At dinner with friends in the days just following Katrina, our host disparaged aloud the merit of rebuilding New Orleans. I became enraged at his cheek – that he would dispatch an entire city – a place he admitted to never having even visited – with the same abandon he’d just employed to pick a bit of food from between his teeth. Though my anger finally cooled, even today I regret that I held my tongue that night. But this week, as seemingly every media source covers the slow but remarkable comeback over the past five years of that city and its people, I can, figuratively at least, thumb my nose at our friend’s callous opinions.
My first visit to New Orleans was in May 1970 for my honeymoon. What I remember most is the delicious oysters and the relentless heat. I wasn’t crazy about the place, and remarked at the time that while it was great to visit, I would never want to live there. Two years later however, I did live there. And loved it. My affair with New Orleans lasted thirty-two years – 29 longer than the marriage that first took me there. I’d vowed never to leave. Don’t ask me why. I can’t explain the hold that city can have on a person. No one ever has, though many have tried. It’s a place that gets under your skin, into your blood, into the very marrow that builds your blood. It’s in your conscious, your subconscious. It becomes the way you think. It becomes the decisions you make, the values you cherish, the culture you identify with, the spoon with which you feed your babies. Don’t ask me to explain that. It just is.
In November, 2004, in spite of my reluctance, I did finally, tearfully, bid adieu to that marvelous place to begin a new life in the northeast. Not certain I would be able to endure the transition, I did not sell my house, my cute Victorian whose every inch I had scraped and painted and restored myself, but rented it instead to an understanding couple who promised to take good care of it. Nine months later my partner and I sat with mouths agape to watch the news coverage of the worst natural disaster to hit the continental US in recorded history. Not knowing, in the initial hours and days, if my house – three blocks from the Mississippi River – still stood or anything, really, about what the damages were. All we knew was that our beloved city was on her knees.
Since the storm, whenever it comes up in introductions that we are from New Orleans, I always feel a rush to explain that we moved before the storm. Survivor’s guilt I suppose, an unexpressed but deeply felt shame – don’t feel sorry for us, I want to say, we got out in time, all we lost was a car and a roof. Feeling almost as though I should have been there, that I deserted her in her hour of greatest need. Of course this is silly, but it’s how it feels to have known a place so well (too well, in fact, so that feelings of love at times devolved into waves of ambivalence), only to have it collapse as soon as I turned my back.
With the same perverted appetite and tear-filled eyes as five years ago I watched again, all this past week, those video clips of people on rooftops, waving from attic windows, or crowded along the streets beside the Superdome and on interstate overpasses; the mile after mile of vacant lots where homes once stood, the flyover shots of a city inundated with filthy waters, where bodies floated amid the detritus of dreams torn asunder. Unable to avert my eyes, as one watches those old films of the Hindenburg’s tragic final flight, oh-the-humanity, those scenes, the tragic annihilation of the city I knew, into whose nooks and crannies I had peered with a curious and jaundiced eye over those many years in love with her, the city whose embrace I carried with me like a battered teddy when finally I left her, now on her knees, bedraggled and weeping more than salty tears. Weeping her very life from every pore.
It’s not easy to explain the joy I feel about New Orleans’ extraordinary recovery. It's bittersweet, because I know that even as she rises like a broken-winged Phoenix, she will never be the same. The scars may one day disappear, but always now will be a pervasive vulnerability that was not there before. A weakness barely visible, just beneath the surface.
I sold my house earlier this year. I still ache with the knowledge that I will never again live in New Orleans, not for any reason other than that I have a new life here now. But New Orleans will always be a part of me. And though battered yet again by the BP oil spill, and no doubt to face problems in the future with storms increasing and sea levels rising, still one can’t just turn one’s back on a place like New Orleans, any more than one would turn one’s back on San Francisco, or Chicago, or even Cleveland, for that matter. New Orleans is like a living soul, a unique and spirited individual who deserves our time, attention and respect. She is a part of our country’s history. She is a part of us. US.
