Duckworth also worried about what vessels he green-lighted. For instance, he received a telephone call from two Texans with a World War II Duckboat. As a military history buff who had built a replica of a Higgins boat, the Louisiana-manufactured craft used on D-Day, Duckworth knew those old Duckboats had a terrible habit of sinking and could be dangerous. Crowd too many evacuees on one and it might just go under. Glad that they were at least asking for approval, Duckworth cut a deal. “Look,” he said, “you come to Alexandria and let me inspect it and I’ll put you in the game.” This was essentially a ploy. The chance that two guys would drive from Houston to Alexandria towing a vintage vessel to be inspected by a Coast Guard commander was slim. But sure enough, the Texans reported for duty about six hours later. “God bless those guys,” Duckworth said. “They show up with a huge custom trailer and a beautiful World War II Army Duck. These two great guys. They came into the command post. I walked outside. I inspected their Duck. It was in tip-top shape. I told them the Coast Guard could use them. I wrote down a bunch of notes on where they needed to go and get people. They followed orders, took off, and the last I heard had saved people in New Orleans.”
The very first responders will never be known by name. When the levees broke, and the bowl started filling, hundreds of residents with recreational vessels went into high gear. The city had people conducting rescues with yachts, dinghies, ferries, canoes, rafts, sailboats, scows, skiffs, sloops, tubs, catamarans, dories, draggers, baiters, and ketches—and even a floating wagon. Who were these navigators? What was their story? They were known at Johnny White’s Bar as the NOLA Homeboys, the oddballs who refused to evacuate, who were saving New Orleanians from the ravages of Katrina. They knew fellow citizens were suffering and even dying and they weren’t going to sit on the sidelines, waiting for our-of-state help. These were their brothers and their sisters. These were the neighbors they never knew. These were the neighbors they were determined to save. They had no official insignia or training. They were bartenders and insurance salespersons and clerks—regular folks. It never dawned on them to wait for the FEMA trucks or the Oregon National Guard.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines “homeboy” a few different ways. The common meaning of “a fellow male gang member” certainly didn’t apply here. But another meaning was a friend or acquaintance (usually male) from “one’s neighborhood or hometown.” Without worrying about mosquitoes, chemical burns, or tetanus, with no surgical masks on their faces, the NOLA Homeboys plunged forward to help the terrified. There was no hesitation, just raw human instinct to risk your life to save another person. There was a part-time dishwasher at Cannon’s Restaurant, a checkout clerk at the A&P, or a tacomaker from Juan’s Flying Burrito. Some of them were considered misfits in town. Without search and rescue training, they were fueled by a combination of courage, decency, instinct, and adrenaline. Some had never heard of FEMA, but they intuitively knew that by the time “those guys” showed up, people would have drowned. “Law enforcement is never comfortable with common citizens coming in,” Bob Mann said. “We didn’t want to be rescuing the rescuer. We had widespread violence. So we were concerned about jeopardizing their lives. In the end, thank God they did.”47
The NOLA Homeboys, in many cases, were the outcasts in the community. One of the NOLA Homeboys, for example, was Michael Knight, a thirty-three-year-old African-American reggae crooner and father of seven who risked his life to help others. With long dreadlocks and a carefree Caribbean demeanor, Knight was high just living on Jah’s cool earth. Everything will be all right, man, was his general outlook on life. He was all about the second-line at Vaughn’s Lounge, steaks from Winn-Dixie, and to-go cups at Lucky Charms. His entire life centered on the eighty-three blocks of the Seventh Ward. Occasionally he dreamed of moving away, and he had once spent a brief spell in Virginia, but the cold weather always brought him back to the bayous. “You can’t go nowhere else in the world and get up at two in the morning and go to the bar to have you a drink and a po’-boy,” Knight explained of New Orleans. “The simplest things is the things you miss the most.”48
On the eve of Katrina, Knight and his wife, Deonne, lived in a blighted block of St. Philip Street, only a short drive from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Considering that Knight was living in a small shotgun house, it was odd that he kept his banana-yellow, twenty-foot boat in his driveway—or it seemed odd to those who didn’t know Michael Knight. Although he worked for a framing company, and had seven kids to raise, he treasured his time alone on Pontchartrain, spool reeling in redfish, speckled trout, and flounder. Sometimes the kids would come along for a family outing, and he would tie ropes around them all to make sure they didn’t dive in and drown. Instinctively, he was a lifeguard, a cautionary fisherman. Only a true lover of Pontchartrain knew how dangerous its riptides and mood swings could be.
Although Knight knew that Katrina would probably flood St. Philip Street, he decided to stay at home, with his family, including his mother-in-law, Rose, and his sister Theresa. Truth be told, he had nowhere to go—without a credit card and living from paycheck to paycheck, he didn’t have the means to head to, say, Memphis. He did stockpile water and a little food and he had a couple of generators. Most important, he hitched his Sea Ray boat to the pickup parked in the street, hoping to anchor it down. He had gone to bed Sunday evening with his wife, deciding not to stay up to monitor the weather; they didn’t want to make the kids nervous. Although Knight seldom went to church, he had developed a spiritual outlook, derived from listening to Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Sly and Robbie, and Bunny Livingstone. Every evening, he played Marley CDs and caught the groove. You name the hypnotic Marley song—“Satisfy My Soul,” “Buffalo Soldiers,” “So Much Trouble in the World”—Knight knew the lyrics to it by heart.
When Knight woke up on Monday morning, St. Philip Street was badly flooded, and his truck was a total loss. But his Sea Ray boat was afloat, bouncing on the water unscathed, a cork in the maelstrom. “I said, ‘I’m gonna get in the boat and just take a ride up the street to assess the damage,’” Knight recalled. “But when I got out there, everyone was hollering from every which way, ‘Help me!’ and ‘Get me outta here! And there were elderly people, and young people, just walking around lootin’. It was sad. And no damn police. I refused to pick looters up, but you know, somebody’d say, ‘Hey, my momma’s ninety years old. She’s on So-and-So Street.’ They’d give me the address and I’d go ride and find it and knock on the door. Some of them wanted to leave, some of them didn’t.”
Infused with a missionary zeal, Knight started using his Sea Ray as a rescue vessel. Deonne, with curly bleached blond hair and a love for everything about St. Philip, was his deckhand. Wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt, denim shorts, and no shoes, with Marley blaring out of his boat stereo, Knight became a one-man 911 operation. Whenever looters would shout at him for a ride, he shook his head no and said, “Fire’s burning, man. Pull your own weight.” To Knight, this meant that the water had risen, find your own way out; it was every able man for himself, but take care of the weak. And he drew inspiration from the Israeli Vibrations song “Ambush,” written by Albert Craig, particularly the verse “I’m just a buffalo soldier / Survival is my game.”
Realizing that many poor folks hadn’t evacuated the Lafitte Housing Project in Tremé, he started shuttles to the 896-unit complex, parking his boat on the corner of Broad and St. Philip. “So I three stories up and there’s an elderly white man and white woman,” he said. “They might have been eighty or ninety years old. I grabbed the man out of his wheelchair and I bring him down to the boat. His wife could walk. We put her in the boat and then we get all set and ready to pull off. The old man said, ‘Where’s my wife?’ and I said, ‘She’s right here in front of you.’ And I took his hand and I took her hand and I put them together. When I did that, he smiled. It was just unbelievable.”49
Over the course of the week Knight rescued around 250 people from the Seventh
Ward, many of them infants and elderly. Locals brought gallons of gasoline to his house so he could keep up the work. Coast Guard helicopters, flying over Knight’s boat, gladly pointed the reggae skipper in the direction of people stranded on balconies or rooftops. “Once the Coast Guard seen I was rescuing people, once they started seeing I was bringing people to them, they’d give the thumbs-up, ‘You’re doing a great job, guy,’” Knight recalled. “I’d look up and they’d be over my head and I’d go over there to the bayou and the helicopter would drop down the baskets and pick people up.”
Refusing to stop even after dark, Knight commandeered a canoe from City Park and paddled around the Seventh Ward in the moonlight, looking for victims whom he could snatch up in the morning with his Sea Ray, which could fit in twenty people a run. “At night, people would shout at me, ‘Hey, can you come rescue me in the morning?’” Knight said. “They’d say, ‘I’ll pay ya!’ And I’d say back, ‘No, don’t worry! I’m comin’ to get you first thing when the sun rise,’ and I did. One woman was stuck in an apartment with fifteen kids. I got all dem to dry, safe land.” Often, after a puff of sacrament, paddling alone in the flooded streets under the stars, Knight would think about Katrina, whether it was the result of the greenhouse effect or a hole in the stratosphere. Then he turned his mind to the Righteous One and all of his troubles evaporated.
On some of these daring rescues, Knight’s wife, Deonne, was his co-captain, guarding the vessel from thieves when he went into the Lafitte Projects to carry out the infirm. She was constantly chasing away “poverty pimps” looking to hustle cash, and “urban foresters” gathering valuable lumber for later resale. She also made sure that there was plenty of Corona in the cooler, and that the pipe was full. Because her husband was a big eater, weighing 220 pounds, he needed to be fed well, preferably home-cooked food. His favorites were T-bones, rib eyes, mustard greens, wild game, and Lake Pontchartrain redfish. A neighbor even brought them a whole beef brisket. Every evening Knight himself cooked steaks and chickens on a grill and with the sky full of stars he launched into “Redemption Song,” “Belly Full,” “Natural Mystic,” and “Kaya.” Always, he said, he “kept the charcoal dry.” And somehow, when nobody else in the neighborhood had cell phone service, Knight was able to get a signal out. He checked in with his father in Atlanta, who was worried about his seven grandchildren. “Get them the hell out of New Orleans,” he instructed his son. “Now, Papa,” Knight said, “I’m rescuing people. I just fine.”
VIII
Operating with the NOLA Homeboys, but not in tandem, was a fiery African-American woman with a time-honored sense of human justice, reminiscent of such civil rights leaders as Fannie Lou Hamer, Daisy Bates, and Ella Baker. With an angelic smile and a bellyful of gripes about authoritarianism, Dyan “Mama D” French Cole was the Florence Nightingale of the Seventh Ward of New Orleans. Scorning handshakes for hugs, and often dressed in flamboyant West African garb, her Dorgenois Street home became a grass-roots post-Katrina nerve center. “I was sittin’ on the porch watchin’ Katrina when she came,” Mama D recalled. “It was crying, howling, like she lost all of her children. But I didn’t mind the storm per se. I’ve been livin’ in the swamp for sixty-one years. We do hurricanes.”50
A dedicated activist, Mama D had trained with Bayard Rustin back in the 1960s on direct-action campaigns for social change. She became the first woman to head the New Orleans chapter of the NAACP. When the 17th Street and London Avenue canals breached, she knew how to find boats. She always knew how to find everything.
She dispatched a group of “brothers” to pull the poor and sick out of attics in canoes and johnboats. “No person left behind” was her motto. Her heart was especially open to the unhinged underdog, the mentally disturbed, the barewall junkies shaking alone in their flooded quarters. She was the Guardian of the Outcast, her long dreadlocked hair usually pulled back, wrapped in a scarf, her deep hazel eyes always looking to assist the untouchables of the Seventh Ward. “You need something to eat?” Mama D would ask some confused, lost soul on Esplanade Avenue. “You need some food, baby?”51 Mama D called everyone “baby.”
Many of the unevacuated New Orleanians were afraid of the NOPD and the National Guard. Instead of fleeing the bowl, they were trying to avoid public notice, each bullhorn shouting from an armored vehicle or aid truck merely intimidated, pushing them farther back into their Seventh Ward garrets. Starting on Katrina Day—August 29—Mama D would parade down streets like Tremé, St. Philip, and St. Ann, carrying herself with down-home dignity, self-confidence apparent in her every stride. She pushed a cartful of baby formula, chicken noodle soup, toothpaste, deodorant, tampons, prenatal vitamins, and ham sandwiches, and handed them out. Mama D was a walking, singing mini-market, a one-woman mercy machine. She had no agenda but to help the afflicted. “So many of them are scared to come out of their homes,” she told Times-Picayune reporter Trymaine D. Lee. “But they’re hungry, I know they are. So, I just come by everyday and let them get used to my voice and hope they come out.” The provisions she passed out had been, in her words, “liberated.”
The posse of African-American men around her house was made up of Christians and Rastafarians. They were named the Soul Patrol by Rick Matthieu, after the Jimi Hendrix song “Power of Soul” from the album Band of Gypsys (Live at Fillmore East). Matthieu was the leader of the Soul Patrol, the navigator-operator of their fleet of five boats: a pontoon, a 12-foot flatboat, a 21-foot fiberglass boat with a 200-horsepower engine, a cabin cruiser, and a 16-foot flatboat. What enabled Matthieu to act so efficiently was his childhood experience with Hurricane Betsy. He had been piloting boats since he was seven years old. “With my dad during Betsy, we saved lots of folks,” Matthieu recalled. “I prepared on Friday night before Katrina because my dad had prepared in the same way for Betsy.”52 During that first post-storm week they saved at least five hundred New Orleanians. They were the very antithesis of looters. The Soul Patrol, like Michael Knight, just kept putting their boats in the sludge, saving babies, priests, and the disabled. Among the members of the Soul Patrol was Earl Barthé, his red, yellow, and green Rasta cap always on. He was the swimmer extraordinaire who dived right into the flooded houses. Some of the other members were Ortegas Coleman, a Black Cross medic on assignment from Mama D, who knew no fear; Ricky Thompson, another Black Cross member, who looked like the all-American athlete next door; and Ronald “Fat” Davis, a man never without a parlor joke. They all shared a deep-seated belief in direct community action, and were suspicious of the National Guard’s rescue orthodoxy. “They were real good,” Mama D said. “Unlike Mayor Nagin who was a poor excuse for a brother.”53
Word was out in the Seventh Ward that the Superdome was a horrific place for evacuees, as was I-10. The Soul Patrol decided that many of the Seventh Warders were better off in the unflooded sections of their own shotguns or apartments than in the cesspool of those so-called staging areas. The Mama D gang had their own way of doing things: herbal medicines, folk cures, nonviolence, vegetarian food, no guns, One Love. It was a holistic haven that didn’t care for the U.S. government or City Hall. In the post-Katrina days, Mama D built a cinder-block fire ring, a barbecue pit that served as a neighborhood powwow center. It was located outside her grandmother’s house, where she had lived since the 1950s. With the Red Cross and FEMA nowhere to be found, Mama D and the Soul Patrol took it upon themselves to dole out compassion. In the Seventh Ward, they didn’t just respect Mama D; they loved her. And for all her maternal bear hugs, when Mama D caught a whiff of inequity of any kind, she confronted it with the old Black Panther, in-your-face determination, which was stylistically anachronistic everywhere except in Oakland, Detroit, and Newark. She was a provocateur, a woman of the left, the breathing epitome of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Testifying before Congress on December 5, 2005, about the Seventh Ward, Mama D stole the show. “You know what we need right now?” Mama D asked the legislators. “We need y’all to take FEMA and the Re
d Cross…just get ’em outta my neighborhood.”54
IX
Once Michael Prevost, the private-school administrator, left his Lakeview home in a canoe on Monday afternoon, he too started paddling toward NOLA Homeboy status. Every house in his upper-middle-class neighborhood, between the 17th Street Canal and the Marconi Canal and City Park Avenue, was swamped. All of the boats and yachts in Lakeview were piled up like firewood, were dumped on top of houses, or had become surreal decorative items on front lawns. Popular Lakeside businesses like the Robert E. Lee Shopping Center, Plantation Coffeehouse, and Basin Bar were under six to eight feet of water. Helicopters were hovering over the breached levee, shining huge searchlights on the gaping holes. As the winds continued to drop, Prevost was hailed by neighbors who shouted for lifts. Without a motor and with the floodwater still choppy, he cautiously started plucking down the “roof people of Lakeview,” one by one. Early on, near the University of New Orleans (UNO) campus, he helped two Chinese men who had been in America for only two weeks. “Is the water going to get higher?” one of them asked, panic-stricken. “We’ve never seen this much water.” All Prevost could say was “Neither have I.”
That evening Prevost commandeered an apartment at UNO along with two African Americans he had rescued. Frogs croaked all night long like a choir—something never heard before in Lakeview. The sky was so gorgeous it was like camping in the Rockies on a perfect summer night. With his mutt, Chelsea, at his side, Prevost slept on the balcony. He enjoyed being out under the stars, an unexpected aspect of Katrina.
The Great Deluge Page 38
