Daniel Wolff, author of ‘The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back’ provides a brief update on how Carolyn Parker is weathering Hurricane Isaac in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
Wednesday, August 29th, 2012
Just spoke with Carolyn. She’s fine, in her house; still raining and blowing hard. Kyrah and Rahsaan are with her. She says:
I said my hard prayer. And God heard.”
Trees are down, and her windows kept flying open, but she put in some screws and tied them shut. The way Isaac is staying around, Carolyn says, “Might be a girl. Might be hatching babies! I don’t know.”
She saw some suspicious people hanging around her house, waiting for her to leave. “Why would you leave all your stuff and be sitting ducks for those thugs who don’t work?!”
But she has seen the National Guard pass by. “They’re not tolerating it.”
And as to the new levee system: “That thing work!”
Thursday, August 30, 2012
The wind has died down and the rain stopped, but there’s still no power.
Carolyn reports: “It’s getting hotter and hotter, and I’m getting meaner and meaner…. We want our air on!”
Daniel Wolff was executive producer on Jonathan Demme’s The Agronomist, has published poetry in The Paris Review, Partisan Review and The Threepenny Review and is the author of a number of nonfiction books, including the recent How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them. A Grammy nominee and winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award for his biography of Sam Cooke, Wolff has collaborated with sculptor Robert Taplin, musician Steve Elson and choreographer Marta Renzi, mother of his two children.
