In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  Poor folk lived in homes whose mortgages had long been paid, but no one covered the insurance. Many did not have the money to open probate or successions; the homes were passed down through families without legal documentation. Though the storm did not discriminate in whom it hit or hurt, the ability of a person to bounce back, heal, or rebuild was determined by one’s strength or vulnerability at the time of impact. Should we fault the people in the Lower Nine who neglected house insurance? I would raise another question: Should the government deny people repair costs from a federal levee failure because proof of ownership does not meet a banking standard? If people can prove that they lived in a house that was theirs, shouldn’t that count? We shouldn’t blame poor people for losing what they had, when the levees broke and destroyed their homes because of massive human error by the Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency.

  Angela Glover Blackwell, the founder and CEO of PolicyLink, has written that because of Katrina, “America was forced to recognize that, for Black America, far too little has changed since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Despite antipoverty efforts, our nation had not addressed the fundamental factors that keep people poor. To lift people out of poverty and make good on the promise of opportunity for all, we must honestly and authentically confront our nation’s deepest fissure and most entrenched barrier to equity: race.”

  Blaming the poor for their poverty shows an America with a warped soul. The legacy of poverty is hardest for people struggling to get out of it. In New Orleans, the rooted underclass turns on a legacy of racial discrimination as it does in parts of many other cities—Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston, to name a few. But when the chips are down and we face a common threat, Americans work together across all lines that separate us, and surprise ourselves with how alike we are. And we need to do more of that. What we need is a political consensus to provide pathways to learning and earning for those who are poor but willing to do the hard work.

  The most powerful message driven home by Katrina was one that seemed to surprise people I met outside New Orleans: the fierce determination of people who wanted to go back to neighborhoods that had been trashed by the flood. The richest and the poorest people both had families, roots, and lives that celebrate the seasons with parades, festivals, and food. The homes of the poorest were gone, but why would they not want to return to their city? For all of the poverty, they wanted the only lives they knew.

  Riding in those boats, helping people get out, I saw women and men holding garbage bags stuffed with whatever they could carry. In that blistering heat, most people wore T-shirts; we saw people floating by in tire tubes, pawing the water without oars, fleeing for their lives. At one apartment building we reached, a little lady was holding a clock. Helping her onto the boat, I said, “Ma’am, what you doing with that clock?”

  “Mitch, baby, I done lost everything. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I don’t know where I’m going. But I know one thing . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Well, what is that, ma’am?”

  “I know what time it is.”

  She was holding on to that one piece of the place she had lost. I have mentioned that lady in countless speeches in saying why, in recovery, we cannot hold on to things. We have to let go and we can’t build back the same way we were before. We have to build a city for the future. Several years ago, we were cutting the ribbon for a renovated CVS pharmacy on St. Claude Avenue in the Lower Ninth, a neighborhood slowly coming back. By this time I was no longer lieutenant governor. I was the mayor now, I was rebuilding the city, putting resources that I could allocate into the Lower Ninth, which some people even today are willing to write off. I was in the middle of a press conference when I heard somebody yelling from the back of the media, “I got something to say! I got something to say!”

  This is New Orleans, where drama lurks at every turn. A woman walked up to the podium and said, “I’m the clock lady!” I got choked up on the spot. This woman was seared into my memory. She said her name, Margie Shorty. She’d been in Philadelphia for ten years, and just moved back. “I live around the corner!” Right near where she used to live. We hugged.

  I am still haunted by those days a dozen years ago, the memories of an abandoned city, and the eerie silence broken by the cries of people trapped by the rising water, waving tattered sheets from the rooftops, yelling, “We are still alive.”

  Tented emergency rooms hastily erected in the shadow of the Convention Center. Makeshift beds on the Superdome floor, people wet and close, children crying, hope fading. Three thousand souls stuck in a sweltering shed in the Port of St. Bernard, waiting. . . . People like apparitions emerging from the water, defiant, heads rising, then shoulders, the full person holding a black garbage bag. Some people made it out. Vera Smith lay dead on the corner of Magazine Street and Jackson Avenue. For days the street was where she lay, a thin, white sheet shrouding her frail body, a simple epitaph written in black permanent marker: “Here lies Vera. God help us.” Grandmas and grandpas died in storm-battered hospitals and nursing homes. They were left on cots in a crowded chapel that became a substitute morgue. Each year, we pray at the tombs of the eighty-five bodies that to this day lay unclaimed in the Hurricane Katrina Memorial. These fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors died as our city was torn apart.

  In those four horrific days, there was anarchy in the streets. And yet we found salvation, light, and hope from the angels among us. There were so many. I saw young black boys—whom some might have dismissed as the stereotype of criminal youth—pushing an old white man in a rusted wheelchair, to find water. I saw an old white woman hold the hand of a crying black girl who had lost her mother. I met a minister from Dallas who sneaked into the city to feed people; and strangers, pressed together by circumstance, leaning on one another for comfort and support.

  Our inundated homes were tattooed with Xs by National Guard soldiers who went house to house to identify who was inside, living or dead. Many people had to gut their houses to the bone. Three feet of water on the second floor; mud caked everywhere; the unforgettable stench of a rotten refrigerator; mold spreading along floorboards and growing like ivy up the walls and across the ceiling. A mighty Mardi Gras Indian headdress swept away. A favorite blanket or dress left behind, now gone. So many photo albums, letters, birthday cards, and recipes lost in the water, forever. A loved one who was never supposed to die in the attic.

  Everything was brown, then gray. Our lives had lost color, but we endured together.

  For a time, we carried the pain as a part of ourselves. Every day the sorrow was there, unwilling to dissipate. Every conversation came back to the storm, every lonely walk made us wish our friends could come home. In time, our sorrow began to wane. Bit by bit, time smoothed the jagged edge of our memories. Families returned, communities regrouped. The grass turned green. Flowers bloomed. We could not do it alone. Faith-based, national, and college groups streamed in from across the country with supplies, working to gut houses and help us stand again. Neighbors helped one another. Together we took down drywall, stretched blue tarps across torn roofs, and began to rebuild. People reached out and came together in living rooms, churches, and community centers throughout the city. We cried and laughed, broke down and held others up, felt fear, felt guilt, felt frustration. We were battered, bruised, and scarred. But with grit, determination, and help, the people of this city rose out of the water, bearing the burden together that none of us could bear alone. Our resilience leads us down the path to resurrection.

  * * *

  —

  When my father was mayor in the 1970s, he had 6,000 city employees. Nagin had as many as 6,300 in 2005 before Katrina; he was forced to lay off thousands after the flood. Sales tax revenues had crashed, leaving scant budget for salaries. Whatever Nagin’s state in the hotel room that day, he had recovered to handle himself with the media and project a sense of control. I am not saying
this cynically, or tongue in cheek. Many people I knew lost houses, cars, in many cases their savings in order to fund home or business rebuilding against what insurance covered; all of that took a heavy emotional and sometimes psychological toll. Countless people told me that prescriptions for antidepressant medications had skyrocketed in New Orleans. Those weeks and months were a nightmare I never want to experience again.

  In the months after the storm, I turned the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism into an emergency recovery agency. With whole areas of New Orleans off the grid, and some neighborhoods in several feet of water for weeks after Katrina, I allocated space in the lieutenant governor’s suite of rooms for the New Orleans City Council to meet privately and conduct public business as needed. My assistants threw in efforts to help people with flooded homes find temporary housing.

  In the weeks it took to drain the city, Mayor Nagin and his team were overwhelmed. At the state level, it soon became clear that we were going to be investing in one of the toughest recoveries in American history. The extent of damage was mind-boggling enough; but the loss of political trust by the people was an open wound. Major foundations and nonprofits wanted to put fuel into the recovery, but City Hall under Nagin was ill equipped to send proposals with targeted needs, captured in clear prose, with well-developed budgets. The wasted opportunity made for long delays in rebuilding. I learned of one official in a major federal agency who had authority over a budget and who personally asked Nagin for a proposal, which he waved off, saying, “We’re not able to handle that yet.” Many of the foundations over time decided not to work directly with City Hall, and instead only with outside nonprofits and community groups. As lieutenant governor, I began engaging with them myself to preserve lines of cooperation and communication for when City Hall could handle it.

  The Bush administration, Nagin, and Blanco were each plagued by distrust and dysfunction. The lack of coordination, agreement, and a unified strategy left Bush in a state of relative indifference, as he became obsessed with the Iraq war, while Nagin was counting on the White House to provide a great inflow of relief funds. As he waited, Nagin formed the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, relying heavily on Joe Canizaro, the downtown developer for whom my dad had once worked. Canizaro invited the Urban Land Institute, an organization of developers, architects, and planners, to draft a plan for rebuilding the city. Most people were still struggling to get back in the fall of 2005, but enough citizens showed up at the BNOBC hearings to rail against the new “urban footprint” that would let whole areas of flood-wracked New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward, and the Broadmoor neighborhoods turn into unoccupied green spaces—buffers against future floods—while people in those areas were displaced. As protests rose, Nagin backed away from the ULI plan, saying that everyone had the right to return to where they wanted to live. He had no plan of his own.

  Governor Blanco, meanwhile, launched the Louisiana Recovery Authority, chaired by Norman Francis and Walter Isaacson, the author and a New Orleans native son who had recently become the CEO at the Aspen Institute. As the LRA became a crossroads for foundation support, Blanco and the congressional delegation pressed for federal legislation that eventually produced the Road Home Program, to give grants to homeowners and businesses whose insurance policies left them short of rebuilding funds. The slow pace at which all of this took place was a case study in how not to respond after a national disaster. Many of us in government realized that the Stafford Act, the enabling legislation for FEMA and crisis response, was woefully outdated. FEMA needed a drastic overhaul; but that is not to shift blame from Louisiana.

  Everyone working with Nagin knew he had been traumatized and was not providing the vision or leadership to spark a genuine recovery. His team was as erratic and disorganized as he was. In January 2006, he made his notorious “chocolate city” speech on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday—saying that the Lord had spoken to him, and New Orleans would always be majority black. This is not the city that I knew—we were not a white city or a black city but a multicultural city. Like the Lost Cause arguments, this rang false to me. True, he was running for reelection; and African Americans had indeed borne a disproportionate share of the losses in the storm. The city needed massive help, but foundation grant officers were uneasy at the spectacle in City Hall. The city had failed to access federal pipelines. The “chocolate city” speech was a clear pitch to African Americans stuck in Atlanta, Baton Rouge, or Houston, or sitting in FEMA trailers, angry at the Bush administration, angry at government period. Nagin, who had donated a thousand dollars to George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, and had won the mayoralty four years earlier with 70 percent of the white vote and only 30 percent of African Americans, now pinned his reelection on black voters, casting himself as the man they needed to keep hold of City Hall. The election turned into a racial litmus test.

  Maybe I made a bad decision to enter that race and run against Nagin, and I have only myself to blame, but I hated to see the city I loved so broken. I had to find a way to make the African American base I had built see that a vote for me was not a vote against their self-interest. Had Nagin done a halfway decent job I would not have run for mayor; but I couldn’t bear to sit passively at the sight of so much neglect, a fractured infrastructure, and flood-battered streets where six months after the storm dead cars layered in dirt still sat under the Claiborne Avenue overpass like carcasses waiting for a far-off burial. I felt that I could kick-start the recovery and begin to rebuild a city that had been torn apart.

  It was, bar none, the worst campaign experience I ever had. People were tired and angry, the mood in the city fierce and intense. Although the recovery had hit a brick wall, Nagin was hungry to find redemption in the public eye. National civil rights groups organized voter transportation to get New Orleans evacuees in Atlanta, Houston, and other cities the opportunity to vote, either where they were staying under special arrangements or back in the city. I watched the support for Nagin build as we entered the runoff, and realized that the turn of events was beyond my capacity to control. Race trumps everything at a certain point. Many African Americans felt scorned by the Katrina debacle; they were afraid. He played on their fears of their city being taken from them—he would stand up to the Man and “take it back.” Ironically, Nagin’s top contributors were from wealthy, old-line white families who thought they could control the mayor. Voters were strewn all over the country. People voted from satellite locations in cities all over, literally. I campaigned in Atlanta and Houston, of all places. It was surreal.

  In the end I got clipped and beaten. I was hurt, mostly because this was one of the few times I realized people viewed me as white. I was confused because these were the same African Americans my family and I had always fought so hard for. I had good public standing and could one day run for governor, but I felt sure I would never be mayor of New Orleans.

  The recovery limped along without the major infusion of dollars needed to bring back streets, parks, and public spaces; the Road Home Program did provide grants for people to rebuild their houses and businesses, and to slowly gain a sense of normalcy to certain neighborhoods. But I dusted myself off and went back to work in Baton Rouge, and was not surprised when Mayor Nagin did not reach out to us for help.

  My whole family went about doing what everyone else was—dealing with claims adjusters and contractors and the red tape necessary to get our homes rebuilt. After we got our moorings back, we created a family fund to rebuild the camp on Lake Pontchartrain. I thought of my grandpa Joe, patiently untangling those fishing lines we had jumbled together—steady of hand, determined to see his work through. It helps to have an example like that in your past.

  I learned a lot during Katrina and its aftermath, about myself and my city. It’s easier to reach for what was, rather than strive for something new. This is something true about people regardless of race or class. Katrina taught us that while we had come a long way in civil rights, the inequities t
hat still existed were a result of the lingering shadow of Jim Crow. Race was an issue we’d have to confront directly if we were ever going to move our city and country forward.

  CHAPTER 5

  Rebuilding and Mourning in NOLA

  Dreams really die hard. After the 2006 defeat I went back to the lieutenant governor’s office. The post-Katrina racial divisions were like gaping wounds, and though Nagin struck me as in way over his head, the voters had spoken. I was determined to help the city as best I could.

  In 2007 I ran for reelection as lieutenant governor. Despite a continuing shift of Louisiana voters to Republican candidates, I won in a landslide. GOP congressman Bobby Jindal, who had lost a close race to Blanco four years earlier, coasted to victory as governor.

  I doubled down on strengthening tourism and the cultural economy, investing in historic preservation, and supporting service organizations and nonprofits doing such work. We developed a master plan to revitalize the New Orleans economy. I was comfortable as lieutenant governor, an office I had turbocharged. I liked being a catalyst for the tourism and hospitality industries, and in traveling the state learned more of the history and mix of rich cultures. I intended to run for governor in 2015. After all, I had twice been elected statewide without a runoff. My sister had just won a third senatorial term in a convincing fashion. My polling numbers were good statewide. I could help New Orleans from Baton Rouge, after all.

  The recovery had flatlined under Nagin, which did not surprise me in light of his personality issues; but four and a half years after Katrina, the city’s dismal condition kept gnawing at me. As the mayoral election in 2010 came into view, I wasn’t impressed with the field lining up for the mayor’s race, which included several wealthy businessmen. No disrespect to men and women of commerce, but government is not a business and the idea of “running government as a business,” while a great line for TV spots, does not work as a political reality. Businesses function to earn profit; cities are governed to deliver public services, maintain infrastructure, and help businesses; they operate with revenue from taxation and grant support from state and federal government, as well as foundations. You can employ “best practices” to weed out rot or improve delivery of services; but you don’t run a police department or any public works department to make a profit. My phone was ringing, with several state legislators urging me to run. Then I heard from James Carville.