East of Tragedy

      When Beatrice, pronounced bee-AH-tris, returned to New Orleans for the first time this past December there was only a bare frame.  "Just to see walls up, just to see it’s coming back. You know?" Beatrice confided and held her hands to her face, trying to stifle tears. "They did a beautiful job," Beatrice said, continuing to walk around, imagining where furnishings will go.  My sink, my kitchen, dining table…"It’ll come alive right here," she says softly, mostly to herself. She was articulating a daydream, making it manifest.

      The garage is being converted into a temporary room–making it the largest in the house–for friends to stay while visiting or fixing up their homes. The garage will then serve as Beatrice’s business, to replace the beauty shop she owned on Felicity Street uptown.  Though she misses her regular customers, Beatrice eased into a stylist position at SmartStyle, a hair salon inside a Wal-Mart in Marrero.

      The sight was not new for Milton, who dressed simply in blue jeans and a t-shirt after church on this Easter Sunday.  He continues to visit the young and eager Mennonite volunteers from across the country during his lunch breaks, bringing snacks or lunch as a gesture of appreciation.  Milton, whose tall and solid frame might be imposing if he weren’t so relaxed and welcoming, takes me on a tour between the bleach-white walls, specifying the dining room and bedroom.  Then, in the living room he stopped. "The water level’s up here, where it settled." Milton held his hand six feet in the air.   Along neighbors’ houses, the thickest dingy tan water line is four feet high, showing where the water eventually stagnated for three weeks in this part of New Orleans East. The line remains the simplest indication of which families have not returned.

      From the small front lawn, Milton shows how neighbors in the Kingsfield Subdevelopment off of Bullard Avenue are in various states of rebuilding: a cop’s house on one side, with a trailer in front, should be ready in a month while another family is living out of their renovated house and still others haven’t been seen since the evacuation. Looking over the houses, it’s as if he’s imagining, against his will, the floodwaters rising a second time. "The water totaled everything here."  After a moment with birds chirping nearby, Milton adds frankly in his characteristic low tone: "Just trying to keep the lawn cut." 

Beatrice, now seated in a chair dusty from construction, tells me knew people who died in the storm, including her eighty-one-year-old uncle who couldn’t survive the stress of an evacuation to Texas.  Even then, with her voice trembling, she is grateful because other families met more devastating fates. "I will say that we have not suffered, because God has not allowed us to suffer," she said, the intimacy of her gaze revealing the strength of her faith. 

 As if on cue to lighten the mood, Brian, a long-time friend, wanders up to the front door, yelling in "Bibi!" -Beatrice’s nickname.  As soon as Brian enters the dining room, she wants an update.

      "Where you working for now?" she asks.

      "On these trailers" Brian states.

      "Workin’ on the trailers?" Beatrice checks.

      "Hmmhmm."

 "Get outta here," she sasses him, then after a pause, "come check this gas thing out on my stove." Everyone laughs at how quick she turns this new fact to her benefit. "It didn’t light right. You gotta come check it out."

      "Oooh lord!" Brian responds, tilting his head in disbelief toward the ceiling.

      "I got food over there though." Beatrice, an avid cook, promises a feast of seafood and soul food.

       Brian laughs, his round belly likely a past recipient of such offers.  His tone gone from resistant to jolly, he blurts out, "What time you gonna be home!"

      "Brian, you haven’t changed,"  Beatrice said, smiling, as Milton and Brian go off to talk. 

      Beatrice turns to me, eyes lit up. "This would make you wanna come home. When you were in Georgia, you didn’t get that.  When you saw someone from New Orleans, you’d be hootin’ and hollerin’ and people be looking like ‘You act like this all the time?!’" Beatrice exclaimed, imitating the squinty-eyed and confused looks that met so many displaced New Orleanians.  

New Orleans East is, arguably, the most susceptible area to flooding in the city, with its low geography averaging six feet below sea level, surrounded by canals and bayous lying precariously between Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain.  Contrary to speculation, however, one quarter of New Orleans East residents had under one foot or no standing water, largely due to a natural ridge along Chef Menteur Highway and a man-made levee on Lake Pontchartrain.  Since the wealthier, mostly white population historically built and bought property in higher-level neighborhoods along the Mississippi River, New Orleans East is predominantly a community of color, from African American to a considerable Vietnamese and South Asian population, living in modest-sized houses and apartment complexes.

      We drove through the Haynes’ enclosed neighborhood full of single-story houses but fewer trailers, the yard fences mangled and the settled water line apparent on unkempt houses.  Beatrice pointed out a brick and redwood house where an elderly woman drowned. "It says zero but they found her body later," Beatrice uttered, correcting the spray painted marks of first responders.

      As Milton turned onto a parallel street to the Haynes’ rather deserted block, many cars and FEMA trailers came into view. Four kids threw a football in the street as families, dressed nicely for Easter Dinner, congregated in their front yards.  Beatrice yelled out "Hi, Happy Easter!" from the car window and smiling people waved back. 

      A shopping center off of Interstate 10, which runs through the middle of New Orleans East, lie in shambles.  Concrete and steel piles dot an otherwise empty parking lot. "They tore it all down. they’re gonna re-do the whole thing," explained Beatrice, adding that there is no major grocery anymore, only convenience stores.  Pressing on, we pass St. Stephens Housing Development.  It is boarded up, fenced off.  Beatrice asked Milton, "What are they doing with it, baby?"  "Nothin’," he muttered.

      After a disaster as widespread as this, even the smallest signs of recapturing the old neighborhood bring joy. "When I first saw this gas station though, and red lights out here," Beatrice recalls energetically, her voice rising in pitch and volume, "I must have screamed and hollered like I was at a football game…And my sister [on the phone], she’s like ‘Oh my god, calm down,’ and I was like ‘We’ve got a gas station open on Bullard! YES! YES! YES! And a red light! AHH!’" 
 

Driving toward the ninth ward on Hayne Boulevard, Milton singled out the Mennonite Disaster Relief headquarters, a large two-story tan building on ten-foot pillars allowing vans and trucks to park underneath.  This, he said, is where the volunteers putting up the drywall coordinate their efforts and sleep at night.

      Past the floodgate, a solid structure of rusted metal and concrete not closed as Hurricane Katrina approached, is the Industrial Canal, marking the boundary of New Orleans East and the beginning of the ninth ward. Here on Jourdan Road, among the shipping interests of the city and the nation, is where Milton works.  He is a pile driver for the Port of New Orleans, using a blue metal crane to lodge 80- and 115-foot wood pilings in the Mississippi River or the Navy Yard for docks.  Near the tin-roofed Morrison Yard headquarters on Jourdan, eighteen wheelers,  a trailer full of repair equipment and all the piling were lifted and moved by the floodwater.  The trailer still remains flipped and the fence showed the signs of destruction, frayed and curled down away from the canal.

      Milton returned to New Orleans on October 3, called back to work. He lived with his mother on the West Bank where no flooding occurred.  She was the couple’s only relative that did not receive house damage. Beatrice’s family, located in the Carrolton neighborhood, suffered devastating losses.  "Everybody lost everything," she told me. 

      From the West Bank, Milton drove forty-five minutes each day to New Orleans East, gutting out and placing the couple’s moldy belongings on the street. Ironically, the Haynes’ were preparing to renovate the house and had purchased supplies the week before Katrina hit.  Fifteen years of memories and possessions were cast aside. "I don’t think I could have gone through it," Beatrice said. "My husband’s really the strong hand. He holds his emotions in, but I know it’s there." Beatrice let on as Milton blushed slightly, murmuring "ah, alright" and let out a brief chuckle to ease the embarrassment.

      The Haynes’ experience with federal and state programs designed to assist flood survivors remains mixed.  They received a FEMA trailer and continue to live in a park on the West Bank as they fix their house. "If we didn’t have the trailer, we didn’t have anything," Beatrice said, grateful.  They favored the trailer park over setting up next to the house mostly for safety, she says, but also because it would depress her to see, on a daily basis, the destruction of the neighborhood.

      Besides the FEMA trailer, the Haynes’ received four months of housing assistance money from FEMA to help assuage the costs of renting an apartment (an additional nine hundred dollars per month) while paying a mortgage in New Orleans.  Beatrice signed a one-year lease on an apartment in Georgia, leaning on her nearby sister for support until she could return to New Orleans and her husband on December 26, 2006.

      However, it was and has been a financial struggle for the Haynes’ despite the state and federal agency efforts to assist.  Fortunately, Milton quickly returned to work and provided an income to support the couple when FEMA’s rental assistance ended.  Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco’s Road Home Program has been so deliberate in providing monetary support for homeowners that after a year and a half a mere twenty thousand (and that’s a generous estimate) of 120,000 applicants have received awards. Standing in his garage put together by the generosity of volunteers, Milton could only shrug, saying of the couple’s pending Road Home application, "you just wait."  

Binky, the cocker spaniel-dachshund mix whose fifteen years marks the length of the Haynes’ marriage, was shooed out to the backyard on Saturday August 28, 2005 before the winds had picked up.  "She looked in the sky and sniffed and she turned her back and came in the house. And it was not even raining," Beatrice recalled.  "I said ‘No, you’ve got to go out.’ And she wouldn’t go out. That was a sign."

      Beatrice then started listening to the warnings on the radio and finally persuaded Milton to leave. "I had to give him some words," she asserted, acknowledging it was a heated argument.  "It got some sense in his head."  As Milton reasoned, perhaps stubbornly, "They say a storm’s coming. Then if they don’t come, you come back home. Tired of that coming and going, coming and going."  But he thanks God that his wife persisted and forced him to leave and now emphatically adds that next time "I’m going." He paused.  "There’ll be no hesitation.  I’m not hanging around."

      The Haynes’ left for downtown New Orleans that Saturday and stayed on the fifth floor of the LaPavillon Hotel where Beatrice’s girlfriend worked.  They waited there and could see on Sunday, as category three winds swept through, that the Hyatt’s windows were blown out and bricks were flying around them.  As the LaPavillon closed down on Monday morning and put people out on the street, a person from the hotel told the couple not to go to the Superdome and that there was only one way out of the city, by interstate. Heeding the advice, the Haynes’ loaded up the car, now full with the dog, Beatrice’s girlfriend and her son, and the couple themselves.  Beatrice can still see the people they left behind at the hotel as the car pulled out, wishing she could bring them along as well.  The car made it out just as water was flowing down Canal Street. An hour or two later and they would not have been able to ascend the I-10 ramp.

      Beatrice couldn’t get in touch with her brother who she thought was at City Hall.  Her stomach in knots, now in Westwego on the West Bank, her girlfriend told her to pray, and as she wept and prayed, and dried her eyes, "My husband said ‘Babe, turned around. Look who’s here.’  And there was my brother. He said something just led him to come this way. He didn’t know [what]."

      Praying, the stressed, but grateful group with forty dollars in cash headed to Vicksburg where a gas station attendant pumped continuously, at a much discounted price, to the throngs of evacuees in cars.  "They were putting gas in cold drink bottles, anything. The guy didn’t turn the pump off, he just continued to go from container to container," Beatrice recalls.  After the six cars in front of them were serviced, it was the Haynes’ turn.  As the total neared forty dollars, filling the car up completely, the pump clicked.  There was no more gas, the Haynes’ were fortunate enough to get the last.

      Safely out of harm’s way, they continued on to Atlanta to stay with Beatrice’s sister and then sat down to see, stunned, what was happening to New Orleans. "When we got to Georgia and saw on the TV what was happening," Beatrice said, "we couldn’t believe it." 

With rhythm and blues radio playing in the background–Marvin Gaye singin’ Brother, Brother, Brother, there are too many of you dying…–we continue driving into the lower 9^th ward alongside the levee.  The levee breach, helped or started by a loose barge in the Industrial Canal, that killed families.

      From working in and around the canal, Milton explained that the barge got loose "from the current of the water. Popped the rope. Sometimes the rope is easy to pop because of the pressure." However, all the barges are supposed to be taken into the Mississippi River during an evacuation.  It is the responsibility of the company that owns the barge to account for the damage done, Milton asserted, his words now weighted and angry.  

      "You know why? Because everyone was holding their hands at the last minute, and then they realized the storm was gonna tear up," Beatrice adds, justifiably furious, "nobody wants to take blame, but they’re just pointing fingers." 

      This is all very personal and intimate for Beatrice who tutored students for nine years at Louis Armstrong Elementary School, a peach colored three-story building in the lower 9^th ward.  It was, according to Beatrice, the first school to be integrated in New Orleans.  Plenty of parents and children she developed relations with over the years lost houses, turned into piles of matchsticks.  "I could never go back into the classroom because I can still see their faces and their parents who were lost in the ninth ward, who lost their lives," Beatrice said.

      Beatrice tutored one family of children between kindergarten and the eighth grade who stayed in the lower ninth as the hurricane passed and the floodwaters descended on homes.  The family went onto the roof to avoid the steadily rising water. The eldest child, an eighth grader who couldn’t swim, tried to reach a higher roof, but drowned under the weight and rush of the water.  In an act of desperation, the other younger children followed suit, drowning in the undertow. 

      Beatrice, her eyes swelling, the memories haunting her still, admitted she "doesn’t have the guts" to go back into a classroom because it’s too hard "to see them grow and have their lives taken away from them." 

      Louis Armstrong is still closed, standing silently like a ghost, like so much in New Orleans twenty months later.

      "There are so many untold stories," Beatrice said, melancholy, "there are stories that will never be heard." This isn’t one of them.