Property matters in another sense: San Francisco’s government emphasizes that citizens are likely to be on their own for the first seventy-two hours after an earthquake, but the poor are unlikely to set aside the earthquake emergency kits and supplies, including food and water, the city urged all citizens to keep on hand. As for New Orleans, Hurricane Gustav threatened the city three years after Katrina, and the event was a measure of what had changed and what was still rotten. Images of water lapping over the levees flanking the Lower Ninth Ward suggested that they were not nearly high enough. The Superdome had a gigantic lock on it, and no one was invited to shelter in place. This time Mayor Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation in time, but for the estimated thirty thousand without resources to evacuate themselves, this meant lining up for a long wait for buses to unknown destinations. The evacuees were processed, given wrist bracelets, and bused to warehouses, where they were confined. Many were subjected to arrest and imprisonment after background checks—though thanks to New Orleans’s shoddy record-keeping, many of them were arrested for charges that had been dismissed but not cleared. Background checks constitute part of the criminalization of disaster victims. An estimated half of all undocumented immigrants in New Orleans were trapped by fear of being denied services or deported and did not evacuate—and this population is deeply imperiled by such criminalization. Many who evacuated by means of the government vowed not to do so again.
It was hard this time around to say whether the problem was the system in that moment or the poverty that consigned so many to such a crude and criminalizing system. Many lessons had still not been learned. As the storm approached, CNN ran a teaser about rape, murder, and looting, and Nagin announced, in a threat played over and over, “Anyone who’s caught looting will be sent directly to Angola”—the notorious former slave plantation and current maximum-security prison. “You will go directly to Angola Prison and God bless you when you get there.” In the same speech he warned that the thousands of FEMA trailers from which those still displaced after three years had presumably been evacuated “will become projectiles” in the violent winds. New Orleans was vulnerable not only because of its setting—facing the great cauldron of hurricanes that is the Caribbean across an eroded buffer zone of wetlands in an era of climate change—but because of its social divides and injustices.
Fixing those wrongs and wounds in New Orleans and everywhere else is the work that everyday disaster requires of us. Recognizing the wealth of meaning and love such work provides is the reward everyday disaster invites us to claim. Joy matters too, and that it is found in this most unpromising of circumstances demonstrates again the desires that have survived dreariness and division for so long. The existing system is built on fear of each other and of scarcity, and it has created more scarcity and more to be afraid of. It is mitigated every day by altruism, mutual aid, and solidarity, by the acts of individuals and organizations who are motivated by hope and by love rather than fear. They are akin to a shadow government—another system ready to do more were they voted into power. Disaster votes them in, in a sense, because in an emergency these skills and ties work while fear and divisiveness do not. Disaster reveals what else the world could be like—reveals the strength of that hope, that generosity, and that solidarity. It reveals mutual aid as a default operating principle and civil society as something waiting in the wings when it’s absent from the stage.
A world could be built on that basis, and to do so would redress the long divides that produce everyday pain, poverty, and loneliness and in times of crisis homicidal fear and opportunism. This is the only paradise that is possible, and it will never exist whole, stable, and complete. It is always coming into being in response to trouble and suffering; making paradise is the work that we are meant to do. All the versions of an achieved paradise sound at best like an eternal vacation, a place where we would have no meaning to make. The paradises built in hell are improvisational; we make them up as we go along, and in so doing they call on all our strength and creativity and leave us free to invent even as we find ourselves enmeshed in community. These paradises built in hell show us both what we want and what we can be.
In the 1906 earthquake, a mansion burned down but its stone portals remained standing. A photograph shows that suddenly, rather than framing the entrance to a private interior, they framed the whole city beyond the hill where the ruins stood. Disaster sometimes knocks down institutions and structures and suspends private life, leaving a broader view of what lies beyond. The task before us is to recognize the possibilities visible through that gateway and endeavor to bring them into the realm of the everyday.
GRATITUDE
Disasters take place on the scale of the personal as well, and for those who are lucky they muster a small version of disaster utopias and societies. I was lucky. Midway through the writing of this book, I underwent a short-lived but serious illness. The medical details don’t matter here, but the social ones do. I had lived through the stories of many disasters, spent time with people who evacuated the Twin Towers or found themselves stranded on a roof during Katrina, been much affected by my own city during the Loma Prieta quake of 1989, been around floods and fires, but this was a more intense experience for me and very much one of disaster in miniature. With what I had learned from my researches, I regarded my own mental and emotional states with great interest. At one point I was so exhausted that much of what I ordinarily cared about didn’t matter, and I was content to be rather than do. There was a strange serenity to this condition, a suspension of ordinary time and ordinary annoyances and ambitions. As Fritz had noted, “Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries, inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and future because they force people to concentrate their full attention on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs within the context of the present realities.” So does illness. Going on being—surviving—was the task at hand, and it was entirely absorbing.
As the illness faded, I found that it had made me fiercer—less willing to waste my time and more urgent about what mattered. As Gioconda Belli had said about the Managua earthquake, “You realize that life has to be lived well or is not worth living. It’s a very profound transformation that takes place during catastrophes. It’s like a near-death experience but lived collectively.” After the way the people around me rose to the occasion, I was left with confidence that the love and bonds that mattered had been and would be there. In a weak moment, I wished that life could always be like this and then realized that I didn’t need such tender care the rest of the time but that it was always there, latent, implicit, a premise from which I could operate all the time. It made everyday life a little better. And it made me think the same latencies pertain to the society at large, not consistently, but in ways that can matter a lot.
This book is dedicated to the citizens of my own small disaster utopia, with love:Tom Tina Susan Sam Rebecca Pam Mike Marina David Antonia Amy
This project began as the Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture at Jesus College of Cambridge University, commissioned by Professor Rod Mengham there, and became a talk at Yale’s Agrarian Studies collo quium, where Professor James Scott provided brilliant commentary and encouragement. It then metamorphosed into an essay for Harper’s magazine that went to press the day Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. My splendid editor there, Luke Mitchell, insisted that my optimism about human nature would be proven right even while I quailed at the avalanche of stories claiming sheer savagery had been unloosed. Luke was right. I equivocated for a while, but the sorrows and secrets of Katrina made it seem important to continue a project that had begun almost as a whim, an investigation of the strange joy I’d found in my own 1989 earthquake experiences and elsewhere, and became a long excavation into unacknowledged social desires and possibilities. Thus, this book.
Over and over again, I went looking for the meaning of disaster and found friendship as well. Dan Bollwinkle, who came along early to transcribe dozens of interviews and to talk a
bout his own good work on the tsunami in Thailand, was particularly generous, as was sociologist Michael Schwartz, who appeared via our connection at TomDispatch. com at the perfect moment to read the first draft and provide brilliantly insightful analysis and critique of the social and political ideas here and considerable encouragement. Also providing valuable readings of the first draft were Brad Erickson, Adam Hochschild, and Marina Sitrin.
The great disaster scholars Kathleen Tierney, Lee Clarke, and Enrico Quarantelli were generous with their time and knowledge, and this project owes a huge debt—as does, I think, this society—to their achievements in this field. Two years running I attended the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center annual disaster studies conference and benefited greatly from the presentations and conversation. In each of the places I visited and wrote about, I again received generosity and a plethora of ideas. Bob Bean, in Halifax, inspired me to investigate disasters more deeply after my 2003 visit there and let me question him further later on.
In San Francisco, a project on the 1906 earthquake with my friends Mark Klett, Michael Lundgren, and Philip Fradkin got me going, and as usual I relied on the San Francisco Public Library and Bancroft and the other libraries at UC, Berkeley and remain grateful to those institutions and their librarians.
My friend Nate Miller dropped everything to accompany me to Mexico City at the last minute and was a huge help; my dear friend Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s ancestral home in the city served as our base, and Laura Carlsen, Marco Ramirez, Gustavo Esteva, John Holloway, Marisol Hernandez, Alejandro Miranda, John Ross, Jose Luis Paredo Pacho, and others were generous with their time, ideas, and memories. Guillermo was the first to tell me how profound a political upheaval the earthquake had been—he himself had participated in the relief activities—and Iain Boal sent along valuable readings on the subject early on.
In New York, the Columbia University Oral History Office’s fantastic 9/11 interviews were a major source for the section on 9/11, and Tobin James Mueller and Pat Enkyu O’Hara kindly made time to talk to me, as did, back in California, Jordan Schuster, Michael Noble, and Astra Taylor.
On my first visit to New Orleans after Katrina, Jennifer Whitney and Jordan Flaherty were generous with their time and local knowledge, as was the sociologist Emmanuel David; on my second visit I crossed paths with Christian Roselund, who was also a big help; Rebecca Snedeker became a great friend and good guide who supplied important resources, encouragement, insight, and inspiration. So many people were generous with time and conversation at a difficult time for their city, including Malik Rahim; Linda Jackson, of NENA; Pam Dashiell and Sharon Lambertson, of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association; Brian Den zer; Darryl Malek-Wiley, of the Sierra Club; Aislyn Colgan, formerly of the Common Ground Clinic; Brian from Habitat for Humanity; Emily Posner from Common Ground; Felipe Chavez; Kate Foyle; Mark Weiner from Emergency Communities; my fellow San Franciscans Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky; and Clara Bartholemew, whom I interviewed for Abe Louise Young’s Austin-based Alive in Truth oral history project in November 2005, and Abe herself, who also became a friend.
Katrina vanden Heuvel, at The Nation, listened to me when no one else did about the unreported murders of the hurricane, and Adam Clay Thompson took up the story of the murders and nailed down all the facts and details with brilliant detective work over the next year. The Nation sustained a long lawsuit to access the coroner’s records that should’ve been public but weren’t, and the world owes them a debt for doing everything in their power to get the truth out and see justice done. Working with A.C. was a joy.
Donnell Herrington, the young man nearly killed by racist vigilantes in the aftermath of Katrina, spent three days with Adam and me three years later. My gratitude for his trust that we would do his story justice and my admiration for his gifts as a storyteller and his strength as a survivor in the face of horror are boundless. Time spent with him was an honor.
Thi, the monk in charge of the Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Biloxi; Dr. Don LaGrone; the Buddhist community of Biloxi; and Carmen Mauk of Burners Without Borders were likewise generous with their time and stories. So was Gioconda Belli during a wonderful afternoon at her house in Santa Monica.
Some of the second draft of this book was completed while I was a senior Mellon scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and thanks go to them for support to focus on the work—and for giving me the opportunity to travel to New Orleans one more time.
I’ve now been working with my editor, Paul Slovak, at Viking, for a dozen years and with my agent, Bonnie Nadell, longer—more reasons to be grateful.
Rebecca Solnit
September 2008, San Francisco/New Orleans/Montreal
NOTES
Prelude: Falling Together
4 The man in charge: The man who had so much to say about the hurricane was Bob Bean, of Nova Scotia School of Art and Design.
I. A MILLENNIAL GOOD FELLOWSHIP: THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE
The Mizpah Café
13 Mrs. Anna Amelia Holshouser: In “The Great Fire of 1906” series on the disaster, Argonaut, May 14, 1927.
14 There they spread an old quilt: Many of these shacks and camp kitchens can be seen in photographs at the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection of the San Francisco Public Library and at the Bancroft Library’s online site, http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/earthquakeandfire/index2.html/.
15 “when the tents of the refugees”: Edwin Emerson, in Malcolm E. Barker, ed., Three Fearful Days: San Francisco Memoirs of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire (San Francisco: Londonborn Publications, 1998), 301.
16 “in cordial appreciation of her prompt”: Argonaut, May 21, 1927.
18 “A map of the world”: Oscar Wilde (quoting from Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”), in Robert V. Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 8.
19 “Stalinists and their ilk”: David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 11.
21 “The number of weather-related disasters has quadrupled over the past”: “Climate Alarm, 2007”: Oxfam Briefing Paper 108.
Pauline Jacobson’s Joy
24 Mary Austen: “The Temblor,” in David Starr Jordan, ed., The California Earthquake of 1906 (San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1907), 355.
24 H. C. Schmitt: Argonaut, May 8, 1926.
25 Thomas A. Burns: Argonaut, May 29, 1926.
26 Maurice Behan: Argonaut, June 19 and 26, 1926.
26 A man from the business department: Bulletin, May 25, 1906.
27 The plumbers union: Information at http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/plumbers.html/.
27 Charles Reddy: Argonaut, July 31, 1926.
28 William G. Harvey: Argonaut, March 5, 1927.
29 “The best thing about the earthquake”: Eric Temple Bell, in Barker, Three Fearful Days, 143.
30 “Remarkable as it may seem,” Jack London, in ibid., 134-35.
30 Charles B. Sedgewick: In ibid., 209.
30 “Owing to the fact that every bank”: Argonaut, April 21, 1906.
31 “a stock of face creams and soap and dresses”: Pauline Jacobson, “How It Feels to Be a Refugee and Have Nothing, By Someone Who Is One of Them,” Bulletin, April 29, 1906.
33 “Modish young women”: Bulletin, April 30, 1906.
General Funston’s Fear
34 “Without warrant of law and without being requested”: Frederick Funston, letter to the editor, Argonaut, July 7, 1906.
34 General Sheridan: In Dennis Smith, San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires (New York: Viking, 2005), 90.
35 as many as five hundred citizens were killed by the occupying forces: Ibid., 157: “A miner, Oliver Posey, testified in a deposition that ‘instant death to scores was the fate for vandalism; the soldiers executed summary justice.’ Like all statistical evidence for the four days of fire, the number of civilians executed by sold
iers varies widely from account to account. Funston himself admits in his narrative to three, and there are accounts that claim as many as five hundred were killed. Based on eyewitness testimonies collected with extraordinary care by the director of the San Francisco virtual museum, Gladys Hansen, the total number of people shot down by the military is estimated to be at least five hundred—one-sixth of the three thousand victims the virtual museum cites as having perished in the earthquake and fire. Any educated analysis of the period would suggest that the actual tally is much closer to Ms. Hansen’s figure than to General Funston’s.” But he cautions, “If as many as five hundred people were shot by soldiers, it can be assumed that there would be many more firsthand accounts of these shootings than actually exist.” The lower estimate is from Philip Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 140: “One researcher placed the number at 490. I doubt if the number exceeded 50 or 75 such murders, which was no small amount.”
35 “unlicked mob”: Argonaut, March 19, 1927.
36 “The Federal Troops . . . have been authorized by me to KILL”: Widely cited and reproduced; a copy of the broadside may be seen at http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/killproc.html/.
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