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Dispatches From A Displaced Mama: (part 14)
One Mama's Experiences After Katrina

My second week back in New Orleans was a study in contrasts. On the one hand, almost every evening we had plans, either to gather with friends (typically friends with kids) or to attend a cultural event (e.g., music after hours at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art or a generator-powered Christmas party in the shell of an Irish pub, owned by close friends, that had sustained both flooding and looting in the days post Katrina). These reunions were, invariably, joy filled and deeply cathartic. Somehow, the social connections we held previous to the storm, with friends and the community, felt that much more vital for being temporarily and violently interrupted.

On the other hand, there was the physical landscape. I did not have to venture into the vast urban wasteland of New Orleans, those neighborhoods and blocks most affected, in order to bear witness, with my son, to evidence of destruction. It became routine for Dylan to point to a pile of debris, a ravaged roof, or a mound of dry wall, dumped on the curb of a gutted house (of which there were now thousands), and observe, in a disturbingly sanguine voice, "The storm did that."

And there were the stories, so many stories. Everybody has one. If the person—friend, acquaintance or, simply, fellow survivor—does not have a first-hand account, he or she has a second-hand story, if not several. These stories are, without fail, alarming. In the first part of the week, conversations revolved around the instability of the economy and expressed a growing anxiety over how the city could feasibly recover without the promise of federal aid, particularly to rebuild the system of levees that the Army Corps of Engineers had so successfully botched. Everyone seemed to have an anecdote about why the place is on the brink of failure; neighborhoods that have been virtually abandoned, businesses that have not returned, strange and unpredictable power outages or areas to which power was not yet restored. Later in the week, after the Bush administration pledged (no doubt under duress) 3.1 billion dollars to the reconstruction effort and the communal anxiety was, for the moment, assuaged, people seemed to return to the as yet unprocessed site of their original trauma: the dramatic events that followed the storm. Many of us know of individuals who had refused to evacuate and had either died as a result or had had to cut their way through their rooftops as the floodwaters rose. More disturbing, while the city has publicly downplayed the violence in the Superdome and Convention Center, not to mention the deaths by gunfire across the city, I have heard repeatedly (enough times and from enough different sources to establish some degree of credibility) that the climate in those "shelters," respectively, was anarchical and bloody, that women were raped and individuals murdered, that the national guardsmen who were there, although greatly outnumbered, had tossed offending individuals from the upper levels of the Superdome into the floodwaters below, that there were many many ("thousands" was the number that I heard several times) of deaths from gun battles—between looters and police and military, and among looters themselves—the bodies of which remain unaccounted for, having been dumped into the muddy depths of the Mississippi River.

All of this was hard to digest and yet I continued to listen and, as unfathomable images clogged my head, to wonder anew how this environment would, in the long term, affect the malleable psyche of my growing boy, the delicate balance of my family, the future health, mental and physical, of the community.

The weird thing is, despite the daily rollercoaster my husband and I ride through joy and despair, Dylan seems profoundly happy. More happy, in fact, than I have seen him in a very long time. I attribute this largely to his being home, back in his room and with his stuff. He seems just as thrilled as we are to reunite with his friends, with whom he plays more amicably and with a greater focus than I remember him doing previously.

Toward the end of the week, I managed to track down and hire one of Dylan's former babysitters, who came with her niece, Nina, with whom Dylan had enjoyed a special friendship, so that Chris and I could enjoy an evening alone. Upon their arrival, Dylan and Nina retreated to his room, and were, shortly thereafter, giggling and immersed in play. Chris and I drove across the river to the edge of the central business district, where a small, ancient brick building houses one of our favorite restaurants, a charming French bistro called "Le Citron." There, as one of only three couples in the restaurant, we enjoyed an intimate and well-prepared meal and glass of wine. At the end of the meal, the chef emerged to offer us and a couple nearby, aperitifs on the house. We all raised our glasses to New Orleans, the city and her future. After a few moments, the inevitable questions bubbled to the surface: "How did you weather the storm? When did you evacuate? What did you see?" The other couple, who lived in a condo in the central business district, had banded together with other residents in their building and stayed through the storm. They had evacuated, they reported, a day later, after looters and water began to flood the downtown. The chef nodded sympathetically. He, too, had stayed, he told us, in that very building. Built in the early 1800's, it was, he explained, the oldest building outside the French Quarter and had weathered many storms. "But things got hairy in the days after when I had to defend the restaurant against bands of people who were trying to break in." He did not elaborate what he did to defend the place or himself, but I was deeply moved by the very idea of this lone French chef, bravely protecting his little restaurant and livelihood, through those darkest of days.

We exchanged cards with the other couple, with whom we seemed to have become instant friends, and vowed to be in touch. Leaving the restaurant I had the feeling that my family and I now lived in a place that was edgier, at once more brutal and more beautiful, than the one we had comfortably inhabited before. We returned home to find Dylan and Nina slumbering in a tangle on the living room couch. Their tired faces revealed the intensity of their play. That night, we, too, would be grateful to rest, sheltered for a time from the conflicts of the world outside.

column added on 2005-12-18 :: ::

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