Organizing for America | Sam Graham-Felsen's Blog: A Day in New Orleans

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A Day in New Orleans

By Sam Graham-Felsen - Jul 8th, 2007 at 6:16 pm EDT

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Tags: new orleans

Every New Orleanian has a story. Ask anyone here and they'll tell you a story about when they first heard that the flood was coming, where they went if they got out in time, and how they survived if they didn't.

Kristie is a New Orleanian with a story.

We met Kristie on Thursday at the Essence Music Festival. A passionate Obama supporter, she spent her afternoon volunteering for the campaign at the New Orleans Convention Center.

Yesterday, she took us to her old apartment--the spot where she lost everything.

Kristie, who calls herself a "typical New Orleanian," figured the Hurricane would be no different from the usual ferocious Gulf Coast storm--bad, but not worth evacuating over.

She remembers her father calling her about the levees. She drove out to the suburbs to be with her family as the flood waters devoured her apartment in Mid-City.

When she returned to her place after the flood, it was completely uninhabitable; all of her belongings destroyed and covered with a thick mold. The smell, she remembers, was unbearable.

Kristie had been employed by the city as an events planner for the Mayor's office, but after the storm, there was no more money left in the budget. Now she was homeless and jobless. On a lark, she contacted an event planner from the New Zealand government who she'd met at an official event in New Orleans. She inquired if there were any employment opportunities; weeks later, she and her daughter boarded a plane for Wellington, New Zealand.

* * *

Kristie and her daughter loved the beauty, comfort, and security of Wellington. "I remember once there was a triple murder and it was huge news here," she says. "Everyone was shocked. I was like, 'that's nothing-- happened all the time back home.'"

After nearly two years abroad, Kristie--who had slowly acquired a slight Kiwi accent-- felt a pull back to the Gulf Coast. Her roots ran deep in New Orleans--her family had been there for generations--and she was homesick.

"I missed it. I missed the music, I missed the streets, I missed the food, the culture, the people. I mean, New Orleans was home," she says. "I wanted to come back and help."

Kristie, who has been back for three weeks, is now looking for work. One of the first things she did upon returning to US soil was sign up volunteer for the Obama campaign.

* * *

Kristie took us to the place where her recently deceased grandmother had once lived. All that was left was rocks, trash, and weeds. Her home, like so many in New Orleans, was demolished and gone.

As we pulled up, a chicken walked up to the field and began feeding on the grass.

Right after Kristie returned to the US, her grandmother, who had lived in this neighborhood her whole life, passed away.

I asked her if they held a New Orleans funeral parade for her. In a traditional New Orleans funeral, a jazz band, family and friends march throughout the neighborhood of the deceased.

"No, we didn't do that," she said with a pause. "It was much more subdued, low-key. There wouldn't have been much of a point in marching through the neighborhood. Look around; all of her neighbors are gone. The church we held the funeral in didn't even have pews in it."

Kristie frequently remarked that she didn't want people to feel sorry for her; what she and her family had gone through, she said repeatedly, was nothing compared to what others had endured. She also insisted that, despite the multitude of sad stories, there were countless stories of hope in New Orleans.

"People love this city, and they want to come back and rebuild their lives. They are coming back," she said.

A few blocks down from her grandmother's street in the Gentilly neighborhood, the evidence of this was palpable. There were brand new homes and meticulously cultivated flower gardens and lively residents chatting on their front porches. For every few scenes of rubble, there seemed to be a construction crane or a crew of volunteers hammering away at another home.

* * *

But not all of New Orleans is pulsing with hope. Indeed, it's still very much a city of ghosts.

We drove the Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood that bore the brunt of Katrina's brutality, and the neighborhood that has been slowest to recover.

Nearly every home was crumbling and uninhabited; roof after roof caving in; weeds creeping their way across abandoned cars; net-less, bent basketball hoops standing above cracked concrete.

It was hard to fathom that, before the storm, each home had actual occupants with actual families, with daily rituals, prized possessions, accumulated trinkets, and mundane tools that, at one point, had a very real purpose. It was those small things--the rusted hammer, the lone Christmas ornament tied to a ribbon, the broken rake--that belied the enormity of what had been lost.

Perhaps the most striking scene we witnessed was a toppled church, its steeple stubbornly refusing to lie down with the rest of the rubble.

"When you talk about rebuilding communities, it's not just about building houses. So much more than just houses were lost," said Kristie as we drove past the church. "People had been going to that church for thrity or forty years."

* * *

"New Orleanians want to return to their way of life, but it's so hard," says Kristie. "Imagine working a nine-to-five job every day, living out of a loaned trailer, negotiating with contractors and insurance companies, trying to renovate your home, doing all this in your spare time. It's an overwhelmingly stressful situation. We're willing to put in the hours and the sweat. We just need a little bit of help."

Kristie says the government needs to provide more assistance to people rebuilding their lives and invest more in city schools. She believes Senator Obama is uniquely suited to meet this challenge--to reinvigorate New Orleans, and America as a whole, with hope.

On Friday, Barack told the Essence Fest crowd at the Superdome that New Orleans was going to be "ground zero" for a new politics of empathy and mutual support:

The moment in which suddenly all of America looked and realized what we lost in this country was almost two years ago, right here in New Orleans, when people recognized we were no longer the America we hoped we would be, that we had lost any sense of fellow-feeling, any sense of mutual regard for each other.

He continued:

It is not that often, maybe once in a generation, when we have an opportunity to put our shoulder against the wheel and move history in a better direction. If all of you seize that moment with me, if you are ready not just to rebuild New Orleans, but rebuild all the New Orleanses all across America, in the south side of Chicago, in New York City, in Houston, then I am convinced we will not just win an election, but we are going to transform a country.

Kristie--whose community was devastated by a disaster and government failure of historic proportions--knows about history. And now she's trying to change it. She says she will continue to volunteer for Barack and support the campaign in any way she can.

Back on American soil, back in her city, she's put her shoulder to the wheel.

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