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Christmas Among the Ruins

New Orleans May Be Bent, but It's Not Broken

By Leonard Earl Johnson
ConsumerAffairs.com

December 19, 2005

Hurricane Katrina • The End of the World: Louisiana is Disappearing • Mississippi Sues State Farm Over Katrina Coverage • Katrina's Legacy: A Flood-Damaged Handicap Van • Payback: State Farm Writes Off Mississippi • Judge Nixes State Farm Katrina Settlement • Judge Rules Against State Farm in Katrina Case • Victimized Twice: Hurricane Victims Scammed by Unscrupulous Contractors • New Orleans Refloats Its Cruise Ship Business • One Year Later: To Miss New Orleans --- • Katrina Archives --- What's New? • Continuing coverage of Katrina recovery efforts

The white van is filled, running board to roof, with colorful anodized aluminum alligator lapel pins, treble and cleft note earrings, assorted bracelets, necklaces, tiaras and magic wands.

"They are just the thing to wave at your friends during Carnival," Cathy Cooper-Stratton says, as we speed towards New Orleans for an arts-and-crafts Christmas show in a newly-reopened downtown office building.

What a Carnival "wand" is doing in a Christmas gift show might baffle outsiders, but not citizens of New Orleans. That hearty group traditionally begins Carnival on Twelfth Night - or King's Day - the twelfth day after Christmas, when The Three Kings arrived to view the baby Jesus. Had they been from New Orleans they might have come bearing a Carnival wand.

"Carnival is never far out of mind in these parts," Cathy says.

She is a New Orleans artist whose family survived Hurricane Camille, in 1969. That former Hurricane high-water mark left her grandparents' place as the only home standing along their stretch of Mississippi coast. Camille also blew her parents into New Orleans; they sought refuge in a home where other family members had lived for years. Now Hurricane Katrina, the new high-water mark, has blown Cathy over to Lafayette, where she, husband and daughter have spent the past three months.

Lafayette is a prosperous oil town 130 miles northwest of New Orleans, on the far side of the Atchafalia Basin. It is the land of French Canadian expatriates, Longfellow's Evangeline, and the University of Louisiana's "Ragin' Cajuns." Before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita the population of Lafayette was 120,000. Today 40,000 New Orleanians have been added.

We left Lafayette late on a Wednesday afternoon. Cathy's work had been featured on the gift-section cover of that day's Independent News. We stopped at Mello Joy, a downtown coffee shop on Jefferson Street, to pick up a copy. Louisiana is the nation's main coffee importer and its coffee shops are temples of pleasure. We lingered over Cathy's press and an excellent brew.

"Mello Joy is great, but the Cajuns don't use chicory," Cathy complains.

Chicory is the dried, ground root of the endive plant. It is often disliked by outsiders, but favored by most coffee drinkers from New Orleans.

Will we start drinking our coffee without chicory or will they start putting it in theirs? This is a small example of a big question in Louisiana, if not much of the country -- will the New Orleans Diaspora change the new environment, or be changed by it?

Baton Rouge

It was nearly dark by the time we reached Baton Rouge, the state capitol and Bishopric of the Catholic Church, the two main governing bodies of Louisiana. Baton Rouge is 80 miles above New Orleans. It suffered an enormous infrastructure strain from the multitudes seeking shelter under the double crooked staffs. (Living well under the crooked staff was a Middle Ages expression referring to prosperity found in towns hosting a Bishop with his crooked stick or staff. The state's crooked staff? It's a pun.)

Baton Rouge is also home to one of the world's largest oil refineries as well as Louisiana State University. The city was not much larger than Lafayette before three, four, five hundred thousand refugees - no one knows exactly how many - descended on it. The next day Baton Rouge's airport became the busiest in the state, and its traffic became the worst. A trip that once took locals twenty minutes now takes them an hour, an irritated resident with an unguarded glare, told me.

We slowed to a crawl before leaving the Mississippi River Bridge. Cathy says, "Look at that great view." I look. She does not. In the warm dusk light were push boats with multiple barges in tow, and an oceangoing ship heading upstream to the refinery. "I've seen it," she says.

Nowadays there are few military convoys on the roads in and around south Louisiana, but fleets of coveted FEMA trailers move about regularly in all directions. One trailer blocked the big green signs telling us which lanes to follow as we make the curve at the foot of the bridge. A misstep here could put us into downtown Baton Rouge and a massive delay.

Luckily, Cathy has driven this road, "a hundred times since Katrina." She follows the right turn into a stream of halted cars and trucks. We come up behind a large truck groaning under the weight of what appears to be huge spools of steel cable. We figure it is headed to re-girder the city of dreamy dreams. Slowly we start up again.

Eventually we leave the thick traffic behind us and head full throttle towards the marshlands surrounding New Orleans. We sail along like the old days, while oncoming traffic is almost as heavy as it was during the evacuation.

Housing in New Orleans was reduced by 80 percent by the storm and flood. It is now the end of the work day and commuters are returning to their Baton Rouge bedrooms. FEMA operates free buses between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, but these tortured souls clearly do not use them.

Below Baton Rouge once-well-lighted off-ramps stand their duty in darkness. A menacing Hummer, with a green Christmas wreath wired to its aggressive front grill, darts dangerously between the ten feet of highway separating our van from the red Jaguar in front. We are traveling at seventy miles an hour. The Christmas Hummer lunges to the right lane and exits at a factory outlet mall.

City Lights

Twenty miles out, we see muted lights bouncing off low hanging clouds. It's the lights of New Orleans, or what's left of them. Above the marshland, a lone airplane is making its descent into Louis Armstrong International Airport. Broken trees rise out of the swamp around the spindly-legged Interstate.

Less than five miles out, the northbound traffic comes to a complete halt behind what looks like a simple rear-end collision. It stays that way until we reach our exit on Carrolton Avenue.

Carrolton, once busy with commerce, is mostly dark. Piles of debris litter the sides of the avenue.

Eventually a house with cascades of white Christmas lights breaks the darkness, then another and another. The houses grow nicer, larger, and are mostly intact. Still there are mounds of trash, and on every other block a gutted home's innards lay spilled out on the sidewalk. This is one of the better parts of town.

Uptown, the French Quarter, Faubourg Marigny and those parts of the Ninth Ward close to The River are, also, mostly intact. Still, even in these areas where flood waters did not reach, the wounds are very visible.

Next day, at lunch in the French Quarter, two stylish women wearing all black and dark glasses weep into their crab cakes about the fate of The Little Red School House. This is the name Quarterites gave their neighborhood public school. Its real name is McDonough Number Fifteen. There is, also, the Catholic Saint Louis Cathedral School nearby.

After the hurricane, Cathedral School reopened quickly, in time for Prince Charles and Camilla to came by and pat a poor child on the head while on an eight-hour madcap devastation tour. McDonough Number Fifteen never reopened. The city public school system has been taken over by the state, and the state has closed The Little Red School House in the French Quarter.

"Probably Cannizaro (local developer Joe Cannizaro) wants to turn it into a shopping center," one of the women in black says.

Some think the school will eventually return as a charter school. Others think it already operated unofficially like a charter school, and since the storm it has lost its student base. "It drew enrolment from far beyond the Quarter," the other woman in black says. "Nobody knows if those kids are coming back or not."

At the tourist information center on Jackson Square, we learn Gray Line is offering tours on Christmas Eve to, "Join a wonderful Louisiana tradition," the "feux de joie (fires of joy)." These are bonfires lit to guide Papa Noel up and down the Mississippi River. We note on another tourist pamphlet that a "Katrina tour" will be added January forth. Why should the British Royals have all the fun?

On Canal Street one afternoon, the huge Christmas tree in front of The Shops at Canal Place was dedicated with free wine and song, though the shops themselves were not open. The Canal Place deluxe hotel, however, with its breathtaking eleventh floor lobby overlooking The River, has been open for over a month.

Much Remains

Many sights are always here. The River is lovely as ever, and few pleasures can top a muffalata and a Barq's while sittin' on the levee. Top line restaurants again serve their creations on real dishes, and the famous Bacco ten-cent martini lunch has returned. And soon there will be those Katrina tours.

The following Sunday FEMA gave free flu and tetanus shots, at the corner of Rampart and Esplanade. Afterwards we attended the Nickel-a-Dance dance, on Frenchmen Street, at Café Brazil. At sunset we joined the Faubourg Marigny carolers, down the street in Washington Square.

The tourists have come back in small but noticeable numbers. "There are more National Geographic readers now, and fewer Reader's Digest ones," L. A. Norma, a longtime French Quarter resident, says.

Cathy's show was successful and the following week she and her husband threw a party in their blue-roofed Uptown home - the same one her parents fled to after Hurricane Camille. It was damaged by Katrina, but not ravaged. They announced their permanent return to New Orleans in January, in time for their daughter's next semester. "And in time for the Katrina tours," Cathy says.

The next day I caught the train called The Sunset Limited back to Lafayette, and took lunch in the dining car with a pretty, soft-spoken desk clerk from Canal Street's Marriott Hotel. This small-framed woman was on duty that dreadful day Katrina canceled everyone's reservations. She rode out the storm and aftermath "with my Marriott family."

She cannot return to her New Orleans East home, she said, and her daughter was evacuated to Houston, where she was now bound to see her newborn grandson. Her son was in Illinois.

The City that FEMA forgot may not bounce back, but it is coming back. With a limp, yes, but a spirited one.

Leonard Earl Johnson is a New Orleans-based writer, former photographer, cook and merchant seaman. His column, "Yours Truly In a Swamp," appeared regularly for years in the New Orleans publication Les Amis de Marigny. He is living temporarily in Lafayette, La., and will teach a Writing Workshop through the Acadiana Arts Council beginning in January. He vows to return to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras.

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