“The music of New Orleans—like the city itself—is able to move from mood to mood in ways that might surprise people from other cultures. The sense of loss is an inevitable theme of this book. Loss almost defines New Orleans at this time. But humor and beauty exist comfortably in these same pages.
“For those who do not already know, humor, beauty and the blues all live right alongside each other. Even after Katrina, laughter is the best life raft.”-- David Rutledge
“We want our city. And we don’t want it to come back like no Disneyland for adults. It was getting that way anyway. We don’t want that. Just give us a chance to collect ourselves.”
-- Wynton Marsalis, as quoted in Rolling Stone
“‘There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.”-- Mark Twain, in his 1883 book “Life on the Mississippi”
Here’s a book that makes you cry, that takes you back to where you didn’t want to go, that reminds you of one of the biggest crimes every perpetrated on U.S. citizens by its own country.
Published in 2006 by Chin Music Press as a “Broken Levees Books edition,” “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” is billed as a collection of stories and essays set in the Big Easy. The collection was completed in just 89 days—and only 92 after Hurricane Katrina hit. In true Cajun tradition, it can best be described as a gumbo, with a massive helping of short stories, a dash of recipes, a pinch of old-world historical accounts, a touch of humor and a dose of sadness. The line “We lost New Orleans” is repeated at heart-aching intervals throughout the book, along with depictions of people who should be mad and devastated, but are instead grateful at strangers’ kindness.
Among the highlights were the hysterical story “I Was a Teenage Float Grunt” by Ray Shea, the tremendous “Professor Stevens Goes to Mardi Gras” by Rex Noone (“There he went, a man who did not participate in Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras happened to him.”), “Where Grace Lives” by Toni McGee Causey and “The World from Jackson Square,” which was a compilation of writings published in 1948. Causey asks why we can pinpoint a 2- by 2-foot hole to an underground bunker from thousands of miles away and strike it from hundreds—yet we can’t find a way to help a city that lies 966 miles from Washington, D.C.? Sentiments like these pepper the book, and no matter what your political affiliation might be or how closely you’ve followed the plight of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, you can’t help but wonder just what in christ’s name we’ve let happen to this American jewel.
To be fair, in a collection like this that relies on the generosity and emotions of contributors who were themselves devastated by the hurricane, there are bound to be some misses. “A Lesson From Below” by Sarah K. Inman was one of these. This strange tale speaks of creepy aerobatics and small masturbating black children, serving as a disturbing and seemingly unnecessary downer smack dab in the middle of an emotional book. Not only was it displaced, but it actually robbed the collection of much of its momentum and emotion to that point, in my view.
Despite this hiccup, the collection was tremendous … unafraid of any subject, unyielding in its criticism of targets large and small, unflappable in its depiction of courage in unthinkable situations, and unwavering in its hope. Here are some memorable turns of phrase on a variety of topics:
On politics:
“When President Bush stood on a disaster site in the neighboring state of Mississippi and declared that Senator Trent Lott’s house would rise up again, bigger and better than ever, it made a few people shudder. Somehow this statement conveyed an image of Trent Lott’s huge house standing on that spot while the surrounding land remained a disaster. George and Trent could sip their mint juleps on a spacious new veranda while the rest of the people still sat in a landscape of rubble waiting for a sip of water. That seems to be the vision that some have of this rebuilding process.”
-- David Rutledge
“I basically told [the President] we had an incredible, uh, crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice.
“But we authorized eight billion dollars to go to Iraq lickety-sp—quick. After 9/11 we gave the president unprecedented powers lickety-s—quick to take care of New York and other places. Now, you mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through, a place that is so unique when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world everybody’s eyes light up, you mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can’t figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on, man.”
-- New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin
“President Bush showed cowardice and incompetence. A commander in chief’s first job is to protect the citizenry. Bush failed shamefully, flying over the city on his way back from another vacation on his ranch in Texas. LBJ was in New Orleans on the heels of Hurricane Betsy, inspecting damage and talking to people.”
-- Jason Berry
“ ‘What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas … and so many of the people in the arenas here are, uh, you know, were, uh, were under-privileged anyway, so this is working very well [chuckles] for them.’”
-- Barbara Bush, in an interview from the Reliant Center in Houston with American Public Media’s “Marketplace” show
On political e-mails:
“From: Worthy, Sharon
Sent: Sunday, September 4, 2005, 10:17 AM
To: michael d. brown
Subject: Your shirt
Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt … all shirts. Even the President rolled his sleeves to just above the elbow.
In this crisis and on TV you just need to look more hard-working … ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!”
On retaining New Orleans’s unique and distinct vibe:
“New Orleans needs to beware of charity … If there is a Starbucks in the French Quarter, something has been lost. If there is a Mardi Gras parade sponsored by Pepsi, something has been lost. If the houses are being designed by Halliburton … some things have already been lost.
“It is not just a city, not just houses—it is a culture … Studs Terkel wrote, ‘Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.’ The same can be said for a culture. Let the trumpet sound.”
-- David Rutledge
“The crime and poverty were always there. My garage was invaded three times so I quit locking it.
“You could not live in the city and avoid the dreary performance of democracy; yet the town was held together by a spiritual essence few cities in this country possess.”
-- Jason Berry
“Through peculiar circumstances, we have evolved a unique kind of society. Architect Robert Cangelosi has reminded us that the reason our housing is so lovely is ‘preservation by neglect.’ Indeed, economic underdevelopment is probably the reason our culture and way of life remain distinct as well. As we look forward hopefully to greater economic opportunity, let us seek to preserve, or to salvage, those social features which also make us beautiful.
“We hold these truths not only to be self-evident, but self-propagating. Everyone in the world who is feeling these basic principles is a New Orleanian. Every New Orleanian who is not feeling these principles is also a New Orleanian because the gods adore difference and abhor sameness. See y’all in the streets. Laissez les bon temps rouler.”
-- C.W. Cannon, in “The New Orleans Manifesto”
On New Orleans’s musical soul:
“[New Orleans] … unlike so many other places, does not hold tightly to one sound. It is not Nashville or Detroit or even Memphis. Rather it is simply the city where music has a place to begin. More than any other, it is a place of musical possibility, and because of that, an endless source of stunning collaborations.”
-- Colleen Mondor
“‘Jazz is important, because it’s the only art form that embodies the fundamental principles of American democracy.’”
-- Colleen Mondor, quoting Wynton Marsalis
“The city of New Orleans is defined by three things: music, corruption and food. The music is nurtured in the souls of hundreds of local musicians who grow up wearing their tubas home and playing them at the bus stops rather than dragging music cases to waiting SUVs like other American kids. The corruption is ingrained in three-hundred-year-old French and Spanish training, with ex-governors sitting in federal prisons and elected officials stuffing cash into their pockets while a hidden video camera whirs. The citizens of the city know America shakes its head at the stories that come out of New Orleans. But they can take the occasional snicker about politics Southern style because their city’s food heritage rivals that of any place in the world.”
-- Dar Wolnik
“I know that the music of New Orleans will survive any catastrophe; the records are set, the lyrics transcribed, the recordings known all over the world. It can never disappear. But the magic of that place is not in the music it already knows, but in the sounds that are yet to be.
“The city has already played witness to an evolution in musical styles that is without precedent in our collective human memory. What I want to hear though, is what comes next. New Orleans is not done yet, not by a long shot. I want to hear what she has to give us next.”
-- Colleen Mondor
On grace:
“Hemingway called courage ‘grace under pressure.’ I saw that grace in great display after Hurricane Katrina bore down, grace entwined with another kind of valor: the realization that in order to be brave, you must first be afraid.”
-- Jason Berry
On knowing what it means to live through Katrina:
“The rage I felt watching New Orleans drown is still palpable. I cannot understand the fact that we live in a country which can put men on the moon, which can help build an international space station, which can create phenomenal structures or explore the deepest oceans, but we could not get water to people trapped on an overpass for days. I cannot wrap my mind around why they were trapped in the first place, since there were trucks passing them by. FEMA trucks, which wouldn’t stop. I don’t understand that. And I can’t believe I live in a country which could show this on TV, for days in a row, and no one did anything about it.
“New Orleans was dying. People were dying. It was just one scene of so many, and it made no sense. People died on that overpass, when help just drove right by them.
“I cannot understand how media crews could show the devastating events down at the Convention Center and the Superdome, and FEMA or our federal government did not ‘know’ the people were there. How do we live in a country which can drop aid to everyone else in the world, and no one could drop water and food to the people trapped there? How can we handle going into war-torn areas and get aid to people there, but a few thugs prevented us from helping Americans? How?
“How is it that more than two weeks later when we were still going to shelters bringing in supplies, I received reports from the outlying areas that FEMA still hadn’t shown up?
“Still. Hadn’t. Shown. Up.
“I don’t understand these things. I know I live in America. Well, last time I checked, Louisiana was still in America. New Orleans was still a major American city. Maybe something happened somewhere that someone forgot to mention to us, but yeah, pretty sure we’re still in America. And the magnitude of the inept response (including local government) was staggering.
“It was like watching someone I love get gutted and lie there bleeding and knowing that help was standing a few feet away, talking about golf scores.”
-- Toni McGee Causey
“Whether someone lost so much as a brick or all of their belongings, people in the Gulf lost far more than I did. They are missing a sense of place that may never come back.”
-- Steve Quinn
“There are images and moments which scarred us all, embedded deep somewhere in our souls, a slash that will not heal. The sights and sounds of people abandoned, dying, here on our soil.
“The heartbreak kept me from sleeping … The helplessness etched into every waking moment, acid into the pores, and rendered the grief unbelievably deep.
“We lost New Orleans.”
-- Toni McGee Causey
“We passed dank, steamy nights in the big house, eating canned food, trying to sleep in the heat, wondering about friends whose whereabouts we knew not and grieving for the city with a sorrow embedded like a sword in the heart.
“The city has fired three-thousand workers and is dead broke. The epidemiological issues are gigantic. Yet each day one sees a new stirring of life, another restaurant opened, lights on in another house. How many people will return? What kind of city will it be? In this strange, rootless configuration of our lives, the pull of family is a constant, and for now and perhaps forever I will think of you, my dear sweet flooded place, as what you were and are in my heart—the holy city of New Orleans.”
-- Jason Berry
On thankfulness:
“So when I say to you that you’ve made a difference, I don’t mean it lightly or in any sort of frivolous way. When it suddenly became clear that we were the ugly, unwanted stepchild of the government, or worse, the beaten, neglected child of the local officials who were hastily trying to cover up their long-term abuse with loud excuses, you made us feel human again. So many of you—giving, calling, writing, trying. Feeling the outrage on our behalf. Knowing it belonged to you, because you were us, we were a part of this country, and you cared.
“We lost New Orleans. We needed you, and you were there, and the outpouring of that grace and hope helped to get us through the worst of the days when we were watching in horror as our own people died, as our friends and family were left, as people were treated worse than we’d ever ever treat an animal.
“You made a difference. A big difference. And we thank you.”
-- Toni McGee Causey
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