The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  “They became whispers of themselves,” says Caroline Fayard, a local attorney waiting on the event to begin.

  “Hopefully this Katrina 10,” Garcia says, making his rounds, “he can parlay that into something better.”

  Across the street, as the crowd files in, a woman on the stage plays a mournful tune on a cello. People sit quietly in the uncomfortable chairs. This is one of the first Katrina 10 events of the summer. Many more will follow, academic conferences and TED Talks and a Hot Boys reunion outside the Superdome. Economists and education specialists will gather all summer, quoting facts and figures, looking to the future.

  The letter project also serves as a memorial to those who died in the storm, so their deaths will not have been in vain. Even 10 years later, nobody knows how many were lost. The best guess is 1,833, but that’s just a guess. At the end of Canal Street, in a pauper’s cemetery, there is a memorial to the dead. Six sleek marble mausoleums hold the remains nobody ever identified or claimed.

  “Some have been forgotten,” the marker reads. “Some remain unknown.”

  The cello on the stage makes the saddest sound, the people here occupying both cities, the one of the dead and the one of the living, trapped in between. That’s what the anniversary is doing, one last time: forcing people to go to a place they’ve tried to avoid. Behind the stage hangs an enormous photograph of Louis Armstrong Park, named for the patron saint of the city, who made New Orleans music so popular that it remains so. Everyone who comes to town arrives at the airport bearing his name, but Armstrong didn’t live in that New Orleans. He grew up in a violently segregated city—his first cornet was given to him at a detention facility named the Colored Waifs’ Home—and while his deepest feelings about his childhood died with him, this fact is true: When Armstrong became famous, he moved to New York City and almost never returned. His body is buried in Queens. He sang “What a Wonderful World” as a prayer, a song about a place that didn’t really exist. The only New Orleans he wanted to visit was the one he imagined with his trumpet, a vision of what the city still tries to be.

  * * *

  —

  The event begins. There’s a strange feeling in the air, people avoiding eye contact, quiet and alone with their memories. Rose has been mingling, slouched at a James Dean slant, joints cocked, sleeves rolled up on his T-shirt. He looks every bit “the avenging angel of the 504,” as a writer once described him. Ten years ago he wrote about New Orleans for the world, and now he’s writing for 50 people in a room.

  David Morris, from the nonprofit hosting tonight’s benefit, welcomes the crowd and explains that five years ago people didn’t have time for extravagances like public remembrance, focused as they were on rotting Chinese drywall and getting all their family members back in New Orleans. Ten years from now, the seniors in high school won’t have even been alive during Katrina, and it will all fade away, like Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the flood of 1927, something studied by coming generations but not felt. “So on the 10th anniversary,” Morris says, “we have this incredibly special moment where not too much time has passed, but just enough has, so we can pause and reflect for a second. I think in a lot of ways this is going to be the first and quite possibly the last collective and cathartic experience that New Orleans experiences together.”

  The first speaker, a local radio DJ named Fresh Johnson, reads Chris Rose’s original story.

  Dear America . . .

  Her voice is supercharged with the thrumming energy of the young. She’s a can of Red Bull with dimples. Standing near the back of the room, Rose looks haunted. He jams his hands down in his pockets and rocks. Nobody bothers him. His body language repels people, and every now and then, as he listens to this dispatch from his former life, he blinks.

  When you meet us now and you look into our eyes, you will see the saddest story ever told. Our hearts are broken into a thousand pieces.

  But don’t pity us. We’re gonna make it. We’re resilient. After all, we’ve been rooting for the Saints for thirty-five years. That’s got to count for something.

  He laughs when Fresh mentions the Saints, and then, as she finishes reading his old words, Rose inches farther and farther from the stage, until he’s alone and against the wall. There isn’t anyone behind him. He closes his eyes. When the next speaker starts reliving her memories and pain, Chris quietly slips out and stands by the curb. He holds the script of his new letter in his hand, reading it again: “It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years,” he’s written. “We may be haunted by our past, but we are not bound to it.”

  A cloud of cigarette smoke rises above his head, and he leans against one of the poles holding up a balcony. A little tremor runs through his body, and his shoulders rise and fall. From behind, it looks like he’s either coughing or crying. Inside, a deaf and blind woman talks about how she’s found her own kind of vision and music in New Orleans, and outside, he’s got neither.

  He smokes and waits.

  “It opens up a lot of old vulnerabilities,” he says, shaking his head. Then his time arrives, and the crowd stands and cheers. He whispers to the musician onstage that he’d like her to keep playing while he reads. What he’s got on the page isn’t a letter so much as a ballad, a prayer like the ones written by Louis Armstrong. Rose, a native of Maryland, came here to work, and like many transplants, he cannot imagine a life anywhere else. The place has swallowed him, and on the stage, he finds his pace and rhythm. “The most important four-letter word in the English language is not ‘love.’ It is ‘home.’ Home, where the senses are filled with the comforting. Where the streets, the accents, and the church bells are familiar. Where the air smells like coffee, sweet olive, fish fry, mule piss, and sex.”

  Everyone in the crowd laughs.

  He smiles, hoping this is the start of a future, not a nostalgia trip to a past forever gone. His letter is poignant, funny, and sweet, and a common idea flows through every line. The hurricane isn’t something that happened a decade ago. It’s something that is still happening, good and bad. The anniversary isn’t a commemoration of the past but a civic prayer that the city’s longest day might finally come to an end.

  II. THE PROBLEM WITH NEW GODS

  In the courtyard behind the St. Louis Cathedral, which rises above Jackson Square, there’s a statue of Jesus missing its thumb and forefinger. Katrina broke them off, and people here joke about Jesus using those missing digits to flick the storm away. At night, if you’re walking down Royal Street, past the antique shops that sell Liberace’s sterling serving pieces, a spotlight throws a silhouette of Jesus against the back wall of the cathedral. It towers above everything else, heaven and hell so close together. That’s New Orleans. After Katrina, the church said it would leave the statue broken, out of solidarity, until the city had recovered. This year, on the anniversary, the archdiocese is reattaching Jesus’s fingers.

  With the recovery coming to an end, at least in the public dialogue, people are remembering how much the city invested in its football team, which is itself so closely aligned with the Catholic Church, from the name of the club to the Masses the Benson family holds in the Superdome before games. This summer, on the last day of a run of practices, Drew Brees takes off his helmet and signs autographs along a rope line of fans. One of the items waving at him from an outstretched hand is a copy of the Monday, February 8, 2010, edition of The Times-Picayune, the day after the Super Bowl. The headline reads “AMEN!”

  The day after that game, when staff members got to the newsroom, they found readers stretched around the corner, waiting. The paper sold 687,000 copies, more than double its typical circulation, people of all ages and races buying them by the bundle. The presses printed into the next night. People wanted to save these papers, pass them down to their children. That front page is now hanging in every imaginable establishment, from the inside of a food truck that sets up at Second Line parades on Sunday afternoons to the corner o
f the stand-up bar at Tujague’s, whose interior always seems filled with a beautiful, strange yellow light. The framed cover is an anthropological document of sorts, capturing a specific madness that swallowed New Orleans in the years after the hurricane.

  The city in that time suffered through Ray Nagin’s two terms as mayor—like many Louisiana politicians before him, he is now in federal prison for a litany of crimes, including bribery, conspiracy, and money laundering. Nagin declined comment for this story, but when he left office in 2010, the city had a $97 million budget deficit. The police department was being investigated by the Department of Justice, and the FBI had set up an office inside the Orleans Parish School Board, so deep was the corruption (2,000 employees had health insurance for which they weren’t eligible, according to Tulane researcher Doug Harris). New Orleans was a place struggling to stand up. And so it was that the people tied their personal and civic self-esteem to the play of a football team, as if 53 men and their coaches predicted whether the city would get off its knees.

  People call New Orleans a Catholic city, but that’s not really true, not anymore. With every census, the percentage of practicing Roman Catholics declines. The religious iconography laid over the rise of a football team would have been considered blasphemous a generation ago, and maybe even for this generation, had the people in New Orleans not needed to believe in something so desperately. The public institution that has replaced the church’s ubiquity is the Saints, and so, “Amen,” the headline writers decided—the most beautiful and surprising gift for a city stripped of its faith: an answered prayer.

  * * *

  —

  If the most visible day in the past 10 years was the day the Saints won the Super Bowl, the most impactful might have been the one before, a Saturday, when people went to the polls and overwhelmingly elected Mitch Landrieu as mayor. To many, his election is the moment when the city began its rebirth, dividing the past decade into two distinct halves: from the storm to the Super Bowl, and from Mitch’s election until the anniversary. Landrieu’s media advisers understood this, placing billboards around the city that tied his victory with the victory of the Saints. They read ONE TEAM. ONE FIGHT. ONE VOICE. ONE CITY.

  Landrieu took over where the Saints left off, and near the end of this past May, he walks toward the microphone to give his fifth State of the City speech to a packed room, where a gospel choir sings him onstage. The event takes place at a renovated theater across from what used to be the Lafitte projects and is now part of a major construction plan for the city, the Lafitte Greenway, a long public park and bike path connecting City Park and the French Quarter. In Landrieu’s speech, he describes the summer’s Katrina 10 events and celebrations, and the recovery the city has made. “When we took office in 2010, we inherited a mess,” he says. “Simply put, five years after the storm we were struggling to make it.”

  Two weeks later, he’s back in his office at City Hall, which is built on the plot of land where Louis Armstrong’s childhood home once stood. He loosens his blue necktie, taking a short break between meetings. He was born and raised in New Orleans, the brother of former U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu and the son of a former mayor, Maurice “Moon” Landrieu, who integrated city government in the 1970s, hiring dozens of young black staffers, and was called “Moon the Coon” by angry whites. On Mitch’s office wall, there’s a framed newspaper editorial about his father, with the headline “CAN AN HONEST MAN WIN?” There’s a book on his coffee table called How to Rebuild a City.

  “We’re going to build it the way it should have been if we would have gotten it right the first time,” he says, for the third time in 20 minutes. “We’re doing great. We’re an ascendant city.”

  He sits on the ratty couches he inherited, along with a nearly bankrupt city, hit by a hurricane and then the criminal tenure of Nagin. “The governance wasn’t good,” Landrieu says. “Nobody was working well together. The recovery wasn’t going well. Finally it started to jell the year before I got elected. And just that weekend, us winning the Super Bowl and then the new election.”

  Today, he carries precincts in the projects and on tree-lined old-money streets. Landrieu is the first white mayor in three decades—the last was his father—and he has the trust of most of the city’s black population; in his last election, he defeated two African American candidates. Saints coach Sean Payton, who is politically conservative, believes in the mayor too. “Both Landrieu and [Governor Bobby] Jindal, agree or disagree with their politics, they’re not going to be arrested someday for it,” he says. “They’re trustworthy.”

  Landrieu has a vision for what New Orleans might be by the time his children inherit the city. He points to the nearly completed Lafitte Greenway, almost three miles of public space, with energy-efficient lighting, fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. There’s a crushed-stone walking path and more than 500 trees providing shade on those hot summer days. It’ll be a beautiful, modern centerpiece of the city, running through a place that was blighted and dangerous before the storm. Landrieu’s interest is complicated. He is trying to drive an economic rebirth while rebuilding the city itself, but when you hear him talk about things like the greenway, his excitement seems to be about something simpler: He remembers a New Orleans that looked and felt like a city on the rise, and he wants to leave that city behind when his time as mayor is up.

  The new University Medical Center and VA hospital, the biggest medical construction project in the country, are positioned near the Lafitte Corridor, and the hospitals fit into the modern design, with no parking visible from the street. This summer, a developer bought nearby land to convert into restaurants and shops. A Whole Foods recently opened near the path of the greenway, right on the edge of Treme, the corner of Bienville and Broad. The neighborhood is already filling with tourists. Pedestrians walking from either direction will be able to step off the greenway into Dooky Chase’s Restaurant and Willie Mae’s Scotch House, two of the most famous soul food places in the city.

  This is one of the oldest and most important African American neighborhoods in the country. Free blacks lived here during slavery, and in its clubs, jazz was born. Some call it Treme, and others call it Lafitte, after the former project. Its original name best expresses its place in the minds of the white citizens who named things back then: “Back of Town.”

  Now it’s the front yard of the New New Orleans.

  Mitch Landrieu was in New Orleans during Katrina, the lieutenant governor then, walking through the crowds in the Superdome while Ray Nagin locked himself in a hotel suite and literally wept, as his aides looked at him in shock. When Steve Gleason blocked that punt, Mitch was there too. To him, it felt cathartic and cleansing, like the team had taken the Superdome back from Katrina. Three and a half years later, the day after he won his election, he went to church and then to his brother’s house in Lakeview to watch the Super Bowl. The whole family was there, and when the game ended, and the Saints had won, his 80-year-old mother led the family out of the house, dozens of Landrieus running around the block in rapture.

  * * *

  —

  Katrina brought the two central players of the Saints’ journey together.

  Sean Payton took the job five months after the hurricane, after the Green Bay Packers turned him down. He instinctively understood how the flood might unify the team; the Friday night before the first game back in the city, he gathered the Saints at midfield and played a video showing the devastation of Katrina. The Dome felt like a church. Payton said that the same people suffering in those images would be back in the stadium the next evening and that the Saints needed to remember these pictures when they played because those were the people in the stands cheering.

  Payton signed a quarterback nobody but the Dolphins wanted, Drew Brees, who was coming off potentially career-ending shoulder surgery and still unable to throw. The team flew in Drew and his wife in March 2006, and after pitching them on t
he Saints, Payton drove them around, only he got lost, and the carefully curated tour of New Orleans turned quickly into a war zone. They passed houses ripped off foundations, with boats and cars at odd angles. They passed houses with the fluorescent orange X’s painted on them, the utilitarian National Guard system for keeping track of what got searched and when.

  Ten years later, the X’s mean different things in different neighborhoods. On Magazine Street, they are something from the past, almost ironic now, or at least a way for survivors to nod at one another in solidarity and silence. Across town, driving into the 7th or 9th Ward, dozens of abandoned houses still have X’s painted on them, one more divide in a city separated by money and opportunity, as well as time and race. Life in white New Orleans is much different from life in black New Orleans, no matter what Landrieu’s billboard says.

  Near Carver High School, Marshall Faulk’s alma mater, an abandoned lot of graffitied cop cars looks like a scene from Mad Max, a square of official government land, left in the panic of full retreat. Trees grow out of windowless houses. Carver still isn’t finished, even 10 years later, the students attending class in white trailers. Near the old Desire projects, the Savemore Supermarket is boarded up, with a graffitied warning: “Do not make this mistake again.” Near Humanity Street, a rooster walks and clucks through the neutral ground. An X says a house was searched on 9/6, another on 9/15. The street names remain: Abundance, Benefit, Pleasure. The nearby Press Park complex is abandoned, just shells and skeletons, each collapsed in its own way, snowflakes of blight.