For days now, I’ve been watching the devastation in New Orleans with tears in my eyes. I’ve sat with my mouth dumb and open at the sight of water licking rooftops, of cars floating down streets clogged with toppled trees and lamp posts. I’ve gasped at the stories of snipers shooting at hospital patients being evacuated, of survivors shooting at each other, of rescuers brandishing weapons. I’ve cried as hungry babies stared fearfully from their mothers’ arms and survivors stretched beseeching arms toward helicopters flying past. I’ve said a little prayer for every dead body I’ve seen wrapped in a sheet and set aside.

Every day that I’ve watched, the sadness has weighed heavier upon my heart. Every day, the desire to do something has grown stronger, and so has my sense of impotence. The destruction is so utterly complete, that I can’t even grasp it all at once. It is so horrifying that I know no words sufficient to express it all at once. Perhaps that’s as it should be. Perhaps grief should come — like recovery one day will — in small steps following one after the other until one day, some day, the process is complete.

That’s how I grieve for New Orleans: with a scattering of tears spilled over tiny memories long-forgotten, my mind turning to recall the sites and sounds and smells of the city, savoring each before bidding them farewell, before letting go. I know New Orleans will never be the same, just as my life has never been the same since the first time I set foot in New Orleans.

It was at Felix’s Oyster Bar on Iberville, in 1997, when my husband first told me that he loved me. We’d been dating only a few months, and it was our first weekend away together. The French Quarter being what it is – or was – I don’t remember much of that weekend aside from a never-ending stream of Hurricanes, etouffe and oysters. It was October, when heat radiates from every surface in New Orleans, and we were crammed amid a press of sweat-drenched bodies, all of us ordering hamburger-sized oysters as fast as the busy men behind the bar could shuck them and pass them across. I’d just tipped a fat oyster laden with extra horseradish into my mouth when he said it. I tried gulping quickly but wound up choking, just managing to sputter “I love you, too” while spraying him with bits of oyster and horseradish sauce. He didn’t mind. I liked that.

The next time we were in New Orleans, in January of 1998, he proposed to me. This was actually the second time he proposed — the first one came just hours after the previous year’s oyster incident but the Hurricanes were to blame for it, or so he said when we’d returned home. This second time, we were altogether sober, although we were heading for The Famous Door with the plan of ending our sobriety quite soon. A nasty blues guitar riff wafted past us, and in the weak winter sunlight the stench of urine embedded in the streets didn’t seem quite so bad. I asked him if he’d bought an engagement ring yet. He hadn’t. I told him I wouldn’t answer until he did. But that afternoon, just for luck, I insisted on visiting the Voodoo Museum where I left a $5 donation in honor of Marie Laveaux along with a request for some assistance on that engagement ring.

We ate that night at a little pink house turned into a restaurant and dubbed “Petunias.” It was one of those charming Southern homes in which dark wood floors, towering ceilings and crown molding speak of age. They give such a sense of permanence, those architectural features, while still reminding one that the pleasures of this life are all to transient. Halfway through my first bowl of she-crab soup I knew I’d never been so happy in my life.

We were married six months later – it had taken him four months to find the perfect ring. There was no question where we’d honeymoon. By then, we’d been to New Orleans enough that the night life had lost some of its appeal. We spent our days strolling the Garden District, imagining ourselves living in the stately mansions or as guests at a cocktail party in one of the gardens fragrant with bouganvillea and jasmine. We toured the famous cemeteries and marveled at the elaborate family crypts, at the packs of cigarettes, bottles of liquor and bowls of beans and rice that the living had left to honor the dead. We sipped sweet café au lait and coffee thick with chicory at the Café Du Monde where magicians tried coaxing tips from the sugar-coated fingertips of tourists like us who’d discovered the fried bits of heaven known as beignets.

When I first began to grieve for New Orleans, these are the things which I was mourning: the times I spent there celebrating the milestones in my life, the city’s joie de vivre that was as brassy as the bands marching down its streets, the sultry air scented with the smell of decadent celebration, the antiques and art and stately mansions that imbued the exotic atmosphere with a sensual grace.

Until Katrina, I’d never thought of New Orleans in larger terms – beyond the tourist spots, beyond the ports and parties. Oh, I knew a little of its history, how it once teemed with slaves whose lives were spent earning money for their masters in the country. I knew about the Cajuns and also of the Creole culture-within-a-culture. I knew of the pervasiveness of the Catholic faith down there, and how gracefully it sometimes blends with vodoun. But I knew these things in an academic sense; they were never truly part of my concept of New Orleans.

I had never thought of New Orleans as a town in which the bleakest poverty strives alongside luxuriant wealth. I’d always known – as had we all – that a coastal town built below sea-level, protected only by man-made levies, was a calamity waiting to happen. But I’d never stopped to think of the people who lived there day-to-day knowing that such a calamity could occur and that they were powerless to prevent it.

When the first images of Katrina’s fury played across my TV screen, I winced but figured that, surely, the city had plans in place for such an event. As word came of the thousands taking refuge in the Superdome, I figured all was well: everyone else would evacuate, right? Then the next day I stared at survivors waving flags and sheets from their rooftops, people holding up signs and setting off flares to draw attention, to ask for rescue. Why hadn’t they left when they knew what was coming? Days went by, and the number of people waving sheets, raising their arms toward passing helicopters, or floating down watery streets atop mattresses only increased. Why were they still there?

I must confess that at first I blamed the victims. Who would stay with such a threat en route? But as time has passed I’ve had to recognize how very long it’s been since I lived in poverty. I’ve forgotten what it’s like not to have a car, much less enough money for gas. It’s been so long since I’ve had to wonder: How will I eat? Where will I stay? How can I afford to feed my kids? What happened in New Orleans is a fact for far too many: sometimes you can’t afford to rescue yourself.

I don’t know who is to blame for the continued suffering in New Orleans, or whether placing blame is even relevant at this point. It seems to me that doing the “right thing” means taking action and giving help when it is needed without pausing to wonder where things went wrong or if they could’ve been prevented after all.

When I grieve for New Orleans now, I grieve for this: the thousands of impoverished people, black and white, who feel that our nation let them down, and the millions of us constituting that nation who will always wonder whether, in fact, we did.

Tuesday, September 6th, 2005, 9:19 pm   |   My Venomous Life  |  RSS feed Comments and pings are currently closed.