Starting in August of 2005 people around the world began to follow the horrific story of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina and what it did to the American Gulf Coast. More than one million people were forced to evacuate their homes, not knowing if they would ever be able return. In terms of the number of permanently displaced people, the only event that surpasses Katrina is the American Civil War.

New Orleans in particular received tremendous media attention, in part because of the unprecedented flooding that took place when the earthen levees collapsed, and partly because of the unique place this city holds in the minds and hearts of anyone who has ever visited. Now there are web blogs and articles mourning what was lost and vowing that New Orleans will rise again, “good as it ever was”.

As is so often the case when we choose to remember, rose colored glasses have slipped over our collective eyes as we look at the New Orleans that was.

A Brave New World

I arrived in New Orleans in late August of 1982, a 21 year old striking out on my own in what was, for me, a brave new world. Midwestern Winter was the fuel that propelled me South, convinced I was meant to live in the tropics. And it seemed that New Orleans, with its blanket of humidity and underlying rot, was as right for me as I was for it.

Youth!

It didn’t take long for me to discover I was, to New Orleanians, the equivalent of a two headed curiosity with suspect northern ways and a funny accent. No matter, I had lived in several countries and spoke more than one language. I had been lumped in with this or that population as the locals eyed me through the lens of their own experience. I would adjust.

Then I started working. Charity Hospital, a notable casualty of Katrina, was an ugly behemoth located downtown close to where Tulane Avenue crossed Loyola. This is the hospital of only resort for the city’s vast population of indigent uninsured. I should say it was the hospital of last resort. Charity is gone now and other hospitals never did accept the uninsured.

A hardworking Midwestern kid, I knew to take any job I could get. So I started in Housekeeping, processing Charity’s ancient floors with 20 inch buffers on a crew of the city’s finest. I don’t say this in a disparaging way. These men, some of them illiterate, were fine people. But they showed me a dark resignation that said they would never do anything besides what they were at that moment.  I, on the other hand, knew I would move up and on, never doubting it for a moment.

There was tension. I was so different, so sure my present circumstances were not a blueprint for the rest of my life, that some of them couldn’t stand it. My naiveté and confusion fermented to resentment and only served to widen the gulf between us.   

Third World Living

What does this say about the New Orleans that was? Well, I stayed for eight years, worked a number of jobs, both blue and white collar. My new wife and I explored the city together (on foot, since we couldn’t afford a car) and were mesmerized by the beauty around us.

Like visitors and residents alike, we loved riding the streetcars on St Charles Avenue, ate oyster poboys and Muffaletas in the French Quarter and strolled the lakefront. New Orleans became ours. So there was no escaping the truth about this city resting in a bowl below sea level on the edge of a continent.

New Orleans is a Third World city, always has been. Forget the news footage of happy Mardi Gras revelers reeling drunk through the streets and young women exposing their breasts for necklaces of plastic beads. Those people flew in from Ohio, Connecticut or L.A. and they left without ever knowing the grinding poverty that defined the lives of the majority here.    

Just a few blocks off St. Charles or even Canal street people lived in substandard houses that should have been demolished years before Katrina. A 40% illiteracy rate was “just how it is”.

I learned that in New Orleans “everybody has a hustle”. Everyone does something on the side, legal or illegal, to make ends meet. This is because jobs pay so little here I often wondered how we would make it.

That housekeeping job at Charity? I was paid every Friday. And no matter how we clipped coupons or hunted for “specials”, our groceries lasted 6 days. On the seventh we fasted, like it or not.

As I learned the ropes it became increasingly obvious to me that this is an American city only in a geographical sense.  New Orleans is perfect practice for living anywhere in the Caribbean. The people are the same, the food, the climate. And the corruption.

Connections

You would seldom see a For Rent sign anywhere in the New Orleans that was. Property owners prefer a personal reference. As we formed a circle of friends things opened up to my wife and I: we rented apartments, bought cars, even got jobs, all on the recommendation of friends.  

Racism and discrimination inevitably come up when you talk about jobs and housing in the American Deep South.  In the New Orleans that was racism also had a unique edge to it. There are those who say racism can only be exercised by those who have the power to enforce it economically, usually meaning Whites. I beg to differ. After living there a number of years I’d say the Black population is about even with the White in terms of racism.  

Monsieur Le Concierge

September marks the beginning of tourist season, that time when the volcanic heat of summer has given way to the sultriness of fall in Louisiana.  All the big hotels are hiring and hopeful applicants literally line up by the hundreds.

I applied for the same position (Concierge) at two different hotels. The application process is the same all over; complete the paperwork and wait for them to call.

When the manager from the Weston at Canal Place called I was delighted and so was he. We talked for 15 minutes and he remarked on my professional phone manner and how my languages would be a welcome resource for their international guests. When I showed up for the interview Mr. Manager was clearly NOT delighted and in an instant I was a candidate, not for Concierge, but for Bellman.

At Le Meridien my experience was a bit different. I was hired. As Concierge, but only after four interviews in which the managers stared at me as if trying to reconcile my appearance with the data on my CV. Then, to a person, they finally asked “Are you actually Hispanic, then?”

I worked there for four years and saw first hand the seedy underbelly of the city’s rich and powerful. I also interacted with people in non-customer contact positions who wondered out loud how I landed the Concierge position.

Yearly Floods, Yearly Hurricanes, Daily Anguish

I am not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, so it took a while for the violence, the lasciviousness and the post-holocaust mentality to erode my enthusiasm for the New Orleans that was. There were many floods over the years, some provoked by hurricanes (we evacuated three times), some by the summer monsoons that were common. Remember New Orleans is in a bowl and below sea level. Every drop of rain that falls on the city has to be pumped out. Sometimes the pumping stations are just overwhelmed by the volume of water.  

We made friends who loved us, but wondered to our faces at how different we were, not being “home grown” and all. The majority of the people in the New Orleans that was were people of color. By that I mean a mélange of African American, Hispanic, Brazilian, Asian and many who simply defied categorization.  

Many, but not all, were poor, some desperately so. This poverty was mental as well as economic and it was multi generational, passed down like some loathsome genetic desease.  When I ‘moved up’ at Charity Hospital I went from Housekeeping to Admissions. There I saw little Black kids from the housing projects terrified to let white physicians touch them, interviewed young Cajun wives from the Atchafalaya Basin prematurely aged from 17 consecutive births and listened to my manager debate with a colleague whether the stream of 11 year olds coming in to give birth should be housed in Pediatrics or on the Neonatal ward. 

That beautiful iron scrollwork you see on houses throughout the city? Protection against burglary. Crime was out of control in the New Orleans that was.  At one time an 8 P.M. curfew, the strictest in the country, was imposed on all minors.

This is not to say people didn’t live calm and productive lives here. They did. And it is a testament to their resilience and insistence on living that they did. People loved their families, mourned their dead, and worked underpaid jobs to sustain their homes. We came to love many people in the New Orleans that was. And they loved us, looked out for us, even fed us when they learned of our weekly fasts.

Where is Luisa?

Our families being who they are, my wife and I were raised to “suck it up” and never, ever ask for a handout. So it was with great surprise, even shock that we returned from one of our exploratory walks to find a rental truck full of furniture parked in front of our apartment. A friend who stopped by one day and wondered why we had not a stick of furniture didn’t buy Anita’s joke that it was “out being cleaned” and did something about it. One of the Cuban Social Clubs donated the whole lot to us!

Now we wonder about that family and many others. Where are the Ramos’, the Barrios’, and the Martinez’? What has happened to Zoila Inestroza, Minia Tobar and Luisa Cruz?   

We spend too much time looking at satellite pictures of the devastation in the city, our city. We try not to become addicted to websites set up to locate the missing.

As my love/hate relationship with the city developed there were many questions that became unavoidable. What future for a city whose port generates $2 billion in earnings and another $231 million in tax revenue annually, yet whose citizens have the standard of living of a country in the Developing World?     

What hope for a population that continued to embrace a caste system reminiscent of India, which choked off intellectual and social development?

The Diaspora

And now there is the diaspora. New Orleanians have been scattered to almost every state in the union, including Alaska. But who was evacuated? The well-to-do and those gainfully employed got out. And the working poor?

That’s who we saw at the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center when the media descended on the city.  When Oprah Winfrey cried on camera about how “this should not have happened” and Geraldo Rivera held a baby in his arms and shed crocodile tears on queue, these were the people being exploited. 

These folks served at Broussard’s, tap danced in Jackson Square and hauled expensive luggage out of limousines. They spun the roulette wheels at Harrah’s and drove the street cars through the Garden District. And now they are gone.   

They have taken something at once unique and terrible with them. Their Creole culture, lust for living and crippling ignorance has gone with them. And anger. Other cities are now dealing with the anger that has come to set up house.  

Westbury High School in Houston has experienced riots on an unprecedented scale, the enemy combatants clearly divided between kids form New Orleans and Houston students.

The Principal of the school remarked in an interview on National Public Radio “In all my years in the school system, I have never dealt with kids who have no fear. Literally no fear.”

These are angry young people from families that have been angry for generations. What do they have to fear? The New Orleans that was served as incubator for the rage that comes from hopelessness, from seeing your life take on the shape others have designed for it. Education was never important in the New Orleans that was. Now these students have to compete in school systems far superior to the 48^th ranked (out of 50) New Orleans School system.  

Though many mourn the loss of their homes, their city, some will have a different view. Some will start to see this as a new beginning, a chance that would never have been in the New Orleans that was. The very youngest still have a chance, more so now that they have been relocated. Once the shock wears off some of them will see it can be for them a brave new world. Maybe they will look around them with youthful eyes ready for anything the way I did at that steaming tropical city of so long ago. I wish that for them all.

Know you all that I miss the dilapidated elegance and lavender sunsets. Part of me still lives there, but how could it be otherwise? My years there marked me forever, changed who I am and explain the peculiar ache I won’t deny when I think about The New Orleans that Was.