In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  “What do you need?” I said.

  He sat in a chair, unable to focus. He seems out of it, I thought. Standing in the Hyatt Regency room with Nagin, I knew we had work to do. The city had a bus fleet for evacuation needs. “Where are the buses?” I asked.

  “We don’t have the keys,” he said. I had not yet seen TV footage of the city’s bus fleet engulfed by the flood, or learned what went wrong in that chain of command.

  I spoke to one of his staffers. “I’m here on behalf of the governor. Figure out what you need and let us know.”

  Rumors abounded in the chaos of those first few days; there was widespread talk of looting, and a report that some thieves had broken into an Uptown drugstore, shuttered after the storm. The New Orleans Police Department communications system was broken. Hospitals were on high alert to guard their pharmacies. Nagin’s rhetoric cast himself as a victim of politics and a city beleaguered by addicts “probably” with guns. We now know this was not the case.

  “Many of the more toxic rumors seem to have come from evacuees, half-crazed with fear sitting through night after night in the dark,” David Carr wrote in the New York Times on September 19, 2005. “Victims, officials and reporters all took one of the most horrific events in American history and made it worse than it actually was.”

  We drove through the French Quarter and onto St. Claude Avenue, heading into the Ninth Ward, where we knew the flood situation was dire; it’s one of the lowest parts of a city already below sea level. The Wildlife and Fisheries agents were waiting with boats after we crossed the St. Claude Bridge over the Industrial Canal into the Lower Ninth Ward. Water was so high people were stranded on rooftops. We set out in boats, helping people out of the flooded houses, getting them to high ground. I couldn’t stop thinking about Junior Rodriguez and his people to the south, in St. Bernard Parish. With the Wildlife and Fisheries agents doing rescue work, and volunteers from the “Cajun Navy” arriving with their own vessels and magnificent bravado, I took a boat and started navigating down the flooded road, about three miles to the St. Bernard Parish government complex in Chalmette. It was surrounded by water. I made it onto the second floor, where traumatized officials had spent the worst night of their lives. The heat was severe. Junior Rodriguez was like the boxer played by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, sopping wet in his underwear, the silver hair in dank curls, his jowls dripping. State Representative Nita Hutter and several other officials were there as well. I pulled Junior aside. “I’m here for the governor. What do you need?”

  “The whole parish is destroyed,” he said in a ragged voice. Word had come of thirty-five people drowned in a nursing home. “Mitch, I need water, food, and dynamite.”

  “Dynamite?”

  I think Junior Rodriguez wanted to blow a hole in a levee to discharge water out of the flooded area, back into the Mississippi.

  “Junior, I’m not asking the governor for dynamite.”

  Creating a hole in an already compromised levee struck me as dangerous, but I suspected where he’d gotten the idea. During the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the New Orleans business elite persuaded the governor and federal authorities to dynamite levees downriver, intentionally flooding St. Bernard Parish in order to spare the city from inundation. The move, which proved to be unnecessary, caused massive damage to low-lying farms and towns, as John M. Barry chronicled in Rising Tide, a celebrated history.

  New Orleans meanwhile was enjoying itself. The fine families, as if on a picnic, traveled down to see the great explosion that would send dirt hundreds of feet high and create a sudden Niagara Falls. Cars jammed the road down to St. Bernard, and yachts crowded the river.

  But not just anyone could witness the explosion. The men who had decided to dynamite the levee controlled those permits. Residents of St. Bernard could not witness the destruction of the levee, of their parish.

  Junior Rodriguez was a friend, and in the steaming despair after what he and his colleagues had endured, I kept the focus on getting a supply line for immediate needs like water, food, and rescue. I wanted to do more, but the hideous reality I learned that week is that in a time of crisis, you can only do what you have the capacity to do, and there were thousands of Juniors in desperate straits. My job was to get accurate information to the EOC, and then go help the people I found in immediate need. Junior could have left, caught a ride with me to the Hyatt or a cool place in Baton Rouge; he stayed. I made trips back to the Lower Nine and St. Bernard every day that week.

  As the sight of people trapped on rooftops of the Lower Ninth Ward became a recurrent image in TV coverage, I heard African Americans fume that whites had dynamited the Industrial Canal floodwall, causing people to drown in the haunting, apocalyptic scenes captured on our screens. There was no evidence of this: in fact, a barge had crashed through the canal floodwall, sending off a loud sound like a thunderclap before the oily waters rushed in. And in those early days, several places in St. Bernard caught fire, with booming explosions. People in the Lower Nine had heard of the dynamiting of the levees in 1927—a major news event back then, part of the memory passed from one generation to the next. Some African Americans in the poorest part of the city seized on the idea of a white conspiracy during that achingly slow federal rescue in 2005.

  On Monday night I got back to Baton Rouge and went to check on Cheryl and the children. More people had arrived—two of Cheryl’s sisters, other family members and their children, and a couple of dogs. As TV news showed that the levees had buckled and the city was filling with water, I figured that my parents’ house on South Prieur Street had flooded, learning much later that it had taken some seven feet of water. My sister Madeleine and her husband, attorney Paige Sensenbrenner, lost their home in Lakeview; my brother Martin had his Lakeview home inundated by the flood. Some days later, Cheryl and I learned that floodwater under our house Uptown had caused the downstairs floor to warp, and a pine tree had fallen on our roof, causing rainfall flooding upstairs. It took many months of dealing with adjusters and contractors before we got back in the house. Ours was a fairly typical experience for an extended New Orleans family. The storm spared no one.

  And by Tuesday no one had heard from my mother or father.

  * * *

  —

  The breakdown in FEMA’s response is now infamous, and it had a crippling impact on President George W. Bush’s standing, but all sorts of people did come to New Orleans in our darkest hour, people arriving from far-off places to help when help was needed most. As I shuttled back and forth to Baton Rouge, visiting my family, relaying information and supplies to the governor and people in the EOC, stocking our vehicles with water, food, emergency items, and then heading back to New Orleans, the ordeal of getting people into dry places showed me human decency at its fullest.

  A big guy with a ruddy face was cooking on a grill outside of Harrah’s casino on Poydras Street downtown. The police and National Guard were blocking people from getting into the city because of the pressure to evacuate those stranded in the Superdome and another emergency shelter, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, which had become horror shows in news coverage. The city would be off-limits for weeks as the floodwaters slowly drained. Entergy, the public utility, would work crews through the night to get the city back on the grid, street by darkened street, for months afterward.

  I introduced myself to the man with the grill. “What are you doing?”

  “God called me to come! I’m from Daphne, Alabama, and I’m cooking for whoever is hungry.”

  “Good for you! Keep cooking!”

  The next day he had two grills, barbecuing away, first responders and nomads waiting in line with paper plates. He waved me over. “Now look, Lieutenant Governor, I’ve got trucks of food coming from Alabama and the State Police wanna stop ’em.” He had found a way to get contraband food into the city and feed people. We cut through red tape to keep him cooking; he wound up with four
grills outside his Winnebago, feeding thousands in those awful days.

  My siblings and I were frantic to find my parents, calling people across the state, when my sister Melanie, who lives in Mandeville, just across Lake Pontchartrain, located them in Crystal Springs, Mississippi. They were at Tiny’s house. “Tiny is a lady who was a barmaid for Mr. Sam Albano, a friend of my daddy’s who had a bar and my daddy was his lawyer,” Melanie told Newsweek. “She’d been calling them to come and visit, so that’s where they went.”

  Realizing it would be months before their water-battered house on Prieur Street could be restored, my parents bought a small boathouse on the Tchefuncte River in St. Tammany Parish, across Lake Pontchartrain. They eventually got the Prieur Street house rebuilt and returned to live there. Cheryl and I, meanwhile, got the children situated in Baton Rouge schools for the fall semester, with a hectic transportation schedule in the weeks to come. At least we were all safe, and together.

  The rescue work I did in the boats we hauled from Baton Rouge was a bone-chilling experience, but what sticks in my mind are those examples of pluck and wit from African American residents in the Lower Ninth Ward. As we maneuvered through water up to our windshields, people called from balconies and rooftops. You pull up to a duplex where twenty-five people are sun parched and desperate, and you only have room for fourteen in the boat. The people who cannot walk get priority; others lay them on sheets, carry them into the vessel, and go back inside. You promise to come back. They wait, we return.

  At one house, near the gaping hole in the Industrial Canal floodwall, a man stood at the second-floor window as our boat pulled up. He was in his T-shirt and underwear.

  “Do you want to be rescued, sir?”

  “You the lieutenant governor?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The lieutenant governor going to rescue me?”

  “Yes, sir. But can I ask a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you hear the mayor and governor say to evacuate?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you hear us tell you the storm was coming?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “We don’t believe anything you politicians say.”

  “You believe me now?”

  “Well, I’m coming!”

  If an epic disaster teaches a politician humility, the other end of the learning curve is a hands-on experience in getting government to deliver for people when they need it. Working with first responders showed me a spiritual magic that caused our self-made divisions to dissolve in time of crisis. Nobody cared who was driving the boat or riding. No one was concerned about whether people in the boat were black or white, rich or poor, who was from New Orleans or who was not. We had a common enemy and a common solution: we had to help people get to a better place, which gave poignant meaning to the phrase “We are all in the same boat.”

  I’m convinced that most of us in elective office have a basic belief in how government should best serve the people, even those who don’t vote for you. Nothing levels the ideological differences like a natural disaster, which forces people to pull together. In that massive outflow of people from the New Orleans metro area, Baton Rouge, which had been smaller than New Orleans before Katrina, more than doubled in population to some eight hundred thousand in a matter of days. This put a huge strain on the resources of Mayor Kip Holden, a friend of mine from our years in the legislature. One night, after I had driven back to the operations center, Andy Kopplin, the chief of staff for Governor Blanco, grabbed me in the hallway and asked if I would intervene with Mayor Holden and State Senator Cleo Fields of Baton Rouge to allow five busloads of New Orleans citizens to stay in a park facility. Holden didn’t want more people in the crowded space, said Kopplin. Fields was demanding that Holden let the buses unload there. Holden and Fields were both strong willed and not close allies.

  “Can I exercise the full authority of the governor in this?” I asked Kopplin.

  “Yes.”

  Holden was dealing with a crisis of massive overcrowding and took the position that he could not accommodate more people. I went to the back of the EOC and found General Landreneau of the Louisiana National Guard, a career military man who had made forceful TV spots denouncing David Duke as a Nazi in 1991. “General, do you have five guys to drive buses?”

  “I will go get them.”

  He got the men out of sleep, brought them to me, and said, “Do whatever the lieutenant governor tells you.”

  The five guardsmen and I drove across the river to West Baton Rouge and connected with the sheriff, Mike Cazes. When the caravan from New Orleans arrived, the people in the buses were tired, wet, hungry, and homeless since the flood. Cazes provided them with bologna sandwiches and potato chips. Small hitch: It turned out that none of the five National Guardsmen had experience driving buses. Neither did I. The exhausted bus drivers had come through hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic, and though they were too tired to go on, they didn’t want to surrender the keys to the vehicles—no doubt for insurance reasons.

  “On the authority of the State of Louisiana,” I said, “give me the keys.”

  The men looked at one another, looked at the National Guardsmen, and handed them over.

  “Now, we need lessons in how to operate the vehicles.”

  We eventually loaded the people back into the buses and headed across the Mississippi River bridge along I-10 going west away from Baton Rouge and into Cajun country. An hour later we reached Lafayette in time to put all the people on a train to Houston, where the Astrodome had become a shelter for people displaced by Katrina. Soon thereafter, I flew to Houston and met up with Governor Blanco to visit the people we had evacuated, and many others living on cots in the Astrodome. The officials in Houston, led by Mayor Bill White and Harris County Judge Robert Eckels, helped us greatly, which we will long remember and will be forever grateful.

  As Katrina evacuees headed off to Atlanta, Nashville, Denver, New York, and everywhere in between, the state established an emergency contact system, trying to collect as many names, cell numbers, and e-mails of displaced people as possible. The staff at my office cast lines across a broad geographic area to help people connect with FEMA for emergency help, and allow us to go and physically meet with as many people as the governor, I, and other state officials could, in order to help them begin to make their way back home. People were also locating friends on Craigslist, newsletter lists like The New Orleans Agenda, and through the Times-Picayune Web site.

  * * *

  —

  When pictures hit the airwaves of thousands of poor people, mostly African Americans, huddled at the Superdome or the Convention Center or walking through water, stranded, abandoned, wet, hot, hungry, thirsty—the nation suddenly found a mirror, and we did not like what we saw. How could there still be such poverty and desperation—in America the superpower? The country was hit with a shock like the one on 9/11. Most people could not imagine that so many poor people lived in rocking, good-times New Orleans, or that they had no means of transportation to escape a flood. They had always been in plain sight, in some ways like the Confederate monuments we walked and drove past every day. Always there, rarely noticed. Now, in full view, those desperate souls were impossible to ignore—a legacy of the racially driven politics that controlled the city long before the civil rights era. The War on Poverty, so derided by the right, had lasted barely more than a decade, whereas a century had passed between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a century of disenfranchisement, political and economic. You cannot undo the legacy of enforced poverty in the blink of history’s eye. New Orleans did not have a public high school for African Americans until 1917. We have made great strides since then, but the city in 2005 had a poverty level of nearly 30 percent and a poorly funded social safety net. The building of a just, equitable society takes honesty, determ
ination, and grit to withstand the reactionary forces.

  It is true that Katrina in many ways did not discriminate. It hit white, black, rich, poor, old, and young. The water was high in many affluent neighborhoods. But Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who led the military troops that stabilized the city, said it best: “Who is affected more when it’s cold? Poor people. Who is affected more when it’s hot? Poor people. Who is affected more when it’s wet? Poor people. Who is most affected when the economy is bad? Poor people. Poor people are the most fragile.” And in New Orleans, most of the people who were poor were also African American.

  Long ago, the Ninth Ward housed plantations that stretched from the Mississippi River to the lake. After the Civil War, desperate to find land and housing, poor immigrants and formerly enslaved African Americans began moving to the area in the 1870s. Because of its topography, they risked flooding and other troubles to move there. It wasn’t until the 1920s that there became an “upper” and “lower” Ninth Ward, divided by the Industrial Canal, which was dredged to assist the port in shipping. The Lower Ninth Ward then became even more segregated from the rest of the city. By the time Hurricane Katrina struck, it was nearly 100 percent African American.

  Katrina gave the Lower Ninth Ward, nearly 100 percent black, and Lakeview, which was over 90 percent white, a water beating of equal proportion—upward of fifteen feet in both areas. Twelve years later, Lakeview has recovered, buoyantly so. It’s at its highest property values and lowest crime rate, and is back bigger and stronger than ever before by nearly any measure. The Lower Ninth Ward is one of only two neighborhoods with less than 50 percent of its pre-Katrina population—a haunting shadow of what it was before. It had been a vast working-class area before the storm. Sicilians and other white ethnic groups were part of the social quilt until the 1960s, when the school desegregation crisis caused many white families to leave, some of them going over the city line into St. Bernard Parish. As the Lower Nine became more African American, the area weathered the crack epidemic that hit many inner-city enclaves in the late 1980s, with drug gangs seeking a foothold. Ironically, the level of home ownership in the Lower Ninth was remarkably high, near 60 percent.