Love & War

by James Carville

  For one, James’s family was possibly in harm’s way. For two, my beloved Donna Brazile’s family was literally underwater. Those she could find.

  JAMES

  I’LL NEVER FORGET THE first LSU football game after the storm. It was September 10, 2005.

  A few days earlier, the Washington Post’s Michael Wilbon had written a column quoting me and talking about what that game meant to the Gulf Coast. I thought he got it exactly right.

  “You see the devastation and despair in Louisiana and Mississippi and figure the last thing in the world you ought to be thinking about is . . . football,” Wilbon wrote. “But if you listen closely to the people in despair, to the people who have lived in those flooded streets and know intimately what matters down around the Gulf Coast, and you realize football is a good thought, that anything that might bring joy for even four hours to people in for such a long haul is a very good thing. It is one of those times, political analyst James Carville reminded me yesterday, that sports helps people remain sane, even hopeful, especially when there’s no light, no fresh water for drinking or a bath, when there’s no food and for some the only clothing they own is what they’re wearing.”

  You almost had to be from there to understand. Louisiana is this mix of all different races and cultures and classes—white and black, Protestant and Catholic, urban and rural, rich and poor. LSU football is the great unifying force. It’s something everybody could rally around, especially during a time when people needed a reason to cheer.

  A lot of the LSU players were from New Orleans or the little parishes around it. Their families were suffering. Their friends were suffering. Refugees were living on the LSU campus, so it’s not like the players were shielded from the devastation. This was a very real and emotional time for them, as it was for everybody.

  Arizona State was supposed to come to Baton Rouge for the game that Saturday. But the field house and the assembly center across from Tiger Stadium were treating Katrina evacuees, and there was a makeshift morgue there. Baton Rouge itself was flooded with refugees. So they decided to move the game to Tempe.

  I watched every single play of that game at home in northern Virginia, feeling a million miles away but also feeling every soul in Louisiana pull for the Tigers alongside me. Arizona State was up 17–7 heading into the fourth quarter. We’d made a bunch of mistakes. It wasn’t looking good.

  All of a sudden, we blocked a field goal attempt and ran it back for a touchdown. We forced another fumble and returned that for a touchdown. We would score, then they would score. The lead just kept changing. Finally, LSU faced a 4th-and-10 on Arizona State’s 39-yard line with a minute and twenty-three seconds left. Do-or-die time. JaMarcus Russell took the snap, rolled right, ran back left and launched a prayer. Early Doucet made this unbelievable freaking catch in the end zone. Tigers win, 35–31.

  That moment was just pure, unfettered joy. I remember it like yesterday. It was exactly what we all needed at that moment.

  • • •

  Race is one of the inescapable issues in New Orleans. Like many cities, it has a long and complicated history with race. In a lot of ways, a really ugly history, from slavery to the Jim Crow segregation laws to the societal failings that Hurricane Katrina laid bare.

  Back a century ago, the neighborhoods were really fairly mixed. Maybe the schools weren’t and the churches weren’t, but people of all races lived side by side in the neighborhoods, at least before the great black migration to the north. The neighborhoods were a real patchwork. You had African Americans, Sicilians, Irish—all these different cultures blending together. It was like the city was its own racial gumbo, and that’s part of what gave New Orleans such a unique character. That’s when some of the best art and the best music and the best culture emerged.

  Today, the neighborhoods have become more segregated, no doubt about it. But people of different races live in closer proximity to each other than in a lot of American cities. If you go to Washington, for example, there’s a huge disparity between where the white people generally live and where African Americans generally live. There’s a giant demographic dividing line between northwest Washington and southeast Washington.

  When you live here, it’s abundantly clear that there’s no separating race from everyday life. Everybody understands this in Louisiana. But the issue of race didn’t get any less complicated after Katrina. If anything, it grew only more complicated. Part of the reason for that has to do with the geography of New Orleans. There are exceptions, but as a general rule, the closer you live to the river, the higher ground you’re on. And, in general, the higher the ground you live on, the whiter you are.

  Katrina happened in August 2005, and people started talking about how to rebuild the city. And they formed a commission to study ways to do smart urban planning, rather than just a half-assed reconstruction. It all sounded like a great idea. They rounded up the usual suspects—a local bank president, a black pastor, lawyers, businessmen, an academic from Tulane, the Catholic archbishop and so on. Ray Nagin, who was the mayor at that time, got behind it.

  The commission studied the situation and issued some recommendations. One proposal they received suggested that the sensible thing to do was to start building from the high ground out. The panel eventually recommended a moratorium on building permits until each neighborhood could prove that enough of its residents were returning and that it could come up with a rebuilding plan.

  It didn’t take long before somebody said, “Aha! This is a plan to keep black people from coming back to the city.” Because, remember, historically, the higher ground you’re on, the whiter you are. And there was a lot of uncertainty around that time about who would come back and how the demographics of the city might change after Katrina.

  So that’s about the time Nagin, who originally supported the idea, came out and said in a speech in early 2006 that New Orleans would always be a “chocolate” city. He was telling his political base that he was not for all of these elites telling people who could move or who couldn’t move back into the city. But it only deepened the racial tensions that already were there. It polarized a city that already was on edge about what the future would look like.

  Like I said, race is never easy in New Orleans.

  But after Katrina, and after I tell you a little more about my heritage, you’ll see why Mary and I eventually had to move back.

  • • •

  The Carville, Louisiana, I knew is mostly gone now, but I can still see it clear as day, just the way it was. The old Illinois Central railroad track. The mighty Mississippi River, winding its way toward New Orleans. Bobby Wintz’s meat market. The juke joints out toward St. Gabriel.

  I can see my grandparents’ place, with its circular drive and the big tree out front and the peach orchard in back. That house hasn’t stood in decades, but I could still draw every inch of it from memory. I must have spent half my childhood at their place.

  I can still see the house where my daddy was born, the green one off Monroe Street, named after Henry Monroe. I can picture the house I grew up in a little ways up the same street. It was about a mile and a half between my grandparents’ house and our home, and I must have ridden my horse along that stretch thousands of times.

  A little ways up the road sat the general store my father ran. It actually was attached to the post office where my grandfather was the postmaster, like his mother before him and his son after him. We were the only third-class post office in the United States that had a branch.

  Just on a little farther was one of the only hospitals in the United States to treat Hansen’s disease, which most people know as leprosy. It used to be called the Louisiana Leper Home (though what might have been acceptable a century ago isn’t now; never use the “L” word to describe someone with Hansen’s, as it’s extremely pejorative). By the time I came along, the federal government had started running the place, and it was called U.S. Ma
rine Hospital Number 66. Books have been written and films have been made about some of the legendary patients who spent time there. The correspondence to and from the hospital, all those tales of struggle and loss and hope and separation—all of it passed through my grandfather’s post office.

  The chemical plants have moved in now and cleared out a bunch of land and brought in a lot of truck traffic. But back then, other than my daddy’s store and the hospital and a few other ramshackle places, Carville was truly rural. We’d travel a few miles over to the old white clapboard Catholic church off Highway 75. It’s the oldest church in the Louisiana Purchase territory. I went to the elementary school nearby, where I still remember my fourth grade teacher, Miss Gert, telling us stories about visiting Paris and New York and other places I could only dream about. She made my friend, Cathy Jo, and I read Little Women to the class.

  That was the world around me; that was the world I knew. We used to have to follow the river to get from Carville to Baton Rouge. What now takes twenty-five minutes took about forty-five back then, so you really did feel pretty isolated.

  It was an idyllic way to grow up. To be honest, I’m not sure that what my kids have is as good as what we had back then. There’s so much pressure on them these days. There’s angst about college and exams. There’s Facebook and Twitter and a million different ways to always be connected and plugged in, but very few ways to escape and be carefree and alone with your thoughts. There are a lot of forces that you don’t have any control over that control your life.

  When you grow up rural, and your daddy runs the local country store, and you got all your brothers and sisters to play with, and you come from a big family with tons of aunts and uncles and cousins—there’s not a lot to reject you out there. There’s no doubt about who you’re going to spend your free time with because you’re surrounded by family. There’s no doubt about where you’re going to college because LSU is right around the corner. And your daddy went, and your uncles went, and your brothers and sisters went. The idea that you’d go anywhere else never crosses your mind.

  There was something to be said for having basically everything and everyone you knew exist in a twenty-mile radius. I loved my world as it existed, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Huck Finn was always running away, floating down the Mississippi trying to find freedom. I lived right there on the banks of the river and felt as free as any boy ever has.

  People know I grew up in Carville, but they probably don’t know just how strange and complicated the Carville family story really is, with immigrants and carpetbaggers and all sorts of characters who found their way to the South a long time ago. It’s an unpredictable tale, and that’s part of what I like about my family.

  On one side, my ancestors were part of a Belgian colony in Guatemala before they came to Louisiana. My daddy’s grandfather was born in Denmark, and his last name was Slangerup. There’s still a town west of Copenhagen called Slangerup.

  Most people assume Carville is a French name, both because of the way it sounds and because we settled in Louisiana. And I used to correct them and say that the Carvilles are all Irish until I learned differently on a trip to Ireland last summer. Actually, Carville is a French name, and our ancestors came over with William the Conqueror in 1066 and settled in Northumberland County in England, and then came into Ireland in the mid-1700s. My great-grandfather’s people eventually ended up in County Monaghan and County Down in Northern Ireland.

  What’s really interesting is that there is a village in Normandy to this day called Carville. My mother’s maiden name was Norman because her people emigrated direct from Normandy to Louisiana. So, if anything, the dominant ancestral gene I have is probably French-Norman.

  My great-grandfather, John M. Carville, emigrated from Ireland to America in 1853 when he was eight years old. He served in the Union army, taught school in Janesville, Wisconsin, then migrated south to teach school in Iberville Parish. He eventually opened a mercantile store in what’s now Carville, near St. Gabriel. He and my great-grandmother, whose parents were French, had eight kids.

  Our family never really left after that.

  My mother grew up in a place called Avoyelles Parish, which is the northernmost parish in Acadiana. It was the home to F. O. “Potch” Didier, maybe the only sheriff ever to be incarcerated in his own jail. He served a seven-day sentence after being convicted of malfeasance. I remember how her side of the family would have these big, raucous French family reunions. They called it a boucherie.

  If you look at the Carvilles today, we still all look Irish, even though we have a French-sounding name. Some of us still drink like we’re Irish, and we certainly have an Irish sense of humor. It’s in our blood.

  I remember when I was about eleven, I got to wondering about the Carville name. My grandmother pulled me aside and said, “You have a really good last name. It’s easy to spell; it sounds just like it spells; and there’s not a lot of other Carvilles around so you’re not going to be getting confused with people all the time.”

  After that, I grew up really liking my name, really proud of it. I just never really knew the full history behind it, or what a diverse background I actually have and what a winding road my ancestors took to end up on the banks of the Mississippi. When we moved back down here, I finally began to research my family and connect all the dots. It helped me understand more about who I am and the people I come from. It reminded me that Louisiana is a mix of many backgrounds and cultures, ethnicities and experiences, and the Carville family was no different.

  What was it that William Faulkner said about the past? It’s never dead. It’s not even past.

  MARY

  THE 2006 MIDTERM ELECTION cycle was a killer. James and I were on the road constantly. We came up with a new boredom-relieving game in that travel season after I couldn’t take one more gin rummy loss to that supercompetitive, card-counting clown—we called it “where would we live if we ever retired?”

  It was only a way to help us forget how often we were actually gone from the place we did live—and loved. And as much as we loved it, and as entrenched as we were in D.C. doings and as happy as our girls were in their Alexandria schools, every time we played the game, it got more serious.

  Before we knew it, we had assembled a must-have list for any postcareer, postkid potential move. The game maintained its fantasy status since no place on this planet or any other (I am a sci-fi nut to the point of sickness) could fulfill the dream list we concocted.

  We had our standard demands, quite a lot of them. And if you got dizzy reading the laundry list of what we were looking for in a house earlier in the book, you might want to skip this part about what we were looking for in a post-D.C. environment, except that its complete disconnect from reality might make you laugh.

  Me: I wanted a stimulating city that was manageable and family oriented, with good schools and restaurants, near water and art and amazing gardens and other botanical wonders. Quality but affordable living. I wanted a vintage house, no debate on that. In my mind, the total ideal would be a college town without liberals. See, I told you it was a fantasy.

  The Ragin’ Cajun’s list was the same one he’d had for the last eighteen years. A place to run, warm, no snow, sports, fresh produce. Unlike me, he’s a predictable human being with realistic desires. But as our game progressed, he added something new that in retrospect makes me think he was one step ahead of the sheriff.

  He wanted to teach and he wanted to walk to work.

  We pored over maps; we went through college towns; we looked for locally grown produce. We tried to imagine ourselves ensconced in a creaking old home in Fantasyville, USA. I tried to ignore his dream-killing distractions. “How much would that cost?” “Will our furniture work there?” “You can’t buy anything else ever again.”

  Lord have mercy. I was about to reconsider gin rummy. Then something happened that we knew was coming, that we didn’
t want to think about, and that we had been dreading for a long time. My father died.

  JAMES

  I THINK MARY AND I had known for a while that we wanted to move. We knew it was time. But the answer never seemed simple. We had kids who had grown up around Washington. A lot of our work relied on our being there. We’d talked about coming back to Louisiana, but the details always got in the way. Would we uproot the kids in the middle of a school year? Would we sell our house in Alexandria? And where exactly would we move? Most of my family was in Baton Rouge, and while Mary loved them and they loved her, I don’t think she would have been happy there. She needed a bigger city and at least an hour’s drive between her and the full force of the Carville clan.

  To some extent, the upcoming presidential election in 2008 made the decision to leave that much easier. There was going to be a new regime coming in, and for the first time in sixteen years, neither Mary nor I would have our guy in the White House. We’d endured the Clinton years and the Bush years. That’s a long stretch. Just the thought of either of us being part of another administration was tiring. I felt kind of tuckered out with politics at that level, and I think she did too. Hell, our kids had already been to more than a decade of Easter egg rolls at the White House. It was time to move on.

  Besides, the last thing you want to be is somebody just hanging on, like the guy who keeps trying to relive his high school glory days after everybody else has gotten on with life. One more dance. One more ball game. There are plenty of those people in Washington. I didn’t want to become one of them.

  The price of staying would be constantly having to prove your relevance, and it was something I thought I’d look foolish doing. I could have evolved into something else, I suppose, like a government-affairs consultant or another job where people wear suits to work every day. But I knew I’d never be happy doing something like that. I’d rather leave on my own terms.