The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  Now the program that Shack built is gone. By the time the greenway is completed, Boutte and Brown won’t be able to find all the scattered kids.

  Sitting in the jazz club, Boutte sighs.

  “What they are calling ‘a better New Orleans,’” he practically sneers, before regaining his composure. “You know,” he says, smiling, “we got all these new people who moved to town, with their fancy little hats. They want to ride bicycles everywhere. Journalists and artists. All the ists are in town. These people need a green space to walk and ride their bikes on.”

  He stops for a moment. There is a point he wants to make clear. The choices are tough, and he understands. Even inside himself, he’s torn, happy to see Iberville come down and nice, mixed-income housing built in its place, even as he mourns the same rush of progress crippling Lemann Playground. For Blair, two contradictory ideas are true at the same time; there aren’t good guys and bad guys, but there are certainly winners and losers. A public green space is part of a modernizing city. Boutte knows that. He also knows that park could have saved a lot of kids.

  He imagines the boys he saw flying around the field, disciplined in their gap assignments. Parents filled the bleachers during games. Now that’s all gone. Only the best two or three athletes get taken to a different park, since coaches can fit only a few in a car. The best kids find a new team, and the rest fade away.

  “You know where they land?” he says. “On the stoop out front. You know the story. These guys are in an uphill battle with cement shoes on, and it’s slippery. We send them right back to the jungle. And we tell them, in our most authoritative voice, ‘Be good. Do well.’”

  * * *

  —

  Shack Brown stands in the empty Lemann Playground.

  It’s an early afternoon in June. The field is a narrow patch of green near the interstate. When he closes his eyes, he can see how it was before. The kids playing ball ranged in age from 5 to 14. Every year, he says, at least one had a parent murdered, and Shack watched helplessly as the boys slipped through his fingers. One of his player’s dads threw his body over his children during a shootout. He died, and they survived. Shack tried to fill the hole in their lives. The playground served as a safe haven, which it will undoubtedly be again. An official with the city’s recreation department insisted that there’d be youth football in Lemann in 2015, although parents and coaches in the neighborhood don’t seem to know anything about it. Everything in New Orleans happens over and over, so this is perfect, really, the idea of something new trying to find a foothold in the same place where something beautiful has been destroyed.

  Trees line the edges, one taller than the rest, on the right if you’re facing the old projects. Brown heads over to the Iberville, parking on the side street between the two corner stores. Some guys hang outside the New Image Supermarket. One of them, a kid named Spencer, rushes over.

  He played for Shack at the Lemann, even went out of town with the team. The boys on those trips still talk about the foreign experience of staying in the host families’ houses. They’d never heard of a breakfast casserole or seen big backyards with swings and pools.

  “I’m an alumni of that park,” Spencer says. “Went to Nashville, everywhere.”

  He played offensive line and linebacker, decent but not good enough to find a new place to play. Many more like him suffered the same fate when the park shut down, collateral damage of the city’s new urban corridor. Now he’s just on the corner, and soon enough, we find out why. Shack heads into the store and buys two Big Shot sodas, and when he swings the door back open and steps outside, he walks right into what looks like a drug deal in progress. Spencer is making some sort of transaction with an old junkie. The older guys hanging by a truck a few feet away look embarrassed and try to shoo the junkie away, at least until Shack leaves. The whole time, Spencer’s mother is standing a few feet away, stone-faced, looking at him and then at Shack. She doesn’t smile, the only one who doesn’t seem happy to see her son’s old coach.

  * * *

  —

  The parts of the city falling further behind were in trouble long before Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas. New Orleans is one of many American cities that rely on tourism and sales tax to support themselves. To survive, New Orleans needs mega-events and massive entertainment districts and an aggressive police presence in places where consumers gather. Sociologists describe this as post-Fordism, the economy of a place after the death of manufacturing jobs. The new focus divides a community into consumers and criminals. Most post-Fordism economies see a rise in zero-tolerance policing and incarceration rates.

  That’s exactly what has happened in New Orleans since 1970.

  During roughly that time frame, half the city’s white population moved to the suburbs while the murder rate grew by 329 percent. Between 1981 and Katrina, the incarceration rate increased by 173 percent. The city lost 13,500 manufacturing jobs between 1970 and 2000, and the low-paying service industry grew by 136 percent. All the while, the city’s most famous institutions were born. The Saints started playing in 1967. The Jazz & Heritage Festival began in 1970. The New Orleans Jazz NBA franchise formed in 1974. The Superdome opened in 1975, created as part of the city’s new vision of itself. New Orleans as a carnal playground famous the world over didn’t happen on its own; it was a calculated and sophisticated marketing campaign. Mardi Gras made the city $4.3 million in 1986 and $21.6 million in 2000. In 2014, direct spending for Mardi Gras totaled $164 million. The city closing those housing projects closest to booming entertainment districts isn’t an accident.

  The rich stayed rich in this new economy, but the poor trapped in the housing projects were almost exclusively a financial engine for tourism. The jobs available didn’t pay to build a middle-class life. The city needed its black people to shuck oysters and pour drinks but chased them back to the Iberville on horseback at the slightest provocation.

  * * *

  —

  Boutte drives down Basin toward Iberville Street, where a few blocks away, the sign from the Hotel Monteleone dominates the sky. If you lived in the Iberville, you saw that sign every day of your life and never once went inside unless you carried bags or cleaned rooms. The glowing sign is always there, a reminder that four blocks is a nearly impossible distance to travel in this life.

  Boutte rounds a corner and sees the first flash of red brick.

  “There she is,” he says, the Iberville coming into view.

  He stops in the New Image and talks to some guys hanging outside. Being back here reminds him of his own rebirth, of death too. One afternoon we sit in his office, in the room with the photo of him and Mandela. He describes the project as “quicksand,” then says, in a voice quieter than before, “I ended up in all of that.”

  He’s deciding how far to go.

  “My story is a bit different,” he says. “We can touch on that if you’d like. I very seldom talk about it.”

  The only sounds are the air-conditioning compressors and the rain outside.

  “I went to prison,” he says. “I had a very . . . I don’t like to go back here.”

  He’s talking slowly, considering every word. “I had a really bad night after I graduated from college,” he says. “Like I said, this was a very bad place.”

  He settles in to tell the story. Blair Boutte’s mother raised him and his three siblings by herself in the ’80s and ’90s in a New Orleans housing project. She never drank or did drugs, never bought herself new clothes. Everything Blair wanted to do, she supported. “If you understand a single mother living in the housing projects of New Orleans,” he says, “bringing up four boys alone. Sometimes working two jobs, sometimes not being able to work at all. It’s a pretty rough ride. And my brothers and I, we weren’t singing in the church choir, all right? We were typical New Orleans boys growing up in the housing projects in every sense of the word. And she fought and she f
ought and she fought, and she scratched, and she toiled, and she basically became the anchor to whatever good we had. She never wavered. She never abandoned ship. She never gave up.”

  Blair got out of the Iberville, made his way to Grambling State University. His mom came up for his graduation. They had a party at a local restaurant, and while everyone celebrated, he looked over and saw her in tears. He didn’t understand. After graduation, he got a full ride to Tulane Law School, and before classes began, he went back to the projects. “It’s not like I had a credit card to go buy an apartment Uptown,” he says. “So I came back from school like any other kid. What do you do? You go back and you live with your parents, right?”

  The first thing he did was buy a gun. The city was a dangerous place, around 250 murders a year. He went and registered the firearm, wanting to both protect himself and be legal. On April 10, 1988, Blair walked through the Lafitte projects and a drug dealer nicknamed Two Pistols drew both guns and tried to rob him. Blair pulled his gun and fired, and the man fired back.

  In his office, a universe away from that night, he looks haunted.

  He’s almost whispering now.

  “I had to make a very tough decision,” he says, “and it didn’t end well. At the end of the day, I ended up pleading guilty to manslaughter. An innocent bystander was actually the one who died.”

  He looks down, thinking about Charles Martin, the 14-year-old boy he shot. Tulane took away Boutte’s scholarship, and he did three years, nine months in jail. When he came out, he started his business. It grew into an empire, with real estate holdings and his B3 Consulting firm. Few people in New Orleans understand more about the goings-on in the shadow city.

  “I know the streets,” he says. “They talk to me.”

  * * *

  —

  The most exclusive street in New Orleans tells the same story as the intersection of Iberville and Crozat—the history of a city where some people pull the strings and other people move at the end of an invisible wire—just from a different point of view. The fortunes might come and go, but the houses on Audubon Place remain. They are monuments to the way things have always worked and the way they always will.

  At No. 16, with six white columns and a fleur-de-lis above the front door, Gayle and Tom Benson live a life impossibly far away from the one they knew growing up poor in New Orleans. He’d never wanted to live Uptown, but she wanted a home on Audubon.

  The houses there all tell similar stories too. The sugar-and-coffee baron who built No. 16 left home just past his 15th birthday, moving to Indianapolis and building a fortune from nothing. The man who lived at No. 2 left his farming family in Russia at 14, taking a boat to America and changing his name to Samuel Zemurray. He built an empire, as well, United Fruit, overthrowing governments in Central America, commanding a private standing army of mercenaries and cutthroats. His soldiers terrorized a village where a young novelist grew up; the book based on the massacre is One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  Gabriel García Márquez’s novel shined a light on United Fruit, which later changed its name to Chiquita. Zemurray died in 1961 and gave his house to Tulane University, and the school’s president now lives there, talking about social justice while walking the same halls as the man who gave the world banana republics. The architect who drew the United Fruit house also designed the Bensons’ home, as well as the Hotel Monteleone, the one whose glowing sign dominates the sky in the Iberville projects.

  A hidden world plays out behind the stone-and-wrought-iron entrance to the street, where a guard approves everyone in or out. Last year, parents threw a debutante party for their teenage daughter that required building a structure on an empty lot near their family’s mansion. The guests, the sons and daughters of dynasties, made their way through a so-called Gallery of Stags. Through another set of doors, the ballroom waited, where the girl’s family had flown in Maroon 5. They were the opening act, because the family also flew in Wiz Khalifa, who rapped and smoked joints in the bathroom with future Wall Street titans. The party cost millions of dollars and lasted one night.

  James W. Hearn built the Bensons’ home in 1902, his reward for the coffee-and-sugar empire he’d created. His money came from the same plantation parish where Gayle LaJaunie’s father lived. There’s nobody from Hearn’s family left in New Orleans, an empire built and lost. The house changed hands four more times before Tom Benson bought it, the history of the city’s financial health told through the transfer of deeds: a bank president to a railroad man to a real estate developer to an oil-field equipment supplier to the owner of a football team. A tech billionaire will surely buy it next.

  Gayle oversaw the interior decoration of the house, no expense spared. A golden stained-glass window in the stairwell, with deep greens and airy lavenders, accents the gold walls and the heavy valances. A painting by Miró hangs over a table with a statue by Remington. There’s a Salvador Dalí and photos of Popes Benedict and Francis above the umbrella stand. It looks like a pre-revolution French aristocrat’s dollhouse brought to life. Her china pattern is Spode Stafford White, the same table settings used on the television show Downton Abbey. It’s everything a girl from Old Algiers could have wished for and more. On a table, there’s a photograph of Tom holding the Lombardi Trophy, and over a marble fireplace, Gayle hung an enormous oil portrait of herself.

  * * *

  —

  Dreams do come true. At the end of May, Boutte and 25 family members fly to see his daughter graduate from Brown University. He’s got a hat that reads “Brown Dad,” and he keeps it in his office, the same room as the Crozat and Iberville photo, a reminder of the distance a family can cover in a generation.

  “A looong way,” he says. “Longer than you could ever imagine.”

  “How does a family go from Iberville to Brown?”

  Boutte tries to speak, sitting at a table at a bar near his office, but the words don’t come. Suddenly, he stands up and excuses himself, and the other people at the table, who know him well, look at one another, stunned. They’ve never seen him like this, Boutte crying alone in the bathroom. He returns to the table when he has composed himself, makes a joke about the onions from the red beans cooking in the back, and continues.

  “That’s a tough question,” he says. “It’s something I’ve asked myself a lot, as you can see. It’s an emotional thing for me because, you know, I feel like . . .”

  He pauses again and thinks about his mother crying at his own college graduation and how he was too young to understand what she felt. All this past year, she asked Blair over and over about their plans to attend the Brown graduation, worrying, calling to make sure he’d booked tickets and made the reservations. His phone would ring, and she’d be on the other line.

  “When is the graduation? I don’t want to miss it.”

  “Mom, you’re gonna be there,” he’d say, which made her relax until she decided to check again.

  They traveled north together, his mom telling every person she encountered where she was going and why. In the hotel the night before, he couldn’t sleep. His mother joined him in the lobby.

  “I want you to know something,” she said. “I’m very proud of you.”

  Blair just looked at her.

  “What did I do?” he asked.

  “You got her this far,” she said.

  Sitting in that lobby, he understood finally what his mother had felt all those years before.

  “You know what,” Blair said. “I’m proud of you.”

  His mom looked at him.

  “I got her this far because you got me this far,” he said.

  Both of them cried then, feeling the weight of their past and also feeling somehow free from it. His mother raised four boys in the worst kind of hell America can throw at a family, and Blair has mirrored her devotion and belief. His children grew up in the city’s affluent Carrollton neighborhood. His daughter
graduated from the city’s most elite private prep school, the alma mater of Peyton and Eli Manning. In one generation, the Bouttes had made it to this hotel in Rhode Island. The next morning, Boutte wore white pants with a pink shirt and a pink pocket square, bucks on his feet—“looking like a Southern gentleman,” he says, smiling—and the whole family waited on the college green as the seniors marched through the old stone-and-iron gates. Red and white balloons floated everywhere. The graduates came on campus in procession, and Blair looked to find his daughter first in line, holding the sign that read “Brown University.”

  He felt everything slow down. It was a perfect day, 82 degrees, blue skies. Most of the time, he just watched his mom take it all in.

  “She was in her glory,” he says.

  The old stone buildings, some of the oldest in an old-money world, rose around them. You couldn’t get farther from the Iberville, and that’s what Blair thought about and couldn’t articulate: He was watching a family change its arc. No Boutte would ever live in a housing project again. And when the ceremony ended, the degrees awarded and the hats thrown, the Bouttes, from the corner of Iberville and Crozat, took out an iPad and cranked up the Rebirth Brass Band. They made their own Second Line that day, dancing through the crowd, waving hankies embroidered with Elaina Boutte’s name.

  “Where are you guys from?” one lady asked.

  “New Orleans,” Blair Boutte said proudly.

  IV. THE CYCLES OF THE CITY

  There’s a map on the Internet of the city’s worst flood before Katrina, in 1849, when a levee ruptured on a sugarcane plantation west of town. Water rushed in, and if you look at the map of that flood and a map of the areas flooded by Katrina, they are almost the same. The United States invested millions of dollars, following plans drawn by the best scientific minds of the day, the construction coming at a great cost, both financial and human, and in the end, it didn’t matter. Katrina flooded the same areas, almost down to the block. The high ground along the banks of the river, raised by a thousand years of floodwaters depositing silt, stayed dry in 1849. The land farther back, what is now Lakeview, New Orleans East, Chalmette, and the Lower 9th Ward—all that was then empty marshland. That’s how it would have stayed, except that in the 1890s humans created the ability to drain swamps so that more people could build homes and lives. By 1915, the first phase of the draining project was complete, and new neighborhoods grew unchecked until Katrina turned them back into brackish swamps. But the drainage had an unintended side effect. As the pipes and pumps drained the water table, the land compacted, and the city began to sink. Today, almost everyone knows that New Orleans resides below sea level, but very few know that it didn’t start that way. The city and its people, trying to survive and expand, literally sank themselves. In New Orleans, a place of self-inflicted wounds and unalterable cycles, the past repeats itself over and over, whether in the city’s struggles against the water or against the hundreds of murders year after year, all immune to police action and prayer vigils and nonprofit intervention, as constant a threat as the water that surrounds it.