Saturday Night,
we went down to the French Quarter and saw the first walking parade of the Mardi
Gras season. The parades are sponsored and carried out by groups called
Krewes, and Krewe de Vieux is known for its irreverence and satire. The
theme this year was Katrina, and the satire was lively. Most memorable float—probably
the last one, Mandatory Ejaculation, with a giant vagina on the cart and lots
of people carrying sperm on sticks, white balls with long wiggly tales, behind.
I went down with Sue and Juniper, and Scotty who promised to desert us in favor
of some of his younger friends. It was great to see the streets filled
with people, to be crushed in the crowd and to hear the drums and follow the
parade. The French Quarter is a perfect setting, with its narrow streets
and high balconies that turn the whole city into a stage. If I ever get to design
a city, I will be thinking about how to make it work for parades and processions,
demonstrations and insurrections, with maybe a few hidden bowers for lovers
here and there. At last I got to hear jazz, with band after band parading
through the streets, trumpets and trombones and drummers with those lively,
syncopated rhythms that make your feet dance. You can’t help but
feel happy when that music is playing. After huge traumas and great sorrows,
music knits the world together again, and that’s what the jazz musicians
and the singers of blues know how to do.
After the parade, eight of us went out to dinner. Somehow, once we squeezed
past the crowded, smoky bar, the restaurant was quiet, the food was delicious—gumbo
and shrimp creole and good wine. Melissa, who was born and raised here,
was in her element—at last our whole workaholic cluster had relaxed enough
to go out to dinner and experience a bit of the culture she loves.
Monday we saw another face of New Orleans. It was the day that FEMA hotel
vouchers ran out, and people were being evicted. Common Ground set up
a demonstration at City Hall, prepared to put up a tent city if local residents
requested it. I stayed there much of the morning, while we waited to here
if an injunction would be issued to stave off the evictions. The injunction
was denied. I heard some of the sad tales of FEMA incompetence and bureaucratic
nightmares: the woman who had a job in New Orleans but no housing, who
was offered a shelter in Shreveport by FEMA but then would lose her job, and
who wanted to stay together with her family. The woman whose sign for
the demonstration was a board from her house, who had a voucher from FEMA for
a hotel room up until March 1, but couldn’t find an hotel in town that
would accept the voucher. Later, Sue came home from a long day with the
sad tale of the man who was evicted from his hotel. FEMA wouldn’t pay
for a room but, in the only incidence of efficiency I’ve ever heard attributed
to them. Immediately issued him a plane ticket to Illinois where he had family.
It might seem that they were eager to get people out of town, were it
not for their unwillingness to issue him a cab voucher or give him any help
to get to the airport. Sue drove him, helping him sort out all of his
worldly possessions, which were in clear, plastic bags, and fit what he could
into a suitcase.
Today, Valentine’s Day, I spent taking samples of soil from some of the
most toxic sites in New Orleans—a romantic occupation if ever there was
one! The EPA tested most of the neighborhoods here, but is refusing to
go back and retest, a pretty standard procedure, saying that access is too difficult.
Juniper and Jen combed through the EPA data to actually identify twenty
or so of the most toxic sites, and trained a group of us to take the samples.
The sites are street corners, peoples’ back yards, schoolyards.
We wear protective boots and carefully keep the soil we scoop up
from getting contaminated and record all the necessary data. I am the photographer
and recorder on our team. Mark, the driver and chief sampler, is an experienced
biologist who has done this before, so it goes quickly. The samples
will be sent back to Washington DC, where the National Resource Defense Council
will at some point hold a press conference and present the samples to the EPA.
I am overwhelmed at the scope of the destruction I’ve seen. We go into
areas I haven’t visited, and I hadn’t realized what vast sections
of the city are still deserted, still in ruins, still fully of collapsed homes
and sediment covered yards. Miles and miles of desolation stretch out
from the city’s core. Block after block of public housing,
still standing but boarded up and shuttered. Someone went to a lot of
trouble to board each door and window—I can’t help but wonder why
they didn’t spend the same energy to fix the places up and bring people
home. Street after street is still empty. Here and there a FEMA
trailer sits in a yard, but most are deserted, at least during the week while
their owners are elsewhere trying to hold down a job, coming into the city on
weekends to work on gutting the house. Vast stretches of strip mall leading
out of town are in ruins. And the lower Ninth Ward is a shambles of wrecked
homes and cars. Little has changed since we drove through in October,
except that now a huge mound of garbage sits on the streets in front of every
house still standing: the whole contents of a family’s life mixed
with the broken sticks of their structure. Stir with mold and let sit
for weeks: a recipe for despair.
2-16-06
Yesterday we spent looking at sites to bioremediate and making our plans. A
surreal day.
We all went down to the lower Ninth Ward and together looked at the building
that will house women and children. It’s a small, brick, single
family home that somehow survived the onslaught of the waters when the levee
broke, even while many of its neighbors were washed away. Common Ground
teams have gutted it, and sprayed it with EM, the preparation of beneficial
microbes that eat mold more effectively—and with less toxicity—than
bleach. The yard is covered with thick, cracked sediment, but in some
areas weeds, wild geraniums and clovers and others I don’t recognize,
poke through the mud. Alongside, someone has carefully laid out what is
left of the family’s possessions: a few pieces of unbroken china,
some soaked and molding pictures, an antique washbowl edged in green. It’s
a small house, but someone lived in it, cared for it, made it nice, carefully
arranged these broken china birds and flowers, fed their children off these
plates. It reminds me a lot of the modest house my aunt and uncle lived
in, with their treasures on the sideboard and their neat hedges bordering the
walkway. Or like the apartments and houses I grew up in. It’s reminding
me of my mother’s final illness and death, how taking apart her house
was like taking apart her identity, her life. I can still walk through
that house in my memory, tell you clearly which pottery bowl was on the mantle
and which was on the bookcase. A child’s face stares up at me from
a molding photo album, a baby of about eighteen months, café-au-lait
skin and dark eyes. Someone who loved that child would treasure that picture,
but I don’t know what to do to save it.
Down the street the Common Ground center in the lower Ninth sits like a small
blue beacon amidst a sea of rubble and sticks. They’ve fixed up
one small house to serve as a distribution and welcome center for people coming
back. They are providing resources for the community to organize and fight
the city’s plans to bulldoze the entire area. The city, in turn,
has not removed any of the debris and garbage, for the five months that have
now elapsed since the hurricane. They are not making it easy for people
to come home.
From the women’s house, a carload of us head down to the neighborhood
near the Murphy’s Oil Spill, where 25,000 gallons of crude oil spilled
from a tank during the flood. This neighborhood is surreal in a different
way. At first, it looks like any optimistic new suburban development,
bright new houses a little too big for the empty lots they stand on. But look
a little closer, and it resembles a ghost town. The houses are empty,
not because they are models waiting for people to move in, but because they
are covered with a thick, black, goo. Doors stand open, gutted interiors
revealed. Here and there someone has scraped away the caked ooze and revealed
bare soil. In one or two yards, FEMA trailers stand, but no one is home.
We drive back, past miles of gutted and abandoned strip malls, the kind of soulless
places that are horrible even when they are functioning. In ruin, they
achieve a kind of stark beauty, as if some giant conceptual artist had installed
them all, a huge, open-air exhibition of the end of the world.
And then somehow we are uptown, winding our way through an enclave of beautiful,
huge old homes with green lawns and landscaping, untouched by the flood, or
by poverty, or seemingly, by any of the ills and disasters that plague life.
Lovely old architecture, gracious, arching trees, quiet streets, and on
the avenues, cafes and open stores and lights. Here, you could believe
the flood never happened—or if it did, that all is being dealt with efficiently,
expertly. Here all is well.
The houses border a golf course and a poor neighborhood of modest homes, where
we are headed because some of the highest concentrations of arsenic have been
reported from these small lawns. We wonder if it comes from the golf course,
from all the weed killers they use on their grass. Here again, no one
is home. We see some workers at one house, an older woman just now moving
into her FEMA trailor who is too overwhelmed to think about bioremediating her
yard. Another man tells us, “It hasn’t killed me yet,” and
shrugs us off. We decide that this will be a longer term project, and
head back for our meeting.
I once heard Amory Lovins, the designer and architect, speak about how he approaches
a project, how important it is to ask the right questions. He was talking about
Curitiba, a city in Brazil where they began with the question, “How do
we love all the children?”
I don’t know what questions the city government, the state and Federal
officials, the huge relief agencies, have asked themselves. But it is
clear to me what they have not asked:
“How do we bring all the people home again?”
There are good people in all these systems, but they’re working against
the odds. And with all the awesome and amazing work being done, by Common
Ground and the other relief workers here, But our efforts are so small, so slight,
measured against this oceanic need.
Starhawk
is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth Path, Webs of Power:
Notes from the Global Uprising, The Fifth Sacred Thing and other
books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches Earth
Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills,
www.earthactivisttraining.org and works with the RANT trainer’s collective,
www.rantcollective.net
that offers training and support for mobilizations around global justice and
peace issues.
Donations to support the work can be made at
www.rantcollective.net
Tax deductible donations can also be sent to:
ACT
1405 Hillmount St.
Austin, Texas
78704
U.S.A.
(Check payable to ACT earmarked NOLA)