The old lady wore a deep pink sweater matched with a black pair of Crocs and a shock of hair white as cotton. The wind spilling over the Chartres Street levy from the mighty Mississip had slammed shut her only entrance while she was out for a morning walk, somehow lodging the gate's handle behind an adjacent plank of rotting wooden fence that marked the perimeter of her property. So when I blew by the locked-out old lady on my second run in two days, her most immediate recourse was to holler at my back.
“Hey!” she implored with more grace than distress. “Can you help me out?”
Turned out all I had to do was pry the now-exposed end of her dilapidated fence far enough away from her gate to let its heavy steel door swing free, out onto the sidewalk. Right after our karmic exchange, I re-started the stopwatch I had paused before lending her a hand and went on my way.
This experience, along with other sights and sounds of New Orleans, made my fourth visit home since the storm a special one. For one thing, Thanksgiving was in the air turning leaves from green to orange to brown in time to mark the change awaited in a city fifteen months removed from absorbing the country’s worst natural disaster ever. More importantly, though, on this occasion I found small yet measurable signs of progress pushing through layers of shit and blooming in late autumn sunlight. As if setting an example for the rest of the Big Easy to follow, the residents of the Bywater had rallied in a grassroots effort to piece their neighborhood back together without relying on governmental aid that would never come.
This do-it-yourself attitude permeated what is known as the Upper Ninth Ward, with my neighbors at the helm of recovering what they had lost. I rounded the corner of Chartres and Piety streets, and the smell of fresh paint shanked my nostrils: a middle-aged couple, with the wife on a ladder and the husband helping from below, was adding a sky-blue coat of Sherwin-Williams to window slats beaten up by gale force winds. At times one needs to finish off nature’s demolition of something he held dear before building it back up again, a lesson I learned while passing by an old man in a faded LSU tee who chucked debris from inside his home onto an already impressive heap of bricks, mortar, glass, and wood.
As expected, the Bywater’s younger and more able-bodied denizens did their part to rouse that mythical beast of normalcy from its deep sleep. On a particularly sunny stretch of Royal Street, a pair of tattooed youths rocked out to Soundgarden blaring from their car while they sized up their next project. It sat with a T-square and blueprints on a makeshift work bench that spanned the entire sidewalk. Another young man on Royal closer to where it hits Franklin Ave cleaned the inside of his old Mitsubishi to the tune of Juvenile’s Rich Niggaz and the delight of his neighbors, all proud of the Ca$h Money Boys’ insistence on collaborations that rep New Orleans hard.
But the landscape of the ‘hood continued to betray signs of an old world struggling to adapt to new circumstances. As I reached the remotest part of my run, where I close the circuit on my course at Poland Ave. and start heading back to my place, alley cats eyed me at the threshold of their lairs and didn’t relent until I had disappeared. It’s as if, in the face of such a topsy-turvy environment, they had reverted to the basic instinctual urge to guard the place they considered home. For a trio of black-and-camo-clad migrant workers whom I ran by as they rifled through glass bottles and other junk gathered at the foot of a street corner trash can, home was a distant memory. The last thing I noted before getting back to the pad lay on the side of the road encrusted in prehistoric mud dredged up by Katrina, a discarded portion of fencing that was once the rolling gate section to an automated entrance.
If you're gullible enough to take Wikipedia’s word for it, the outlook for the Bywater doesn't so bleak: “The portion of Bywater on the river side of St. Claude Avenue was one of the few portions of the 9th Ward to escape flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and has made a more rapid recovery than many other parts of the city.” More rapid, as in, not stiff with rigor mortis like the rest of the city's.
To eulogize the portion of the Ninth that took cited flooding the rawest, I recall a run I went on the first time I visited home since the storm.
For starters, my starting point was at the time somewhat foreign to me. My brother and dad had signed the lease of ownership to a pleasant condo on Royal and Congress streets midway through August 2005, so the ink on the contract had hardly dried when Katrina made landfall on the 29th of that month. It would serve as my base of operations for any visit after the fact, since my mom had sold the Uptown house where I spent my middle school and high school. Over winter break ’05, just a handful of months after the hurricane roared through, I made my first acquaintance with the place and its neighborhood. The water it’s ‘By’ is the river, a location that kept it dry while, dozens of blocks away, storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain burst through the levees of the Industrial Canal and laid waste to the Lower Ninth. The official division between upper and lower is a broad and two-way avenue called Saint Claude.
As I breached this boundary between my new neighborhood and the one most ravaged by the country’s most devastating natural disaster on record, I steeled myself for the unexpected. What I wound up seeing just a dozen blocks past St. Claude, I still have trouble putting in words.
The whole area looked like the blast zone of a bomb mankind will never be capable of creating, a monstrosity that’s one part hell and three parts high water. Indescribable amounts of debris, formerly the stuff of people’s lives, lay strewn about on the sidewalks. Entire houses and cars had been lifted and plopped down haphazardly on each other like so many toys. A thin, filmy scum coated every exposed bit of anything and formed a water line that slashed its way across the facades of houses for blocks and blocks. I traced that line on my run, and stood breathless as I noticed how much higher it rose the nearer I approached where the levees broke. Roofs had been sheared off and found their resting place across the street in the neighbor’s lawn. Add to all this the smell. Not nearly as pronounced as what my friends and family reported in the weeks following the storm, the scent still made me feel sorry for dogs.
I ran through the surreal setting at a steady pace for about thirty minutes, all the while wearing a shirt with the word SECURITY written on its back. Ironically enough, I didn't need any since the neighborhood was America's newest ghost town. The late afternoon sun smiled down on me. At one point, I came across a bunch of young ones helping their grandmamá gut her house in preparation for demolition. I could’ve sworn one of the kids yelled at me from what used to be his porch.
"We ain't gonna hurt ya," he said. "Whatchou runnin' for?"
I'm still trying to figure out the answer to that question.
Fast forward one full year, to winter break ’06. I’m back in the city of my birth, staying at the same place that had me shake hands with a post-Katrina Lower Ninth, and still bent on running all over it. The holidays were in the air, so the hospitality identified with New Orleans year-round had elevated to a special level of fellow feeling. A pleasant greeting of ‘Afternoon,’ I gave to anyone on my route elicited a variety of good-natured and homespun responses, ranging from ‘Yep,’ to ‘Awright, baby,’ to ‘How ya feelin’?,’ to the standard ‘All right.’
In a town that has become the on-again, off-again charity case of the country, charity of the purest variety took hold this winter. On one of my favorite stretches of a run that cuts through the Faubourg Marigny, I passed by a couple on bikes begging for hand-outs—up to four dozen pies—at the employee entrance to the headquarters of Hubig’s Pies. The sugary and jelly-filled treat is a local icon on par with Philly’s Tasty Kakes or New York’s Krispy Kreme, distributed in trademarked wax paper wrappers to delis, public and private school cafeterias, and office spaces all over the Crescent City. The spectrum of Hubig’s loyal customers runs from Juvenile’s Ghetto Children all the way to Le Roux’s New Orleans Ladies, covering everybody in between.
Even more pressing than the holidays and more iconic than a pie, however, was a regional obsession that had everybody shook up with football fever until this year’s NFC Championship game. On my run that Sunday afternoon I lost count of the houses whose front doors were open with their screen doors shut behind them, sharing with the streets a broadcast of the New Orleans Saints’ final regular season game. We were play-off bound, baby! Others chose to worship a different god altogether that day, belting out Gospel hymns behind closed doors guarded by a multi-colored wood version of La Pieta. I swear Mary winked at me as I strode by.
As I hit the corner of Dauphine and Independence, I found history repeating itself: there he was, the same ancient black man wearing a knock-off Yankees ball cap and liming on the porch where I had seen him many times before. Speaking of continuity against all odds, what about that old lady in distress from the opening paragraph? I’m happy to report she’s since had her ratty fence re-done, foregoing a steel door entrance in favor of a sturdy and entirely sealed-off wooden perimeter.
I speak for all of us thriving in the Bywater and surviving in every other ‘hood in the city, when I say Sunday is meant to be spent at home. Our home. Our New Orleans.
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