She became an optimist, though her route there was circuitous. A political insider, she at first attempted to use all her contacts to figure out when the next attack would be, to be in control of what was happening. “And then all of a sudden one day I realized I just wasn’t going to know. The cloud lifted, I felt better. . . . One day it all went away and I don’t know why. I couldn’t control the environment and I wasn’t going to know. My neighborhood I had worked so hard to rebuild is a huge scar; I had my children thinking, half the people thought I was a freak, the other half thought I was a hero, which was also a problem. One night I sat down here and realized we had these incredible sunsets [where the towers had been] and everything was fine. The return to normal was a return to chaos.” She added that one of her “mythologies” had been “that I was born too late for a cause—and here I was given one.” The neighborhood organized to fight for its rights, for realistic safety standards, for compensation, and in doing so came together. She was a participant but not one who assumed public leadership or came to depend on that leadership for identity. She also suffered a near-fatal illness. After the two experiences, “I became a person of faith. You realize what horror awaits and are grateful it didn’t happen. Three thousand were murdered but 25,000 were saved. It was 3,000 and not 3,004, and we’re still here. I think it’s very easy to be compassionate when it’s abstract. People say it’s how people behave when things are bad that matters. But that’s easy. It’s how they behave when things are good.”
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were civil servants in abundance: firefighters, police, city workers, and volunteer civil servants converging to deal with failed systems. Citizens themselves were making the major decisions, from evacuating the Trade Center buildings despite the advice to stay put from the Port Authority to organizing massive relief efforts. While the Pentagon failed to act, citizens took dramatic action inside Flight 93, possibly because of the passengers’ quick collective decisions and actions. It was not only a moment of mutual aid and altruism but also a moment of participatory democracy at the forum in Union Square, at the dispensaries, impromptu kitchens, and volunteer efforts all over the city. People decided to do something, banded together—usually with strangers—and made it happen. It was anarchy in Kropotkin’s sense of self-determination rather than of chaos. It was also typical of what happens in disaster, when institutions fail and civil society succeeds. It demonstrated that both the will and the ability to make a vibrant society in the absence of authority can exist, at least briefly. Once they gathered their wits, the Bush administration’s most urgent campaign was not to take America back from terrorists but from its citizens. That campaign was largely successful.
In some ways that matter, 9/11 was an anomaly, and the refrain after it happened was that everything had changed. In other ways, it was a classic disaster complete with a revitalized civil society of rescuers, mutual aid, and public forums and with many forms of elite panic. If the people of Mexico had won the postdisaster contest of power against their government, or at least won significant battles, Americans lost most of the battles after 9/11 and got instead a militarized society with fewer rights and less privacy. If Argentines three months after 9/11 had made of a sudden economic disaster a chance for social rebirth, Americans missed the chance. The country’s romance with right-wing solutions was in full flower, and militarism, individualism, and consumerism drowned out the other possibilities. Argentina had been at the end of a long road of authoritarianism, repression, and foreign intervention when it rose up. The language to describe, let alone celebrate, what had arisen in the ruins of the Twin Towers was missing, and so was the vision of what role this mutual aid, altruism, collaboration, improvisation, and empowerment could play in a society free to invent and direct itself. The logic of wartime was used to inculcate a patriotism that was akin to deferential obedience. Civil society had triumphed in the hours and days after the attacks, but it failed in the face of more familiar stories told by the government and retold by the media, again and again. Four years later the balance would shift a little.
V
NEW ORLEANS: COMMON GROUNDS AND KILLERS
WHAT DIFFERENCE WOULD IT MAKE?
The Deluge and the Guns
At the last minute, her daughter was unable to pick her up for the drive to Atlanta, so Clara Rita Bartholomew, a strong, outspoken woman of sixty-one, went into the closet of the house she’d inherited from her sister to escape Hurricane Katrina’s wind. She’d been awakened by the howling gale at six that Monday morning, August 29, 2005. She sheltered first in the bathroom, where she could see the wind rip chunks off the neighbor’s house, then in that closet, the safest place in the house. The gales died down, she left the closet, looked out the window, and saw the water was at the level of a nearby stop sign. A foot of water had come into her home, even though it was high off the ground. She was in St. Bernard Parish, next to New Orleans Parish, and in her parish exactly four houses would escape flooding. She didn’t know it at the time, but the levees had broken all along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. This man-made shortcut from the sea for commercial ships was nicknamed the Hurricane Highway, since it invites hurricane storm surges to charge in straight from the Gulf. As the water began rising up her legs, she pulled down the latch for the stairs to the attic and climbed higher.
There Bartholomew saw that the storm had ripped part of the roof off the attic. And even up there she wasn’t out of reach of the waters. “And I’m screaming and hollering, ‘I don’t want to die, Jesus save me, please. What have I done?’ And by the time I closed my eyes, a big wave . . . two big waves just met and covered me, and when it sprayed, it just sprayed on top of all the other houses, because this house was up high, and finally it just sprayed it, and the wind kept blowing, the wind kept blowing. I could reach down and touch the water. The water was pretty, it was nice and white. And I’m screaming and hollering, ‘Please God, don’t let me die. Please God, don’t let me die.’ And then finally all different types of animals I’ve never seen before in my life came into the house. Finally I did have nerve enough to look down. Every ceiling in the house was gone, every window was gone, the back door was gone. All kinds of animals [were] making all kinds of noise, and I was running, because they was coming to my feet. It was horrible. So finally I’m thinking it’s over, and it came and shook the back side of the house, and I’m praying to ‘God, Lordy, Lordy, you know I can’t swim,’ and then finally for about four hours it beared down and so finally I’m standing on the stairs to the roof, and I’m tired, Lord, I’m tired, but if I fall asleep I’m going to drown. So here come the wind again, and then finally it must have been about three o’clock and it stopped. A white couple drowned in front of me, they were trying to get to the river.” That is, they were trying to get to the high ground by the Mississippi River, where they might crawl out of the water. Bartholomew cheered them on as they struggled.
“And like a big wave, a surge, just came and took them under. Oh, the little girl hollered. She just screamed and screamed and screamed. In the meantime the wind is still blowing you still got that fine misting rain. Then a body passed right in front of me. Then I’m looking around the attic to try to get something to pull it up to me, and then there was a big old alligator following the body. Oh, I froze, I couldn’t even move, and then after it calmed down the rain stopped. I thought my neighbor was on the roof, so I hollered and all of a sudden beautiful seagulls came and pelicans. [My neighbor] didn’t have a shirt on, so they was eating him up like he was dead meat, and so he got a shotgun and started shooting at them. And then the wind started up again. Oh, it blowed and blowed and blowed. I was getting tired.” She found her sister’s Bible and read a psalm. She repented of her sins. She saw a beautiful boat without anyone in it float by and took it as a sign from God. She waited to die.
A lot of people waited to die in Hurricane Katrina, and more than sixteen hundred did so, though some of them were so unwell they never knew what got them, o
r they died not of the hurricane or the flood but of thirst, heatstroke, lack of medicine, or murder in the days after the waters had settled and the wind had passed. It’s hard to say that Bartholomew was lucky, but she lived. She stayed on that torn-up attic a while longer and saw coffins and bodies, livestock and wildlife, alive and dead, go floating by. A boat went by with a young white couple in charge. “So finally I heard the white girl say, ‘I hear someone hollering,’ and he said, ‘No it’s just the water going down.’ She said, ‘No, turn the motor off.’ When he turned the motor off, you know what I did? I hollered, ‘I’m Clarita, I’m alive.’ When he came to the opening of the roof and he saw me, ‘How did you live through that?’ ”
She got into the boat, where one rescued neighbor told her of seeing alligators swimming in the flooded neighborhood, another told of fleeing from rooftop to rooftop as the water rose. They passed St. Rita’s Nursing Home, where thirty-five elderly and disabled people drowned in the suddenly flooded building. Clarita’s rescuer, who worked for the parish, and his wife saved about a hundred stranded people with their boat, she recalls. An armada of volunteers went out in small craft that week and ferried uncounted thousands, tens of thousands, to dry ground. Bartholomew herself got dropped off at a high school and slept on the floor that Monday night. From there, she was evacuated to the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, and when I met her, she was trying to make a home of an empty apartment in San Francisco and keep tabs on when she would be allowed to return to fix her house. She endured something like the apocalypse, more so than most people can imagine, but her ordeal had comparatively few stages. An ordeal of wind and water, an evacuation, an awful time in the Astrodome, and a long exile.
A lot of people who lived in New Orleans Parish went through more. Cory Delaney, a twenty-four-year-old from a one-story home in the outskirts of New Orleans, went with his father, his disabled mother, and a few other relatives to take shelter in his aunt’s two-story house in the city. From there everything went wrong. The possessions on the ground floor began to float in the seeping water, and then the water began to climb the stairs. They were stranded, and a help sign on the roof brought nothing. They ran out of water to drink, and the helicoptors flying by that they hoped would rescue them kept going, guns pointing out the window. On the third day as he began building a raft, a boat came. He carried his mother, while other relatives carried her wheelchair. At the staging area were more men with guns: a policeman with an M16 in hand who told them to walk to the top of the interstate and wait for a bus. They settled in with about two thousand people. Buses did begin to come by, but some didn’t stop, and others took away the most vulnerable.
Delaney found himself in a group of about twenty-five that began to function as a social unit—a lot of people stranded by Katrina would become part of these improvised communities that took care of each other and made decisions together. But sitting on the shadeless blacktop of an elevated highway surrounded by water reflecting back the glare and humid heat was too much for his frail mother. One policeman came and gave them water, but the next round of police to come by “got out of their cars with their M16s and their AK-47s ready to shoot somebody. They told us to back up like we was all fugitives. They pointed their guns at us and told us, ‘They not coming for ya’ll. Ya’ll got to fend for yourself. Try to walk to the Superdome’ So we walked down there pulling my mama, and nobody tried to help. They just ride past—people riding past in boats taking pictures of us like we was just some homeless people, refugees or something. We stayed out there two more nights sleeping on the interstate, this is like five nights now. We was just all frustrated, didn’t know what to do. I had to build a tent over my mama to keep the shade on her ’cause she was dehydrated. She wasn’t eating and wasn’t drinking too much. I mean, she was like going away. So we’re praying, we got people coming up to us praying for my mama.” He asked people for help, to no avail, until finally the National Guard got them on a truck to the suburb of Metarie, where his mother got priority for evacuation—and was whisked away, lost to the rest of the family for days. Eventually, the rest of the family got a bus to Texas. “We ended up in this concentration-like camp with barbed-wire fences and snipers, like we did something wrong.” At the time of his interview, he was in Minnesota, about as displaced as a person could be without leaving his country.
He wasn’t the only one to end up with a succession of guns pointed at him. Fed by racism and the enormity of the storm, the elite panic reached extraordinary levels in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That generated a disaster of its own, whereby the victims of Katrina were regarded as menaces and monsters, and the response shifted from rescue to control and worse. Katrina was a succession of disasters, the somewhat natural disaster of the storm, the strictly unnatural disaster of the failing levees that flooded St. Bernard Parish and much of New Orleans, the social devastation of the failure or refusal of successive layers of government to supply evacuation and relief, and the appalling calamity of the way that local and then state and federal authorities decided to regard victims as criminals and turned New Orleans into a prison city, in which many had guns pointed at them and many were prevented from evacuating. Or killed. Or left to die.
Of course, as Kathleen Tierney pointed out to me, Katrina wasn’t a disaster. It was a catastrophe, far larger in scale than almost anything in American history. An emergency is local—a house burns down, a hospital floods. A disaster covers a city or a small region. After the 1906 earthquake you could just cross the bay for sanctuary, and half the city remained standing anyway. After 9/11 you just had to evacuate lower Manhattan; the rest of the island and other boroughs were fine. On September 11, many people in New York City sat home ordering takeout and watching TV about “New York Under Attack.” The day after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake my power was restored so that I could sit near the exact center of San Francisco and watch network news report on my city’s destruction. After Katrina, 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded, all vital services were wrecked or suspended, and ninety thousand square miles of the coastal south were declared a disaster area. The most impacted areas of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana had devastation far inland. The storm surge alone had pushed ocean water—a nearly thirty-foot-high wall of it in places like Biloxi—miles in from the coast. Places like New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward were underwater for weeks, and basic services were not restored for months. Many places will never return to anything like what they were before August 29, 2005; many communities and extended families were permanently ripped asunder.
But much of what happened after the levees broke didn’t have to. It was the result of fear. When Tierney was speaking about elite panic—“fear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities, and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor”—she was talking shortly after Katrina, perhaps the worst case of elite panic in the history of the United States. New Orleans had long been a high-crime city, but the mythic city of monsters the media and authorities invented in the wake of Katrina never existed, except in their imagination. That belief ravaged the lives of tens of thousands of the most vulnerable.
The Corpses That Weren’t There
“What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?” William James had asked in his second lecture on pragmatism. In the hours, days, and weeks after Katrina, those with one set of beliefs were responsible for many deaths; those with another saved many lives. Fear fed by rumors and lies and lurking unexamined beliefs about human nature hit New Orleans like a second hurricane. Ray Nagin and Eddie Compass, respectively the mayor and police chief of New Orleans (and both African Americans), contributed to the atmosphere of fear and turmoil. About twenty thousand people had taken refuge in the downtown Superdome sports arena, which had been opened up as a shelter of last resort but was not stocked with anything near the needed quantity of food and water or backup power. The hurricane had
ripped off part of the roof, the restrooms backed up and the plumbing failed, so that sewage seeped out into the rest of the facility, and without air-conditioning and adequate electricity the place became a dark, fetid, chaotic oven. Much of the area surrounding its raised concrete perimeter was flooded. People were not allowed to leave, prisoners of the fears of those in power. Rumors of savagery inside abounded. Compass told the television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, “We had little babies in there. . . . Some of the little babies getting raped.” He was overwhelmed by sobs on television and eventually had a breakdown. Nagin reported that there were “hundreds of gang members” in the Superdome, raping and murdering. During his Oprah moment, he told the national audience that people had been “in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”
Despite the assumption that the Superdome and Convention Center had become nests of vipers, the media focus was for a while on the retail outlets on dry ground reportedly being plundered. The hysteria about looting became so intense that two and a half days after the storm, on August 31, Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco called emergency responders—police and National Guard, mostly—off search and rescue to focus on combating looting. They had chosen protecting property over saving lives. Put that way, the decision sounds bizarre, but the word looting itself is maddening to some minds, creating images of chaos, danger, and boundless savagery. What difference would it make if we were blasé about property and passionate about human life? Governor Blanco said, “These are some of the forty thousand extra troops that I have demanded. They have M16s, and they’re locked and loaded. . . . I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.” Ninety-nine years later things had not changed from the San Francisco mayor’s infamous “shoot to kill” proclamation that also focused on looting.
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 28
