City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  Nobody had ever thanked Wesley for being steady before, or a source of strength. It was a strange thing to hear, but it made him feel like he had done something good, himself. He liked the idea that Uncle J would have been proud of him. But he wasn’t really sure what he had done. “All I did was cook some pork chops,” he said.

  “Well…” Art said. “Sometimes that’s enough.”

  They went and watched the news, and then Art asked Wesley if he liked Western movies and Wesley asked him what he had, and they looked through Art’s stash of war movies and Westerns and finally settled on The Searchers. They both fell asleep about halfway through.

  17

  Okay, you’re on the air, Bill from Grafton, Wisconsin, Get Wise.

  Bobby?

  You’re on, sir.

  Hi. What I’d like to know, is [garbled].

  Bill, you broke up a little there.

  Sorry, what I said is some of these people if they sat in the middle of a railroad track and a train hit ’em they’d sue the railroad. How much money are the trial lawyers milking out of the rest of us for these lawsuits, and—by the way—now they’d call it a ‘hate crime.’ What I’d like to know is when are these people going to realize that they need to [garbled]…

  Bill? Okay…looks like we lost you there, Bill; thanks for your call. Ray, from New Braunfels, Texas, Get Wise.

  Yeah, Hello Mr. Wise.

  Hi Ray. What’s on your mind?

  I’d like to know this. Two things.

  Okay.

  One is, these people are trying to turn the federal government into the place of God almighty. What I mean, instead of praying to the Lord to provide, and then helping themselves some, what you call lifting yourself up, and placing faith in God, they want the government to do everything for them. That’s number one.

  Well, that’s because they have no other God to believe in. I guess they have to believe in something.

  That’s number one. Number two—I don’t hear anyone talking about what’s been going on in these places to where the Lord would get angry enough to send the storms on them. There’s fornication, gambling—some of these casinos, which I have seen in pictures, you can’t even see past ’em they’re so big—crimes, robberies, holdups, what have you. I mean, people don’t see a pattern in this? When the Lord got angry with the city of Babylon, what happened?

  He razed it.

  He razed it. And the Lord is bringing the waters now upon them, but instead of praying to Him they praying to the government and the television with all its filth. And they wonder why their roof falls in. You see them on TV crying about this or that. If I warn you about something five times and you don’t do anything about it, don’t cry to me. Like that last caller said about sitting in a railroad track. Don’t ask me to pay your hospital bill if you’re too stupid to get off the tracks…

  Well, Ray, first of all we want to say that nobody wants to see people get hurt, and of course for the elderly, or little children…

  I’m not sayin’ that, Bobby…

  Hold…hold on, there, Ray…I know you’re not. But I think you touched on something important there. You know for liberals, if there are any liberals listening right now, I’ll tell you exactly what they are thinking. They are laughing at you because they can’t even conceive of what faith is. To them if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. They call that materialism, and it goes straight back to Karl Marx, even though some of them have gotten smart enough to say they don’t believe in Communism anymore.

  Well, it fell apart on ’em…

  A lot of them haven’t noticed (laughter of guest over phone). But they still have that faith in the government being the Great Father who’s supposed to do everything for them. And now you see what has happened. And they see all these faces of people crying on the TV, which of course the media is milking this for all it’s worth, crying people, going “Why don’t you help us?” Well, I’m sorry, but unless you are a little baby, the question really should be, “Why didn’t you help yourself?” Ray, we’re going to have to move to the next caller; this is Sheila from Kennett, Missouri. Sheila, Get Wise.

  Mr. Wise?

  You’re on the air.

  Yes. I have been listening to these last few callers, and what I wanted to say is this. You all believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ. You have a personal relationship with the Lord.

  Yes.

  What I don’t hear in what the people has said is any compassion for people in trouble. You seem so mean…I haven’t listened to your show before this, but we had to evacuate here and I heard your show…

  Where did you evacuate from, ma’am?

  We are from New Orleans.

  Well I am glad that you listened to the warnings and got out and made it to safety.

  Thank you, praise God, but there was a lot of people in New Orleans and other places who weren’t…who didn’t have the means to get out. And also the people whose houses got flooded out, that was the fault of the levees. They had levees that cracked and that’s what sent the water. Now people can’t fix a levee by themselves. But what I mean is, how can you look at people when they suffering, some of these people lost their parents or children…My brother had his two children had to be sent two different places. Families got tore apart, and some of these people had nothing to begin with. And it seem to me that if we are talking about what Jesus would do or say, how can you look at people suffering…

  Ma’am……and say “I wash my hands of him.” You almost sound like you’re making fun of people who lost their house…

  Ma’am…If that is how I sounded I didn’t mean it to sound that way. But now let me ask you a question. You say you are from New Orleans.

  Yes, I am. I live in the Seventh Ward, and I lived there my whole life.

  Did anybody ever tell you that it wasn’t smart to build a house below sea level?

  What you want people to do? Your mama and daddy are there, and your grandparents, and the church you go to…You didn’t just get dropped someplace and pick up and leave…

  Answer my question: Did anyone ever tell you it wasn’t smart to build a house below sea level?

  Look, motherf—

  Okay, next caller; Frank from Arlington, Virginia. Frank, Get Wise…

  One afternoon early in their third week in Elkton, Craig found Gus in the kitchen listening to the radio and shaking his head. Craig recognized the voice; everyone knew that voice:

  Nobody wants to see anybody lose their homes, and our thoughts and sympathy go out to everybody who listened to the weather service and got out of town, took the kids and the most valuable stuff and acted like responsible adults. But I think most of us wonder why we should be stuck cleaning up after people who didn’t bother listening to the warnings, who just sat around and said, “Why should I bother? Somebody’ll give me a handout like they always do…” It’s another case of wanting Big Brother to do everything. Like—do you remember this one?—the lady who sued McDonald’s when she spilled coffee all over herself, saying the coffee was too hot? And won? Do you remember this? Okay we’re going to go to Billy in St. Augustine…

  “Tell ’em, Bobby,” Gus said.

  Craig took a deep breath and looked in the refrigerator for the soy milk he had bought the day before. Bobby Wise’s voice was a sound guaranteed to drive him up a wall. The show was hard to escape, especially through the South and Midwest.

  “I can’t see,” Gus said, “why people would just sit around scratching themselves when they know something like this is on the way. Can you explain this to me?”

  Calmly, Craig thought to himself. It would be so much easier if Gus were a bad drunk and you could blame it on the booze talking, or if he were just a coldhearted son-of-a-bitch. But he was a loving, generous-hearted man who had worked hard his entire life. How could he be so susceptible to this vile crap? Craig usually tried to avoid the kitchen during the times when Gus was listening to Bobby Wise.

  “Well,” Craig began, “a lot of the peopl
e I think you’re talking about don’t have cars and couldn’t get out. The city was supposed to provide buses, which they never did. And a lot of them aren’t particularly sophisticated…”

  “How sophisticated do you have to be to get out of the way of a Category Five hurricane?”

  Craig kept on. “…people; they hear year in and year out about storms coming and it’s always a false alarm. Evacuating is expensive and a lot of them have big families…”

  “That’s part of the problem right there,” Gus said. “They have five or six kids on the welfare that they can’t take care of, and it’s everybody else’s problem.”

  Craig was about to say that “families” could mean aging, sick parents, it could mean a lot of things…But he stopped himself. The gray-haired, crew-cut man with the craggy face looked up at him from the kitchen table as if he really expected an answer from Craig, and at that moment Alice walked into the room and a quick glance between them told her everything she needed to know.

  “Uncle Gus,” she said, kissing him on the cheek, “I’m going to have to steal Craig away from you. We have to go to the store and then he has to go do an article.”

  “Okay, Allie,” he said, kissing her back. “I was just giving him a hard time anyway. Sorry, there, Craig; there’s a lot of things the old flight mechanic doesn’t understand too well.”

  “There’s a lot of things I don’t understand, too, Gus,” Craig said, jollying it along. “I guess we’d better be going. See you for dinner?”

  “You bet,” Gus said.

  Outside, Craig thanked Alice for saving him. “I really thought I was going to lose it.”

  “Well, don’t lose it; they are putting us up and being incredibly generous to us.”

  For his second column, Craig had decided to track down some New Orleans evacuees. By talking to Catholic Charities, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, Craig came up with a provisional list of sites, mostly churches, where groups of New Orleans evacuees were being temporarily housed. Small groups of evacuees had landed all over Chicago, awaiting the next step, whatever it might be.

  That afternoon, Craig visited a church, Our Lady of Lima, which was embedded on a short street that connected two longer streets in Old Town, on the North Side. Eight New Orleans families were reportedly quartered there. As he approached the church, Craig found three people sitting on the front steps of the brick building next door, two women in their thirties and a boy who looked to be about nine or ten years old, who was bouncing up and down in place, shaking one of his hands. The women returned Craig’s tentative nod, warily, watching him. On a hunch he asked them if this was where the “folks from New Orleans” were.

  The women looked at him guardedly. The one wearing a kelly-green T-shirt, culottes and sandals, said, “We from New Orleans.”

  Craig’s heart quickened. He introduced himself and told them what he was doing there.

  “You from New Orleans?” the one in green said. “You evacuated up here?”

  Craig told her the short version of their story, and how he came to be doing these articles, told them he was the editor of Gumbo, which she had not heard of.

  “I heard of it,” the other said. “It like a magazine.”

  “Where you stayed at in New Orleans,” the other asked.

  Craig told her.

  “When they going to let us back in?”

  Craig, slipping his tape recorder out of his bag, tried to establish control of the conversation by asking her, in return, where they lived.

  “Lafitte Projects, baby,” the second one said. “Orleans Avenue.” They both eyed the tape recorder hesitantly. The boy was shaking one of his hands in the air, bobbing his head down, shaking his hand. “Stop that joogin’,” she said to him, sharply, and the boy stopped.

  “Would you mind if I interviewed you on tape?” Craig said.

  “What this for,” the woman in green asked.

  “It’s for a weekly paper here called the CHI EYE,” he said. He added, “It’s sort of like Chicago’s version of Gumbo.”

  “You doing a article?”

  “Right,” Craig said. “I’m doing a series of articles, actually, on people who had to evacuate from New Orleans who landed in Chicago, and what’s happening with them…”

  “You going to pay us?”

  Craig immediately knew he should have anticipated this question. He, after all, was getting paid for doing this, and they were undoubtedly in worse shape than he was.

  “I hate to say this,” he said, “but I don’t have money to pay you. The paper doesn’t give me money to pay the people I interview. I understand if you don’t want to take up time to talk for free. I completely understand that. I’m hoping to be able to talk to as many people as possible, because people’s stories have to be told. That is the only way New Orleans is going to get the help it needs. What happened in our city should never have happened…” Craig stopped talking for a moment, surprised as always by the onrush of overwhelming emotion.

  “That’s allright,” the other woman said. “Go on ask your questions. People got to know what happened.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t pay you…”

  “That allright. Ask your questions.”

  Craig talked to them for half an hour. They had awakened Tuesday morning to find themselves in a lake; some men they had never seen came in a boat and got them off the steps. “Look like it had to be ’bout six feet of water. Dooky Chase was underwater. You know Dooky Chase’s?” They were deposited not far from the Superdome, walked there with the boy in a shopping cart they found (“He can’t walk good for too long”), only to be turned away because the Dome was full. They ended up at the Convention Center for three days.

  “A woman died right next to us on the sidewalk. We was trying to fan her. It was a white lady in hospital clothes; they had her in a wheelchair. I don’t even know where she come from. Wasn’t nothing we could do but fan her; wasn’t even any water. She died and they put a blanket over her head.”

  Then on a bus to Baton Rouge, then on a plane and another bus, and here they were. “People just told us where we needed to go and we went.”

  “What’s going to happen now?” Craig asked. “Are they putting you in touch with relatives?”

  “We don’t even know where they at,” the one in green said. “The FEMA supposed to get us in a hotel. We been here a week. But we don’t know nobody in Chicago. Raeann got a brother in Cincinnati. Is that close to here?”

  Craig asked if they had ever been out of New Orleans before, and the one who hadn’t wanted to talk said, “I was in Baton Rouge one time.”

  That day Craig talked to three other people, all of whom seemed to be in some degree of shock. The last was a woman who looked to be in her early sixties, wearing a bright paisley blouse and a wig of straight, styled black hair, although her eyebrows were gray. How, Craig wondered, had she managed to keep the wig with her through all the evacuating? They spoke at a table in a green-painted cinder-block common room inside, while several people watched a soap opera on the television. She filled him in sketchily on some background facts: she had been a schoolteacher, she was leaving the next day to stay with her brother in Indianapolis, she had raised five children at her house in the Lower Ninth Ward. She spoke in an educated manner, with a formality that Craig had heard before in black people of a certain generation.

  “I am going to tell you something,” she said, regarding him across the coffee table. “This event is a tragedy for the country. Do you understand? It is not just a tragedy for our people, black or white, people from New Orleans. This is a tragedy for everyone in this country. This is the greatest country on earth, and if this is the best they can do then it is a shame on all of us. It is an embarrassment in front of the world.”

  Craig took notes in his notebook as she watched him. “How old are you?” she asked him.

  Craig stopped writing, smiled a little, looked at the woman. “I’m thirty-six.”

  “You’re not o
ld enough to remember Martin Luther King.”

  Craig chuckled, self-effacingly, said, “No, but I certainly know his story and his speeches.”

  The woman did not smile along with him. “I am a teacher,” she said. “I have taught young people for almost fifty years. I am seventy-four years old.” At Craig’s unfeigned look of surprise, she said, “Does that surprise you? I was born in 1931 during a rainstorm in Algiers, Louisiana. You know where that is. Right across the river from downtown. There was no bridge at that time; you took the ferry if you wanted to come to New Orleans. My parents raised me and my three brothers through the Great Depression and the Second World War, what they called Jim Crow times. I have seen many things come and go. We had to sit in our own place in the movie theaters, we could not go to the public pool, or the beaches by the Lake. But I have never seen a time this bad in our country. I am not just talking about this particular event of Hurricane Katrina. There was an aspiration toward something better that does not exist today.”

  The woman’s sound was one Craig had heard on many occasions from older African-Americans—the formal diction, the essential seriousness, the indifference to making an impression—the gravitas—a word that Craig hated although he used it all the time. Listening to these people, usually older, he always felt exposed, as if his measure were being taken and he was being found wanting. What, after all, had he done to help things? He asked this woman, who gave her name as Mrs. Gray, where she had taught.

  “Lawless High School, and then at McDonough 35 until I took my retirement. What people need to know is that there are schools in New Orleans with no books, with no light fixtures in some classrooms. Where there should be a toilet in the lavatory, sometimes it is only a hole in the floor. And no toilet paper; some children had to bring their own toilet paper to school. I am telling you the truth. How are young people supposed to learn in such an environment? How are they supposed to feel that something is expected of them? School is a place where you learn values, and among them is the value of yourself as a part of a larger group. What are these conditions saying to our young people?”