’s culture (jazz, Mardi Gras, and Creolized soul food to name but a few) paved the way for the ethnic fusion that modern life has come to embrace.

Only time will tell, but that’s a precious commodity of which the Gulf Coast has little to spare!

Can We Go Home Again?

2007-02-13T10:10:00.001-05:00

By Steve White

Mesmerized. That’s how I watched last night’s PBS American Experience on New Orleans; it’s the state -- combined with weepy nostalgia -- that any halfway accurate and intelligent media assessment of the only place I really think of as home induces. New Orleans’ imagery is always powerful, almost primitive, proving time and time again the city’s rich history remains it most potent asset. More so now, than ever!

Only in retrospect, meaning this morning, did the first big contradiction present itself to me. Contradiction is to be expected, of course; the subject is New Orleans, city of enigma. At the conclusion, the filmmaker leaves his audience with a hopefulness that New Orleans, while riddled with problems and contradictions, represents a possible model for going forward, that its longstanding tradition of cultural democracy can show America “how to be America” if they are interested.

This is a pretty standard party line from the city’s cultural ambassadors from Wynton Marsalis to my old teacher John Biguenet, and it’s a noble conceit, one that romances me on a regular basis. Here’s the rub: I can’t always jive this idea with my own experiences of living in New Orleans for more than a decade from the 80s through to the late 90s. For sure, the city’s complicated cultural gumbo held me in a trance. Race, or the intersecting point of white European high culture and African folk culture, certainly informed the unique experience of the city’s music, food, civic celebration and more.

In my New Orleans, whites may have still lived closer to blacks, but there were no less foreign as “real people” than they are in say Chicago, where the geographic divide is more pronounced. We liked the idea that we lived in an “Afro Caribbean Paris” and enjoyed the fruits of an exploited culture; it made us more authentic, in the know and culturally superior to every one else in America living in their nameless, faceless suburbias listening to Top 40 FM radio and eating bland American food.

But most of us didn’t really connect with our fellow black New Orleanians, nor as the documentary pointed out so well was the historical or political outcome much different than in other places around the country.

On my last trip home, I had dinner one night with two locals, one whose family stretches back generations and the other a Midwestern academic liberal who came to town in the 1960s, fell in love with the city and never left. Over wine and one of the best meals I have ever eaten in my life (at Herbsaint), they thoroughly chewed and digested a favorite discussion of theirs – the lack of real black political leadership in New Orleans and ultimately the tragic disconnect between the races because of their inability to speak the same language. I asked about the possibility for making new connections, maybe through a vocabulary of faith, but they simply shook their heads. They had given up hope.

In that moment, I remembered with ever fiber of my being why I willingly left New Orleans in 1998.

I, for one, haven’t given up hope, not yet. As Mose Allison puts it: "I ain't downhearted, but I'm gettin' there."

Meanwhile I question the logic underlying the PBS message, that just because something was, it still is or can be again? And that avoids entirely the much more troubling question of myth – whether New Orleans ever was what it purports to have been? This is a game that Southern mythmakers have been at for a long time, using a storied and idealized past to assault present conditions and circumstances.

In his short, but tasty, book-length study “Dusty in Memphis” examining the way in which southern folk culture is experienced and transmuted into the mainstream commercial world, former New Orleans resident and Loyola student Warren Zanes writes:

“This notion of a ‘stubborn medievalism’ and a ‘more shadowed past,’ so long associated with what W.J. Cash describes as the “backward South” has remained at the center of the imagined South…Particularly in periods of anxious change, backwardness offers a certain comfort.” Zanes goes on to note rightly that even a violence-tinged past can be “met and matched by an idealization of the place that finally served as a kind of symbolic buoy in the face of modernity’s relentless change.”

Modernism, says a more learned friend of mine, was the last gasp of romanticism, trying to put the pieces of our great myths back together again in some cosmic game of Humpty Dumpty that would hopefully bring about redemption, at least poetically. While fruitful in the classroom, these arguments find little audience at the statehouse or in the corporate boardroom, where crucial decisions have yet to be made. Thousands of would-be entrepreneurs are watching to see whether New Orleans will emerge from this moment of historical impasse. Ironically, those waiting in the wings hold the fate of the city’s future, if only they are given the green light.

Just over a year ago, on a trip home to New Orleans, a local friend took me to task for suggesting that the New Orleans likely to emerge from Katrina would be very different from the city we had previously known. “That sounds like the kind of thing somebody who doesn’t live here would say,” he fired back, angrily. Today, a year later, conditions remain much the same.

Mythmaking aside, the history of the Crescent City is filled with stories of assimilation, cultural, racial and ultimately economic. New Orleans grew up where it did, in its own unique manner, because it had a compelling reason to be -- in the present and not historical tense. That’s what brings people together and forges common bonds!

Accountability for the Corps, Finally

2007-02-06T11:26:00.001-05:00

By Steve White

Maybe the Corps of Engineers will be held accountable for something, finally!

News reports this week note that residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, St. Bernard Parish and New Orleans East actually have the right so sue over the role that Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR GO) caused in intensifying storm surge flooding from Katrina in those areas.

“The 76-mile canal was completed in 1965 as a shortcut for ships heading from the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico,” described the New York Times, aptly. “Environmentalists and local officials have long argued that it has done great damage to the coastal environment by piping salt water inland and killing off the cypress swamps and grassy marshes that serve as natural barriers to storms.”

In fact, several writers in recent years have remarked on the significant erosion of the so-called MR GO canal, meaning it is much wider today than it was intended to be 42 years ago. Thus, it provided an ample pipeline for rising waters to pour into nearby neighborhoods as Katrina made its way inland.

Lawyers for the Corps have argued that residents can’t sue over the failure of levees and other flood control projects, based on protections built into the Flood Control Act of 1928. That law was passed right after the great Mississippi River flood in 1927. The Corps’s response to that flood, building mammoth levees along the Mississippi and in turn depleting the Louisiana wetlands, led directly to the kind of catastrophe that occurred during Katrina. The storm met little resistance from a much depleted buffer zone of swamp and marshland between the Gulf and New Orleans.

Fortunately, for local residents, a federal judge has ruled, rightly, that the MR GO is not a flood control project but rather a navigational waterway.

Global warming, or climate change as politicians like to call it now, tops the headlines daily, as it should. Scientists recently agreed that it’s man made, and contributing to the cycle of increased hurricanes, stating the obvious to many long-dedicated environmentalists. But the Corps’ responsibility for what happened to New Orleans and the Louisiana wetland predates the widespread damaging effects of hydrocarbons, going back to a time in the early 20th century when they adopted a tragic “levees only” policy, against the advice of the best engineering minds of the time.

Why must we continue to make the same mistakes, over and over, from generation to generation? New Orleans needs proper levee protection, but what it needs even more is the restoration of the wetlands to protect it from future storms like Katrina. The plan to do that has also been in place for decades, and the costs, while high, are pennies compared to what the rising tide will wreak if we don’t.

Sights and Sounds of the Crescent City in Austin

2007-01-30T17:46:00.001-05:00

By Steve White

After relocating from the Los Angeles area, I am just getting settled into my new life here in Austin. Yet already I can feel the close proximity of Louisiana, culturally speaking. It feels good! Two separate events this weekend underscored the influence of Louisiana culture on the ‘capital of live music’ here in the Lone Star State.

First, I caught a show on Friday at Antone’s world famous music club downtown, long the home of blues here in Texas. It was my first trip there, but it won’t be my last. On the bill Friday night was guitar slinging sensation and Louisiana native Kenny Wayne Shepherd, appropriately enough with the band that used to back his rockin’ blues predecessor Stevie Ray Vaughn, Double Trouble. Sadly, I didn’t stay for the whole show, but did catch some of his “Ten Days Out act with French Quarter icon Bryan Lee, a blind blues guitar impresario who was one of a number of aging musicians featured in Shepherd’s road movie of the same name.

Lee worked the crowd, “squeezed” his guitar and reminded me that even Bourbon Street, the sleazy stereotype that so many people sadly identify as New Orleans, can offer up charms of a more soulful nature.

On Sunday, we caught the premier of the IMAX movie "Hurricane on the Bayou"at the Texas State History Museum. Started before Katrina as a project to educate people about the disappearing wetlands, additional film was shot after the crew wrapped up the first shoot. Katrina proved to be a tragic demonstration of the point their film set out to make. If ever a subject matter was tailor made for the large format screen, it is the stunning beauty of the Louisiana wetlands, often scene from above in the MacGillivray Freeman film, contrasted to the power and devastation of a storm like Hurricane Katrina roaring ashore without the much needed buffer of silt lands lost to the sea.

The film offers a powerful emotional medium to convey an issue that continues to be ignored a year and a half later. What it lacks in detail about the solution – long ago spelled out by knowing scientists and environmentalists – it makes up for in the raw, visceral way it communicates to those with little knowledge of the problem. Check it out at a museum near you.

I, for one, know what it means to miss New Orleans (and the Mississippi Gulf Coast), but at least I can find a small part of my homeland here in the heart of Texas.

A Trio of Outrages for New Orleans

2007-01-24T11:49:00.001-05:00

By Steve White

President Bush has all but forgotten about New Orleans, with nary a word about Katrina relief in last night’s speech. Democrats like the official responder Jim Webb seem to be making only passing comment, for good measure, without really getting the ball rolling. It’s not at the top of Speaker Pelosi’s agenda, that’s clear.

Yesterday, Mississippi scored the biggest coup so far, getting State Farm to say uncle on wind vs. flood claims, largely through the work of private attorney Dickie Scruggs. State officials had to weigh in and sign off at the end of the process to make it look like they were actually doing their job. Press reports suggest that all the other major carriers will soon follow suit. But a short paragraph in The New York Times said it all for New Orleans and Louisiana and the vacuum of leadership therein: “The agreement does not apply to New Orleans, where the failure of the levees left much of the city underwater for days. Lawyers and insurers say no similar settlement talks are in progress there.”

Adding even more insult to injury, reports from this past weekend’s Saints/Bears game in Soldier Field suggest the ravages of Katrina have not been forgotten in the Windy City. Worse, sad memories of the storm became fodder for meathead Bears fans to express their latent frustration and hostility against supporters of their visiting rivals.

“Many of the (Saints) fans seated in the upper decks were subjected to horrific taunts, insults, and threats. Cries of “We are going to finish what Katrina started”, and “I hope the levees break again” were commonplace,” my friend John L. reported in a letter to the Chicago Tribune after attending the game in person. “Others were told to “Get in your boat and go back to your cardboard house.” One fan, in a report televised by ABC-26 TV in New Orleans said that he was told, “I wish you had drowned when your house flooded.”

“I encountered a young woman in tears as she left the stadium, not crying about the outcome of the game, but crying about the abuse she had received at the hands of the Bears fans seated around her,” he continued. “I met an older woman at O’Hare on Monday who broke down and cried as she recounted her mistreatment at the hands of hateful Bears fans.

“For even one person to have been treated like this would be too many, and the fact that so many visiting fans experienced similar cruelty reflects badly on all Bears fans and the entire city. However, the even more distressing thing about the whole episode is that the greater majority of reasonable, level-headed Bears fans SAT BY AND DID NOTHING AS IT HAPPENED,” John concluded in his letter. “In any crowd of 70,000, there are bound to be some idiots, but it is a sad reflection on your city and our society that seemingly decent people would sit idly and watch as a small contingent of visitors were tortured in their midst.”

As a former Chicago resident (Paulina Street in Lakeview) and a big fan of the Windy City, I too am ashamed. There is so much history between New Orleans and Mississippi and Chicago, and without that legacy so much of modern music and contemporary life would sound and look different. But what about John’s bigger point; that it’s not just about the bad guys?

Whether it’s in Guantanamo or the halls of Congress or the corridors of the capitol building in Baton Rouge or even the increasingly mean streets of New Orleans, the failure of good, well-meaning people to act is far more dangerous to us, collectively, than the threats posed by a handful of the menacing and mean spirited.

A Good Lesson For A Golfer’s Son

2007-01-23T14:23:00.001-05:00

By Steve White

I grew up hanging around the Great Southern golf club in Gulfport, MS. My parents lived in the 1950s vintage apartment building next to the tennis court, behind the Spanish-style mansion where original course owner Charlie Stewart lived. By the time we moved there, the Great Southern was owned by the Broadwater Hotel in Biloxi and known as the Sea Course; the hotel also owned a longer, less inspired 18-hole layout, located right behind the resort premises, called the Sun Course.

The Sea Course, known once again today as the Great Southern, sits overlooking the waterfront in Gulfport, along the narrow frontage road that runs just above Highway 90. Based on an original Donald Ross design, the course’s legacy dates back to 1908. It is the oldest course in Mississippi, playing host to early golf greats like Bobby Jones, Frances Ouimet, Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen, not to mention later immortals such as Ben Hogan, Bryon Nelson and Sam Snead. Members bought the club from the hotel in the early 1990s and soon restored many of the holes to their Golden Age glory. Unfortunately, the clubhouse and several holes near the beach were washed away by Katrina, the latest in a series of hurricanes to strip the land of its lush and once plentiful oaks.

My grandparents -- a marriage in which two distant universes collided – retired to the Mississippi Gulf Coast from south Florida around the time I started school. We made the move from a rental house in Mississippi City to the Southern Circle beachfront apartments shortly thereafter. My grandfather, a former professional golfer who spent two decades on tour and close to another two decades as an instructor in the Miami area, wanted to move closer to his only child, my dad. In doing so, he bought two memberships to the club, one for he and my grandmother and one for our financially struggling family of three.

My grandfather’s decision to come back to Mississippi, where he first met my grandmother four decades earlier, proved pivotal in the arc of my young life. The club membership gave me a place to flourish, swimming and roaming the fairways, mostly among the company of my grandfather and my dad and the colorful men with whom they played golf and cards and Ping Pong and, later tennis -- always for money. They were sportsmen, although not in the manner of Long Island bluebloods. My grandfather, the consummate sports professional, spent his life making money at golf, both in official prize checks and often from the more lucrative un-official gambling pot up for grabs amongst his fellow pros.

His cronies, at least during the Sea Course years, fell fall short of the colorful characters described in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine article, “Looking for My Father in Las Vegas” by Pat Jordan. However, out on tour, he had known, and gambled with, some fairly notorious characters including Martin “The Fat Man” Stanovich and Titanic Thompson and later, in south Florida, he had provided golf instruction to the legendary gambling financier Meyer Lansky.

Jordan’s article is a gem, evoking the kind of world that I only glimpsed as a youngster, when he writes of his own less than reputable forefathers. “My uncles were not like the uncles of my childhood friends — tall, blond, smiling men who taught their nephews how to toss a baseball,” he writes. “My uncles were short, dour men in shimmering sharkskin suits. They smoked crooked Toscano cigars and taught me, from the time I was 6, how to palm the ace of spades, how to spot shaved dice and how to pray to God before I went to bed that the Bears would beat the Packers by at least a point and a half. They weren’t really my uncles; they were my father’s gambling cronies.”

Not unlike my own efforts to summon up the ghosts of my past, Jordan goes in search of his father’s essence in the modern Mecca of vice, Las Vegas. He learns a lot about gambling, but in the end is left with his own father’s words as the most reliable coordinates to finding himself.

“My father decided at some point in his life that it was gambling that defined him. It didn’t matter whether that was true or not, it mattered only that to him it was true,” Jordan concludes. “He told me once: 'Find out who you are, kid. And be it.' A good lesson for a gambler’s son.”

I Want To Be In That Number

2007-01-19T15:57:00.001-05:00

By Steve White

What could the passing of Art Buchwald, pimento cheese and the possibility that the Saints might go to the Super Bowl have in common? For me, they converged this week in a Proustian moment of reverie, transporting me back in time to childhood weekends at my Grandmother Mabelle’s apartment in Biloxi, Miss.

She was one of a kind, my grandmother, smoking her endless Salem cigarettes out of those little plastic holders, as we watched pro golf and pro football on Sunday afternoons. The golf could be excused by the fact that she was married to my grandfather, a professional golfer named Emmett O’Neal “Buck” White, for more than four decades. But football?

My grandmother was educated at Vassar and a lover of poetry and short stories, both dying art forms she used to claim. In college, she wrote her thesis on William Faulkner when he was a young emerging author decades before he gave that famous Nobel Prize speech. She was also a keen investor who read three newspapers a day, and an avid follower of politics who enjoyed the witty satire of Buchwald and Mark Russell. [The only political causes she ever advocated for personally were the right for women to smoke at Vassar and wear pants in the lobbies of prestigious hotels.] Yet football ranked right up there in a list of her passions, particularly the Miami Dolphins, her home team for many years, followed by the Saints in order of importance.

I remember going to the Superdome with Grandmother Mabelle and a friend of hers visiting from Florida to see the Saints play the Dolphins in a rare match-up -- and a moment of great conflict for her. It turned out to be one of first times then backup quarterback Dan Marino took the field. He, of course, went on to Dolphins greatness. Grandmother Mabelle and her friend Jean, cheering wildly for the Miami team, made more than a few enemies that day in the Dome stands. Fortunately, for us, the Saints prevailed. At least that’s the way I remember it today, more than two decades later.

In many ways, visiting that musty apartment on Sundays was like entering her own particular brand of literary salon, although sometimes it felt more like a sports book because Grandmother Mabelle was always willing to take a good bet. We talked about current events, political candidates, American and English history, the stock and bond markets, horse racing, golf, football and, of course, literature. She understood that the common bond between all these varied subjects was character, the stuff of which real people are made. In many ways, those Sunday afternoons made me who I am now, and like today in my own adult life, I always left wanting more, hungry both intellectually and literally.

Grandmother Mabelle ate to live, strictly, so an emerging glutton like me often found slim pickings in her icebox. The one thing I could always count on, though, was a small tub of commercially made Pimento cheese, especially on Masters weekend, and a box of Wheat Thins, a combination that held me in good stead when the only other options were black coffee, menthol cigarettes and the occasional can of ginger ale.

So Buchwald’s gone; his death represents a passing of the kind of gentle Eisenhower age approach to political humor that Mabelle would still find far more tasteful than the jaded barbs of Jon Stewart or the obscenity studded rants of Bill Maher. The Saints are one game away from the Super Bowl, something inconceivable on those Sundays in the early 1980s. And NPR waxed poetic this week about the Southern charms of pimento cheese, ultimately reaching my memory banks through my taste buds.

On my first post-Katrina trip home to Mississippi, I drove by the ruins of her old apartment building, and chuckled at my grandparents’ seeming indifference to hurricanes. They lived with hurricanes most of their adult lives, first in Hollywood Beach, Fla., and then Biloxi, where they moved when I was young to be nearer to us – to me. Grandaddy Buck always went to bed as a storm approached, saying, “Mabelle, wake me up when it’s all over.” Meanwhile, she stocked up on batteries for her flashlight, mainly for reading in the case of a power outage.

Their both gone for a long time now, so we’ll never know if they would have fled Katrina, or decided foolishly to ride out the storm, like they had done so many times before. Likewise, I don’t know if I’ll be in that special number marching into heaven when my time here is up, but if so I am sure looking forward to seeing Grandmother Mabelle, hopefully with a color TV and a tub of pimento cheese because I am ready to pick up where we left off…

N.O.: Stay or Go

2007-01-17T13:27:00.001-05:00

By Steve White

“Do I live in a sterile environment & possibly die of boredom. Or do I return to the city I love so much & possibly die at the hands of a ‘Child of the Night?”

How hundreds, maybe thousands, of people answer that question will determine the outcome to two large and inextricably linked riddles: how will New Orleans resurrect itself and what can done to stem rampant crime? You can’t have one without the other.

A friend of mine (someone I used to room with in New Orleans more than a decade ago) posed the question above, in response to a recent Chris Rose column entitled "Fear and Firepower." Rose, a comic wit who found his mature voice in hurricane’s wake singing humorous love songs to the city, now seriously questions the sanity of staying in New Orleans as bullets rain down.

My friend, whose family is considering a return, responds in kind. They are the kind of people New Orleans needs. He’s a health care provider, she an active mom, both with deep ties in the community they left before the hurricane to pursue a job opportunity in Florida. Now they want to come home and be a part of the rebirth.

There aren’t any easy answers, of course, so let’s ask that age-old question: what would Jesus do. In this instance, we actually have some guidance. In the lead up to his own crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus goes to the Garden of Gethsemane and seeks counsel from God, expresses fear and hesitation at what is to come, is betrayed by a loved one and ultimately atones for the sins of the world through his own sacrifice and suffering.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating sacrifice for others (as I sit safely on the sidelines), nor am I a macho proponent of the No Pain/No Gain school of thought, but I do believe that God answers all our prayers if we go to him and then sit quietly and listen. The answers are there; they just aren’t always easy, or simple, or what we think we want or need.

New Orleans & A New Start

2007-01-16T12:39:00.001-05:00

By Steve White

We are two weeks into the New Year, and I am finally getting around to one of my big “commitments” for 2007, to revive this journal. I started penning some thoughts about my homeland and what happened to it in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina about a year ago. Unfortunately, life was in session, as it always is, and my resolve withered amidst other pressing concerns, namely job, family, and the general state of chaos and confusion in the world today. It’s a state I know all too well.

I may not have been talking, but I continued reading – the mainstream press, the alternative press, and, most importantly, the enlightening work being done by bloggers from across the Gulf Coast region. Citizen journalists and bloggers have painted a picture of what’s happening, especially in New Orleans, in a way that tackles the complexity of life there far better than any traditional media has, or can. It’s a pure distillation of what Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The Tipping Point about the power of word of mouth. In an age of increasing technological complexity we have come to highly value a fairly primitive form of communication: one person talking in their authentic voice, unfiltered by large corporate mediation.

It was those voices that aroused me from my stupor as New Orleans’ old demon – violence – has come back with a vengeance, assuming it was ever gone at all during those weeks following Katrina. I lived in New Orleans for more than a decade, from the mid-80s to the late 90s, and crime was a main character then, as it is now. Like today, it came from all corners, including the police (remember Antoinette Frank or Len Davis), and, like today, a string of crimes culminating in one that hit a little too close to home for the white community (Helen Hill now, the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen murders then) prompted the citizenry to march on City Hall. Today, Mayor Ray Nagin offers hollow promises to do something about it; then, former Mayor Marc Morial adopted a more traditional mode: extortion. We can solve your crime problem, he told us at the time, but we’ll have to raise your taxes to get the job done.

Real historians are surely already making these connections, drawing parallels to the wave of violence that shook New Orleans a decade ago -- long before Katrina added insult to injury, mold to misery. My memory of that darkest hour is always brightened when I think of an op-ed piece that ran during the height of the crime wave in the Times Picayune. The author, a local citizen who had emigrated from Europe to New Orleans, praised the unique values of the community and said we could overcome crime by drawing on that character. “New Orleans locals are more civilized than most Americans,” I remember him writing. “They take time to visit with their neighbors and invite strangers into their homes, offering them something to eat and drink and lingering in conversation long after the coffee is cold. It’s what sets them apart, favorably, from the rest of the modern world where nobody has any time or energy for their fellow man.”

He was right then, and I am sure he is right now. I know another one-time New Orleans resident, author William Faulkner, agreed when he held out hope for man despite much evidence to suggest the contrary. “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?,” Faulkner said in accepting the Nobel Prize for literature almost 60 years ago with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over the world. “I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

Memories of Mardi Gras

2006-02-27T17:24:00.001-04:00

By Steve White

My favorite memory of Carnival is stumbling out of Tipitina’s on Lundi Gras 1989 around 5 AM in the morning. Bleary eyed and exhausted, we were nonetheless walking on air, filled with the true spirit of the holiday yet to come. Dr. John in full Mardi Gras regalia, including a towering feather crown, started playing just before midnight on Sunday. In rare form, the good doctor laid down his own funky gumbo groove for more than four hours, filling that illustrious house of music with the ephemeral essence of New Orleans. The Night Tripper was channeling all the piano professors and hoodoo men who came before him, right there in the club named in honor of the patron saint of Big Easy boogie woogie – Professor Longhair. The last set finished with a 30-minute rendition of Earl King’s timeless Carnival classic “Big Chief.” In tow that night were some newfound friends from upstate New York. I wonder to this day if they realized that they were in the presence of the supernatural.

Growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, we had our own Mardi Gras celebrations including masque balls and parades. My parents took me to my first New Orleans’ Carnival when I was about 12 years old. I can still remember the images of bacchanalia in the French Quarter from that maiden voyage. I was hooked. But my first un-chaperoned Mardi Gras was 20 years ago when I rode the bus from Gulfport, Miss., to the New Orleans Greyhound station at the foot of Poydras to meet my fellow St. Stanislaus juniors on a chilly February weekend in 1986. Our crew included my boarding school roommates John King and Charles Oliver, along with their friend David “Toto” Drennin. In what I should have recognized as a precursor to many future Carnival seasons, a shifty looking guy on the bus offered to sell me some of modern pharmacology’s finest treats to help complete the party. I passed, but not because I wasn’t already seeking the kind of full flight from reality that Mardi Gras generously offers to locals and visitors alike.

Sporting a Navy issue pea coat and a sense of limitless possibility, I hit the streets of Uptown with my school pals, catching parades whose names I wouldn’t remember until years later, meeting all kinds of interesting “city kids,” drinking beer from krewe-themed plastic cups on streets with names like Constantinople, Delachaise and Toledano, and ultimately finishing each night by slipping into Uptown college bars packed with Tulane and Loyola students -- a preview of life to come.

Mardi Gras Day 1986: We woke up late and missed the infamous Zulu parade, which I had first glimpsed along Canal Street four years earlier when they still threw their coconuts and spears from the only African American krewe’s floats. Instead, we started out the day with a traditional Budweiser breakfast before heading out on foot to catch Rex (the King of Carnival) and meet up with more friends along the Garden District parade route. Somewhere near Louisiana Avenue we stopped to use the facilities and found our way to a crumbling and abandoned mansion just steps away from the crowds. After taking care of business, we explored its formerly grand and now dilapidated rooms, climbing the rickety staircase all the way to the third floor where a group of ominous-looking older guys were engaging in some illicit herbal activity and looking threateningly in our direction. Coming down the back steps, we spied a gaggle of college age girls utilizing the estate’s equally decrepit slave quarters as their own outdoor ladies room. Bathrooms are hard to come by on Mardi Gras day! Years later, I went searching for that house, unsure of its exact location, and, after several passes through the neighborhood, finally pinpointed the corner lot where it would have been. Amazingly, there stood a new version of the house and slave quarters, fully restored to their former glory. Only in New Orleans, eh?

Amidst a veritable sea of revelers of all ages ranging from wild college kids to families with barbecues on the St. Charles neutral ground to flamboyant queens in outlandish costumes, we made our way to Seventh Street where dozens of fellow Rock-A-Chaws (a sandspur was our Stanislaus mascot if you can believe it) were settling in for a long day of partying. Two seasons later, in my freshman year at Loyola, I ran into then-Stanislaus senior Sandy Sarpy manning a parked station wagon loaded down with Popeye’s chicken dinners. He was giving them out to just about every celebrant who passed through the intersection of Prytania and Seventh on their way to the parade. Another 15 years passed before the meaning of that moment hit me. Perusing a book on the history of Carnival in the Wilmette, Illinois library, I recognized a very young Sandy standing in an early 1980s era picture with his regal looking family members including grandfather Leon Sarpy who once served as king of Rex, one of the older Carnival organizations that today reigns over the annual pre-Lenten season.

The last stop of the day, at least in my memory of that momentous Mardi Gras, was a party of high school seniors at the corner of St. Charles and Second Street. There they were, the hot shots of the Stanislaus upper class dorm including one particular guy dressed as a catholic school girl. He was a diminutive but muscle bound live wire who used to strut up the residence hallway announcing in his best mock-YAT accent, “Yeah, you right, bro!” Years later this same fellow would make news twice, first by saving a bankrupt independent movie house Uptown and then kidnapping and killing his police office girlfriend in that same theater in the late 1990s before turning the gun on himself.

As dusk approached on that Mardi Gras day in 1986, my first glimpse of the Comus parade came into view. Following efforts by city leaders to integrate the old-line secret society krewes in the early 1990s, Comus no longer parades, its members content to celebrate the season with their very private masque ball. Illuminated by hand-held flambeau torches, the parade made its way up the avenue, rocking back forth on their 19th century wagons. My already overwhelmed senses were brought to a crescendo with this last burst of riotous sights and sounds. Comus was a vision to behold, its floats decorated elegantly in hand designed paper mache (as opposed to the more obvious fiberglass of today’s superkrewes), giving visual exposition to their annual take on a classical theme, all in good tongue-in-cheek fun.

Then it was all over. Except that it wasn’t. That day has stayed with me for two decades, drawing me to New Orleans a year and a half later for college at Loyola and helping plant the seed of a lifelong passion for New Orleans, Mardi Gras and everything that makes that city a place like no other.

A Forgotten Place

2006-02-26T13:07:00.001-04:00

By Steve White

Who speaks for the Gulf Coast and New Orleans? They do, of course, but why aren’t the rest of us listening?

People everywhere go about their daily lives of work, school, shopping, little league practice, etc., while hundreds of thousands of their fellow Americans are struggling to put their own lives back together. Some are stuck thousands of miles from home waiting for when they can return; others are worse off, making do in the wreckage of their former homes with a bucket for a bathroom or sleeping in tents and eking out an existence on food stamps and welfare while holding down a job as a public school teacher.

It has been nearly six months since Katrina made landfall. Where is the outrage, and where is the outreach – as a nation? Don’t get me wrong, thousands of individual volunteers (many part of faith-based mission groups) have come out of the woodwork to give of their time, money and labor to help people who are total strangers. I saw it with my own eyes, and recorded it here in an earlier post. But these efforts, while valiant and worthy, are like offering a Band-Aid to someone who has lost a limb. What is it going to take to get our nation’s leaders to bring the full power of our government to bear on a problem that is solvable by, as they say, throwing money its way. The cure to cancer or Middle East peace may remain elusive goals with no clear answers, but rebuilding the Gulf Coast and restoring the protective wetlands can be done with the tools we already have at hand.

“New York Times” columnist Frank Rich put it best recently in a radio interview when asked how citizens of this country can begin to demand more integrity from the system. Like the movie “Network,” we need to start communicating a simple but powerful message to our elected officials -- that we are Mad As Hell And Aren’t Going To Take It Anymore!

If you can believe it, there are still more than 2,000 people who are unaccounted for in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. How many of those lost people are bodies still buried in the wreckage of the houses that were destroyed, especially in hard hit areas like the Lower Ninth Ward? Those are all people who have fallen and been left behind by the rest of us. Meanwhile, FEMA is stopping hotel payments for 12,000 families, government run tent cities are set to close, there aren’t enough trailers, many people aren’t in a position to even use a trailer because they can’t connect it local utilities for many reasons, and nobody has any answers as to where any of these people will go.

“When you go to New Orleans, when you go to Waveland, Miss., the winds are still blowing; the disaster is still with us,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper told Oprah Winfrey last week during a special edition of the latter’s daytime show. “We are judged as a nation by how we take care of our citizens and we need to take a hard look at that…It’s all still there, the debris, the bodies. And we can all help.”

He’s right!

“Even when we try to put a smile on our face, we remember people who are still missing,” New Orleans City Council member Oliver Thomas told CNN correspondent John King during the same Oprah segment. Thomas turned around several days later and made headlines across the country by saying the only people welcome back to New Orleans were those willing to work, not so-called “soap opera watchers.” That sure sounds like code for the largely white voters who remain in the city. It also plays directly into the notion that New Orleans and Gulf Coast residents must somehow prove their worthiness to be made whole. That’s bunk.

Prior to the great flood of 1927, Americans had very little expectation of help from the federal government following natural disasters. But Herbert Hoover, along with other community-minded leaders in the South, changed all that, realizing that the plight of the country’s working class was essential to the health of the economy. (Read John Barry’s “Rising Tide” for more on this pivotal moment in history.) It wasn’t even a question of morality or compassion; leaders realized that helping victims of that great flood was the right thing to do for the country’s overriding interests. Have we lost sight of that in the intervening 78 years?

The Gulf Coast and New Orleans are breathtakingly beautiful and, in this writer’s humble opinion, one of the most interesting places on the entire planet. It’s a region with a strong sense of place, where families stake their claim and stay rooted for generations. “This is home…the only home we’ve known,” said the matriarch of the Taylor family, whose image appeared on the cover of Time Magazine being rescued from the roof of their engulfed SUV in Bay St. Louis, Miss., at the height of the storm surge. Many fellow storm victims echo this connection when interviewed about their desire to return to these storm prone locales.

In Pass Christian, Miss., only one public school remains open, or even intact, Delisle Elementary. Eighty percent of the students and faculty there are still living in trailers, and proud teachers are forced to accept welfare and food stamps to feed their families. Reporter Lisa Ling interviewed one of these teachers during the recent episode of Oprah, asking her: “You are a citizen of the most powerful country in the world. Do you feel like it?”

“No,” the teacher responded, without rancor. “I think of all the money we have spent on wars; we need to help ourselves, now.”

Carnival Time

2006-02-21T19:25:00.001-04:00

By Steve White

I came into my office this morning, whistling that most infectious of tunes to any New Orleanian past or present: Al Johnson singing his almost eerie signature tune “Carnival Time.” Think about it for a minute, and you can hear it too: ”Oh well, it’s carnival time, everybody’s havin’ fun!” I know that my internal Mardi Gras clock has started ticking when that campy song comes to my lips, no matter where I am living. It happens every year, but this year it’s no surprise. There’s been a lot in the national media over the past week about the kick-off of Carnival in storm battered New Orleans. Then, just today a friend sent some pictures of the parade scene over this past weekend that show mighty sparse crowds along St. Charles Ave. It’s a melancholy Mardi Gras for sure. Yet it’s also a chance for New Orleans residents and people everywhere who care about the city to re-focus attention on the continuing needs there. Local columnist, educator and humorist Liz Scott, aka Modine Gunch, said it best in her Times Picayune opinion column last week, calling for locals and Carnival revelers to fly their American flags proudly, and upside down, to remind the rest of the nation of a simple but important message: “We need help,” Scott concluded her op ed piece. And they do! Check out Scott's article in its entirety at http://www.nola.com/archives/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1139900610172530.xml.

Required Reading

2006-02-09T02:53:00.001-04:00

By Steve White

“Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast”
By Mike Tidwell

“Holding Back The Sea: The Struggle on the Gulf Coast to Save America”
By Christopher Hallowell

“Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood and How It Changed America”
By John Barry

What a difference 36 years can make!

Hurricane Camille, which made landfall on Aug. 17, 1969 (just a month after my own birth), had long been the benchmark by which the Gulf Coast region had defined the so-called worst-case scenario. Homes and buildings that survived Camille were assumed to be impervious to hurricane force winds and waters, especially considering that gusts of more than 200 miles an hour were reportedly measured atop my high school alma mater, St. Stanislaus College in Bay St. Louis, Miss, during that storm. So why did Katrina, a Category 4 hurricane at landfall, wreak so much more havoc than the Category 5 Camille?

Likewise in New Orleans, Hurricane Betsy in 1965 punched holes in the levees along the industrial canal and flooded parts of the city (ironically in some of the same areas hard hit by Katrina). But the devastation didn’t approach Katrina levels, and New Orleans bounced back in weeks as opposed to the months or years it is likely to take in the aftermath of last year’s post-hurricane flooding.

The reasons for the disparity are many including the sheer size of the storm, the power and height of Katrina’s wave surge, lower barometric pressure levels, making landfall at high tide, global warming and the resulting active hurricane season and the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers to maintain levees properly along the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals in New Orleans (possibly because soil data may have been improperly recorded, according to reports on nola.com).

The overriding issues are the loss of wetlands in southeast Louisiana, where hundreds of miles of marsh has turned to open water, and the erosion of barrier islands off the coastlines of both states. These land masses protect the metro New Orleans area and the coastal towns in Mississippi. “Every 2.7 miles of marsh grass absorbs a foot of a hurricane’s surge,” explained author Mike Tidwell is his 2001 book “Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast.” “For New Orleans alone, hemmed in by levees and already an average of eight feet below sea level, the apron of wetlands between it and the closest Gulf shore was, cumulatively, about 50 miles a century ago. Today that distance is perhaps 20 miles and shrinking fast.”

So why are the wetlands disappearing? Again, environmentalists point to a number of reasons including warmer temperatures, which have raised the level of the globe’s oceans, some say as a result of global warming. That may be part of the problem, but the main issue at hand is simple: the entire Louisiana wetlands were formed as a result of sedimentary deposit from the Mississippi River over literally thousands and thousands of years of flooding. Man finally tamed the wild river following the great flood of 1927, bringing to an end this natural land creation process. Plus, the land on the other side of the levees continued the natural process of settling (i.e. sinking). The land is falling; Gulf water is rising. Thus the wetlands begin to disappear at a rapid pace, producing a wide array of negative fallout including the steady loss of land, the demise of a Cajun culture that thrived by living off the fertile bayous of southern Louisiana and the disappearance of a much needed buffer zone when destructive hurricanes roar into the Gulf of Mexico headed for Louisiana and Mississippi.

The three books I have listed above including Tidwell’s “Bayou Farewell,” a literary travelogue that examines the issue from many angles; Christopher Hallowell’s “Holding Back the Sea: The Struggle on the Gulf Coast To Save America,” taking a slightly more wonkish approach to the same material; and, lastly, John Barry’s landmark history on the 1927 flood, “Rising Tide,” that explains the drive by federal agencies to finally subdue the dangerous river behind a levee system, are all crucial to understanding the problems and solutions. These books set the stage and spell out what this all means in painful and frightening detail.

I am ashamed to say that it took a storm like Katrina to wake me up to these issues, despite the fact that I grew up along the Mississippi Coast and lived in the New Orleans area for more than a decade. I may be a day late and a few environmentally conscious brain cells too short, but it’s not necessarily too late.

Plans have long been on the table (www.coast2050.gov) to build a massive river diversion near Donaldsonville, La., thereby managing a man-made split in the mighty Mississippi and creating a second river delta. The result: the creation of new land that within a short period of time can begin to rebuild the wetlands, save many endangered species and a unique way of life in Acadia, and ultimately restore crucial marshland to blunt the effects of Katrina-like storms in the future.

Let’s hope the pain, suffering and loss of Katrina will prompt action on the part of this country’s leaders. It’s not as if we don’t have the money (approximately $14 billion); so far what we have lacked is the political will to stem land loss averaging more than 25 miles of coastline, each year!

New Orleans Soul At Stake

2006-02-03T13:53:00.001-04:00

By Steve White

Why is New Orleans so beloved by those who have lived, or even visited, there? Because it’s a place with an old and elegant soul! An article in today’s Washington Post covers some of the same ground this blogger touched on earlier this week about the fate not only of New Orleans as a place where people live and do business, but also as a safe haven for its own unique brand of American culture – whether that be funky music, spicy Creole food or folk patterns like Carnival and second lines and St. Joseph’s Day that have infused locals’ lives with meaning and myth for generations. “Even as the city's riverfront high ground -- now dubbed the ‘Isle of Denial’ by one scholar -- gamely revives, miles of culturally vibrant neighborhoods that once smelled of simmering red beans and hosted funky second-line parades lie dark and empty, their futures in doubt,” observes Post writer Manuel Roig-Franzia. “Their worry is that the curious and crazy that developed naturally here over time will be replaced by an artificial version of what once was, that a desperate attempt to resurrect New Orleans will turn it into a sanitized, charmless, soulless city.” The full article is a good read and well worth your time. To read the full piece, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/02/AR2006020202746.html

What Next

2006-01-31T15:54:00.001-04:00

A Gulf Coast native returns home to a region that continues to dig out from Hurricane Katrina even as they debate what will emerge from the rubble

By Steve White

“Well, you’ll never be able to bring your kids back here and show them where you grew up,” my mom informed me, stating the obvious as we stood on the slab that was my childhood home before Hurricane Katrina swallowed the structure whole on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005.

By this point almost five months later, my mom is pretty stoic in the face of twisted steel and concrete, having seen her own current home go under eight feet of water and come out looking pretty soggy, but not a total loss.

This was my first visit home to Gulfport, MS, since the storm changed the landscape of my childhood forever, and I was still struggling to assimilate my emotions in the face of such total devastation.

Five days of traveling from one end of the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the other and across Lake Pontchartrain to my adopted home city of New Orleans, where I lived from 1987 – 1998, left me numb with disbelief and guilt. The conditions remain appalling by most modern standards, and rebuilding remains a hope for the future as residents of both states continue to clear debris and struggle with the question of just how to make a start in tackling the enormous problems that lie ahead.

Along the Mississippi Coast and the shores of Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, the images leave little to the imagination. High winds and powerful waves literally shredded mile after mile of coastline. Now, residents are faced with the daunting question of whether to rebuild and face possible destruction again or to move to higher and dryer ground.

South of Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans appears listless. The city is still standing but soggy. Many neighborhoods including Lakeview, Gentilly and New Orleans East look like they are about to collapse long after the floodwaters have receded. Levee breaches in New Orleans ultimately flooded over 80% of the city, in some places for more than a month.

Locals are still experiencing waves of shock and remorse, months later. “I wake up every day thinking it was a bad dream,” a man driving a road repair tractor in Bay St. Louis tells me offhandedly. “We’re all a little crazy,” noted my friend, New Orleans-based independent filmmaker Henry Griffin. “Some are crazy with a capital C while others may appear to be OK on the outside but they are losing it inside. We’re all losing it.”

Several other people I meet along the way describe the community that has emerged since Katrina as bi-polar. “Life is very intense here,” says Heidi Grace, owner of Yoga Bywater in the downriver neighborhood across the industrial canal from the devastated Lower Ninth Ward. “When people let loose, they really let loose.”

Missionaries and Mexicans

The presence of mission groups – mostly Christians with a smattering of other faiths – is felt strongly across the storm zone from a massive impromptu city called Project Hope set up at the western end of Waveland, MS, by the Morrell Foundation to a much smaller enclave of tents in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans along South Claiborne.

A sign hanging in front of St. Claire’s Catholic Church in Waveland says it best: “Katrina was big, God is bigger.”

In fact, missionary groups are everywhere from the joint brigade of Lutherans and Episcopalians who flew out with me after a week on the Coast to the Mennonites who quietly invaded neighborhoods in the post-storm period to help out with a universe of clean up and repair tasks to the Southern Baptist providing help and food in all their evangelical glory.

“I have to admit it,” a friend in New Orleans tells me, a bit sheepishly. “The conservative Christians, the ones I always make fun of, were consistently there for the storm victims hardest hit.”

Meanwhile, we are on a mission of our own to get my sister a graphing calculator for Calculus class (she was forced to transfer colleges by Katrina) when we encounter evidence of another group making a difference in the storm damaged areas: Mexican workers who have arrived to be part of the rebuilding.

It’s Saturday night in Wal-Mart, and a line of young men are waiting to utilize the Biloxi store’s newest offering, announced by the sign hanging over the customer service desk, “International Currency Transfer.” Elsewhere in the store, Hispanic men mill around in groups of three and four, casually sifting through a bin of discount DVDs or picking up a package of corn tortillas prominently displayed at the end of a main aisle near the bank of cash registers.

“I don't know what we would do without them,” one Coast resident says enthusiastically about the influx of new manual labor to the area.

A Tale of Two Catastrophes

According to the lead story in the January 20 edition of the New Orleans Times Picayune, more than 100,000 of the homes destroyed were without flood insurance, and those homeowners are all hoping to get their share of more than $10 billion in federal grant money that has been set aside by Congress for rebuilding these properties. But as of this writing, that money is still an academic reality, and the FEMA funds that many have been living on for the past months will soon be coming to an end.

In the meantime, there is considerable tension, even between survivors across state lines. Residents of Louisiana are want to see the problems of Mississippi in anything other than a secondary light, even though the storm itself made landfall along the Magnolia state’s shores.

Meanwhile, Mississippians are resentful of the national media spotlight that has focused almost exclusively on the Crescent City, where flooding was caused by the failure of inadequate levees in the aftermath of the storm and not Katrina’s immediate assault of wind and waves.

“Louisiana officials say that getting 54% of the Community Development Block Grant money – the most it can get under law – is nowhere near enough for the level of damage to homes, schools, hospitals and businesses, which they say far overshadows the destruction in Mississippi and the other Gulf Coast states,” the Times Picayune story informed.

Most of the people I met during my days along the Coast and in New Orleans, were deeply ambivalent when quizzed about the response to Katrina’s devastation. People are good, but officialdom and government institutions are inept at best and more likely malicious and uncaring, they seemed to be saying.

Everyone you meet has a story of how some person, or group of people, came to their aid, helping them out when they most needed assistance. For my mom, it was a group of traveling Mennonite missionaries, who removed fallen trees and helped clean out her water soaked house. For others, it was neighbors or even strangers who had something to offer at their most desperate hour.

The tone of the conversation shifts when locals begin talking about their insurance company or FEMA and other governmental agencies. Most people are angry with and fearful, even paranoid, of these groups and their intentions.

This tension is made more pronounced when the political aspects of the catastrophe are brought into focus. Largely Republican South Mississippi faced its fare share of post Katrina challenges, but they seem to pale in comparison to the levee failures and public fiascos that have transpired across the Mississippi River in Louisiana.

“What happened in Louisiana was a man-made disaster,” declared Loyola University professor and New York Times columnist John Biguenet at a politically charged panel discussion on preserving New Orleans culture held at the school in middle January. “An agency of the U.S. government, the Army Corps of Engineers, did this to us."

Cultural Preservation

The destruction in dollars and cents may, in Louisiana, far outpace the more visually disturbing scenes one finds along the Mississippi, especially in Waveland where an entire beachfront town has been all but obliterated.

However, the loss of a quintessentially coastal culture, blending French, Spanish and African and Native American heritage in a special southern gumbo, is beyond measure in both states.

For many, like myself, this question of cultural preservation looms as large as the rebuilding of homes, businesses and economies. As much-need new capital flows into the region, what effect will that have on a part of the nation largely resistant, until now, to the national consumer brands that have taken over so much of the rest of this country?

Just like that childhood home that my kids will never see, the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast will result in a new and different community, and some of what was best about the old is sure to slip through the cracks of redevelopment.

During their presentation to a packed house at Loyola University in New Orleans, Biguenet and his fellow panelists made the case that traditional culture was already in danger before the storm. A disaster like Katrina, they said, can serve to either speed that process or provide local residents with an opportunity to save what is unique about where they live and work.

“It’s not all moonlight and magnolias,” said historian Alecia Long (“The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race and Respectability in New Orleans”) of the local New Orleans culture. “The more we know about the city’s history, the better decisions we can make (about rebuilding). Now is the time to step up. Be less careful. Be more confrontational.”

Times Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie worried that the new New Orleans, which will emerge as a result of rebuilding, would represent a more corporate, market-driven place that had no room for many of the city’s old school charms.

“It’s hard to sew an Indian suit all year if you are trying to make VP at the local bank or partner of your law firm,” he said, referring to the age old folk tradition of so-called Mardi Gras Indians that parade each year in hand-made Native American garb during Mardi Gras.

At the center of many cultural traditions in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, even Mardi Gras itself has become controversial – whether to have it or not in the face of so many other public challenges.

“Should we have Mardi Gras?” asked local celebrity chef Susan Spicer, another panelist at the Loyola cultural forum. “Yes. It’s what we do.”

That seems to sum up the attitude of many locals, prominent or otherwise. New Orleans and the Gulf Coast have a rich cultural tradition; of that there is little argument from any quarter. Moreover, the defenders of this unique region have a grand opportunity to make “sweet usage of adversity” in saving what is best while improving upon the seemingly impenetrable problems of poverty, racial tension and some of the worst public schools in the U.S.

In their own intensely civil and charming way, locals in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast are having a boisterous conversation about what their new community will look like. And the loudest voices appear to be saying that they want to get back what was theirs before Katrina, in all its deeply flawed glory.

“We lived with a public school system and housing projects that were an abomination and we have to balance that with our enthusiasm,” noted Biguenet. “New Orleanians are just not very good at mourning though. We are about celebrating life. A jazz funeral is the greatest example of that. We start out trying to be sad and wind up having a party.”

During my own tour around town with New Orleans native and local filmmaker Henry Griffin, we paused on Magazine Street to visit two different businesses in the same city block. One is an upscale jewelry store, Katy Beh Contemporary Jewelry, started by an Iowa transplant who fell in love with New Orleans and plans to stay even after the storm. The other is a shoe repair shop, Edwards Shoe Service, which predates Magazine Street gentrification by decades.

“Mr. Edwards worked all his life to put his kids through college and make a better life for the next generation,” said Griffin, who once lived in an apartment above the store. “If we really want this place to survive for the future, we are going to have to work hard for it just like he did.”