Devil Sent the Rain Read online

  In any case, Liggins’s narrator is going back home for a straightforward reason—to see his bay-bee. But that quickly gets mixed up with a desire to see the rest of the family—his cousins, his parrain, and Ma and Pa. The family stuff is also mixed up with all the other elements of New Orleans culture: music and a sense of place (he wants to “pat his feet on Rampart Street”), Mardi Gras, and, especially, food—crawfish, jambalaya, red beans, gumbo filé, and pralines (he even throws in dessert). In New Orleans, all these elements are of a piece, and Liggins’s record is directly about all the sensual, tactile tension and gratification that most of his other records keep on a short leash. Maybe for Liggins, as for so many, New Orleans was a place where he could connect all the different parts of himself, for three minutes at least. His record has that sense of resistance overcome—in this case, maybe, his own resistance to letting the wilder part of himself out for a little air. Maybe for Joe Liggins, as for so many, past and present, the Crescent City provided an opportunity to change personas and dance. And in that minor-key agitation, maybe just a prescient hint of storms, social and meteorological, to come.

  From the Oxford American Music Issue, Summer 2006

  What follows are four pieces about New Orleans written in the five years following Katrina. As mentioned, the publication of Why New Orleans Matters turned me, for a while at least, into an instant talking head on all topics relating to New Orleans. It also brought e-mails and letters from people who loved what I wrote and people who hated what I wrote.

  The first of these is an edited version of an online chat I conducted for the Washington Post in February 2006, and it gives a fair idea of the elements that made up my standard responses to the questions I encountered about the city’s prospects. Mary and I had moved into my just-repaired apartment from temporary quarters at a friend’s house on Kerlerec Street. Repairs on Mary’s house would not be finished for another six months. The editing is only to comb out pointless repetitions that cropped up here and there.

  The second, from May 2006, is something different: an exchange of letters about the future of New Orleans. The letter I received is typical of a certain narrow vein of response to my book. Such letters would invariably start out politely, even courtly, and would be written by someone with impeccable credentials as a lady or gentleman, always oozing with solicitude for the “underclass” while espousing a program for the future of the city that would effectively eliminate the “underclass” from New Orleans. The courtly manner was a perfume to disguise a familiar scent. My response to this particular letter sums up my feelings about the subtext of these communiqués. I had to do extensive plastic surgery on the reader’s letter to disguise any trace of his or her identity; Harper lawyers have assured me that this was necessary.

  After that summer of 2006, I became deeply involved in writing the novel that became City of Refuge, and except for “Charlie Chan in New Orleans!” I did very little discretionary writing between the fall of 2006 and the fall of 2008, when the novel was published. During that period, though, there were many developments in the city, on both the positive and negative sides of the ledger. Essentially, the city came back to life, haltingly at first, and then with a vengeance, culminating in the extraordinary first half of 2010, when we got (at last) a new mayor, the Saints won the Super Bowl, and Treme debuted on HBO. That was quite a time to be in the city.

  On the down side, various cadres of influence had been at work trying as quietly as possible to engineer controversial changes in the city that became public knowledge only through the efforts of a handful of concerned citizens. “Other People’s Houses” addresses one of these schemes: the effort to keep Charity Hospital closed and raze seventy acres of historic homes in the heart of the city to build a sprawling new hospital complex under the combined auspices of Louisiana State University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Charity Hospital was the city’s main venue for treating poor and indigent populations, and was ready to reopen within weeks after Katrina; it was kept closed through the enormous influence of LSU. This isn’t the place for a rundown of post-Katrina New Orleans politics, but it is worth saying that the opponents of the plan (I was, obviously, one) agreed on the need for a hospital but argued for rehabbing Charity and utilizing the more vertical space available in the already-existing downtown medical district, much of which was vacant and begging for development, instead of expropriating the homes of hundreds of people who had sunk the previous several years and much of their life savings into returning to their homes. Guess who won the fight. The piece appeared as an op-ed in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

  Finally, an amuse-bouche that appeared in The Huffington Post in September 2010, discussing the five-year Katrina anniversary in light of the infamous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I wonder if anyone will remember that disaster in ten years, aside from historians and the thousands of people who had their lives upended, businesses destroyed, and sense of continuity terminated. Seemed pretty important at the time. The BP spill was treated in the media as a regional disaster, but if “Incontinental Drift” has a point, it is that there is no such thing, anymore, as a regional disaster.

  Seer and Seen: An Online Chat About New Orleans

  In February 2006 I was asked by the Washington Post to do an online chat about my book Why New Orleans Matters and the questions raised by the need to rebuild New Orleans. Here are some excerpts from that chat. In the introduction, the editor quoted something I had said in a previous interview, and it might illuminate the first exchange:

  In a recent interview Piazza stated that, in his eyes, ‘New Orleans is . . . a small model of all the best of America. You have a truly multicultural city, in which all social and ethnic and economic levels of society have somehow managed to fashion a distinct and beautiful culture out of the tensions among their differences. . . . In a larger sense that is the story of United States culture as a whole, but in New Orleans the expressions of that culture have included jazz, rhythm and blues, a distinctive cuisine, and so much more. And an attitude towards life that includes a spiritual resilience which has spoken to people around the world—for a couple of hundred years.

  Tom Piazza: I’m answering these questions from my New Orleans apartment, which is finally habitable after six months. During these months I have spent about half my time in New Orleans, and the rest on the road, speaking in Missouri, Connecticut, New York State, Vermont, Florida, San Francisco, and many other places. The intense concern for New Orleans on the part of so many people has been very moving, and it makes me hopeful about the future of my city. I had a number of questions waiting for me when I logged on, so I will just dive in with the first one in the queue.

  New Braunfels, Texas: Why do you call New Orleans the “best of America?” To me, it is the worst of America—I lived there twenty-five years. It is the murder capital of the United States, witchcraft and voodoo thrive there as well as prostitution and gambling. If this city is the best I hate to think of the worst city. Mardi Gras is a pagan celebration and I think the Lord has had about enough of New Orleans.

  Thanks for letting me sound off.

  Tom Piazza: Thanks for your question. I’ll try to answer as well as I can.

  First of all, you lived in New Orleans for twenty-five years and all you remember is witchcraft, voodoo, prostitution, and gambling? It sounds as if you were hanging out with the wrong crowd.

  I called New Orleans “a small model of all the best of America” because I have found here a vivid expression of my conception of what the United States can be at its best—a truly multicultural place, in which all social, ethnic, and economic elements of the society have somehow managed to fashion a distinct and vibrant culture out of the tensions among their differences. This embrace of diversity is a beautiful thing, when you can find it.

  In the eleven and a half years that I have lived here, I have seen most of the downside aspects that you mention, along with horrible racism, corruption, official incompetence, crumbling pu
blic schools, and so on—much of which, be it said, you can find in most urban areas of the U.S. to some degree. I have also seen human beauty, generosity of spirit, humor, astonishing grace in adversity, and a heroic affirmation of life itself through music, cuisine, dance, and fellowship unequaled anywhere else in my experience.

  If New Orleans’s particular mix of good and bad is not to your taste, that’s fine. But I think we need to be careful about seeing the Hand Of God at work in events that confirm our own ideas, tastes, or prejudices. As we know from the Book of Job, if not from our own experience in daily life, the hard rain falls on the good and the bad, the just and the unjust alike. If there is in fact a God, it is the height of hubris to think that you can fathom His reasons for doing what He does on this earth, and near-blasphemy to imagine that He is serving your own ideas of who needs correction or punishment.

  By the way, I notice from the lead story in the online edition of today’s [February 24] New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung [the city website calls the town “a little bit of old Germany”] that a local custodian at Smithson Valley Middle School in nearby Spring Branch has been arrested for allegedly possessing large amounts of child pornography. That’s only twenty-five miles from you; you might want to bring an umbrella later if you are going out.

  One more thing in the Acts Of God department: the catastrophe in New Orleans is the result of human incompetence and error—not, so far as I can tell, divine malice. The Hurricane Katrina winds and rain were disastrous, there is no question. But the massive and, again, catastrophic destruction that we have seen in the city is mainly the result of the flooding that took place—from the failure of the levees. And the primary responsibility for that tragic turn of events, and for fixing it, lies directly with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and they have admitted as much. And we need to hold them, and those whose job it is to oversee them, responsible until they have repaired the levees and made a good start on restoring the coastal wetlands that protect the entire Gulf Coast from the worst effects of these storms.

  Washington, D.C.: It’s been eight years ago since me and a girlfriend of mine attended the Essence Magazine Fest in New Orleans and I will never forget that little city. The people, the food, the music was great. We had a wonderful time at the Superdome and the French Quarters. I am certainly glad that I got the chance to see and experience New Orleans before Katrina hit.

  I had no clue how poor New Orleans was in its certain “wards” of the city, and now that it is 95 percent white due to those who were not affected by the “mysterious” breaking of the levees in the mostly black populated areas of the city—what should we expect to see now? Does the government have plans to bulldoze those “poor” areas and make way for moneymaking entertainment, or will there be plans to rebuild better homes and bring back the people who made New Orleans the city it once was?

  TP: As you can imagine, there is a huge and complicated arm-wrestle going on right now over these exact questions. It is my view that the city needs, in every sense, to actively encourage the return of its citizens from all economic and ethnic backgrounds, and from all of its neighborhoods. There have been enormous problems involved in doing this, which have amounted to a kind of logistical gridlock.

  Here is an example of what I mean: The trailers promised by FEMA as temporary housing for displaced people have been slow to arrive, when they have arrived at all. Those fortunate enough to have a trailer delivered have often found that there is no electricity to serve the trailer. The best estimate I have heard is that about three quarters of the city is still without electricity. This includes areas in which there is no electricity restored at all, as well as areas in which there is electricity in principle but houses are unable to get hooked up to it. The local power utility, Entergy New Orleans, has declared bankruptcy and is operating on what could generously be called a skeleton crew—hence drastically insufficient personnel to perform the hookups, not to mention all the other necessary public electrical work. By the way, the parent company of Entergy made something like $800 million in profits last year, and yet will not bail out Entergy New Orleans. Problems of this general sort exist in almost every area of the rebuilding process.

  In any case, people who want to come back and rebuild their lives and property even in areas that have not been seriously compromised are having trouble finding places to live while they rebuild. Rents and property values have gone up astronomically in the areas that did not flood. Obviously this is going to weigh most heavily on the people with the fewest resources.

  You suggest, correctly I think, that there is a racial dimension to the way some of these problems are being approached. The politics and economics of race in New Orleans, as elsewhere, are enormously complex. It is easy both to overstate and to understate the significance of race in this process. By the way, the rough division of black and white population in the city now is more like 65 percent white to 35 percent black, roughly the mirror image of the pre-Katrina ratio.

  Here is my feeling about this. There is no question but that the heaviest weight of this catastrophe has fallen on the poorest citizens of New Orleans. The heaviest weight of any catastrophe usually falls on the poorest citizens. In New Orleans, the poor are overwhelmingly African-American. As I said in Why New Orleans Matters, most of those poor are people who work, or were working, very, very hard at low-paying jobs just to make ends meet. All of them were and are members of our community, in New Orleans and as Americans.

  The question of their return sits at the moral and spiritual center of the discussion of post-Katrina New Orleans. But it is not a straightforward question, partly because until we have a clear picture of viable, rebuilt levee protection, it is close to murder to invite people to rebuild and reoccupy areas that could flood again. These areas, by the way, include not just the largely poor and African-American Lower Ninth Ward but the largely white, upper-middle-class neighborhood Lakeview, the upper-middle-class, mostly African-American New Orleans East, and mixed areas such as Gentilly, not to mention the overwhelmingly white, working-class St. Bernard and Chalmette.

  So it is not a straightforward issue of race, but it is plainly inflected by racial politics. Some, for example, have raised the above-mentioned flooding concerns as a way of saying, in code, that it is better that the residents of the overwhelmingly African-American neighborhoods not return. I would raise it to say, straightforwardly, that it is a national disgrace that the federal government has not moved more aggressively to do what is necessary to rebuild the levees and, just as importantly, restore the coastal wetlands that weaken hurricanes and absorb much of their impact as they approach land. Everyone in New Orleans, and everyone who wants to return to New Orleans, has a major case of the jitters right now because nobody knows what will happen during the next hurricane season.

  There are other major questions on the topic. Many of the evacuees in the post-Katrina shelters had school-age children with them. Most public schools in New Orleans are closed indefinitely. If these evacuees return, where will their children attend school? Most of the evacuees had no health insurance; presently, Charity Hospital, which was the main public source of health care for the poor, is closed indefinitely, and the number of beds in the hospitals that have reopened is down sharply. How will they get health care if they return? Where will they work? How will they care for sick or elderly family members?

  It is not enough to use these questions to say, “Sorry—too bad about your old life, and good luck in your new one, as long as it is someplace else.” That is just a way of not answering the questions in the first place. We need to use them to take a look at our priorities as a nation—a good, hard look at what we see in the mirror, and not just on the television screen.

  One more thing that I do need to say before moving on to the next question: Your quotes around the word “mysterious” are misleading. There was nothing mysterious about it. Engineers have been telling us for years exactly what would happen to the levees sooner or later, under certain conditions,
and they have also told us how much it would cost to fix them. Nobody wanted to hear it, especially the second part. Some people, additionally, have suggested that the levees were blown up during the hurricane to intentionally flood the largely African-American areas you mention. I have seen absolutely no evidence of this, and neither has anyone else. I am not saying that it is inconceivable that that kind of thing could happen, only that I don’t believe it happened this time. The levees crumbled on black and white alike, poor and well-off alike. The outrage should be directed at the miserable and ineffectual response at the local, state, and federal levels alike.

  Medford, Massachusetts: Tom, whether or not New Orleans is the type of town you say (and the view from the outside certainly matches the description in your first question), why should we rebuild it? Why, up here on a hill in Medford, Massachusetts, should we be paying to rebuild a city that is below sea level and that, except for human efforts, would not exist in its current form? It’s politically unpopular to say, but I can’t think of a good reason.

  TP: Hi, Medford, and thank you for the question. I hear this question a lot, and I will answer it as well as I can. First of all, no city we know of would exist “in its current form,” or any other form, if it weren’t for “human efforts.” I don’t mean that to sound flip. I mean it to say that everything worthwhile that humankind has achieved involves a rear-guard action against entropy. And without continual effort it would all quickly revert to weeds and waste. Anyone who owns a house, tends a garden, raises children, shaves, or does just about anything else knows this to be true.

  So our initial stance has to accept the fact that we are always, in this sense, pushing back against nature. Secondly, the sad fact of the matter is that many of the major cities in America are improbable, to say the least. Where are we going to make a stand and say that, as Americans, all of our country needs the efforts of all of us, whether up on a hill in Medford, Massachusetts, or down home in Tuscaloosa or way out west in Texas?