And then there were the groups descended from the countercultures, the not-always-beloved communities of resistance of the 1960s, the Black Panthers and the Rainbow Family, as well as a lot of young anarchists connected to more recent movements around economic and environmental justice and human rights. Often while the big groups were still sorting out their business or entangled in bureaucracy, the small groups these radicals begat were able to move faster, to stay longer, to sink deeper, to improvise more fitting responses to the needs of the hour. The volunteers became their own culture. And much of the positive experience of disaster seemed to belong to them, not to the residents.
Six months after the hurricane, I stopped in at the Made with Love Café, in St. Bernard Parish, just across the line from the Lower Ninth. The dining room was a big tent where volunteers served three hot meals a day to hundreds of returnees. New Orleanians called it “the hippie kitchen.” Behind a young woman in a bandanna and undershirt serving up food, a sign painted on cardboard in bright colors read, “To Emergency Communities Made with Love Café & all the amazing residents: WE WILL NOT FORGET YOU!” A black woman and white man were singing and playing music as people sat at long tables talking and eating. Around the main pavilion was a collection of tents, trailers, temporary buildings and other tarp-covered structures, a packaged food giveaway, a yoga site, and various other amenities. I struck up a conversation with one of the volunteers, Roger, who was walking his two elderly greyhound rescue dogs around the back of the complex. A white-haired white retiree with a thick Boston accent, Roger seemed almost transfigured by joy when he spoke of his work in this little community. He and his wife worked in the supplies site, handing out free stuff. They had found the volunteer opportunity on the Web, driven down to participate, and were, when I met them, six weeks into an eight-week stay.
Half an hour later, I met an African American man who’d been in New Orleans all his life. We were standing at the site where the infamous barge bashed through the levee to flood the Ninth Ward. Looking downcast, this substantial middle-aged man told me he had grown up at the levee breach in a house that had become a pile of splinters and rubble, though after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, his family had moved uptown. This day six months later was the first time he felt ready to come and look at the devastation. He had been evacuated from New Orleans, spent three months in Houston, come back, but he said it didn’t feel like home anymore, and it never would. He was grieved and embittered by the way people like him had been treated in the eventual evacuation and upon their return. If he could win the lottery, he told me, he would leave New Orleans for good. This spectrum, from Roger’s joy to the local’s despair, was New Orleans early on.
The out-of-town volunteers were often very different from the locals, emotionally and culturally. But they weren’t necessarily at odds. I asked Linda Jackson, a former laundromat owner who became a key staff person at NENA, the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network, how the community felt about the assistance pouring in from around the world. She replied in her whispery voice, “They’re stunned. They never thought the world would reach out the way they did. I’m not going to say that it makes up for [the initial, official Katrina response], but the help that we’ve been given from throughout the United States and the world, it makes us work that much harder. We say: you know what, if these people can come down here and take off of work, drop out of school for a couple weeks, there’s no way, there’s just no way we can have a negative attitude.”
Over and over again I met volunteers who told me they initially came for a week or two but who three months, six months, a year later were still at work in New Orleans. One morning in June of 2007, I stopped at the Musicians’ Village that Habitat for Humanity was building in the Upper Ninth Ward—a whole neighborhood of small, tidy row houses raised well off the ground and painted in bright colors. I struck up a conversation with a small, dark man of unclear ethnicity and a very distinct Harley-Davidson motorcycle, Brian from Monterey, California. He told me that ten months earlier, in August of 2006, he had taken a detour to New Orleans from his journey to watch the leaves change in Vermont. “And I was going to stay for a month, but after a couple weeks they realized that I was the only trim carpenter they had. So they asked me to stay.” Habitat for Humanity was founded by a wealthy couple who realized that their money wasn’t giving them purpose or joy; it is a Christian group and one that has a strategy for integrating volunteers and locals. They call it “sweat equity”: the future homeowners must work on the houses—though in New Orleans the houses were going up in such numbers that the homeowners would sometimes be chosen only later. Brian said that for him, it wasn’t about saving New Orleans or social justice: “At first I thought it was, or I just wanted to help because it was such a mess. In New Orleans East, this elderly couple had been in this house thirty-five or forty years, very elderly, they couldn’t get anybody to tear it down, they had no insurance, they had to get the lot leveled, so every day they would burn. They would tear off part of their house and burn it in the front yard. You see stuff like that and you just get angry. The money’s there. The money is there, and like I said, at first I thought I was doing it for an idealistic reason, but I get more out of it than I put into it, a lot more. I get letters and postcards from people that have been here, and a lot of them just can’t wait to get back. I’m doing it for the people here, the people I’m working with, and the volunteers. That’s where I get my love from.”
Finding Common Ground
It started out with shotguns on a front porch, transformed into young medics bicycling through the streets offering assistance to anyone and everyone who wanted it, and it ended up as dozens of relief and reconstruction projects around the city and thousands of volunteers. Malik Rahim, the former Black Panther who reported to anyone who listened that vigilantes were murdering African American men in Algiers, recalls, “Right after the hurricane I got into a confrontation with some white vigilantes in Algiers, and when I got into them I seen that I was over-matched. I had access to a couple of weapons, and maybe enough ammunition that I could withstand maybe two, three firefights with them, and that’s about it. I made a call for some help. Scott Crow and Brandon Darby came to assist us.” Crow and Darby were white activists from Texas who had worked with Rahim on the case of the Angola 3—former Black Panthers who had endured decades of solitary confinement on questionable charges. One of them, Robert King Wilkerson, had been exonerated and released, and the young Texans came to check in on him. Their adventures in eluding the authorities, launching a boat, exploring the city by water, and eventually being united with King were considerable, and at the end the two young white activists, the two older ex-Panthers, and Rahim’s partner, Sharon Johnson, sat together in Algiers and talked.
As Rahim, a substantial, powerful, deep-voiced man with long dreadlocks, remembers it, “Scott on the morning of the fifth of September, he said it was time that we organize. And when he told us this, we sat down at my kitchen table and we started organizing Common Ground. The name came from Robert King Wilkerson. King said that what we have to do—because our main discussion was upon how come social movements, all social movements, in America start off with a bang and end with a fizzle—what he said was that we allow all our petty differences to divide us. And King said what we have to find then is that common ground that’s going to bring everybody together. So with that we said, ‘Hey, that’s it, Common Ground, let that be the name.’ ” The response brought up another King, the one who had popularized the term “beloved community” and declared, “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
Rahim continued, “After that I had twenty dollars, Sharon put up thirty dollars, and with that we financed Common Ground.” Millions of dollars would follow. “And from there we was blessed that our phones were still working, so from there we started getting on the phone. We started calling around the country to everyone we knew, and started asking them for some assistance. After that here comes Veterans for
Peace. The first to come up was the Veterans for Peace from Florida, and they brought up a bunch of supplies. The next thing you know people start coming. Cindy Sheehan came. And with her came a lot of help. By then we had opened up our health clinic, at least it was a first-aid station by then. A group from France came and helped us make the transition. We organized Common Ground Relief on the fifth of September, and on the ninth we organized a first-aid station. And then maybe three weeks later we made the transition from a first-aid station to a bona fide health clinic. But when it was a first-aid station, it was open twenty-four-seven; we must have been serving at one time from 100 to 150 people a day. Again, like I said, I’m a spiritual person and I truly believe that the Most High casts no burden on you greater than you could bear. My life has been a life of community activism, so I was always able to call upon some of the things that he had blessed me with to provide, to use now in this time of need. A food distribution center was easy for us to start with because this was what I learned how to do when I was in the Panther Party. The health clinic or the first-aid station: again, what we did in the Panther Party.”
The Panthers had started out as an oppositional group to fight police brutality and discrimination in the inner city. The rhetoric of the Panthers was fiery, and the images of young African Americans with weapons and spectacular shoot-outs with the police (and ambushes by police in which Panthers died) were all too memorable. Much of the rest of the Panthers’ achievements have been overshadowed by their outlaw glamour and “off the pigs” rhetoric. The year of its founding, 1966, the Party had come up with a “ten-point program” whose last point was, “We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace, and people’s community control of modern technology.” As the party spread to cities across the United States, the members went about providing some of those things. They fed breakfast to schoolchildren, tested for sickle-cell anemia, and escorted elders to the bank to cash their checks safely. They called these “survival programs.” The term underscores how much the inner city felt like a disaster zone.
Common Ground started out with its own survival programs. And the truth of the organization’s name was borne out by a clinic that immediately began offering medical services to everyone on the West Bank—including some of the vigilantes who confessed about the murders to the medics while receiving care. Rahim credits the medics who bicycled around the area with preventing an all-out race war in the volatile area. They went door-to-door checking on people, offering care, and softening the divides and fears. At first Common Ground was run largely out of Johnson and Rahim’s modest one-story house, and then the storefront clinic nearby in Algiers was added.
In the Lower Ninth Ward, Common Ground set up a tool-lending station, and as the volunteers began to flood in, some were put to work gutting houses ruined by the floodwaters. Others began to work on bioremediation, on a soup kitchen, and on other projects. It was an ambitious organization that planned, in addition to basic survival programs, to replant the cypress swamps killed off by the salt water of the MR-GO canal on the north side of the Lower Ninth, to try to take over a big apartment complex on the West Bank to lodge many of Katrina’s displaced, and to publish a small newspaper for a while. Sometimes its reach exceeded its grasp: the housing project fell through, after a lot of time and money were squandered on it.
The organization was sometimes criticized for bringing white people into black communities, for attempting to make policy as well as practical change, for the ambitious scope of its plans and programs, for its sometimes turbulent internal politics. Thousands of volunteers cycled through, bringing fresh energy—and chaos. A lot of the activists needed to be oriented on how to work across cultural and racial differences. Many came from groups that operated by consensus and wanted that form of direct democracy to be the modus operandi at Common Ground. Allowing transient volunteers to make major decisions without living with the consequences didn’t make sense to Common Ground’s leadership, and so a lot of friction resulted.
Still, the extremely informal methods often worked, and they allowed improvisation in constantly changing circumstances. Emily Posner, a white volunteer who came early on and stayed a long time, recalled, “After the disaster, it was amazing; the Red Cross had a hundred warehouses all over the place and their stuff was just sitting there. Sit, sit, sit, and then we would befriend some Red Cross workers and say: ‘Come on, we need to drive our trucks in here.’ So we would just get the stuff and get it out and distribute it all over the community. And we did this in not just Red Cross warehouses but all kinds of groups. We had a network of grassroots people working together all over the Gulf. ‘We have all this chicken and no electricity yet—can we send a truck over to your community? ’ And that way the most amount of people would get something. There’s all kinds of communities within Common Ground. When you work with eleven thousand people [the number of volunteers who had passed through by early 2007], hundreds of people have taken up, at a certain point, long-term roles. While it’s an informal thing, there are friendships that have been made that will last forever, and those friendships will be needed in the future for sure. We’re a network of people now that if a storm happens we know what to do. And we’ll all call each other.”
When it worked well, people on both sides of the old racial divides went away with changed perceptions. The volunteers mitigated the racial violence and demonization of the first days after the storm. And they went back to their homes and communities around the country, often transformed in some ways by the experience, and spread the word. This kind of social change is incalculable but important. When he studied Common Ground’s beginnings, disaster scholar Emmanuel David thought of Freedom Summer, the movement to register Mississippi voters in 1964, which brought a lot of college-age youth from around the country down to witness and combat racism and poverty. They then went home again bearing stories of what they had seen, galvanized to keep working toward some version of the beloved community. Freedom Summer is a landmark in American history, but the actual number of participants in rebuilding New Orleans is far, far larger—certainly in the hundreds of thousands at this point, but no one is counting. Of course, what transpired also made visible who had abundance and who was destitute—a nation of haves and have nots.
Rahim says the encounters his organization fomented “showed blacks that all whites are not evil or oppressors or exploiters because here that’s the only thing that we ever had. And it showed the whites that all blacks here are not criminals, that there are good God-fearing people here.” Volunteers stayed in rough barracks in the community, often in reclaimed buildings. “We work with solidarity. That means that if you work here, you going to have to stay here. You going to have to keep your presence in the community, and it breached those gaps. We was the first organization to reach out to the Native American community in Houma, we was the first organization to reach out to the Vietnamese community here.” Common Ground’s motto is Solidarity, Not Charity, an emphasis on working with rather than for that sets it apart from many national relief groups, however messy its realization of its goals. Projects begat projects. The clinic split off to become a separate organization, Common Ground Clinic, which begat the Latino Health Outreach Project, which for a few years provided outreach and aid to the hordes of mostly undocumented immigrants who arrived to do the hard work of demolishing and rebuilding the city.
Aislyn Colgan, the young medic who had told me about vigilantes confessing to her about the murders, reflected on her nearly two years on and off with the Common Ground Clinic: “I was only twenty-five when I came down here, and I was in the middle age range. There were very few people over the age of forty, so no one had any experience and we were all learning how to be a leader without being forceful, and a lot of people had different ideas about that. I use the excuse all the time: it was so life and death, that chaos and crisis was propelling a lot of our actions. It took a long time for the clinic to transition. I don’t think it was until right when I wa
s leaving that we realized that we have to keep that spirit alive, the spirit that it was created in, that ‘we have to just give everything we can.’ We were open twelve hours a day, seven days a week the first three months and giving, giving, giving because that was the spirit that it was created in and how do you institutionalize that? How do you make it sustainable?
“It is so rare that you get an opportunity to put into action what maybe you’ve sat around the coffee table and talked with someone about. When do you ever see that the powers that be are failing at their duty, and when do you ever get the chance to move beyond being angry about it and actually do something very concrete and tangible and immediate? Like, you can’t provide these people with health care, but we’re here and we can do it. We would get calls from the Red Cross asking us if we had any gloves because they were out of gloves. You’re the Red Cross, you just got billions of dollars donated to you and you don’t have gloves? And here we are getting everything donated to us through all of these informal networks of organizations, and the National Guard was referring people to us. The systems that you’d expect to be in place were just not, and we were able to provide, to fill that gap. I was really surprised by—I don’t know if the right word is empathy—but I was really surprised by just how far down you go with someone. I really built my life around the struggle the last year and a half. I gave every ounce of my attention to this city and it really has changed my whole way of thinking about things and viewing the world.
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 35
