After Katrina
The Lower Ninth Ward two a half years post-disaster
When I drove around The Lower 9th Ward two years post-major disaster, the neighborhood still appeared disjointed. I couldn’t tell which houses were inhabited versus which ones were not, as either scenario was just as likely to have a couch roosting on the front lawn or broken steps leading up to a porch. People were there, but they were also not. It was as though I was driving around a living ghost town where the ghosts were actual people that I occasionally saw crossing the street. It was evident that the city resigned itself to its fate, albeit it wasn’t necessarily embracing it. It was just there. All of it.
All of the debris that was piled up on street corners, all of the houses that were spray painted with cryptic red crosses, all of the houses that were missing doors, all of the houses that had plywood in place of windows, all of the roofs that were missing shingles, all of the siding that was torn off in certain sections, all of the facades that had marks where porches used to be, all stood as testaments that something terrible had recently happened. Nothing anywhere I had seen before looked so devastatingly real to me, and I had to question whether or not this set a precedent for becoming the new normal. The thought crossed my mind of tossing in a polar bear floating aimlessly on an iceberg and a couple of fracking drills on one or two front lawns to ensure its status of becoming the future’s quintessential American city. I barely flinched at the thought that something was wrong with that concept because, standing in the middle of The Lower 9th Ward, it was hard to deny that any of this was not okay.
It was difficult not to get out of the car and shake hands with everyone I saw, for I interpreted every Lower 9th Warder as a much stronger person than I’d ever be. It takes an insurmountable amount of strength to muster through something like what they were going through. A moment of weakness can cause one’s soul to sink into the abyss, and I can’t say that I wouldn’t have fallen head-first into that pit. Sometimes, it takes a disaster to discover who you really are as a person, and every single person who was fighting for The Lower 9th Ward was a hero.
Interspersed between the chaos and the destruction, there were slivers of beauty. The people picking up the scattered remains of their world were the most beautiful people I have ever seen to the degree that they were walking Rembrandts. All of post-Katrina was a real-life Dutch painting in all its chiaroscuro. The broken Lower 9th Ward presented itself as America’s Louvre, and the price of displaying its creations cost the artists all that they had. The verdict was still out on whether or not to regard the artists as prodigies, failures, or misunderstood geniuses. The general consensus was to allow posterity to decide. For the moment, no judgments were being made on the merit of leaving a half-ruined shotgun house to sit on its tilted foundation, for it would sit like that whether someone preferred to frame the scene and hang it on a wall or not. All of The Lower 9th Ward was on display just as it was: America’s fucking mess. If ever a city personified the appearance of what people stare at when they are unable to turn their heads away from watching a train wreck, The Lower 9th Ward nailed that look. It was almost a shame that models couldn’t drape that city on their shoulders and walk it down a runway because it would have been a hit with the upper-class socialites. The Lower 9th Ward was oddly attractive for all its chaos in its swampy post-apocalyptic way.
Excerpt from my book Time Traveled, available as e-book or paperback
