The color of death is not black. It is grayish brown, and it
is the color of anything touched by the flood that drowned New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In some places, it is a layer
of slippery sludge that proves Lake Pontchartrain once extended
through this city, pouring into thousands of buildings and depositing
its sediment as it drove to the rooftops so many souls desperate
to escape nature's fury. Elsewhere, it has seeped in like poison
dye, painting lifeless every tree and blade of grass. To show
how high the dark waters rose, it slashed a flat line on every
wall.
The making of this sprawling scene, described often as resembling
a war zone, astounded a nation that watched for days the televised
pictures of hell spilling forth as gale winds fractured our levees
and ushered a storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico. For those,
like myself, who knew the Crescent City before the great flood,
watching so many neighborhoods -- Mid-City, Gentilly, Lakeview,
New Orleans East, the Ninth Ward and parts of Uptown -- slip below
the surface yielded a numb and helpless feeling as we witnessed
firsthand a weather event long forecast in bayou lore.
But even before the water settled where it would wait for weeks
to be pumped out, another plot began to unravel. It entwined every
local person who lived inside this battered metropolis in the
weeks and months after the hurricane. For us, the land of putrid
water and gray muck was not a disaster zone. It was our hometown:
beaten, drowned, begging for help but also poised for resurrection.
Here, few asked whether rebuilding this city below the level of
the sea would appear foolish or inefficient. We wanted our homes
back, our lives back, so we went to work -- writing newspaper
stories, in my case -- to accomplish in daily measure the success
that would revitalize the City that Care Forgot.
To be fair, New Orleans is not universally adored. It is poorer
than most other places in America, and through even the toniest
neighborhoods can waft an outhouse stench. Its murder rate spikes
every year. Its politics are hardly textbook, with indictments
not rare among the elected bunch. Families of even modest means
write hefty checks to private schools to avoid the dismal public
system, which has failed legions of graduates. Its streets are
crumbling, its economy lagging and its long-range plan somewhat
in flux, even before Katrina.
But for those who love the underdog, New Orleans is a city of
inspiring history, engaging culture and boundless opportunity,
a place where people celebrate with brass bands at such traumatic
times as the approach of a hurricane or the death of a friend.
My connection to this place was born on the first floor of Alumni
Hall on a frozen Saturday night in January 1997. Patrick Dupré
Quigley, also a freshman that year, had invited to his dorm room
some new friends, and when we arrived, we found him pulling from
an overnight-delivery box a braided King Cake and a fistful of
sparkly, plastic necklaces of purple, green and gold, the colors
of Carnival.
Such a package from home might be expected to spawn a party,
or at least an offer of dessert to his guests, but Patrick just
stared at the cache. This would be the first Mardi Gras of all
his 19 years, he told us, that he would not be at home. The reality
had not struck until that moment, he said as he fingered a silver-dollar-sized
doubloon embossed with the crest of one of dozens of krewes that
parade through New Orleans' streets in the weeks preceding Ash
Wednesday.
We visitors glanced at each other, unsure what to make of such
impulsive depression. Then Patrick spoke up: "You don't understand."
Carnival season was not neon glitz on Bourbon Street and amateur
videos of impetuous women, he said. Sure, that all existed, but
it only defined a fraction of Carnival. To Patrick, the season
that begins with Epiphany was about friends and family, about
endless afternoons of parades and crawfish pie. It required packing
a day's worth of po-boy sandwiches and beer, spreading a blanket
on the grassy neutral ground that divides Saint Charles Avenue
and waiting for the Jesuit High School marching band to pass so
you could dance in the street.
We listened, most of us admitting later that we thought our
friend had spun a tale when he insisted we could not understand
Mardi Gras, could not really appreciate New Orleans, unless we
experienced it ourselves. "So let's go," somebody said.
Some weeks and a thousand driving miles later, we saw it, rising
from the swamp not unlike the Emerald City: New Orleans, with
its Mardi Gras fête, straight ahead on Interstate 10. It
wasn't a few hours before the six of us huddled on Canal Street
in middle-income Mid-City, each sipping from a screw-cap bottle
of wine and craning our necks to see if Endymion, one of Carnival's
extravagant super-parades, had turned off Carrollton Avenue on
its way downtown.
Night already upon us, we were surrounded by people of every
race and age, with children aloft on their parents' shoulders
casting grins and waving in hopes of catching a teddy bear or
strand of beads from the thousands of masked riders on double-decker
floats. We were enveloped by music and twinkling lights that cast
shadows off century-old homes. We were honoring pagan gods in
a thoroughly Catholic city, rejoicing the days before Lent with
howls that could raise the dead. Surely we had not seen this before.
Maybe now we understood.
By the time I moved to New Orleans in 2002 to take a job as
a reporter at The Times-Picayune, the city's 169-year-old
daily newspaper, I had visited many times more. With each arrival,
I felt somehow more at home in this city where even residents
of 40 years are deemed outsiders if they were born in another
place. I also had learned about the worst-case scenario, now so
familiar across the country: New Orleans sits in a topographical
bowl. Fill it up with rainwater or, say, Lake Pontchartrain, and
the liquid would have nowhere to go. It would pool and have to
be pumped out, which would take weeks. In the meantime, one should
store an ax and a small boat in the attic as a contingency, should
the flood reach the second floor.
My native Chicago mind could not grasp that prophecy. Even so,
I leased a third-story apartment Uptown, figuring the elevation
would protect me from ever having to jolt from sleep in terror
of water spilling through the windows. By virtue of topography
and goddamn luck, that kind of flood did not happen to me during
Katrina. But it happened to so many others, including Kelli Markelwitz
Leger '00, another classmate of mine.
Leger told me some weeks after the hurricane that she had heard
the same story about the boat in the attic when she first arrived
in New Orleans to start law school at Tulane University. She had
been raised in New Jersey, and her vision of flood was meager:
"Things get wet," she said. But returning September 12 to the
home she shared with her new husband, Walt, in suburban Arabi,
Leger found the house, already raised 2-1/2 feet off the ground,
had bathed in 6 feet of lake water that spilled from the Industrial
Canal breach, through the infamous Lower Ninth Ward and into Saint
Bernard Parish, where an estimated 40,000 buildings flooded --
every structure in the county.
Displayed on her exterior walls were four separate spray-painted
codes. Each giant X had a zero in the bottom quadrant, meaning
no bodies had been found inside, and in the left quadrant were
the initials of the military or police units that had visited
to check for survivors. Meandering down her street less than two
weeks after Katrina, Leger noticed some houses with "1" or "2"
inked below the X. "You drive though your neighborhood and there's
a mark on the house, and you remember that a little old couple
lived there, and it's awful," she said. "You think: Why didn't
someone pick them up?"
That magnitude of loss cannot be undermined, any more than memories
can be erased from those who witnessed Katrina's earliest aftermath.
The first body I saw was a white man. He was bloated, wearing
blue jeans, set face down on an Uptown sidewalk, still waiting
to be recovered 10 days after the hurricane.
"There was no point of reference for the devastation," said
Roderick West '90, who ventured through New Orleans by boat and
helicopter to survey the property damage of his company, electricity
giant Entergy Corp., long before the lake stopped pouring through
four catastrophic levee breaches. "There is nothing that prepares
you to accept the level of devastation," he said. "I saw the bodies
of people who didn't leave for the storm. I saw the bodies of
people who were trying to get out and couldn't make it. I saw
actual live bodies still stuck on the roofs after three days."
Before the dead were collected and survivors rescued, West led
efforts to reconstruct the power grid for the city's half-million
residents. It ultimately required draining substations and generating
plants that festered in floodwaters for weeks. The process was
handled by a workforce of which 70 percent had been made homeless
by Katrina, West said. It was their homes that poked through flood
waters, some barely visible but for chimneys. "I knew as I flew
over the city that first Tuesday that for every rooftop, there
was a family that was devastated, whose lives would never be the
same," he said.
For West, re-lighting New Orleans represented no less than re-creating
the city's capacity to house residents who scattered as Katrina
churned toward shore. "The gravity of responsibility is not lost
on me because I am dealing with the human, the financial, the
legal, physical, the emotional and spiritual impact of the devastation
of this city. We're not just rebuilding an electrical distribution
system," West said in late October, with the work still far from
complete. "We're rebuilding a city."
Part of my own job after Katrina was to tell the stories of
exhausted, fearless people who populated New Orleans, however
sparsely, in the earliest days of recovery. A few weeks after
the storm but before Hurricane Rita forced a massive storm surge
September 24 through southwest Louisiana, my assignment comprised
driving around litter-strewn streets and hunting for stories.
In a single afternoon, I met a folk artist, a furniture salesman
and three neighbors who worked in tandem to tear doused Sheetrock
from each other's homes. Each person had ridden out Katrina in
the disaster zone, and I asked them what it was like that night
of August 29, after the storm subsided. Each offered nearly identical,
stunning replies: "You should have seen the stars," they said.
It turns out that the night Katrina blew away, when the lake
levees lay in various states of collapse but the sun had not yet
risen on the worst images of ruined New Orleans, the midnight
sky stretched out with a brilliance seldom viewed in a modern
city. Every electrical lamp had broken. The downtown skyline hid
in gloom. The mighty Mississippi melted into its blacked-out banks.
But above New Orleans, these residents told me, a million stars
illuminated the sky, becoming a million beacons for so many survivors
who had no place to go but the roof.
A few weeks later, a husband and wife shared with me their harrowing
tale of trying to keep alive their 25-year-old daughter, Lauren
Read '03, who before Katrina had been struggling to recover from
liver failure and related neurological damage at New Orleans'
Touro Infirmary. For three days after the storm, Hope Read packed
Lauren's body with ice to simulate air conditioning after the
electricity blinked off. When the supply ran out, Hope improvised
with holy water. Then she tried to work out how she would tell
her husband, Mike '65, that she had failed to save their child.
With Lauren's heart rate sustained at 171 beats per minute and
her body heated to 104 degrees, Hope Read used a tiny flashlight
to illuminate a pitch-black stairwell. Two people carried Lauren
in a wheelchair from the seventh floor to the third floor, where
a helicopter waited to evacuate, she said. The ordeal probably
set back Lauren's recovery one week, Mike Read said. But she later
showed exceptional improvement at her hospital of refuge in Lafayette,
Louisiana. "For Lauren, Katrina turned out to be a good move,"
Hope Read said. "God works in a lot of different ways."
How it is that the human mind transforms tragedy into beauty,
suffering into hope, I cannot understand. It had not been yet
a month since the nation's worst natural disaster cursed their
hometown that residents of New Orleans and its suburbs recounted
not the horror of Katrina, with its winds of 155 miles per hour
and its driving rain, but faith and optimism that reigned in its
wake. They talked about how much greater the rebuilt New Orleans
would be, imagining the bright future even as they piled their
most prized possessions in soggy heaps at the curb.
In early October, just about 40 days after Katrina slashed across
Louisiana, a band of costumed revelers swaggered up Decatur Street,
the French Quarter's river road that passes in front of Jackson
Square and the towering Saint Louis Cathedral. The parade, complete
with brass band, included mostly 20- and 30-something professionals
whose jobs as oil rig engineers, banking executives and journalists
allowed them to be in the city before the evacuation order lifted.
We toasted with beer cans and bottles of champagne. We flung beads
to neighbors drawn out of cottages and restaurants by the party.
Donning wigs and gowns and angel wings, we indeed danced through
the streets, pulling behind us a handmade float with a paper machê
casket that held our ghost of Katrina. Not more than a mile away
lay the dusty brown remnants of whole neighborhoods ruined by
the flood that engulfed our city. But that was work for daytime.
This moment was about the tradition of so many jazz funerals that
celebrate a spirit rising out of the past. It was about the myriad
colors glowing from windows as darkness settled on New Orleans'
oldest neighborhood, about the melodies of people who had returned
to rebuild. Far above us surely blazed countless stars. But on
this night, they were invisible because of the street lamps' glow.
Michelle Krupa was the editor of The Observer in
1999-2000. She may be reached at krup78@hotmail.com.
(January 2006)
