I walk through a nearby trailer park with Paul and some local environmental activists testing campers. The campers are supposed to be for camping, not for living in months at a time. Susan Saunders opens her door and shows us how red her eyes are from the fumes. She has a hacking cough. FEMA inspectors tell everyone to ventilate the trailers, but it is nearly a hundred degrees outside and no one wants to turn off the AC. Everyone keeps talking about the smell.
I decide we should conduct our own tests. CNN pays an independent lab to test the FEMA trailer of Denise Martin and her four little kids. Lisa is sleeping right on the particleboard shelf that contains the formaldehyde. The test comes back 80 percent higher than federal recommendations. The tests done by the group return high levels in twenty-nine of the thirty-one trailers where they take samples. We find a dozen home owners who have complained to FEMA about feeling ill. Gulf Stream, which manufactures the Cavalier trailers, warns people to ventilate but says they have had no complaints. FEMA says the problem is more nuisance than health hazard and offers Paul and Melody Stewart a new trailer. They take out a second mortgage on their home that was destroyed by the storm and buy their own.
I come back to St. Bernard Parish a year later and take a tour with Sheriff Jack. I see gutted houses and the fortified levees but not much other progress. An estimated ten thousand to twenty thousand of the seventy thousand residents have returned. Every so often you see an oasis of flowers, but mostly there are abandoned houses and piles of debris housing rats and snakes. A year ago, I had met Rachel Kestling while she was breaking down her door to get back in her house. Now volunteers have gutted the inside of her old home and begun repairs. It’s far from perfect, but it is better. Sheriff Jack worries about anything that could drive the fledgling recovery away, a growing crime problem, ten-foot weeds surrounding abandoned homes. He claims the disaster has been liberating for him, that he no longer cares about his political career. There is still limited electricity and sewage and every rain brings a flash flood. Contractors gouge the residents with prices ten times the normal rate.
Sheriff Jack says he could go to three funerals a week for local residents, mostly seniors he says have died of depression. There has been a spike in attempted suicides and suicides. The schools are reopened but there are not many children. The value of homes has fallen to a quarter of what they were. Sheriff Jack feels like they are victims of government neglect. A year has honed his anger. He begins to list the communities ravaged by the storm—Mobile, Alabama; Gulfport, Mississippi; Biloxi; Long Beach; Waveland; Ocean Spring; Slidell; Plaquemines; St. Bernard; New Orleans; Cameron. All of these, he says, should be worth more than Baghdad.
The residents who are rebuilding are doing it on their own.
Christmas 2005 arrives in Pearlington and Angela becomes obsessed with making it a little less miserable for everyone. Lisa Martin is still sleeping on the particleboard shelf. She sometimes plays in the wreckage of her old home. She asks after the kittens that drowned in the storm there. The town has no way to pick itself up. The shrimpers have no boats and the muddy Pearl River is choked with sewage. Lisa’s grandmother begins to cry when Angela mentions Christmas. But Angela has collected donations back in New York and brought in a truckload of gifts and supplies. Firefighters from Canyon, California, help her transport everything and medical students from Stanford unload it. She enlists Steve Horn, who came in from Carbondale, Colorado, to rebuild homes. He helps her figure out distribution. “You can’t make that kind of connection with somebody in a situation that is so dire and then just say I did my part and walk away,” she says.
The most consistent thing about this tragedy has been the resilience of both the victims and the volunteers. They prove over and over again that in this country you have to get up and do things yourself if you want them done right. Americans know how to be angry and make demands, but at their best they also know when it’s time to just step in and fix stuff. Angela decorates a six-hundred-pound tree at what passes for a main intersection and sings mightily as a generator powers up a string of lights. The younger folks cry and give thanks but they can’t capture a Christmas spirit. What, they ask, could they possibly be thankful for? Then the town’s elder, an eighty-eight-year-old woman they call Mama Sams, yells at folks to come together. “They have fed us, they have clothed us, they have given us shelter, and we want to thank the good Lord for them,” she says to the volunteers. For them, at least, they can give thanks.
A few months after the storm I come up with a plan to monitor the wound that Katrina has left on people. I give out digital video cameras to eleven students in the NoLa school system in January 2006. I go with Spike Lee to hand them out. He has made a documentary called When the Levees Broke and is something of a rock star in New Orleans.
At age twelve, Sophie Boudreaux is the youngest of our group. She seems quiet and shy, until she suddenly blurts out something incredibly thoughtful about her goals for telling her story. She wants to explore why people have forgotten about New Orleans. Sophie used to live on Florida Street in St. Bernard Parish, a street where I spent a lot of time reporting right after the storm. It’s a street where some of the homes were blown off their foundations; the hurricane resembled a tornado on one corner. Florida Street is also where we’ve returned to do more stories lately. Some home owners have been coming back and rebuilding, in some cases without any insurance money to help them out. Sophie says she wants to show people exactly how she survived the storm.
When I ask if their stories would be “overwhelmingly hopeful or overwhelmingly negative,” I am surprised at the quick response. Fifteen-year-old Deshawn Dabney says “overwhelmingly hopeful,” and all the other students murmur in agreement. Deshawn lives with his mother, grandmother, and uncle in a crowded, run-down two-room apartment around the corner from the destroyed house his grandmother owns. Money is tight; repairs are going brutally slowly. The family is currently relying on church volunteers to patch and paint and wire their home. Still, he is hopeful.
Spike asks the kids if they saw the president’s State of the Union address. They all say, “Yes.” Deshawn complains that the president “didn’t say anything about the hurricane, nothing about building more levees or sending money down here to help rebuild the Gulf Coast. He didn’t even mention us, not one word.”
Arianna Cassar, seventeen, tells me she wants to retrace the steps she took when she was evacuated. She lives near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, now, and her parents drive her to and from high school in Chalmette, Louisiana. That’s about a 130-mile round trip. Every day.
Darold Alexander, fifteen, tells us he already knows ten or fifteen people with Katrina stories he wants to tell. Brandon Franklin, nineteen, says he wants to “show guys what I used to do, prior to Katrina, catch all that, as it is now, you know, still shut down and nothing popping.”
These are kids, but they’re old souls, even beyond Katrina and the recovery. Jerell Edgerson says, “At times, it feels like I’m sixteen and I’m on my own.” She says she and her mom are very close, but her mom stayed in Atlanta, where there’s housing and stability. Jerell felt it was important to finish high school in New Orleans. She’s living with a family friend and was chosen for a Mudd jeans ad for what she wrote to the company about Katrina. She calls the modeling work a “blessing” of Katrina.
My producer Michelle Rozsa falls in love with the kids and methodically documents everything they do. She allows me to chart how their lives are challenged in the aftermath of the storm. What will their video stories reveal? What lies ahead for these kids who are so hopeful, and yet, at times, seem so worn out by all they’ve been through? The tape will tell. Sophie, our twelve-year-old, says she wants to show us her home, which they’re in the process of rebuilding.
A month later, in February 2006, I get to see the first results. Eighteen-year-old Amanda Hill sits on a plastic lawn chair in a gutted home, talking straight into a camera. She looks shell-shocked, as if she has survived a war, and in a way that is exac
tly what has happened. Amanda and her grandmother lost their home and their livelihood as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
“I know what it is like not to have the finer things in life,” she says, “and I don’t need that to be happy, but I wake up at three a.m. to hearing my grandma crying because she doesn’t know if she’ll have money to put milk in the fridge or bread on the table.” Amanda speaks these words on the first tape she sends to us. She tells us her grandmother, Dolores, has mentioned suicide. “All I could say was it’s going to be okay, when in my heart I don’t think it is.” Dolores has raised Amanda since she was eleven years old. That was the year her mother died from cancer. Since returning to St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans, Dolores has tried to support the two of them while working at McDonald’s.
In early spring, fifteen-year-old Deshawn Dabney confides to his camera, “I don’t want to be dead at fifteen. I have dreams, a whole life to live. I want to be this huge entertainer... and there is no way I can do that if I’m dead.” He has reason to be concerned. He is speaking just days after a neighbor, seventeen-year-old Anthony Placide, was killed by a gunshot wound to the head. The shooting happened only a few hundred feet from Deshawn’s front door.
On another tape we get a few days later, Deshawn is interviewing Anthony’s fourteen-year-old brother, Jamell Hurst. “I was shocked,” Jamell tells Deshawn about his brother’s murder. Seventeen-year-old Shantia Reneau talks about her inability to afford the college of her dreams, Southeastern Louisiana University. All of the family’s extra money is going toward rebuilding their damaged home in the Ninth Ward. They’re living in a FEMA trailer in a parking lot. “I really want to go to Southeastern, but if not, I’ll have to stay down here,” she says while walking along her damaged street. “I didn’t want to. New Orleans has nothing to offer, nothing, not a thing.”
Nineteen-year-old Brandon Franklin is looking outside New Orleans, too. He wants to go away to college to study to become a band director. But it may be a tough road for him. He is raising a one-year-old with his live-in girlfriend, Ivorionne, and they have another baby on the way. “I feel like we’re a little bit too young for the responsibilities we have,” he tells the camera in a strong, confident voice. “But I feel like I can do anything I put my mind to.” Seeing and hearing him, you want to believe it. Amanda, Deshawn, Shantia, and Brandon are among the approximately thirty thousand students who attend public schools in Orleans and St. Bernard Parish nearly two years after the storm, down from more than seventy-five thousand before Katrina hit. Their stories will be seen on TV.
With all that hope coming from young people, the adults of St. Bernard Parish seem hopelessly in competition for scant resources. The storm aftermath had been punctuated by moments of bald-faced racism, roads blocked off to black people, and survivors left behind. It had also unified everyone in mysterious ways. There was a shared agony, a common enemy. But in the slow, painful rebuilding the parish fought to make sure the low-income, working black families would never return. The efforts were so blatant that a federal court would ultimately find them in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
St. Bernard Parish was listed as 88 percent white before the storm destroyed nearly all its homes, including Village Square, a collection of a hundred buildings inhabited mostly by low-income African-American renters. The parish leadership fought against rentals and multifamily housing units. Craig Taffaro Jr., the president of the St. Bernard Parish Council, promoted a “blood-relative ordinance” that forbid anyone from renting there unless they were relatives of home owners. The white population already owned 93 percent of the housing before the storm.
Two years after the storm, Sheriff Jack, who keeps getting elected, tells me just a third of St. Bernard Parish’s residents have been able to return. The place still lacks a fully operational sewer system, enough schools or fire stations. Weeds grow up through the cement, threatening to overcome the city. Sheriff Jack figures he has spoken to twelve sets of representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, each with a new set of rules. One set asked him to prove his deputies worked overtime in the days following the storm. “We were sleeping on cement slabs. We didn’t have cars. We didn’t have boats. They want us to produce sheets for the deputies to justify the overtime. We didn’t even have toilet paper, much less paper to fill out trip sheets,” he shouts. The new FEMA administrator confirms they made the request as if it meant nothing. Meanwhile, the sheriff seems to have abandoned his promise to be done with politics and is running again.
When my series on Katrina is over, so is my job as the anchor of American Morning. It happens suddenly after weeks of flagging ratings. MSNBC simulcasts Don Imus and their ratings rise 39 percent compared with the previous year. It’s a slow news period and we are down 6 percent. We are nearly tied with them and both of us are suddenly being overshadowed by the personality-driven Fox and Friends. The hope had been that teaming me with Miles would overcome these challenges but it’s not working. We are told that we are great reporters but not magnetic anchors. He will move on to covering NASA and I will do long-form documentaries, which I’ve never done before. It feels like I’m being fired and rehired the same day. In our chairs will go John Roberts from CBS and Kiran Chetry, freshly hired from FOX. The news is painful to hear and the coverage biting. One report even mentions that I have a lot of kids.
I feel suddenly I have nothing to do and nowhere to go. I have a job but nothing to shoot and no stories to tell. I am anxious because I don’t know what lies ahead. I am just sitting around, enjoying my kids, taking yoga, and running like someone is chasing me. I feel very different from when I started at CNN.
In a way—like they say in church—I’ve been changed. After I lose the pace of the American Morning gig, my brain loses its main distraction and begins to replay the last few years. I have daily crying jags. I feel like I’m losing my mind. Pictures of bodies facedown in water or rolling by in trucks pop into my head when I’m on the treadmill. My work feels so much more important, but it feels like it’s killing my head and making me a little bit insane. I care so much that I feel like I have to hop on another plane and get the word out. I cannot lose that platform. Technically I have been rehired and promoted. Part of me wonders if the new job I’ve been given is a consolation prize. I have four lovely kids who need to go to college, but for me it has never been about the money. The salary is only the half of it. When we walked out of the airport for the last time after Katrina, people spotted our CNN hats and stood up and applauded. I am overwhelmed by how many African-Americans walk up to me and urge me to tell more stories.
My last day on the anchor desk of a CNN flagship show is April 3, 2007, and a week later I’m invited to the anniversary gala for Dress for Success, a group that collects business clothing for disadvantaged women trying to enter the workforce. I decide to go. I have just turned forty a few months earlier and I slide into a fitted cream pantsuit and leopard-print heels. A young reporter nervously introduces herself and says she has landed a job at FOX News. “Great! Good for you! How old are you?” I ask her. “Twenty-two,” she says. “Awesome—that’s perfect!” I tell her. “If you’re not a little bit scared, you’re not doing it right.” I am the last person to leave the red carpet that evening. I have so many more stories left to tell.
CHAPTER SIX
WORDS TO CHANGE A NATION
I peer out the car window and see the glint of razor wire coming up on the right. Michael Eric Dyson leans out and sees it, too. His eyes fill with water and he takes a quick breath. I steady his arm. Michael has a doctorate from Princeton. He has published over a dozen books. He rose from the ashes of ghetto Detroit to become a celebrated social critic and sociologist. He is one of the people we turn to to understand the world, a top intellectual voice of black America. Yet, he is about to cry in my rental car. We are on our way to visit his brother, Everett, who grew up with Michael under the very same circumstances. But Everett is now serving a life sentence in a federal penitent
iary—for murder.
I have just begun to report a two-night, four-hour special called Black in America. I feel excited but I’m a bit overwhelmed. It is my first major assignment as anchor of CNN Presents, a long-form unit that makes news documentaries. There is no way to cover an entire people in a documentary, much less a group whose American experience has been historically underreported. The task feels enormous. But I am thrilled. This is the kind of reporting I have wanted to do all along. This is a great opportunity to give voice to so many important stories in the African-American experience. I hardly know where to start.
I am eager to tell the Dyson brothers’ story. I’ve heard it so many times, yet don’t often see it on TV. African-American men are 14 percent of the general population, yet they represent 40 percent of the prison population. In the United States, nearly one in twenty black men is in prison. It is typical in this country for many African-American families to be fractured by the criminal justice system. It is a consequence of bad law, bad discrimination, bad circumstance, and bad behavior. The end result is brothers divided and family life flattened. Dyson and his brother are an opportunity to take a human look at that harsh reality.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 11
