I saw a face on television today that told a story. The face belonged to a woman named Kimberly, who stayed in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina five years ago this weekend. She and her husband didn’t have a car and stayed behind with their families to ride out the storm, climbing to their attic as the flood waters rose and combing the city for days to find shelter and food. Two days before Katrina hit, Kimberly grabbed her camcorder and shot amateur video of her ordeal, catching the eye of a National Geographic producer who hired a film crew to follow her for months afterward. Kimberly is from an impoverished neighborhood, born to a drug-addicted “rockhead” mother and married to a former drug dealer and gang member. She is an aspiring rap artist and though she vowed never to return to the Ninth Ward in the days following the storm, she lives there now with the few of her neighbors that returned.
I saw a face in PEOPLE magazine last week that also told a story. This face is one I know well, and belongs to a woman who has been my friend for almost 15 years. She is a mother, a wife and a lawyer. Before Katrina she had no real ties to New Orleans. After Katrina, she committed her life’s work to representing the underrepresented and in doing so she met her husband, adopted the Crescent City as her home and married there under the lights of the French Quarter. I was there to see her and her fair city three years after the hurricane. I visited Lakefront, a community flooded by the breached levees. I took photographs of water lines above overpasses and houses that probably still haven’t been rebuilt. My friend had her daughter in Louisiana and, with her family, lives near a military base there.
I saw a face sitting next to me in a taxi last week, and this face told a story I’d never heard. As he drove me up Canal Street, from the French Quarter and around to Jackson Square, I listened to his Louisiana accent and saw the lines on his face. I never learned his name, but this man – in his late 60s – was born and raised in New Orleans. He remembered Hurricane Betsy and so he evacuated the day before the storm, per the orders given by the city and state. He left with his family and returned not long after Katrina, coming home only to a little wind damage, but luckily no flood waters. He couldn’t understand why so many people stayed, and further, he couldn’t fathom the “lack of self control” his fellow New Orleans residents exhibited in the days after. This man was ashamed of the fighting, the looting, the reaction of his people, but he never said a word about the action – or lack thereof – of the government. He was proud to be back in his city driving tourists around to see the sights that are still standing, that seemed never to be touched.
When I was in New Orleans last week, I watched the local news in the morning and again at night. There were stories after stories after stories featured on each channel about rebuilding. There were families with new Habitat homes. There were children preparing for a new school year in new schools. There were local politicians cutting ribbons on new businesses in different neighborhoods. There were very few pictures of flood waters, and even fewer pictures of the Superdome and the Convention Center.
My friends and I did the usual touristy stuff. We walked to the French Quarter and ate dinner. We rode the street car up St. Charles, saw Loyola and Tulane, and pointed out The Real World house. We lost money at Harrah’s, took pictures of the Mississippi from the Riverwalk and ate beignets under the shade at Café du Monde. We bought pralines and jewelry, took pictures of the mimes and the jazz musicians and brought home t-shirts to children. I met a friend for drinks in an up-and-coming section of town, and marveled at her historic Garden District home. All of us spent money. We met natives and transplants, asking them questions along the way. Some of them were tired of the questions – the same ones – about Katrina and whether or not they stayed. Had their houses suffered damage? Did they live in the Ninth Ward? Did they know anyone who did? Or who had died? Some of them wanted to talk, and some of them just wanted to show off their town.
I have watched the documentaries, listened to the stories, seen my dear friend fight for the rights of the underprivileged and I am still shocked that a natural disaster could tear our country apart and expose it for what it really is. Five years later, 25 years later, doesn’t matter. I live in a small Southern town, I know what goes on here. You know it, too. As a really ignorant woman once said to me, there are the haves and the have-nots. She was a have, she told me. But she did pity those poor other people. Most of them.
It’s hard to say why, in the last ten years, these horrific things keep happening to us. Yes, to us, I believe. In the South, there are evangelical Christians who are recruiting young people in droves to their mega-churches with coffee shops and rock bands. It gives them comfort to know that their religion and faith in their God will carry them through whatever else is coming. Some people my age, myself included, find themselves past the quarter-life crisis and in the middle of their anxiety-fueled 30s, ever upwardly mobile. We compare ourselves to each other, watching as our neighbors’ houses get bigger, our friends’ cars get more expensive and our own credit card debt gets higher.
Somewhere along the way we have continued to miss the big picture. It isn’t necessarily about the power of religious belief. It definitely isn’t about our own small corners of our own small worlds. It’s about the faces we see every day, that could tell us a story if we listened. How very many of us have forgotten about Katrina victims until we were reminded on television? How many of us take our girls’ weekends to the beach and whine to our friends that our kitchen counters need replacing and that our waists just aren’t as small as they used to be?
I do it and you do it. We forget to look at the lines on the faces of our fellow human beings and think about how those lines got there. From laughing? From crying? From worrying? From mourning? From rejoicing? We don’t stop to think that there is a bigger world outside of our own, and that bigger world has a much bigger story to tell.
My own story is small and forgettable, because I am only one of millions who have traveled to Louisiana in the last five years. I am one of an unfortunately large group of people who didn’t travel to New Orleans to help. I went on business, spent some money and patted myself on the shoulder for shopping because I thought it would help the economy. Perhaps it did. But probably it didn’t, because probably my money would have been much better spent buying a hammer and some nails and helping someone rebuild…something. Anything.
No one likes to be preached to, least of all me. But I found myself in the middle of one of the most open wounds in our country, in the middle of the anniversary of its injury, and I couldn’t come home and blog about the wonderful restaurants I tried or the funny stories of the shit that happened while I was there. It’s not funny and it’s not relevant unless we’re talking about HELPING PEOPLE.
I haven’t done that in a while. It’s time I did.
