Harvey in the Age of Disbelief

Ed Note: The following is by J.P. Gritton, written in Houston, August 30, 2017 — the morning of the fourth day of Harvey.

1)

So we’re out of the shit now, sort of. And I find myself thinking often of a conversation I overheard on the last day Harvey “wobbled” over Houston, spraying somewhere upward of a trillion gallons of water at the city. I was in line at a food truck. A man with an umbrella sidled up to where a girl and her boyfriend were standing:

“Get under here,” he said. “Y’all stay dry.”

The man was black, although I still can’t decide if this detail has any relevance here.

The woman and her boyfriend, who were white, cozied under the umbrella, and then the woman said something I still don’t understand:

“Ah, hurricanes,” she said: “the great equalizer.”

The line sounded rehearsed, maybe a bit of dialogue the woman had recycled from, say, a B-movie about a natural disaster (i.e., “Ah, [earthquakes, tornadoes, etc.]: the great equalizer.”). It might have been one of those things that get said without the speaker’s full participation in the speech act: a thoughtless, careless, “throwaway” line.

But often we mean the most when we least know it. So I have puzzled over this: what did she mean? Did the woman feel that she and the stranger were on some obscurely uneven ground? If so, who occupied the higher ground? The stranger, by virtue of his umbrella? Or the woman, by virtue of something else?

And was that something else her whiteness?

I don’t know. I suspect that the woman was probably referring to the weird mood that has prevailed in Houston in the wake of this disaster: with our supermarkets shuttered for 18 hours out of the day; with the corporate offices of oil and gas interests under six feet of water; and with our beleaguered mayor appearing in news conferences in a baseball cap, the city feels like a veritable Feast of Fools.

2)

If that is the feeling she was trying to capture, then this, too, seems odd: one of the many wonderful things about Houston is that black and white, poor and rich, conservative and liberal commingle so easily here. The hurricane did not and will not change that. At one of my favorite bars in the city, for instance, which stands at the confluence of historically gay and historically African-American neighborhoods, the bartender’s iPod might belch a ranchero, or Frank Sinatra, or DJ Screw. If you took a day to walk along Scott Street on Houston’s east side, you could buy fried lake trout for breakfast, beef patties for lunch, Pho for dinner, and tres leches for dessert.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying our city is some post-racial, progressive paradise. It’s not. I’m sure there were people in Houston who applauded Ann Coulter when she said she’d blame Harvey on our “lesbian mayor” before she faulted climate change. I remember riding my bike past a BLM rally on the campus of Texas Southern: of the perhaps 75 people at the rally, probably two thirds were cops in uniform. And cops are patrolling the streets as I write this, and cops will enforce the city’s midnight curfew.

3)

I’m thinking lately, too, of an exchange I witnessed a couple years ago, at my favorite seafood joint in Houston. Danton’s is the kind of place you go to for the happy hour, and at this particular happy hour you can find Houston’s curious mishmash in miniature: students from Rice University rub elbows with their professors, people from the Third Ward rub elbows with people from the Museum District and West University; the broke and the not-so-broke alike get together and drink five-dollar cocktails.

My friends and I were sitting next to an older couple, this particular evening. We were grad students. Just judging by his navy blazer and the abundance of jewels hanging from her liver-spotted neck, I’m guessing they were well-off. Rich, in other words.

Which, for the record, I don’t have a problem with. I’m not one of those people who think the proletariat will only be free when the last priest is hanging by the entrails of the last banker, or whatever. Nor do ostentatious displays of wealth irritate me: this couple, after all, was taking advantage of the five-dollar martini deal.

A vodka martini goes pretty well with oysters, which is what this lady was eating. It developed that she wanted one of those little forks, the kind used to dislodge oyster meat from shell. As a busser passed her table, she clawed at the sleeve of his shirt:

“Señor,” she said, in a molasses-thick accent, “tenedor poquito, por favor.”

And by assuming the waiter didn’t speak English, I think the woman alluded to our city’s obscurely uneven ground. Maybe she meant her Spanish as a kind of favor, a kindness. But by condescending to speak what she assumed was his native tongue, this woman only highlighted the differences between them: she was drinking martinis, he was serving them; she was eating food, he was serving food; she wanted a tenedor poquito, and it was the man’s job to give her one.

I doubt the woman saw anything especially patronizing about her attitude toward the busser. I doubt she even noticed the grimace on his face when, nodding, he went to get her silverware. And in truth, I don’t know this lady. Maybe she learned her Spanish on a church-building mission in the Honduras, or maybe she plans to spend three weeks building latrines in Guatemala this Christmas.

It occurs to me, that lady is probably out in the flood waters right now, filling up sandbags or sorting canned food. She is out there doing good.

4)

We are never as big as the systems we operate in.

I would not be the first person to suggest that there is something innately condescending about charity. I don’t think that argument needs to be rehearsed here, nor do I think condescension completely accounts for the outpouring of love and generosity that we have witnessed in the wake of this horror. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that our genteel manners and good hearts insulate us from deeper and uglier truths. They subtract from our minds bigger and uglier questions.

Questions like, who is to blame for an act of God?

Don’t look to Shell Oil, for example, which recently pledged $1 million to the American Red Cross for Hurricane Harvey relief. Don’t look to Chevron oil, which made exactly the same donation. Don’t look to BP, which blackened the waters of the Gulf less than a decade ago: they donated $750,000.

There is no sense pondering these imponderables. Seek guidance at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood megachurch, the doors of which remained closed for most of the storm. Seek guidance, that is, and forget.

5)

If you thought, or hoped, that there might be some sort of reckoning in the wake of Harvey — that is, an honest and open conversation about the role the Oil and Gas industry played in this disaster — do not hold your breath.

In 1829, the Guerrero Decree conditionally abolished slavery in all Mexican territories, including Texas. Seven years later, the Constitution of the Republic of Texas made slavery legal once more. The last American slaves were emancipated in Texas, when General Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston Island.

Three and a half decades after the end of the Civil War, Galveston Island was devastated by a category 4 storm, the deadliest in American history. It is worse than crazy — in fact, it is inhuman — to wonder why.