Disintegration (14 page)

The waters in New Orleans flushed out a long-ignored residue of black poverty and dysfunction for all to see. The nation felt a deep sense of shame, at least for a while. But the reality of Abandoned black America had been there all along—perfectly visible to those who cared to look.

Before the flood, two-thirds of New Orleans’s population was black. The city was one of the poorest in the country; the official poverty rate was a staggering 27.9 percent, according to the authoritative Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, and some 84 percent of those poor people were African American.
¹
Nearly half of African Americans with incomes below the poverty line lived in neighborhoods where the
poverty rate exceeded 40 percent, according to a Brookings Institution analysis—which meant that poverty was highly concentrated.
²

In other words, the racially segregated but economically integrated model for African American neighborhoods until the 1960s had given way to a new model—still racially segregated, as far as the Abandoned were concerned, but now economically segregated as well. In New Orleans as elsewhere, concentrated black poverty was accompanied by concentrated black dysfunction. Four out of every five children in these neighborhoods were being raised in single-parent households. Only three out of five working-age adults actually participated in the labor market. Just one adult in twelve, in these Abandoned zones, had a college degree.
³

The upwardly mobile black Mainstream was steadily moving out, either to the suburbs or to a newly developed sector of the city called New Orleans East. As the black population became poorer and less educated, it became more resentful. Mayor Ray Nagin, whose histrionics during and after the flood drew nationwide ridicule, had won election in the first place because he had the backing of whites, middle-class blacks, and the powerful downtown business community. His credentials as a longtime corporate executive provoked more suspicion than admiration in Abandoned neighborhoods—places where people would notice the
thunk
of car doors locking when a black corporate executive, perhaps having lost his way, rolled through in his shiny BMW or Benz.

There is no excuse for the behavior of the young men and women who, when the hurricane hit, rushed downtown to loot the stores. It is useful, though, to have a sense of how they viewed the world. For most Americans, New Orleans is synonymous
with fun. The city’s insomniac street-party culture is, indeed, unique and enchanting. But in Abandoned neighborhoods like Mid-City, Treme, and the Lower Ninth, the good times did not roll. The public schools were failing so hopelessly that a whole generation was effectively being written off. The exodus of the oil and gas industry was almost complete, which meant there were precious few jobs to be had except in the low-paying tourism sector. Drug dealing was what passed for economic development in some neighborhoods. Black-on-black crime was a truly horrific problem—the city’s murder rate regularly flirted with being the highest in the nation—and it seemed as if all the police wanted to do was contain the fire, not put it out. The authorities’ main concern seemed to be making sure that violent criminals were kept away from the restaurants, casinos, strip clubs, and trinket shops of the tourist zone, lest the city’s theme-park image suffer.

So the breakdown of order that Hurricane Katrina caused was more than an opportunity to steal. It was a chance for payback—not against any individual, not against any one retailer, but against a whole system. The rampage, such as it was, proved highly impractical. When the streets are under six feet of water, another name for “wide-screen TV” is “not-very-good raft.”

At the airport and elsewhere, it was the Abandoned who insisted on the theory—which was baseless—that poor neighborhoods had been intentionally flooded so that rich neighborhoods could stay dry. I spoke with at least a dozen people who swore they had heard the explosions that demolished the floodwalls protecting the Lower Ninth. In fact, there were no explosions; the witnesses probably heard ships, houses, concrete slabs, and other flotsam being smashed around by the
inrushing torrent. After I got back to Washington from covering the flood, I accepted an invitation to appear on Fox News for the first (and last) time. Bill O’Reilly used a column I had written as an excuse to ridicule the idea that anyone could think, even for one minute, that government officials would do such a thing as deliberately and callously flood American citizens out of house and home. I informed him that within the living memory of some of those Lower Ninth Ward residents, government officials had done just that: At the height of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, authorities dynamited levees south of New Orleans, ruining farmhouses and destroying crops, in a desperate and misguided attempt to save the city. O’Reilly paused for a nanosecond, then responded that, well, he didn’t know about any of that … but he
did
know that it was an
outrage
that people would
think
such a thing, and that it was
irresponsible
for a journalist to report that people were saying such
nonsense
. As I said, that was my one appearance on Fox.

There was near-universal criticism of how Mayor Nagin handled the evacuation of the city in the hours before Katrina made landfall, but in many ways he orchestrated a great success; the vast majority of New Orleanians heeded the warnings and managed to get out. The early evacuees, however, included most whites, most middle-class blacks, and a much smaller percentage of the poor. Those Abandoned black Americans who remained had been literally abandoned: They found themselves, basically, the only people left in town. The impression conveyed by much of the television coverage was of a bunch of poor black people who were too ignorant to get out of the path of the storm of the century—and who then,
trapped in a Waterworld without laws or authority, reverted to savagery.

I knew better. The day after my trip to the New Orleans airport, I was back in the city—this time in the French Quarter, which had remained dry. I heard a breathless report on the radio warning people to steer clear of the Jackson Square area because a sniper was on the loose; police were said to be pinned down under heavy fire. That was odd, because I happened to be a block away, and I’d seen no evidence of trouble. I went over to the square and asked some loitering police officers about the “sniper,” and they looked at me as if I were hallucinating. They had been there all morning. They were in communication with their colleagues around the Quarter. Nothing of the sort had happened.

There were reports of people firing at rescue helicopters—untrue, as far as I could determine. There had indeed been instances in which people stranded on their roofs fired weapons, but the flood victims I talked to said the shooters were trying to get the attention of the helicopters, not bring them down.

If you think about it, that’s the only explanation that makes sense. But fear of the unleashed black unknown was not conducive to clear thinking. Rumors of phantom snipers led hapless federal officials—under the leadership of the feckless Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown—to organize their rescue crews into huge armored convoys comprising scores of vehicles. A convoy would set out in some direction, and the lead truck would inevitably reach a point where the water was too deep to proceed. Then an hour or more would be wasted while the whole convoy was turned
around and pointed in some other direction. Soon the lead vehicle would reach deep water again, and the whole process had to be repeated. Precious time and resources were being squandered, all because of reports that somewhere, hiding in the ruined city, there might be poor African Americans with guns.

There were, indeed, many incidents of criminal violence—New Orleans was, after all, no stranger to crime before the flood. But I watched as young men wearing the “fear me” uniform—baggy pants around the hips, white T-shirts, cheap gold chains—helped distribute bottled water to exhausted families. I saw human beings pulling together to get through a crisis, just as human beings do all over the world.

There is no one explanation for how so many people ended up staying rather than leaving. It’s true that transportation was a major factor for some. Anyone who didn’t own a car, and couldn’t get a ride from someone who did own one, was basically out of luck. By the time it had become clear that a once-in-a-lifetime hurricane strike was almost certain, as opposed to merely possible, other modes of getting out of town—planes, trains, buses—had ceased operating and moved their equipment to safety. Perhaps if Nagin had pressed all the city’s school buses into service, thousands more might have escaped the storm. But that’s not the kind of elaborate contingency plan that can be put together in an hour or two. Qualified drivers would have had to know when and where to report for duty. Would-be evacuees would have had to know to gather at pre-identified pick-up points. And, of course, there would have had to be someplace for the buses to go once they left New Orleans.

Most of the people I spoke with, though, had other reasons
for deciding to hunker down. An unusually high percentage of poor African Americans in New Orleans own their homes rather than rent, and some were determined to protect their property against looting. The parts of the Lower Ninth Ward that are closest to the Mississippi sit on relatively high ground, and those streets had never flooded before Katrina; I met one man who made the reasonable, but unlucky, wager that history would prove a good guide. Several people told me that they had had the means to leave, but could find no way to safely move their elderly relatives who were housebound with chronic medical problems.

Like those who evacuated, those who stayed behind had chosen from among their viable options. They just had fewer of them.

* * *

How did those options become so very narrow? The story involves several interwoven narratives.
⁴
Hurricane Katrina offers an apt analogy, in that it was literally a “perfect storm” whose devastating impact depended on the synergy of unrelated factors. A canal built years ago to shorten the shipping route to the Gulf of Mexico hadn’t been properly maintained, and as a result had widened greatly. As the hurricane neared, its winds blew at just the right angle to send a massive surge of water coursing toward the city; ultimately that surge helped overwhelm the floodwalls that were supposed to protect the Lower Ninth Ward. Then, as the storm continued inland, it narrowly missed hitting New Orleans head-on, instead passing a few miles to the east; this meant that while the hurricane had approached from the south, the most powerful winds, those
closest to the eye, swirled in from the north. Those winds sent water from Lake Pontchartrain into several drainage canals that puncture the city like daggers, putting unbearable pressure on the thin floodwalls that ran alongside the canals. When those barriers failed, water from the lake, which is at a higher elevation than most of the city, poured in. All of these factors had to combine in just the right—or wrong—way for New Orleans to be turned into a giant bathtub with no drain. Likewise, it took a conspiracy of woe to create the human conditions that Hurricane Katrina unmasked.

In the 1950s, the Lower Ninth Ward was a working-class, mostly black community. By the time Katrina hit, the modifiers “working-class” and “mostly” no longer applied. Half of all households in the neighborhood reported income of less than $20,000 a year, according to the 2000 census, with only about 13 percent earning more than $50,000 annually. More than 98 percent of the Lower Ninth Ward’s residents were black.
⁵

On a return visit to New Orleans four months after the flood, I met a cheerful and determined woman in her fifties named Janie Blackmon, who was working with a preservationist group to try to bring the ruined neighborhood back to life. She had grown up in Holy Cross, the part of the district nearest the Mississippi, and remembered when the Lower Ninth was home not exclusively to African American families like hers but also to a smattering of Italians and Jews. There was a thriving commercial strip, but not much industry; the Lower Ninth was a place where families owned their homes, where fathers got up every morning, said goodbye to the wife and kids, went to their jobs elsewhere in the city, and came home at night to a hot supper. Blackmon pointed to houses where the same families had lived for four or five generations. Everyone knew the
big house where the Lower Ninth’s most famous resident lived: the legendary musician Antoine Dominique “Fats” Domino. He stayed—and survived Katrina. Everything else changed.

Those working-class jobs that had sustained the Lower Ninth disappeared. The acclaimed sociologist William Julius Wilson, now at Harvard and formerly at the University of Chicago, was a pioneer in studying the evolution of persistent black poverty in inner cities across the nation. Wilson argued in favor of the “spatial mismatch” theory that the migration of industry—indeed, of most economic growth—from central urban zones to the suburbs and beyond was the principal factor in the creation of what is sometimes called the black underclass. With few jobs available nearby for low-skilled or entry-level workers, with transportation a daunting ordeal for anyone without a car, and with no easy way for inner-city residents even to learn of employment opportunities in the burgeoning suburbs, joblessness in neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward soared.

That would seem to be the obvious consequence. But Wilson argued that the disappearance of work opportunities had another effect: Young women concluded they had little incentive to marry the fathers of their children, since the men were now unlikely to become steady breadwinners. Mothers decided they could do as well, or perhaps better, raising the children on their own. The result was that the two-parent household became just one of several possible living arrangements, rather than a standard enforced by the moral judgment of friends and neighbors. The single-parent, female-headed household—once considered a shameful way to live—became commonplace, then normal.
⁶