Returning Home After Katrina
Carolyn tried to come back home immediately, but the Lower Ninth was cordoned off. "The policeman stopped me at the foot of the bridge. I told him, 'Officer, all I want to do is... see if my house is still standing.'" She wasn't allowed. A month later, in October, she tried again, and this time a guard recognized her. And told her she was dead.
"Pinch me!" was Carolyn's response.
As she walked through the emptiness of Holy Cross, a neighbor told her the same thing, and somehow it fit. "When I came to see my house," she says now, "there was a deep breath I had to take. 'Cause everything down here was, like, dead." She looks around slowly. "It was like I was walking into death... Everything was gray."
She saw her house was still in one piece and took pictures of the ruined interior. "In a swirl, like it had gone down a drain."
A couple of months later, on Kyra's Christmas break, the two of them returned to start the cleanup. Father Joe met them. It was clear to Carolyn that someone had been through the swirl of her possessions and helped themselves. Mother, daughter, priest, and another parishioner salvaged what they could, shoveling out the river mud that covered the hardwood floors, pulling down the rotted walls. Volunteers from the Alleluia Group -- a self-described "charismatic, ecumenical, Christian community" -- had come down from Georgia to volunteer. "The Alleluia Group came in and pretty much finished off everything that we couldn't do," Kyrah recalls. "'Cause we weren't tall enough and didn't have ladders." The team also gutted another parishioner's house and started on St. David. Father Joe held a pre-Christmas service outside the battered church.
During that time, Mayor Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission held its first public meeting at the Sheraton Hotel. Holy Cross had been designated an "Infill Development Area," subject to land seizure and developer's plans. Carolyn put on a brown print house dress and, with a black purse over her shoulder, made her way downtown through the ruins. Inside the Sheraton, she kept running into people she knew. And they kept telling her she was dead.
When the time came for public comment, she walked to the microphone and politely introduced herself. "I came to this meeting to find what your vision for the Lower Ninth Ward." Her voice was a little hesitant at first, in front of the cameras and the crowd. "I heard nothing really for the Lower Ninth Ward." As her confidence grew, she emphasized her points by tossing her head. "Those are my family, my friend, my neighbor. I been down there -- yes, I'm telling my age -- fifty-nine years! And I know who been here, I know who came, and I know who went."
Now, standing on her porch, describing the scene, she says, "It looked like they didn't understand me, right? So that's what made me pause."
After the pause, she leaned in to the mike. "I'm here for those persons who cannot get back to New Orleans," scanning the panel, which included Mayor Nagin, "and I don't think it's right if you try and take our property." A voice gave a faint thank-you; her two minutes were up. "Because like I said," Carolyn continued, "over my dead body! I didn't die with Katrina! Bye." And she spun from the mike, the crowd applauding and shouting.
"I think they heard me," she says now, grinning. The moment was replayed on C-SPAN; NPR picked it up. Carolyn says someone asked President Bush about the woman at the Sheraton. Here on her porch, Carolyn reenacts the president's back-and-forth with reporters. "The man said, 'Well, President, the lady say you'll get it over her dead body.'" Carolyn's big smile reemerges. "'I have no comment.' 'But the lady say --' 'Well, I don't know how she really, really feel.'"
Now, with this small party going on in the midst of her still-dark neighborhood, she adds, "I'll tell you how I really, really feel. I love New Orleans. I love the Lower Ninth Ward. And I'm not going anywhere." She gives a proud smile, looking at her gutted house. "'Cause I'm home. I'm home. These are my friends. These are my neighbors. And I love that."
She's been staying here, illegally, since February. "It was supposed to be look-and-leave. I came in a U-Haul. And with flashlights and batteries. And candles!" She gives her troublemaking grin. Carolyn and her brother Raymond started camping in the bare bones of her gutted home. That first night, she remembers, "I lit up the whole house!... It was glowing on the corner, and it was total darkness all around... So the police came, and I let them in. And he said, 'Don't you know you're supposed to look and leave?' I said, 'The last time I noticed, I owned this house!'" She tosses her head and grins some more. "So, look-and-leave went to look-and-stay."
They've been camping ever since: bathing in water hauled from the corner fire hydrant, watching battery-run TVs, cooking off a propane barbeque grill that doubles as a heater. The Red Cross gave them hot food and blankets. "They thought it was so cute: two senior citizens breaking violations." Carolyn laughs.
Someone suggests throwing a block party to show they're back: putting tables out on Jourdan Avenue and having everyone cook.
"Next year," says Carolyn. "My knees will be ready." She's scheduled for a knee replacement operation. And by next year, she figures, the neighborhood should be back. Looking out on the block, she ticks off the status of each house. The one to her north, "the landlord has." And the one to the south, "I find out this couple's not coming back, so that's probably up for sale. The next house right behind it, I don't know if he's coming back. 'Cause that's a senior citizen."
The sun has now set, and the mosquitoes are starting to come out. It's time for the small party to break up. Carolyn says goodnight to everyone, then locks the front gate against stray dogs. She carefully pulls the front door closed and locks it, too -- against looters. Soon the block is still again, the only light the blue flicker of her TV.
Copyright 2012 by Daniel Wolff. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury.
Remembering Segregation
Sitting on her bed in the trailer, a plate of chicken on her lap, Carolyn remains hopeful that things are about to get better. She says she was one of the first to apply for Road Home, and they promised her the process would be accelerated. Her mortgage was paid off a decade ago. And Carolyn adds, smiling, "They didn't have to worry about fighting over no insurance, because no insurance was there..."
At that, she puts her plate of chicken to the side and lifts her chin.
"They didn't want us back. They don't want us back. But we are back."
They're almost exactly Lathan's words. But where he's fighting for his home by doing his own repairs, investing in real estate, Carolyn's strategy has to be different. "We have the patience of Job," she says. "We gonna wait. And they gonna see. And we gonna," she pauses between each word: "still be here."
It's like a siege: ruined houses, poor medical care, few schools, the delay in relief money. Plus FEMA recently declared its new deadline: it will start repossessing trailers early this spring. Against these obstacles, Carolyn sees her only real weapon as the ability to wait. To pray and to wait.
Right now, she's especially disturbed by the latest addition to the siege: the threat to her church. As part of its post-Katrina realignment, the Catholic archdiocese has announced that its two congregations in the Lower Ninth will have to merge. They'll worship at either St. Maurice or the building where Carolyn married and baptized her children, St. David.
St. Maurice is bigger, older, more ornate, with marble pillars and a high cathedral vault. It's always been the neighborhood's white church. In the sixties, its congregation included prominent leaders of the segregationist Citizens Council. When she was a child, Carolyn remembers, "[though] we were supposed to be going to church to praise God... blacks had to go upstairs. To the balcony. And to the back..." Her eyes glint, the rest of her face unmoving. "You just took their communion and got out. You couldn't even stay there to go to mass." That, she explains, is the reason St. David was built. "Because of St. Maurice's attitude. They didn't want us there."
Though most of St. Maurice's congregation has moved out to the suburbs, the archdiocese announced at a recent community meeting that it would resolve the issue through "dialogue." "Where do people want to worship?" a soft-spoken priest had asked. A white man with a northern accent, he had instructed the mostly black congregation to repeat twice after him: "Nothing (Nothing) has been decided (has been decided). Nothing..."
Carolyn stood and spoke at the meeting. "St. Maurice, this is your home. I'm visiting you... St. David is my home... I want to go home." Now, in her trailer, she says the archdiocese has gone out of its way to close "all the black Catholic churches." Her speech slows; her eyes flare. "[It's] bringing us back to a place -- a very uncomfortable place -- that I really don't want to revisit... Nobody wants to revisit segregation."
As far as she's concerned, the threatened closing is a call to arms. But she's worried that people Kyrah's and Rahsaan's ages don't recognize that. "I hate to say this, but it look like our younger generation don't fight strong enough. Look like they just let people turn them around." She has a perplexed expression. "And you know, we came up with that 'Don't let nobody turn you around.'" Smiles at the old hymn lyric and civil rights slogan. "...I'm sorry: I can't just sit still and let you promise me you're gonna do something, and then you don't do it."
It's why, she says, pointing to her silent, flickering TV, she supports the latest protests. This week, on Martin Luther King Day, residents marched on the St. Bernard housing development in midcity. It's one of the Big Four that HUD closed after the floods. Now it's been announced that it's scheduled for demolition. In response, protestors circled the complex, found an opening in the fence, and broke in: a drop squad. As Carolyn speaks, they're still occupying a number of apartments, demanding the development be reopened.
"They're gonna stay in there," Carolyn says, "until HUD decides to either fix them, or fix something for them to move into. And I think that's a good idea." It's the same strategy she's using: to wait. "'Cause if they didn't, HUD's not gonna worry about you... What the city wants to do and HUD wants to do is tell them it's unlivable. But they told me the same thing." She gives a triumphant grin toward her double shotgun. "I'm still alive!"
To Carolyn, the fight for home goes way back. "I'm a lady of action," she explains. "I believe in action... the NAACP, the National Urban League. I got hooked up with the late great Reverend Avery Alexander." In 1960, at the time of the sit-ins that changed the South, Carolyn was in junior high, and the Reverend Alexander was helping to organize the Consumers' League of Greater New Orleans. "You see him maybe when they show the civil rights in New Orleans? He's the old man that they're dragging down the steps of city hall." She stops and stares over her plate of chicken. "Uh-huh! Beating his head on the pavement -- uh-uh-uh -- as he goes down the steps." She bobs her head, mouth open. "That was the man that taught me, really, about life and about civil rights."
During an Easter break when she was in high school, she became the first black to work at the Elmer Candy factory. Carolyn says she was hired "'cause I was passant blanc: very, very fair. With long hair." She speaks slowly, like she's revealing a secret. "Long curly hair. Like creole. So they couldn't tell." She worked there for three days making Heavenly Hash and Gold Brick chocolates. "When they found out I was black, they was really, really peeved." Her oval eyes open wide. "I went from sitting at the table, eating -- to outside in the back!" She rocks sideways with laughter. "I said [to Rev. Alexander], 'I had to eat my lunch outside! And it's raining out here. And you know I don't like getting wet.'"
A few years later, Carolyn went over to the Desire housing project, "[to] see what that Panther stuff was all about..." The Black Panthers had set up their headquarters at the Dirty D. "So the meeting was going fine," Carolyn recalls, "until for some reason, the police decided to come... And they just started a fight with the Panthers. And calling people 'niggers' and all kind of stuff." She lowers her head and gives a stern look. "Yes, I was one of them that turned over the police cars in the Desire housing project. That was not a good thing," she announces, "but it was a good thing in a way... The police was beating this boy with billies, and I couldn't stand it. And the boy didn't do nothing! They was just beating him to be beating him... If God wanted us to be beaten," her voice rising in indignation, "we would have been an animal..." She snorts a laugh. "My grandmother was really shocked with that one. They all thought I was gonna be a nun!"
She's done with her meal. It's gotten dark out, and the trailer only has a dim overhead light. Carolyn sits on the edge of the bed, facing the tiny kitchen and Rahsaan.
"My grandmother was fair," she explains, stroking her own cheek, "but you could still see she was black. But I was fair, and you couldn't tell." At age three and four, she says, she was "just like a little white girl." One day she got on a city bus with her grandmother. The driver saw the elderly black woman and the light-skinned toddler and "thought that she was my--" A breath, and then with emphasis: "Mammy. 'Cause that's what they called them back then."
At the time, buses in New Orleans had screens to segregate white riders from black. "I didn't know nothing about a screen... So I went and took me a seat in the front." As more whites entered, her grandmother "had to go way to the back..." A grimace. "Then I got up because I wanted to go sit with my grandmother. And this white lady said, 'Come on, I'll hold you, baby.'" A look of amazement. "And I said, 'No. I want to go with my grandmother.' Ooo, Lord! When I said that!? Them people!?"
She laughs again, falling to the side, then stops. "Children don't know nothin' about this. But from a baby, they made me realize it. In the worst way..." She gathers herself. "I felt that everybody should have been able to sit down on that bus. And I think that stayed in me, from a little girl. 'Cause ever since that, I been like -- well, some say like an activist." Carolyn rolls her eyes. "But I'm not an activist: I'm just a person who don't like things going the way I been seeing it being done." She shrugs. "And I just like to see it change. I like to see somebody be treated fairly."
It's time to wash and dry the dishes. Rahsaan is about to head off to his restaurant job. But Carolyn needs to make one last point. "We are a mixture of people," she says, "...and we're family. Even though some of us act stupid..." She laughs. "My momma is some from Jamaica, some from this one, some from that." Her father, she says, revealing another secret, was Mexican. "That's why I was comfortable when [the roofers] came here... A lot of them when they see me," she assumes a look of careful inspection. " 'Yeah, I'm looking at her eyebrows. Yeah!'" She laughs and brushes her thick, arched eyebrows. Kyrah, she continues, "had Mexican from my side, and Cherokee from her daddy's side. I'm telling you, the people here in New Orleans are mixed."
She grins: a big woman perched on a small bed in a dark trailer.
Then, in what seems like a switch of subject, she starts talking about the dinner she just cooked. "You had the blend: you had the Black, you had the Indian, and then you had the Cajun... 'Cause the chicken was Cajun, the potatoes were Indian, and the greens were Black." She cocks her head with a big smile. "Oh, I forgot about the rice! Your Asian." She bursts out laughing, slapping her hands together. "That's how we cook down here."
Copyright 2012 by Daniel Wolff. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury.