1.

It is the middle of summer in New Orleans, which means the sensible people—or at least those that have money—are gone, south to Mexican beaches or north to the mountains.  Anywhere but New Orleans, where the heat and humidity mingle with a sense of desperation in the midst of hurricane season two years past what we now refer to simply as “the storm.” 

I’m standing in the master bathroom of a newly renovated house in Holy Cross, the riverside neighborhood of the lower Ninth Ward, which was destroyed in the storm.  I’m standing in the bathroom, because I’ve somehow managed to purchase this house from the preservation group that has been fixing it.   This seems improbable for a number of reasons: there are few inhabitable houses these days, their cost has skyrocketed, and homeowner’s insurance is nearly impossible to secure.  Rentals are equally impossible to find; jobs are around but unstable.  I’m standing in the bathroom wondering why we stay. 

“Did you see this?” I ask the woman who is handling the sale.  Although the house has been gutted, treated for mold, and rebuilt, there is a clearly defined flood line across the rear window at about the height of my neck.  Looking closely, we can see that the line is actually made up of tiny dead snail shells clinging permanently to the glass. 

She is unimpressed. 

“At least I know that my head will be above water,” I say, trying for a response. 

Her face brightens absurdly.  “That’s right!” she says, nodding.  She tells me the story of a woman down the street who survived by holding onto the exhaust hood above her stove.  Otherwise she would have been swept away. 

Outside, from the front porch, one can see the houses for blocks.  All are gutted, abandoned, some have collapsed beyond repair.  Two years have past since the storm, and I will be the first to occupy a house on this street, where a surge of water flooded the houses briefly, but a “Look and Leave” order kept anyone from working on their houses for nine months after the storm. 

2.  

When the dogs and I returned to New Orleans, six weeks after the storm, we didn’t know what to expect.  I had heard alternating stories about the condition of our neighborhood: it was untouched, it was total chaos, the people were running around like madmen, the animals had taken over, it was occupied by the national guard, they had circled the area with military barricades made from gravel and barbed wire.  All of these things turned out to be in one way or another true. 

I had been in touch with Mikey, the landlord, and knew that he had shut the front of my house by screwing sheets of metal to the door and windows.  I bought an electric screwdriver and had it ready in the drivers seat, with the correct bit in place so that we would be able to enter the house quickly.  I’m not good with tools, but I managed to remove the metal plates within minutes, and entered the house to find everything almost as we had left it.

On the TV screen, there was a frozen image a manic comedian.  Each of the houses was marked with a code that represented who had searched it, how many live people they had found, how many dead, how many animals.  Across the street, in a fit of early post-hurricane humor, someone had painted the door with: Two cats, one drag queen.

3. 

Thursday, January 4 2007, we were all sitting in Coffea getting morning coffee when Kappa came in and announced that there'd been another murder in the neighborhood. A woman was killed and her husband injured. I went online and read that their two year old had been found cradled in the injured father's bloody arms. People gathered around the computer in disbelief. 

There aren’t that many people with children in the city these days, so we all kept quiet, thinking on our own, about who we knew that fit the description.  Four days earlier I had been in the same chair, watching Dr. Paul as his son Francis ran around with bells on his shoes.  The bells were Helen’s idea, he said, now that Francis was running around the house on his own.  This way she could always now when he was moving if she was working on something at home. 

Gwen gave me my to go order on a real plate for me to take home, and when I came back with to return the plate an hour later, she was closing the shop. “It was Helen,” she said, barely able to speak.  “Why do we even stay here?  It’s too difficult.  And then this.”

I drove to Sound Cafe, because I knew that they were close with the Hot Eight Brass Band, who lost their drummer the previous Thursday. He, too, was shot and killed in front of his child. Baty, the owner of the cafe, was talking with a few people when I walked in, and I knew that they could only be talking about one thing.

"We need to do something," I said. "But I don't know how."

We decided to march to city hall.  Five thousand people joined.  As we walked down the middle of the business district, white-collar workers gathered in front of their buildings, watching us, until we passed, and a change fell over their faces. A sense of possibilities.  They stepped off the sidewalk and joined in.

4.

“Maybe nothing bad has ever happened to them before,” one of us said.  

I was sitting with Anne and Brad at their kitchen table, in the rear of their house, after the first neighborhood meeting, the month after the storm.  The meeting had been held in the basement of the damaged St. Paul’s church in the Marigny, a neighborhood that had still been considered a dicey artists’ ghetto a decade ago, but now was part of the gentrified “sliver on the river” that had been spared from the flood.  Subsequently, it had been one of the first to have electricity and gas restored.  People from the surrounding areas filled the meeting room, standing on chairs.  They were from neighborhoods that had no running water now, no electricity, no homes. 

We were the lucky ones who got to return.  You could look around the room and see it—these were people who had achieved a certain economic comfort in their lives.  These were people with the means to return.  These were people who could survive a few months without work, or maybe they were born into wealth and didn’t need to work at all. 

“When is our cable going to be restored?”  This became the focal point of the discussion.  People were angry.  They were standing on chairs.  They wanted their television shows and internet access.  They wanted their lives to return immediately to what they had been before.

After slipping out the back, we convened at the kitchen table.  We didn’t care about not being able to shower.  Or the blackouts that continued to roll through the neighborhood, sometimes for 18 hours at a time.  A year earlier I had almost died from an undiagnosed heart condition.  Four years earlier I had lived in New York during 9/11.  Around the same time, Anne’s two sisters, twins, had died within a year of each other.  Brad’s first wife, the mother of his young son, died from  brain cancer. 

We had had bad things happen.  We knew how lucky we were now, just to be home. 

5.

On Port Street, on a rainy Tuesday night, a brass band fills what seems to be half the floor of the Sound Café.  From the outside, one would only hear the brass and would never guess that a third of those playing are between the ages of three and eight.  They sit sandwiched between full-sized, grown up musicians, who are playing loudly enough to cover the kids’ mistakes.  This is a performance, but it is also a clinic for young musicians, one in a series produced by Dinerral Shavers’ young sister, Nakita, who watches from the side of the stage. 

Throughout the neighborhoods, Mexican restaurants are popping up alongside established local cuisine, opened by folks who came to help with the reconstruction and decided to stay. 

This summer we’re all watching an army of toddlers take over the city, one-year old New Orleanians, all of whom were born about nine months following our return. 

On top of the piano at Coffea every morning, there is a framed portrait of Helen Hill, and Dr. Paul, and Francis. 

Somehow, for the first time in my life, I actually live in a house that I own. 

And the damage to the ceiling of St. Paul’s chapel has been repaired, revealing a series of paintings underneath that no one had known about until after the storm. 

Originally published in Neue Rundschau, volume 118, “The True Colors of America”