photo by Alex Lear
=========
THOMAS JEFFERSON, a denunciation of slavery, 1785:
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is to be born to live and labor for another or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.
==================
What To Us Negroes
Is Your “New” New Orleans?
//A SYSTEM OF THOT//
FELLOW NEW ORLEANIANS, pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your “New” New Orleans? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in this celebration of a new metropolis rising from the ashes and debris of an old and inundated city, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to this august celebration, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a famous city’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of New Orleans’ forthcoming tricentennial jubilee in the year 2018? I am not that man.
I say this with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious celebration! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This pride and joy concerning the rejuvenation of our home town is yours, not mine.
Here I am paraphrasing the 1852 words of Frederick Douglass. I opened by saying they are trying to kill us. I spoke plainly and with out theatrical exaggeration or rhetorical flourish. I meant those words literally. The advent of hurricane Katrina is often used as a universal marker, separating the old and decrepit from the new and vigorous, separating corruption and incompetence from honor and expertise.
But for us the arrival of the New New Orleans was a bloody birth. For you James Brissette is just a name. For me James Brissette is a name that conjures great sorrow. The unarmed 17-year-old who was gunned down on the Danzinger Bridge in New Orleans on September 4, 2005 was the future we sacrificed to the gods of industry and progress. He was not just another teenager who met an untimely death, not just another thug who suffered a justifiable demise, not just a quiet young man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is how Laura Maggi described him in a June 20, 2011 Times-Picayune article. James Brissette was my student at Frederick Douglass high school. I feel his loss on a personal level.
I did not know Henry Glover, nor did the police officer who shot him and left him for dead. Two other police officers put his body in an abandoned automobile and burned both Glover’s body and the vehicle in some pagan bloodlust rite. Did they dance around the macabre funeral pyre?
If only the blood-letting had stopped with those deaths, but it went on and on, and on. And on. Added to the ongoing police murders are the insane killings we blacks inflict on each other as we struggle to overcome poverty and decades of inequality and social destruction. Just this past Wednesday on November 13, Deshawn Kinard, a seven-month-old baby boy, was murdered along with his twenty-five-year-old father who seemed to have been the intended target and who died slumped over his son in a vain attempt to shield the baby from assassin bullets.
In this context of shootings and killings, it is an insane society that does not provide for its own mental health. Why have those responsible for the social well-being neglected mental health as a major issue? Why are hospitals closed rather than opened? Why are mental health services discontinued rather than expanded? Why do we assume we can ignore this need?
I believe we ignore the mental health needs of the black and poor of New Orleans because we don’t care about the black and poor. Is it not true that we once called ourselves the city that care forgot? Now we are the city that forgot to care.
My purpose here today is simple: I will attempt to share some of the truths of my life. I was born and reared in New Orleans. I grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward. My mother was a third-grade school teacher. I attended Fisk elementary school through fourth grade, Phyliss Wheatley elementary for fifth and sixth grade, Rivers Frederick junior high school for seventh through ninth grade, and St. Augustine high school for tenth through twelfth grade from which I graduated in May of 1964.
I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement, and was an active participant as a young man in the Black Power Movement of the late sixties and early seventies. I have been a social justice activist; a writer and arts administrator; a health clinic administrator and an advertising executive; a radio personality and producer at WWOZ and WWNO, as well the executive director of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation; the director of writing workshops including a ten-year term at the head of the Nommo Literary Soceity, and currently am co-director of Students at the Center, an independent writing program that functions within New Orleans public schools. I know New Orleans in a multiplicity of ways from diverse perspectives and with intimate access to information and experiences that cut across a wide swath of social, economic, educational, political and racial lines of demarcation.
We suffered through Katrina but most of us do not fully understand that experience even as most of us are deeply affected by the Katrina experience. The majority of the flooding that happened was not because of levee failure. I repeat, for emphasis and because I want to make sure you fully hear me: the majority of the flooded areas of New Orleans were not because of levee failure.
I ask you what levees failed in New Orleans East, which was the largest land and residential area that flooded? There was no levee failure in the East. The East was flooded as a result of Mr. GO, The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal. Mr. GO was an economic scheme that had two disastrous unintended consequences.
First, Mr. GO was a major source of flooding in both New Orleans East and in St. Bernard Parish; second, Mr. GO was an environmental disaster in the area between the Gulf of Mexico and the Industrial Canal in New Orleans.
The Industrial Canal was constructed in 1923 and connected the Mississippi River with Lake Ponchartrain to the north of the city. The Industrial Canal was built to compete with the 1914 Houston Ship Channel as the two cities competed for commercial shipping. The Industrial Canal with it systems of locks that enabled large ships coming from the Gulf of Mexico to access the port of New Orleans along the Mississippi River. By the fifties, however, the Industrial Canal had become limited because of its inability to handle deep draft maritime traffic. The business interests in this region successfully lobbied congress to construct a deep-draft canal connecting the Gulf to the Industrial Canal. Mr. GO was completed in 1965 by the Army Corp of Engineers.
Unfortunately the 76-mile canal never was utilized to the extent projected. Indeed, in a scathing May 1, 1997 report David Barrett of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian organization dedicated to “the principles of free enterprise and limited government” criticized the project in stark terms:
The MRGO project was completed 30 years ago to provide a shortcut to vessels travelling from the Gulf of Mexico to the port of New Orleans. The promised economic development along the 76 mile channel in poverty-stricken St. Bernard Parish has yet to materialize. What the MRGO has delivered is an $8-plus million yearly maintenance plan for commercial and recreational waterborne traffic. The nearly $1 billion price tag for the less than two large container ships a day that use the channel is baffling, especially considering that the channel only shaved 37 miles off the original route.
Worse, the MRGO has created numerous environmental problems. The rate of bank erosion is estimated at 15 feet per year. The increased salinity of the water is wiping out the brackish marshes and cypress forests – over 4,200 acres thus far – beyond the 27,000 acres of land lost during construction. Erosion threatens to break through into Lake Borgne and harm the oyster and marine fisheries. The Corps has estimated that in order to address some of the worst erosion problems it would cost $1.13-$3.19 million per mile.
So the motherfuckers who pushed this scheme through Congress not only ruined our wetlands and failed to develop the economy, they also have gone nameless in history and have never taken responsibility for the damage they caused, specifically for the flooding of New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish, and for the economic devastation of the wetlands between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.
As I said earlier I grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward. We used to go hunting and fishing in the wetlands. After Katrina I went to the eastern end of Lower Nine, climbed the levee embankment and looked over the concrete wall to the wet hell of the wasteland that stood where swamp flora and fauna, cypress trees and a diverse array of fish, fowl, reptiles were abundant. What I saw resembled apocalypse later. I literally nearly cried.
Worse yet, the Lower Ninth Ward was destroyed by a levee breach of the Industrial Canal caused by a large barge that was left in the canal. Over three stories tall, this barge broke through the concrete wall atop the levee. Whose responsibility was it to clear the canal, especially in light of the mandated evacuation of New Orleans? The levee didn’t fail, it was busted open by a barge that was neglected.
In 2005 Lower 9 had over 70% home ownership and was overwhelmingly black in its residential composition. If you go down there today, it is clear that there has been no serious redevelopment. This is a massive failure at all levels of government from city, to parish, to state, to federal government. Or is it? Perhaps this is not a failure but instead is the very real intentions. The motherfuckers were trying to kill us.
And in case you think I exaggerate, I refer you to John M. Barry’s book “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America.” Barry describes how the proud fathers of New Orleans blew up the levee in St. Bernard Parish in 1927. They promised to compensate and make whole those who were affected by the flood. In his documentary about Katrina movie director Spike Lee even includes footage of the officials actually igniting the dynamite and blowing up the levee. The people of St. Bernard never received what was promised. Worse yet, blowing up the levee was unnecessary as the water levels had not reached flood levels and were subsiding prior to the government action.
We experienced Katrina but did we understand what we experienced? Do we really know the causes of the damage that was done and who was responsible? Have we undertaken real efforts to compensate those who were damaged and to redevelop the areas most affected. Isn’t it ironic that the two areas most affected, most damaged, most destroyed as the result of human activity and not simply the result of levee failure have received the least attention and have had only a miniscule amount of redevelopment as compared to other areas of New Orleans? Is it any wonder I do not celebrate the redevelopment of New Orleans? What do I, a child of Lower Nine have to celebrate?
I return to the words of Frederick Douglass.
I have nothing to celebrate in the “New” New Orleans. I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This “New” New Orleans is yours, not mine.
NOLA pop 2004 – 484,674; 2006 – 181,400;
New Orleans metro area as of July 2012 – 1,205,374.
Changes in race/ethnicity
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 population estimates, there are now 103,881 fewer African Americans living in Orleans Parish compared to 2000, but there are also 14,984 fewer whites.[2] Meanwhile, the number of Hispanics grew by 4,830.[3]
African American, white, and Hispanic population Pre– and post–Katrina, Orleans Parish
Source: GNOCDC analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data from Census 2000 and Population Estimates 2012.
========================
I don’t want to live anywhere where they are killing me
1.
it’s crazy. most of us
kind of assume that where we are born
is home, where our first kiss was, learning to walk, literally,
throwing our first stone at someone in anger,
sitting at the table a mouth full of mother’s meatloaf
or was it strawberry pie, or even monkey bread—
those twisted strings of dough that were a wonderful
combination of chewy cake and sweet stuffing—
catching the bus home from school with friends,
the first drink, wasn’t it when uncle teddy
served you beer at thanksgiving, you were five?
like that, we think of that location in the mythic sense
the high drama that came later, the desperately sought
trysts, sneaking to liaison with someone you know you
ought to avoid, or the first time you got together
with someone whom you wanted the whole world
to know you were committed to being with for life,
or so you thought, how wonderful the world looked
as you lay dreaming on your back your head
secure in a special someone’s lap, or how short
the walk after the dance from the club to the parking lot,
what you wouldn’t have given for a reprise of that heaven
the way a lover looks when their whole face smiles
just because you came around the corner with
a yellow tulip in your hand and a pack of almond m&m’s
secreted behind your back as you whispered
smokey’s ooh baby baby into an eagerly awaiting ear
actually those were the preludes—the real high drama
came some years later, the first time calling someone,
anyone, to come and get you out of jail, which you were in
for doing something stupid, something really, really
stupid, and then there was the accident when you banged
up someone’s new car, but those were just the breaks, not
the actual high drama of sitting sullen in some counselor’s
waiting room, your head thrown back to the wall
avoiding the eyes of your better half who was now
the loyal opposition and whose eyes were the same eyes
only smaller in the head of the child to whom you
could not some how find the right words to make sense
of this mess that was formerly your marriage
where these scenes take place, the parlor in which
a cousin’s camera has caught you crying, the foggy mirror
where you examined yourself, one flight up in a total
stranger’s house and sheepishly you wonder what were you
doing in this blue tiled bathroom so very early in the morning
when you were supposed to be somewhere else—life is what
some people call this, and where you live your life, shouldn’t
that be the place you call home?
2.
the water. my god the water. the angry water
rain roaring sideways with the force of a freight train,
smashing your resolve to ride it out, or inching
down an interstate at two miles an hour so call evacuating
from the water. the dirty, angry water, running
if you were lucky enough to have wheels and a wallet
with plastic in it. the water. you will dream of
wet mountains falling on you and wake up gasping
for air as though you were drowning, oh the water
deeper than any pool you’ve ever swam in,
water more terrible than anything you can think
of, another middle passage, except this time
they don’t even provide ships
I used to wonder how my ancestors survived
the Atlantic, Katrina has answered that question,
I wonder no more—there is a faith that is beyond
faith, a belief when there is nothing left to believe in,
no, not god, well, yes, god, for some, for many, it was
jesus, a few humduallahed, or whatever, but it was also
whatever that visited this terror upon us, and so
to keep believing in whatever, now takes something
the mind can not imagine, the realization that in order
to live you had to survive and in order to survive
you had to do whatever needed to be done, few
of us really, really know what we will do
when we’ve got nothing but have to find something
to keep us going, how you manage your sanity
in the water, corpses floating by, gas flames
bubbling up from some leaking underground line,
and you sitting on a roof and you just pissed
on yourself because, well, because there was
no where to go and do your business, five days
of filth, no water but flood water, no food but
hot sun, no sanitation but being careful where
you stepped, where you slept, where you turned
your back and eliminated, being careful to survive
twelve days later and you still don’t know where
all your family is, if you’ve got faith, you’re about to
use it all—is this some of what our ancestors saw?
3.
it is over a month later and you still can’t walk
on the land that used to be your backyard,
they treat you like a tourist, you can only
be driven down your street in a big bus,
you can only look out the window at what twisted,
funk encrusted little remains of all you ever owned
and some kid with a gun won’t let you go
to get big mama’s bible
this shit is fucked up, that’s what it is,
fucked up and foul, the smell of a million
toilets overflowing, of food that been rotting
for days inside a refrigerator that became
an oven because the electricity was off and
the sun was beaming down ninety degrees or more
and the worse part is that none of what you
already went through is the worst part, the worst
is yet to come as government peoples with
boxes and things they stick into the ground
tell you that even if the water hadn’t drowned
you, something called toxicity has made it
impossible for you to stay here, they are
telling you it is impossible for you to stay
in the house that been in your family
for over fifty years even though it’s still standing
it’s impossible to live here, and what shall
we call this? what shall we tell the children
when they ask: when are we going home?
4.
I don’t want to live anywhere where they have
tried to kill us even if it was once a place
I called home—but still and all, my bones
don’t cotton to Boston, I can’t breath
that thinness they call air in Colorado,
a Minnesota snow angel don’t mean shit
to me, and still and all, even with all of that,
all the many complaints that taint my
appreciation of charity, help and shelter,
even though I know there is no turning back
to drier times, still, as still as a fan when
the man done cut the ‘lectric off, still,
regardless of how much I hate the taste
of bland food, still, I may never go back,
not to live, maybe for a used to be
visit, like how every now and then you
go by a graveyard… I am not bitter, I am
just trying to answer the question:
what is life without a home?
what is life, without
a home? and how long does it take
to grow a new one?