Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans
Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?
WHAT do people really know about New Orleans?
Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great
white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where
African-Americans have come together again and again to form the
strongest African-American culture in the land?
The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work
of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together
their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire.
That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous
class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners,
skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own
in the city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a
few dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month.
This is not to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of the
famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave labor on
plantations from one end of the state to the other. It is merely to say
that it was never all "have or have not" in this strange and beautiful
city.
Later in the 19th century, as the Irish immigrants poured
in by the thousands, filling the holds of ships that had emptied their
cargoes of cotton in Liverpool, and as the German and Italian
immigrants soon followed, a vital and complex culture emerged. Huge
churches went up to serve the great faith of the city's European-born
Catholics; convents and schools and orphanages were built for the newly
arrived and the struggling; the city expanded in all directions with
new neighborhoods of large, graceful houses, or areas of more humble
cottages, even the smallest of which, with their floor-length shutters
and deep-pitched roofs, possessed an undeniable Caribbean charm.
Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New
Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other
American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier
University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in
America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New
Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class
that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to
this day.
The influence of blacks on the music of the city and
the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was
black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the
city "the Big Easy" because it was a place where they could always find
a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz
and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.
Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock
ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people
loved; there was joy.
Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place
where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries;
they didn't want to leave families whose rounds of weddings, births and
funerals had become the fabric of their lives. They didn't want to
leave a city where tolerance had always been able to outweigh
prejudice, where patience had always been able to outweigh rage. They
didn't want to leave a place that was theirs.
And so New Orleans prospered, slowly, unevenly, but surely - home to Protestants
and Catholics, including the Irish parading through the old
neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day as they hand out cabbages and
potatoes and onions to the eager crowds; including the Italians, with
their lavish St. Joseph's altars spread out with cakes and cookies in
homes and restaurants and churches every March; including the uptown
traditionalists who seek to preserve the peace and beauty of the Garden
District; including the Germans with their clubs and traditions;
including the black population playing an ever increasing role in the
city's civic affairs.
Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn't do. Nature has done
what the labor riots of the 1920's couldn't do. Nature had done what
"modern life" with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn't do. It
has done what racism couldn't do, and what segregation couldn't do
either. Nature has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to
mind the end of Pompeii.
I share this history for a reason - and to answer questions that
have arisen these last few days. Almost as soon as the cameras began
panning over the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free
those trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. "Why didn't
they leave?" people asked both on and off camera. "Why did they stay
there when they knew a storm was coming?" One reporter even asked me,
"Why do people live in such a place?"
Then as conditions became unbearable, the looters took to the streets. Windows were smashed,
jewelry snatched, stores broken open, water and food and televisions
carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds.
Now the voices grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and pillage in a time of
such crisis? How could people shoot one another? Because the faces of
those drowning and the faces of those looting were largely black faces,
race came into the picture. What kind of people are these, the people
of New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be flooded, and then turn
on one another?
Well, here's an answer. Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money.
They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They
are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers;
and they did what they felt they could do - they huddled together in
the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave
and check into the nearest Ramada Inn.
What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the
helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went through
the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather those they could
find. Meanwhile, city officials tried desperately to alleviate the
worsening conditions in the Superdome, while makeshift shelters and
hotel and hospitals struggled.
And where was everyone else during all this? Oh, help is coming, New Orleans was told. We are a
rich country. Congress is acting. Someone will come to stop the looting
and care for the refugees.
And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the
situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to
call for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and
excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life
for so long? That's my question.
I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many
years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place
where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and
about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their
very gentleness that gives them their endurance.
They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in
New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their
mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by
their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200
years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness
of family life that other communities lost long ago.
But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You
looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You
want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and
our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny
minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and
turned your backs.
Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times,
the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are
Americans. We are you.