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Christmas in New Orleans
By Fatima Shaik
Picture
Santa's sled with a rolling kitchenette attached and you have
some idea about the size of a FEMA trailer. I came across a yard
of them when I got lost on the highway near Baton Rouge, where
most of my family evacuated out of New Orleans.
The
trailers are not the double-wides I imagined—but some are festooned with lights and
an artificial Christmas tree outside the door as in a Bobbie Ann
Mason short story. A FEMA trailer is more like a camper that
you'd attach with a hitch to your four-wheeler when you want to
get out of the city for the weekend. Tiny, but nonetheless a
gift.
As
the rest of the country, children and adults alike, envision
Christmas with piles of presents from their favorite electronic
and clothing stores, the people of the Katrina diaspora are
waking up daily with thoughts of clean underwear, one
comfortable chair and not being home for the holidays. But they
are trying to make it.
In
the town of Baker, the trailers sit row after incalculable row
on a dusty field isolated from the sleepy community. Baker is a
town where Main Street sits along the railroad tracks and leads
from the interstate past the chemical plant and the playground
to the church and two roads named Magnolia. An estimated 1,700
people live on the Baker plain. It is a good mile from any
shopping or familiar community life. The FEMA park is named
Renaissance Village, for the RVs as much as the hopes of their
occupants.
Other
evacuees stay in temporary apartments and pile into houses
around Baton Rouge. One of my cousins hosted 70 people in her
home in the days after the hurricane.
Now,
life means close quarters, small irritations and long hugs with
too many memories of home. Evacuees send e-mails to each other
with Christmas poetry wistful for beignets, king cakes and
burgers at Port of Call. People who lived for their front
porches and pecan trees are getting used to seeing a clear, cold
night sky.
Like
children making their wish lists to Santa, the evacuees are
hoping hard and wondering if they will ever regain shelter,
sanity and a decent future.
The
Christmas commerce that exists in the welcoming malls of the
North is a harsh contrast to the stores and hotels of New
Orleans, that were boarded up for protection and to keep out
Katrina's homeless. People joke about spending food stamps on
Christmas candy or presents or seafood for gumbo, and the
reasons not to hoard instant noodles and canned goods. The
suddenly indigent now recognize the delicate balance between
entitlement and nutrition.
The
jokes these days are edgy. Once voting for governor was a choice
between the Klansman and the Crook. (Vote for the Crook, my
folks advised everyone.) Now, the joke is "Where's
Waldo?," with bank officers and city and government
officials hard to find.
Best
friends and neighbors whose family connections extend for
generations now meet fleetingly before traveling to jobs in one
city or another. Relatives lose precious phone numbers and
castigate themselves for doing everything wrong. Those who
escaped Katrina have not escaped worry and longing.
Going
home for the holidays are mostly the elderly and infirm. Their
homecomings take place in downtown New Orleans at one of the
three St. Louis cemeteries, which hold some of the city's most
permanent residents.
Still,
the survivors talk openly to strangers in crowded meeting halls.
People with dedication and sympathetic hearts are working and
planning. As in New Orleans' early days, crooks and futurists
are finding commonalities in notions of a new frontier.
Individuals are washing their houses by cup and spoon. They are
teaching their children that kindness is sharing a bottle of
water and self-sufficiency is keeping some.
When
the nation emerges from its pile of gifts on Christmas morning
and picks up the newspaper or moves to the television, will
Americans still attend to the people of New Orleans? Or will
Katrina's poor folk move back toward the invisibility where they
existed for so many years? The people of south Louisiana may
accept their lot or maybe disappointments will fester. Let us
hope that they bear no bitterness if America moves on.
In poor Louisiana, the community of Katrina survivors is looking for
miracles. At this time of the year, they are finding a parallel
to their tragedy and hardship from long ago: There was no room
at the inn for the first Christmas and few places to rest their
heads now for the people of New Orleans.
Source:
InTheseTimes
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[i do not usually comment, but this time is
different. i used to live in the 1700 block of tennessee street
in the lower ninth ward of new orleans. the 1600 block is next
to the main thoroughfare running through lower nine. it is four
months later. people returning to survey their homes are finding
bodies of family and friends. the authorities said they had
searched every house. recovered all the bodies. yet, week after
week, especially in lower nine, bodies are found. what's going
on? -- kalamu]
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Son finds body in rubble
He had watched mother die on roof
By Walt Philbin
Staff writer
A Lower 9th Ward man who saw his mother die on the roof of their
home as Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters rose in their
neighborhood, returned Thursday and found their house collapsed
and her skeletal remains in the rubble, police said.
The body was tentatively identified by police as Joyce Green,
after her son found her remains in the debris outside their home
about 3:30 p.m. in the 1600 block of Tennessee Street, said
officer Juan Barnes, a police spokesman.
Her son, whose name wasn't released by police, told police he
and another relative had taken refuge on the roof of the home
with his mother after the Industrial Canal levee broke, police
said.
He told police his mother died before he and the other relative
were rescued and evacuated from New Orleans.
After returning to New Orleans, the son told police that he went
to the home Thursday and found his mother's remains. The
grieving son said he recognized her body from the clothes she
was wearing at the time she died.
An autopsy will be done at the coroner's office at St. Gabriel
to obtain a positive identification, Barnes said.
Source: Times-Picayune (Friday, December
30, 2005)* * * *
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The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and
Recovery
Seeing Things
from Inside the Circle
By
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
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posted
24 December 2008
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