N.O. better blues
Watching Spike Lee's four-hour epic on Hurricane Katrina in the New Orleans Arena with my neighbors, I felt awed, exhausted and heartbroken -- and more convinced than ever that somebody should go to jail for what happened here.
By Cynthia Joyce

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Aug. 20, 2006 | People had been talking for weeks about how the New Orleans premiere of Spike Lee's much anticipated Hurricane Katrina documentary, "When the Levees Broke," was sold out, so it was a little eerie when we arrived at New Orleans Arena Wednesday night to find that fewer than half of the 14,000 who'd reportedly snatched up the free tickets actually showed up for the event. Maybe they'd heard there would be no alcohol sold in the arena. Certainly Lee's ambitious film -- sweeping in its scope, emotionally intense and a challenge to watch in one sitting -- could drive just about anyone to drink. It's also possible that all those people who didn't show up don't live here anymore. The new New Orleans can be a pretty lonely town sometimes.

Which is partly why watching a Katrina documentary with thousands of other local residents -- certain to be a gut-wrenching experience -- also carried with it the possibility of catharsis. All summer long, apprehension about the first anniversary of "The Storm" (First? Really? Why does everyone look 10 years older already?) has been steadily building. With so many people still assessing their losses, coming up with a meaningful commemoration can be difficult. I know that 11 months ago I would never have predicted that I might be sitting in the arena across the street from the Superdome -- eating nachos, no less -- eager to watch more footage of what I thought I'd witnessed too much of already.

Lee kept his introductory comments brief, thanking the audience for the opportunity to tell their story. He encouraged people to laugh at the funny parts. Given how common inexplicable weeping spells are around here (as I write this from my neighborhood coffee shop, there is a man next to me reading his e-mail and sobbing intermittently -- I don't even ask anymore) everyone seemed relieved to hear that there would be funny parts, even if they did turn out to be few and far between.

Lee has frequently stated that at four hours – apparently the longest running time ever for an HBO original movie -- "Levees" is still not long enough, nor complete, and he's right. But through hundreds of interviews, "Levees" admirably covers an entire spectrum of events and circumstances. Starting with Katrina's landfall and the flooding from levee breaks, Lee moves quickly into the rapid spread of conspiracy theories and the government's refusal to address them. We see familiar footage of the botched evacuation, as Americans became refugees in their own country, and witness, again, how it was the inaction of elected leaders, not bad weather, that led to the subsequent breakdown of their lives.

Lee also addresses every major aspect of the storm's aftermath, from insurance fraud to mental health breakdowns to the Army Corps' admissions of error to life in FEMA trailers ("I've got water, but no electricity," says one interviewee, even though it's now months after the storm. When Lee asks her when she thinks she might have power, she says, point-blank, "I guess when I decide to give somebody a blow job"). The result is a sort of Cliffs Notes to Hurricane Katrina, Volume 1, and though the subject is dense, the conclusions drawn are as simple and straightforward as Kanye West's "George Bush doesn't like black people" comment (which also gets full treatment here): Louisiana needs to stop being an oil colony for the rest of the country. And, oh yeah -- somebody ought to go to jail over this.

On the day of the premiere, Times-Picayune television critic Dave Walker wrote that "Levees," while frequently brilliant, didn't tell the whole story. "Those who were here know that, in virtually every way, Katrina was an indiscriminate storm that killed and destroyed without regard to ethnicity or economic condition. That is not the impression that the nation received watching coverage of the immediate aftermath of the storm, nor the one viewers will take away from Lee's documentary."

Lee's intention wasn't to make "Levees" the document of record for just the black experience (lots of whites weigh in here as well), but for the death of what was a mostly black American city. There's no other director who would have even attempted to do that so thoroughly. So what if he interviews CNN's Soledad O'Brien (her replayed eviscerations of then FEMA chief Mike Brown won lengthy applause from the arena audience) but not Anderson Cooper, and Wynton Marsalis but not Harry Connick Jr., or for that matter the Rev. Al Sharpton but not the Rev. Billy Graham? Those were valid choices, not oversights, and when most reports from New Orleans over the last year reflexively equated black with poor, a film like "Levees" provides some much-needed balance by portraying many members of New Orleans' often overlooked black middle and professional classes.

"Levees" establishes early on, for instance, that it wasn't just poor blacks who chose not to evacuate -- prominent local luminaries like actor Wendell Pierce (of "The Wire") and jazz musician Donald Harrison Jr. both talk about how hard it is to get New Orleanians to leave town. When Pierce says "New Orleans people, we don't venture very far," he's just stating the facts, not offering an explanation.

For the most part, Lee adheres to the traditional documentary format -- interviews strung together with recent news clips and archival footage -- and his stylistic trademarks are employed only sparingly here. But occasionally we hear his voice off-camera, prompting his subjects to answer what are often painful, intimate questions. It's not necessarily the drama inherent in these stories that moved some to tears -- and it's possible that some audiences won't recognize the restraint Lee exercised in rendering them -- it's the heartbreaking matter-of-factness with which they're being retold.

A Ninth Ward resident talks about seeing his dead neighbor floating in the water for days and remarks how "he was all blown up." Herbert Freeman Jr. tells us how he sat outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center with his elderly mother in the heat with no water for days while waiting for buses that took too long arrive. "She was asking me questions like every five, 10 minutes, and then I noticed she had nodded off." When a soldier ordered him at gunpoint onto the bus that finally came, he was forced to leave his mother's body behind with only a handwritten note identifying her. "I had to pray for my own salvation," he says, and his voice never once breaks -- but his face shows a man who still can't believe that was the choice he had to make.

The tedium of tragedy has prevailed here for so long now that many people are saturated emotionally. But twice during the premiere, dozens of people filed out of the arena as if on some emotional-overload cue -- one time after we witness the funeral of a 5-year-old girl who drowned, and another after a wordless photo montage set to haunting chamber music shows scores of dead bodies, some slumped over and dried out, others floating by, bloated and with eyes bulging. One photo even shows a body being eaten by wild dogs. When you remember that one of the photographers who captured some of those images recently snapped, you don't wonder why -- you just wonder why more people haven't.

Lee gives his subjects full rein to teasingly discuss Kanye West's outburst, and it's the only funny part of the film that leaves no bitter aftertaste. At first, West maintains his bravado -- "If you don't want me to say what I feel, then don't put me in front of the camera" -- but moments later, he admits how scared he was. "I was like, 'Oh shit.' I thought the CIA might come take me away." And Mayor Ray Nagin is even more macho than usual here, boasting about taking a longer shower than was probably polite in the president's "pimpmobile," otherwise known as Air Force One. The arena crowd hissed anytime President Bush's name was mentioned.

The mock second line funeral of a "Katrina" casket at the end was meant to provide closure, and it was a nice gesture. But on our way out of the New Orleans Arena, as we looked down to see the train depot where prisoners had been kept in makeshift cages after the storm, the central post office where some people still have to pick up their mail, and the dents where flying debris had struck the side of the now mostly repaired Superdome, I'm not sure closure was what people felt. It was now after midnight, and this crowd was tired. When a white kid with dreadlocks, one of many freelance vigilantes who flocked here after the storm, started chanting, "You've seen the film, now it's time to do something!" a lady in front of me harrumphed back at him, "Yeah? Why don't you do something -- like build us a levee."

"When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" will air in two two-hour segments on HBO on Monday and Tuesday nights. It also will be shown in its entirety Aug. 29, the one-year anniversary of Katrina's landfall.

-- By Cynthia Joyce

August 3, 2006
Agony of New Orleans, Through Spike Lee's Eyes
By FELICIA R. LEE (new york times)

NEW ORLEANS - From the beginning Spike Lee knew that Hurricane Katrina was a story he had to tell. Watching the first television images of floating bodies and of desperate people, mostly black, stranded on rooftops, he quickly realized he was witnessing a major historical moment. As those moments kept coming, he spent almost a year capturing the hurricane's sorrowful consequences for a four-hour documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," to be shown on HBO this month.

The film, which Mr. Lee directed and produced, comes 20 years after the August 1986 debut of his first hit, "She's Gotta Have It," about Nola Darling, a Brooklyn graphic artist, and her three lovers. The
provocative films that followed ("Do the Right Thing," "Jungle Fever," "Malcolm X," among others), with their searing cultural critiques, cemented Mr. Lee's reputation as his generation's pioneering black
filmmaker. This year he had a commercial and critical success with "Inside Man," about a bank heist.

Like him or not, Mr. Lee, 49, is an artist many people feel they know. People, black and white, approached him and the "Levees" crew here, he said, imploring: "Tell the story. Tell the story." "It becomes like an obligation we have," he said.

Mr. Lee's reputation helped get his camera crew into the city's water-soaked homes, he said. It allowed him to stretch out a complex story, with themes of race, class and politics that, he said, have too often been sensationalized or rendered in sound bites. He received permission, for example, from Kimberly Polk to film the funeral of her 5-year-old daughter, Sarena Polk, swept away when the waters ravaged
the Lower Ninth Ward. "She came to me in a dream," Ms. Polk says in the film. "She said, 'Mama, I'm falling.' "

"Levees" opens with the Louis Armstrong song "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" and offers black-and-white images of the city's Southern-with-a-twist past - Mardi Gras, Confederate flags -
interspersed with scenes of children airlifted from demolished houses, a door marked "dead body inside."

This gumbo of a film lingers on the politics of disaster response, the science of levees and storms, the city's Creolized culture, the stories of loss. Many faces are familiar: politicians like C. Ray Nagin, the
city's mayor, and Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana; celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Kanye West, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Sean Penn; and the native son and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who talks about New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz. "It's like somebody violating your mama," Mr. Marsalis says of the flooding.

Mr. Lee said he intended most of the "Levee" stories to come from the ordinary people who endured the Superdome's makeshift shelter or long searches for loved ones. So "Levees" includes many people like Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, depressed and outraged after her family was evacuated to different places around the country and she waited four months for a government trailer. "Not just the levees broke," she says in the film. "The spirit broke."

And there's Paris Ervin, a University of New Orleans student, who fled Hurricane Katrina but left behind his mother, Mary Johnell Morant. Months later, after their home was officially searched and marked empty, the police found Ms. Morant's remains in the kitchen, under a refrigerator. It took two more months for the coroner's office to identify her officially and release the body.

As a kind of thank-you to the many residents like Mr. Ervin, the first half of "Levees" will be first shown free on Aug. 16 to 10,000 people at the New Orleans Arena. HBO is to show the first two hours of "Levees"
on Aug. 21 at 9 p.m., the last two on Aug. 22 at 9 p.m. It will be shown in its entirety at 8 p.m. on Aug. 29, the anniversary of the hurricane, one of the country's worst natural disasters.

The critics and audience will have the final say on whether "Levees" is the thorough examination that Mr. Lee intends. His views are clear. "What happened in New Orleans was a criminal act," he said, a tragic
backhanded slap to poor, black or politically insignificant people. "The levees were a Band-Aid here and a Band-Aid there. In the famous statement of Malcolm X, the chickens came home to roost. Somebody
needs to go to jail."

Douglas Brinkley, the author of "The Great Deluge," a book about Hurricane Katrina said: "When I heard Spike Lee was coming down, I felt grateful. I thought the media perspective - while good - still showed
that a lot wasn't being asked." Mr. Lee is "grappling with the larger question of why so many African-Americans distrust government," said Mr. Brinkley, a professor of history at Tulane University, who appears in the film.

Just as Michael Apted's "7 Up," documentary series followed a group of people, filmed first as children, Mr. Lee said he hopes to return to the people profiled in "Levees."

One 90-degree Saturday, some of those interviewed gathered in a big meeting room at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel, not far from the Convention Center. Each person was photographed within a frame,
intended to convey the idea that each interview is a portrait.

"It's really just a mood," Cliff Charles, the cinematographer on "Levees," said of what he was trying to capture in the various portraits.

"Levees" has no voice-over narration and is stitched together by the witnesses and commentators. Sam Pollard, the producer and supervising editor, said they had made 30 or so versions of the documentary, wading through hours of film for the moments and the elements that best tell the story.

Mr. Pollard, who like Mr. Charles is black, has worked with Mr. Lee on two other documentaries, "4 Little Girls," about the girls killed in the bombing of a black church in Birmingham in 1963, and "Jim Brown: All
American," about the former pro football star. Mr. Pollard said Mr. Lee came up with the film's title last year, before they started shooting.

On the set Mr. Lee asked all the questions from a typed list. ("You have to say the question in the answer," he said to those he interviewed. "Don't look at me, keep looking at the lenses.")

The interview lineup on that day in May included Joseph Bruno, a lawyer, talking about the complexities of flood insurance, among other topics; the musician Terence Blanchard (who also did the score for the film); Calvin Mackie, a mechanical engineer; Brian Thevenot and Trymaine Lee (who had Mr. Lee autograph his videos), reporters from The New Orleans Times-Picayune; and Mr. Brinkley.

Mr. Lee's direction was terse, although he is more soft-spoken than his public image suggests. He told Mr. Mackie, whose father had lung cancer and was supposed to start chemotherapy the day the hurricane hit: "Talk about your father and stepmother. Say their names too."

Mr. Mackie, 38, a professor of engineering at Tulane, was mourning their deaths. His 43-year-old stepmother Linda Emery Mackie's breast cancer had metastasized in the weeks after the hurricane. His 63-year-old father Willie Mackie's cancer treatment was delayed for six weeks, his health records lost. They died days apart in March.

"I hope that the documentary opens America's eyes to how we continue to struggle here," Mr. Mackie, who is black, said after his on-camera interview. "No matter how you feel about Spike, and I don't like all
his movies, people know about his integrity and his unrelenting commitment to African-American people, to tell our stories. You talk about street credibility, well, he has a cultural credibility."

"Levees" started out as a two-hour, $1 million film. HBO executives looking for a Hurricane Katrina project snapped it up. Mr. Lee and his crew were able to get into New Orleans after Thanksgiving, Mr. Lee
said, and he quickly realized that he needed two more hours and $1 million more to give the story a full airing. He got it.

Sheila Nevins, the film's executive producer and the president of the documentary and family division at HBO, said "Levees" was an easy sell, at both prices.

"I realized this would be the film of record," she said. "When Spike interviews a forgotten American whose kid floated away in the water, he lets them raise up their poetry. They're able to express to him what they're not able to express to anyone else."

With all those hours of conversations and interviews, he certainly ended up with themes that went beyond the floodwaters, Mr. Lee said.

"Politics. Ethics. Morals," he said, when asked what Katrina and in turn "Levees" was really about. "This is about what this country is really going to be."


When the Levees Broke

Last of the Ninth
New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward was a historic black neighborhood, home to Fats Domino, abandoned by government, and the "murder capital of the murder capital." Now that it has been destroyed by Katrina, will its loyal inhabitants be able to return?
By Frank Etheridge, Sept. 13, 2005
NEW ORLEANS -- Michael Knight lived on Flood Street

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An auto mechanic, Knight, 44, made a home for himself in the neighborhood he was raised in, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Bounded by water on three sides -- the Industrial Canal to the west, Bayou Bienvenue to the east and the Mississippi River to the south -- his impoverished neighborhood has long suffered from isolation and neglect. Yet, the Lower Ninth Ward was violently thrust into the national spotlight when it flooded after the first levee breach in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. America watched as a break in the Industrial Canal levee allowed water, death and destruction to flow into the neighborhood. The damage that occurred -- especially in the lower part of the Ninth Ward -- was so extensive that the head of homeland security for New Orleans, Col. Terry Ebbert, told the New York Times Sunday that "there's nothing out there that can be saved at all."

The night before Katrina struck, Knight secured his pirogue -- pronounced pee-row, these small, flat-bottom boats are omnipresent in south Louisiana, popular for a design ideal for navigating the area's canals and bayous -- by tying it to his house. After the rain slowed Tuesday morning, Knight went outside to survey the damage. That's when he saw the water rising. Fast.

"I've never seen water come up that fast," Knight recalls a week later. "It was collecting at the curb when I came out. By the time I finished smoking a cigarette, it was in the yard."

That's when Knight sprang to action. He untied his pirogue and recruited his brother Reginald Jackson and cousin Freddie Hicks to begin rescue efforts in the neighborhood. "It was a nightmare, just the noise," Knight says. "You never heard nothing like that. Wind howling, people hollering for help. Just scary."

Knight stopped counting at 200 the number of people he rescued -- from rooftops, from treetops -- but estimates he brought at least 400 people to safety. He worked nonstop for the first two days with no sleep, and then only took quick naps in his pirogue for the remaining three days of rescue efforts. Knight slept in his boat, securing it by fastening it to an antennae on the roof of his house, which was by Tuesday afternoon completely submerged in water.

"He's the neighborhood hero," says Democratic state Rep. Charmaine Marchand, a lifelong neighbor of Knight's who represents the area in the Louisiana Legislature.

"I must have been crazy; I must have gotten possessed," Knight says, speaking from Atlanta, where he's living post-Katrina.

Knight had been taking his neighbors to safety on the nearby rooftop of Krantz Elementary on Caffin Avenue. But after the Coast Guard arrived, he was ordered to stop using the school, directed instead to take everyone to the St. Claude Avenue bridge over the Industrial Canal, where they were instructed to walk three miles to the Superdome.

"I told them I could be making double time, saving double the people, if I could drop them off at the school," Knight says. "The trip to the bridge took twice as long. I asked them for gas. They said no. I had to siphon off gas from boats I saw floating around to keep going."

"People like Michael Knight came out in droves when the water started to come up," says Marchand. "Neighbors with boats helped other neighbors. We had a lot of effort, but just not enough manpower. No question the Coast Guard should have arrived sooner. The levee broke Tuesday morning. They didn't come until Wednesday."

Marchand sums up the delay with the same cause and effect that has contributed to the many problems her neighborhood faces: "We're the area everyone forgets about."

Hurricane Betsy in 1965, a catastrophic storm in human deaths and property damage but one wreaking far less havoc than Katrina, still informs much of her community's mindset, Marchand says. "They blew the locks in the levees to save Uptown, to save the French Quarter, the richer upriver areas, in Betsy, at the expense of us," she says. "Katrina brings back those old fears. Was this intentional? Did they do this to us again? We're still the dumping grounds for the city of New Orleans. That's what's going through people's minds in the community right now."

Representing a 98 percent African-American area with a 25 percent unemployment rate and an average annual income of $16,000, Marchand says economics were the largest factor in determining who survived Katrina, but that racism will be the storm's legacy.

"People want to push race aside in this, but those aren't the people that have to deal with race like poor African-Americans do," Marchand says. "If it were affluent whites who were flooded out and stranded on the side of the highway, I don't think America would have let them starve."

Like the rest of Louisiana, New Orleans is divided into numbered wards for purposes of municipal districting. Geographic descriptions in the city are as nebulous as its morality: The West Bank of the river is to the south; north or south names for crosstown streets are determined on an east-west border; upper means upriver and lower means downriver.

The Lower Ninth Ward, or the "lower Nines" as it's called by most who live there, is the farthest neighborhood downriver in New Orleans, bordered to the east by the white-flight boom area of St. Bernard Parish. The historic neighborhood, constructed primarily in the years following the Civil War as European immigrants poured into the city, carries a unique set of burdens and glories.

It's the lifelong home of R&B legend Antoine "Fats" Domino (who was safely rescued during Katrina from his Caffin Avenue home, though the famously private 77-year-old was evacuated to parts unknown) and late folk-art icon Sister Gertrude Morgan, who spent her life walking the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward in the traditional custom of evangelical African-American women, dressed in all white, playing tambourines, singing hymns and looking for souls to save.

It's where New Orleans first attempted to integrate its schools when 6-year-old Ruby Bridges entered kindergarten in 1960 -- at Frantz Elementary, where Knight took his rescued neighbors -- with the protection of a U.S. marshal escort, past rows of neighborhood ladies self-dubbed "The Cheerleaders" who hurled racial slurs, threats and tomatoes. The ugly scene was famously captured in Norman Rockwell's painting "The Problem We All Live With" and by John Steinbeck in his travelogue "Travels With Charley," in which he described a revelation of human nature so repellent he left the city in disgust.

Populated for its first century with working-class Irish, Italian and German immigrants, the racial makeup of the Lower Ninth Ward changed dramatically following the failed integration of Frantz Elementary. Rather than send their children to school with little Ruby, white families responded in droves to St. Bernard Parish president and land baron Leander Perez's invitation to white Lower Ninth Ward residents to move to the neighboring parish on the promise of all-white schools and neighborhoods.

The Lower Ninth Ward has witnessed some specific horrors that have become the stuff of local legend. In the late '60s and early '70s, shootouts occurred between police and Black Panthers locally headquartered in the Desire housing development, so named for its location on the street made famous by Tennessee Williams. Racial tensions following the clashes between Black Panthers and police were further inflamed during name changes at the formerly all-white Nicholls High School -- named for a slave-owning Confederate general and Louisiana governor. In 1973, the school was renamed Douglass in honor of freed slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. Students then wanted a mascot change from Rebels -- illustrated by a sword-wielding Confederate -- to Panthers in support of the Black Panthers. An enraged school board rejected the idea; the name Douglass Bobcats came about as a compromise. The community was shocked last year to read the story of a Lower Ninth Ward street gang that used a mentally disabled teen from the neighborhood as target practice, in broad daylight and on a bloody path stretching for blocks.

Sadly, the dominating legacy of the Lower Ninth Ward in recent decades is crime, specifically homicide.

"It's the murder capital of the murder capital," says criminologist Peter Scharf, co-director of the University of New Orleans' Center for Society, Law and Justice, referring to statistics revealing a per capita homicide rate in the Lower Ninth Ward over the last 10 years of 120 people per 100,000 residents, a rate six times higher than that of New York City, at 12.1 per 100,000. Overall, New Orleans has a rate of 62.5 murders per 100,000 residents, according to Scharf.

"Why are we so different in New Orleans?" Scharf asks in explaining an increase in New Orleans' homicide rate in recent years despite a national downward trend in murder. "A primary factor is the lack of interaction between the system and the lower-class subculture, a problem compounded in the isolated Lower Ninth Ward."

"We've developed an intensely isolated lower class in New Orleans," Scharf says. "The structure of our service-industry-dependent economy offers no jobs, or ones with low pay and no future. This has created a youth culture with kids who live armed, live high on drugs and with no contact with the legitimate system."

Scharf points to a sizable reduction in the homicide rate for police districts covering the Lower Ninth Ward in the late '90s as proof that change in policing tactics can produce positive results. After the area suffered from an all-time-high homicide rate in 1993 and 1994 (625 combined), police engaged "in a very people-oriented strategy, with cops interacting on a friendly, pedestrian level with the community," Scharf says, adding that the shift in tactic was led by then Lt. Eddie Compass, now New Orleans' police chief.

"Plus, they got rid of the corrupt cops," he says, referring to a New Orleans Police Department notoriously filled with corruption throughout its history, and specifically to convicted murderer Len Davis, who patrolled the Lower Ninth Ward in the early 1990s and was both a cop with a reputation for brutality and a drug kingpin. Davis' murder conviction in 1996 stemmed from the slaying of Kim Groves, killed after filing a police brutality complaint against Davis.

As a result of the cleanup, in 1999 the homicide rate dropped to a 10-year low of just 35. Yet, by 2003, the murder rate had nearly doubled, back up to 61 killings for that year. Scharf says much of the increase in violence stems from prosecution problems. "Stats show that in New Orleans, if you kill somebody, you have anywhere from a 6 to 19 percent rate of going to jail for murder," Scharf says. "You have to either kill the Virgin Mary or kill someone in bed and then stay in that bed until the police come to get convicted for murder in New Orleans."

Scharf says explanations for the recent increase in violence could be due to many key leadership changes -- New Orleans has seen a new sheriff, police chief, district attorney and mayor since 1999. He also cites the lack of programs that address the root causes of crime, such as a probation system that better tracks and guides convicts and sustainable economic development.

"The wheels were coming off in New Orleans, and that was before the flood," Scharf says of the city's violence. "Before Katrina, we didn't really have an effective governance to think this crime problem through. What it's going to take as we rebuild is leadership. Leadership, and a lot of healing."

"What's the Lower Ninth Ward going to be like when they open the city back up?" Scharf asks. "Is it going to be more culturally and economically integrated? Or is it going to become even more racially polarized following Katrina, when you have the perception that the white establishment in New Orleans left its black citizens to die?"

Scharf and Rep. Marchand both agree that much of the Lower Ninth Ward's future lies in the physical reconstruction of the neighborhood. "The whole neighborhood is going to have to be rebuilt," Marchand says. "The houses are all just devastated. Even if they're still standing, they've been soaking in toxins for weeks."

Unlike the Lower Ninth, the upriver section of the Ninth Ward, the Bywater, was relatively untouched by the flooding that inundated the lower section on the other side of the river. In the past decade, according to Scharf and Marchand, Bywater has benefited from investment and integration.

"We had a real hodgepodge of people that was really cool: black and white, musicians, artists, a lot of gay people, the working class and corporate executives," says Bywater resident Robert Nelson, who has been one of the investors renovating and reselling the 19th century houses in the neighborhood, buying his first property in the area four years ago for less than $7,500.

Before Katrina, Nelson was involved in the real estate market in the Lower Ninth Ward, figuring it was a prime area for investment. But now?

"What if I invest in a [new] property, and there's no industry or economy to support people enough to pay rent or buy the house?" Nelson asks from a friend's house in Minneapolis where he took refuge.

Nelson says part of the process he enjoys in renovating the historic neighborhood is the mixing of class and race. "New Orleans has traditionally had the separatist mentality: Separate the rich and poor, the black and white," he says. "In the Bywater the last few years, you saw individuals fighting that old mentality. The divide America saw with Katrina and the Lower Ninth Ward, with poor and black left behind, I think that was a real eye-opener for everybody to that kind of divide we have down here."

Marchand's primary concern now is to make sure the Lower Ninth Ward residents are included in the Federal Emergency Management Agency windfall following Katrina. "The pie is being sliced up now," she says, adding that environmental concerns are likely to require the majority -- perhaps all -- of the houses in the area to be bulldozed. But she wonders who will live in the new properties: her constituents, or those reflecting the profits of developers?

"I just ask that they put my people to work, rebuilding the houses they live in. We are the poorest neighborhood, but we have the highest homeownership rate in the city [62 percent, vs. a 41 percent homeownership rate citywide]. Why is that? Because people were born, raised and want to live here. Give the people here a chance for jobs, to make an income. People in this area have long been sacrificed. Poverty. Crime. Betsy. Katrina. Are they about to be sacrificed again during the rebuilding, in terms of jobs and money? I'm worried about that."

Following his heroism in saving his neighbors, Michael Knight had to beg for gas through Mississippi and Alabama as he and his girlfriend drove to Atlanta, where they now are staying with her extended family. "Neighborhood? What neighborhood?" Knight asks incredulously about the future of the Lower Ninth Ward. "It's gone, man."

"I don't want to be here," he says. "I don't want to make new friends. I don't want to look for a new job. I want to be home. I want to be back in my raggedy-ass house."

About the writer
Frank Etheridge is a freelance writer from New Orleans displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

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