Lifting The
Curtain On
Racism And Poverty
By Leigh Saavedra
09 September, 2005
CrisisPapers
When
Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast on August 29, she tore open not
only a city, its levees, and a coastline, but a glamorous body that
was false, something created with cosmetic surgery; she exposed the
cancers and scar tissue and ugly organs of our nation that we had either
forgotten or never known were there.
When I saw clips
of the Superdome, people on TV starving and dehydrated three days after
Katrina's strike, I decided on the spot to make the 500-mile drive from
Austin with all the water and food I could carry in my small car. I
didn't know why the government wasn't there, why the people who hadn't
been able to leave on their own hadn't been evacuated, but I'm a "build-it-and-they-will-come"
believer, certain that if one person went to their rescue, another would,
and another. Kind of like voting with one small voice. In my inability
to comprehend the magnitude of what had happened when the levees were
breached, I thought we could save everyone.
And I had to, partly
from a selfish standpoint. New Orleans was one of the most vibrant cities
I'd ever spent time in. It was personal to me, had been since a Girl
Scout trip when I was twelve, watching the cook prepare cherries jubilee
the real way, open flames and all, at Diamond Jim's. It was magic, and
for years I still had the snapshots made from my Brownie camera. Gorgeous
courtyards filled with hanging baskets of magnificent flowers, wrought
iron balconies from which people shouted and waved down to wide-eyed
girl scouts, the Mighty Mississippi, street musicians, crawfish etouffee.
Later, as an undergraduate
at the University of Mississippi, it was the home of my roommate, a
destination for long weekends, the perfect place to get drunk after
an Ole Miss - LSU football game. There was the inimitable Pat O'Brien's,
but it was also the place to which I escaped after the ugliness that
arose from James Meredith's admission to the all-white university. In
the Big Easy, we could go through the quarter and, drunk or not, soak
up the embraces between blacks and whites. A jazz haven where James
Meredith would have been as welcome being one color as another. No crime
statistics fuzz up what I saw and experienced: it was a haven for many
of us from the racism of the early sixties. The French Quarter told
us about love long before San Francisco's flower children did.
And now its people,
so known for celebrating life despite poverty, were starving. The poverty
and squalor beneath the city's charm were exposed like a mutation meant
to be hidden under bandages.
The plan to load
up my 13-year old son and our supplies and take off the same day changed
quickly when a woman at the Texas highway department in Houston advised
me strongly against taking a child into Louisiana while people were
desperate. I concurred, then prepared to leave alone, not quite as confident
as I had been. Then Patty Esfandiari called to ask if she could come.
I had already started collecting food and clothing and pledges from
internet friends to reimburse me for buying what was needed, and nothing
could have been more welcome or needed than both Patty and her van.
By the time we left,
a little over a week after Governor Blanco had declared a state of emergency,
the first convoy of food and water had finally moved into New Orleans,
but the horror stories were mounting. A man on CNN had screamed that
a baby was dying every day in the Superdome. It was impossible to kill
the image of bloated human bodies floating around people who were trying
to escape the nightmare. Poisonous snakes in the toxic, muddy water
that had risen in places up to twenty feet, submerging houses in which
people might be hiding.
In the eight hours
it took us to get to central Louisiana, the Red Cross had come to the
rescue, but we had no idea how successful their relief would be in the
next few hours. Really, we knew very little. We weren't at that time
concerned with the cause of the levee failures, the role of Homeland
Security. Politics had been pushed aside; we wanted only to get rice
to hungry people.
Among the hodgepodge
of disturbing thoughts that wouldn't leave my mind during those hours
driving down toward the muggy, fertile delta were a series of emails
I had received the day before, notes full of anger that I was collecting
donations for "those people." I had made the mistake of answering
one, saying that I didn't think this governmental neglect would be taking
place if the victims were white. One of the notes sent me said:
"..... - if
you are so certain that the violence in N.O. has more to do with white
racism that [sic] black misbehavior I'll buy you an airline ticket to
Lafayette Louisinana [sic] and you can go there and help all those poor,
helpless black people - how does that sound?" Attached were other
articles about crime and African-Americans. One was written by David
Duke, though I don't know if it was the well-known David Duke or a namesake.
The writer was raging hot about the "liberal Jewish media"
brainwashing us.
In a separate email
the same person wrote: "would this happen if these were white people?
The answer to that is NO. One would not be able to find a comparable
example of this type of behavior among whites in all of recorded history."
The last note told
me to just go ahead then, if I thought "those people" were
going to welcome us, to send a report...
I will.
We bypassed Houston,
having heard that the Astrodome was receiving abundant supplies, and
made our first real stop in Beaumont, not far from the Louisiana line.
First a church, then a distribution center. Things were calm, but we
were not directed to the place where the evacuees were sheltered. It
didn't matter; they were safe, and the time for visiting had not yet
come. Clothing and food was pouring in already, but a volunteer told
us to go on through Orange, Texas and cross the state line. There, she
told us hesitantly, we'd see a bit of a park near the "Welcome
to Louisiana" sign. She had just heard that people were sleeping
there and had nothing to eat.
So we headed across
the line. Without the tip, we wouldn't have noticed the small park,
or the picnic table where four people sat, staring into space, an ancient
car with a lifted hood parked idly behind them.
Through tears that
she kept insisting were "tears of joy because someone would stop
for us" and needing to be held, Kim Simpson was the spokesperson
for the four-member family. There was Kim, early twenties, rail-thin,
and four-months pregnant, her father, able to say little except that
they wanted out of Louisiana, a sister who was missing a leg, and an
older woman who never said a word, just continued to look into space,
seeing something I would never see.
At first all four
had looked frightened as I approached them, but the minute I asked what
they needed, Kim became a fountain of emotion, clinging to me, saying,
"Mother, mother, mother, you stopped for us. You saw us."
In a moment she was able to tell me that their family of six had left
New Orleans, that two of them had drowned. Their car had overheated,
broken, and they stopped here. Someone had seen them and brought them
hamburgers, but they were hungry again, and very thirsty.
There was water
nearby, in the public restroom, but I wondered if they were afraid to
separate or whether, in their stunned state, they understood that they
were only yards away from it.
While I'm the talker,
Patty is the doer, and she was already gathering up food and juice,
towels and soap. With the public restroom so close, they could get themselves
clean, and I was grateful that toothbrushes and toothpaste were in the
supplies that our generous donors had allowed us to buy. She was distributing
everything that they seemed to have a need for while I talked to Kim,
tried to calm her, explained that -- for the baby -- she needed to make
herself calm, practice taking deep breaths with me.
We never asked them
about the two family members who drowned; it would not have felt right.
We talked only about what they needed. In the middle of this, like a
descending angel, a woman pulled her car up next to our van and ran
over to us. She was an independent volunteer working to find people
who needed to get to Red Cross shelters. We introduced her to Kim's
family and began to assure them that they would soon be in a shelter,
safe.
The woman, whose
name we never even wrote down, was making phone calls from her car.
Then she returned and told us that someone from a Red Cross shelter
in Orange, Texas, was going to come for them as soon as possible. She
assured us that she would stay with the family until they arrived and
that should anything go wrong, she would transport them herself. We
all, except for the totally silent woman, began to talk a bit, with
an edge of hysteria, covering only one thing, the number of birthdays
that everyone or a relative had in September. I don't know if the silent
woman even heard us.
It would soon be
dark, and we knew we should reach a destination, probably Lafayette,
before nighttime. So we went back to the car, Kim walking with us, still
clinging to my arm, listening to the chatter I made up as we went, about
how someday her baby would grow older and think times were bad and how
she could tell him or her about what was really difficult. "And,"
I made certain to always conclude, "how you made it through, got
to safety, had a home ready for the birth."
"Oh, Mother,
it will come down. Tears of joy because I know it will come down. You
stopped for us. Why did you stop for us?"
I don't remember
how I answered her. Maybe we just held each other, but I do remember
fuzzily thinking how New Orleans has a culture all its own, not a Black
culture but a New Orleans culture, a soft, wondrous combination of Cajun
and African with its own lingo. I knew many New Orleans residents lived
and died in the city without ever leaving it. I was wondering if a person
who had never been outside New Orleans could find comfort in another
city, another world.
At the van, Patty
was pulling out more supplies for Kim and her family, and Kim adamantly
stopped her, pushing what Patty was taking out back into the van.
"No, no, we
have enough now. We don't need it. There's people behind," as she
pointed east. "They that needs it more. We don't need it, Mother.
Save it for the others."
For an instant,
as Kim turned and again threw her arms around my neck, I remembered
the woman who had sent me emails warning me of the hate with which we
would be received. Then I looked at Kim and was reminded of Sir Philip
Sydney, the 16th century "worthiest knight that lived" (as
the English people dubbed him), who died at age 32 at Zutphen fighting
the Spanish. It was reported that when Sir Philip was offered a drink
of water before he died, he turned to a dying comrade nearby and purportedly
said, "Give it to him, his need is greater than mine."
Sir Phillip was
white and highly privileged. Kim is black and "underprivileged."
I didn't want to
leave her, but I knew there were supposed to be over a million people
we wouldn't want to leave, so we drove on to Lafayette, where we sought
a shelter outside the good but bureaucratic confines of an institutional
charity. We spent some time at the Cajundome, which we were told held
4,000 people. It was full, and while there was enough food and water
for everyone, the overflow was camping outside. We talked with those
who could talk, but there were many I couldn't understand. One man could
talk of nothing but the alligators. He said alligators were eating people,
but he said it more to the air than to me. Later I read that there were
no alligators in the canals, only poisonous snakes. Whatever the fact,
this man believed he had seen alligators eating people.
It was late, and
the only officials we could find were two policemen who could tell us
nothing, just to leave our donations by the door. But they weren't really
needed, not then anyway, so -- hungry and tired -- we went on to Patty's
cousin's house, where we ate real gumbo with real roux, and sifted through
their information. The cousin and her husband had been cooking and taking
food to the Cajundome, as had their neighbors. I slept in a comfortable
bed but fitfully, alligators in my dreams.
In the morning we
found what we wanted at the Lafayette First Assembly of God, where an
abandoned school behind the church had been converted to a four-building
shelter, able to hold about thirty evacuees in each building. Three
were full. By the time we arrived, volunteer plumbers had already come
and installed showers in each building.
There we were allowed to move freely, to talk to the people. Some sat
silently, staring into space, an observation that wouldn't fully hit
home with me until a day later, when I remembered how many of those
camping outside the Cajundome had the same blank expression. Others
at the First Assembly school were vocal, happy and thankful to have
someone there. Their food and drink needs were already met, and each
had some form of bedding, mostly on the floor. It was far more comforting
than the more institutionalized Cajundome had seemed. Then again, we
were dealing with about 130 people rather than over 4,000.
It was luxurious
to be able to go person to person and ask them what they most needed.
The response was almost unanimous: clean underwear. Because of people's
generosity, we were able to buy everything requested, large piles of
fresh white underwear, new socks, children's tee-shirts and shorts,
all the bags we could manage. One young man, perhaps 16, shyly told
me that he was lactose-intolerant, and we were able to return with soy
milk for him. Also lactose-free milk for one baby. Our last purchase
was a VHS/DVD player, and the people at the church assured us, as we
were by then out of funds, that church members would supply them with
plenty of tapes.
It is being able
to address these specific needs that makes me confident that despite
the overwhelming results of the Red Cross, single independent people
have their place too. On our last shopping trip, I picked up four little
bottles of nail polish, hoping they would promote socialization among
young women, along with the simple activity of painting each other's
nails. Later, my friend Paul pointed out that the Red Cross, feeding
thousands, might not have the time to think of nail polish for a few
young women.
While we ran into
dozens upon dozens of evacuees who simply couldn't talk, not yet, we
met with not one instant of hostility or bitterness. It exists; of course
it exists; it must. But it's possible that it is most strongly expressed
by those who have no idea of the humiliation involved in having to ask
for clean underwear.
One of my favorite
editors recently suggested to me that we keep in mind Lewis Carroll's
suggestion that a writer start at the beginning and stop at the end.
In this case, I'm not so sure that Katrina and all her ramifications
are linear. It's too big.
We headed into this
hearing expressions of racism. I returned to find out that others had
received clearly racist email. One activist who posts as "Magginkat"
shared some of the notes she had received, one saying, "let the
Blacks take in the black people of New Orleans."
I am one of those
who believe the level of criminal governmental neglect involved in the
rescue of the people of New Orleans would not have been so high had
they been all white, or maybe more financially secure people. But it
doesn't end with knowing that. It doesn't end until we find out how
racism can morph into hate and hate into what some are viewing as genocide.
It doesn't end until we can understand why there is such a disdain,
nearly phobic, for poverty in this country. It doesn't end until we
can separate neglect from accident from ineptitude. We saw racism, poverty
down to its bare bones, and still we saw love -- one man cutting a younger
man's hair, a little girl with pretty barrettes in her hair, daughter
of a volunteer, playing ball with a teenage boy who had come from New
Orleans with nothing; both were laughing.
We know that violence erupted during the looting period, and we know
atrocities were committed in the Superdome. But we also know that many
African-Americans drove themselves to near exhaustion trying to save
others while their mostly-white leaders played golf, strummed guitars,
and passed the "problem" on to others, that being a kind of
violence itself.
It will be sorted
out, the racism perhaps separated from the hatred of poverty, the fear
of those who have nothing. Whether it will ever be solved is not so
certain. Every observation comes back in the night, quietly sometimes,
showing me something that simply couldn't fit into my view at the moment.
It was later, much
later, before I realized that Kim -- smiling, crying Kim, who had seen
two members of her family drown in a filthy, toxic lake of rushing water
caused by a lack of public funds but who would accept no more supplies
than what was needed immediately -- was wearing pajamas, only pajamas.
By the time Patty
and I reached home Sunday night, we both knew, in hushed knowledge,
that New Orleans was dead. I found myself preoccupied with my last memories
of the way it was. By coincidence and now-sad luck, I had taken my son
there only three weeks before Katrina struck. It was the first time
he had been able to walk down Bourbon Street and listen to jazz as it
was perhaps designed to be heard, straight from musician to music lover,
eyes meeting. Strangers approached us and talked in the muggy night
air about everything -- how beautiful the night was, that my son plays
the sax, whatever came out, as they do only in New Orleans. I almost
fell outside a club on Dauphine Street, and a very tall young man in
a bright red shirt appeared beside me, helping me through the moment,
telling me, "Mother, you don't have to fall. Just believe!"
He had the most beautiful smile in the world, and I believed.
That, with its myriad
names, is gone, is irreplaceable.
Oh, some kind of
replication will probably be attempted, but the heart of New Orleans
has been torn out. Whether it has been sacrificed to the gods of greed
is still left to be determined, but it will never fully beat again.
The unique culture of New Orleans cannot be reproduced.
And in that exposure,
the raw poverty and helplessness of hundreds of thousands of nonessential
people, people too poor to cause their leaders to sound the alarm and
come rushing to save them, Katrina shook us, awakened us to what exists
throughout this nation that advertises itself as the land of plenty,
where every man and woman is equal. When the world saw how many "throwaways"
lived beneath the facade of New Orleans, they knew they were also in
Omaha, Dallas, Pittsburg, Tallahassee, Seattle. They knew the billboard
signs and the television ads were lies.
The country is broken.
We've feared it for some time, and New Orleans proved it. It didn't,
perhaps, have to happen. For seven years, from 1993 to 2000, poverty
in the U.S. declined. Now for four straight years, according to last
week's Census Bureau, the number of Americans falling into poverty has
increased.
The upper two percent
of America has never been so wealthy, has not in a very long time enjoyed
such low taxes. It is no longer truly uncommon to have two or more houses.
Congress is ready to abolish the estate tax after brainwashing us into
thinking of it as a "death" tax, rarely telling us that it
affects only two percent of the nation, those able to lift all boats.
Like a piece of taffy pulled until it finally breaks, the nation is
pulled, the rich now being able to live lavishly off the interest of
their interest even when rates are low, the poor being unable to buy
medicine and eat at the same time. The corruption and callousness in
high places has never been higher. A poor black African-American boy
is a candidate for the army, probably his only hope of ever coming out
of the ghetto. Corporations have never had greater power over the people.
Their CEOs cheat and steal and most often go unpunished.
The feeling prevalent
in the Eisenhower and Kennedy days that the rich had been blessed and
should in return shoulder enough load to lift the whole country upwards
began at some time to change into an every-man-for-himself social Darwinism
that began to embrace that aspect of new Christianity that sometimes
suggests the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor. As the winds
changed, those who were able became less willing to pay taxes; social
programs began to be looked upon not as something to make the entire
nation stronger, but as a leftist affront to hard work. The "haves"
insisted upon pulling themselves further to one end of the spectrum,
pushing the "have-nots" further to the other. Social infrastructure
began to crumble.
The glamorous body
that we thought was America, that we tried to project to the world and
to our children, was a myth. It was as false as a mannequin, as bloated
as the bodies of the dead being collected in the streets and attics
of New Orleans.
It didn't have to
happen that way.
Leigh Saavedra, writing for years under the name Lisa Walsh Thomas,
has been a peace and human rights activist and writer for all her life.
She can be contacted at [email protected] .