Examining Hurricane Katrina from every angle

Realizing the inherent stubbornness of the Lower Ninth, Thomas spent Saturday going door-to-door like some college-age canvasser, telling everybody to evacuate. He wasn’t just playing politician. Thomas himself had been a hurricane survivor. Back in 1965, when Betsy came to town, Oliver’s parents had refused to evacuate, and lived to regret their recalcitrance. “I told everybody that as a child, the scariest thing in my life was Hurricane Betsy,” Thomas said. “You listen to the wind coming through the cracks in your house, the breaking windows, the howling sound.” Betsy flooded out the Thomas home; they were stranded, in fact, for a day on their rooftop and had to be saved by the Coast Guard. Forty years later, as a city councilman, Thomas was in a position to make sure Lower Ninth folks like his parents, people afraid to leave the one thing they owned, dropped their antagonism toward municipal warnings.

At one juncture on Saturday, while Thomas was on Claiborne Avenue, he spotted Frank Watson, an old friend, walking down the sidewalk. “Where are you going?” Thomas shouted at him. “I’m goin’ home,” Watson replied. “Why are you still here?” Thomas shot back. A smile broke out on Watson’s face and he shook his head in disbelief; his childhood buddy was acting like an old grandma worrywart. “Oliver, come on now,” he said. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Y’all always talkin’ about leaving and every time we leave and just turn around and come right back.”

Such stubbornness was typical of everybody Thomas knew in the Lower Ninth Ward; they were like mules with no sleep. “Ah, cut it out,” Thomas said. “Come on now, Frank, I don’t feel good about this one.” Watson never evacuated, and his conversation with Councilman Thomas was the last he was known to have. He was never found after the storm.

III
While the worlds of business, academics, and politics were responding to the latest news, some were strangely isolated from it. Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, like much of America, was divided by class, race, and neighborhood. The rich, for the most part white, were living in Lakeview, Mid-City, Uptown, the Garden District, the Warehouse District, and in the French Quarter. The poor were mostly African American, living predominantly in New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward, Central City, Hollygrove, and Tremé. But there was crossover in all neighborhoods. At least, that is the way it looked at first sight. The truth was far more complex.

There were many varieties of African Americans, some of whom were the light-skinned Creoles, who had been the political leaders of the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Wards for decades. The poorest New Orleanians were country folk from the delta, who had been coming to the city looking for jobs since the woeful days of the Great Depression. They were the people of the housing projects; by and large, they didn’t trust whites or cops. The prisonlike projects of New Orleans were beehives for drug trafficking. Hoodlums armed with AK-47s could make up to $50,000 a week dealing crack cocaine. (The marijuana trade had moved primarily out to the white suburbs.) The drugs would flow into New Orleans via I-10 and I-12. The projects became a virtual farmers’ market of drugs. The NOPD often turned a blind eye to the “rock dealers,” making sure they received a cash cut for their enabling services. The drug suppliers were sometimes Iranians, called Talibans by local African Americans. In some cases, the suppliers were Vietnamese, as were those at the convenience store beside the St. Thomas project, where crack cocaine was sold in bubble gum wrappers. All over the projects five- or ten-dollar bags of heroin were readily available. The rivalry for control of the illegal drug industry turned New Orleans’s housing projects into killing fields. Every week the Times-Picayune would list the names of the dead, casualties in urban gang warfare, with the phrase “gunshot wound” closing the cases on autopsy reports. Even outside of the projects, there was an imprisoned quality to life for poor blacks. Housing was relatively inexpensive in New Orleans, with an average monthly rent of $488, but it tended to be flimsy wood-frame construction that would be considered substandard in other cities. Small houses, barely more than shanties, and “shotgun” two-family structures were common in the poorer neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods were insulated from mainstream life in a way that made being poor in New Orleans a special hardship. “New Orleans has a 40 percent literacy rate; over 50 percent of black ninth graders won’t graduate in four years,” Michael Eric Dyson explained in "Come Hell or High Water," his post-Katrina study of race relations in America. “Louisiana expends an average of $4,724 per student and has the third-lowest rank for teacher salaries in the nation. The black dropout rates are high and nearly 50,000 students cut class every day. When they are done with school, many young black males end up at Angola Prison, a correctional facility located on a former plantation where inmates still perform manual farm labor, and where 90 percent of them eventually die. New Orleans’s employment picture is equally gloomy, since industry long ago deserted the city, leaving in its place a service economy that caters to tourists and that thrives on low-paying, transient, and unstable jobs.”¹⁸

MORE FROM TODAY BOOKS: HISTORY POLITICS

‘A History of Ghosts’ explores paranormal past

‘A History of Ghosts’ explores paranormal past David Alan Grier: Is beige the new black? Is price gouging in wake of a hurricane wrong? New book places blame for Pat Tillman’s death Blagojevich tells his side of story in ‘Governor’ Geraldo on Hispanics’ new era of prosperity Ousted Ill. governor explains self in new book Michelle Malkin: Obama’s team is corrupt Book: Obama turning slump into socialism Book traces rise of 44th U.S. president   Add Today Books: History Politics headlines to your news reader: