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Hurricane Takes a Further Toll: Suicides Up
in New Orleans
By Adam Nossiter
Mental health professionals say this city appears
to be experiencing a sharp increase in suicides in the wake
of Hurricane Katrina, and interviews and statistics suggest that
the rate is now double or more the national and local averages.
At least seven people have killed themselves in the four months
since the storm, officials say, here in a city whose population is
now no more than 75,000 to 100,000. That compares with a national
rate of 11 suicides per 100,000 for all of 2002, and a rate in New
Orleans of about nine per 100,000 for all of 2004. There is broad
agreement that the problem is likely to get worse.
Stevenson Palfi, 53, a well-known local filmmaker, was apparently
the latest to take his own life. Mr. Palfi's house in the Mid-City
section had taken eight feet of water, and he was in despair over
losing years of files and photographs, a computer - in fact, all
the contents of his office.
The aftermath of the storm pushed him "right off the cliff
emotionally," said a friend, Mary Katherine Aldin.
"This just hit him so hard," she said. "It was a
cumulative devastation to him emotionally."
Mr. Palfi sat down to write a suicide note and a will, then shot
himself on the second floor of his Banks Street home in the early
hours of Dec. 14, Ms. Aldin said.
The signs of despair are pervasive here: a woman, having returned
to see her flooded-out house for the first time, runs screaming
down Mirabeau Avenue in the Gentilly neighborhood, where the
police find her babbling uncontrollably; in a Bourbon Street
nightclub, a man draws a gun and shoots himself in the head, even
as dancers sway to the music; from half-ruined houses, the police
retrieve homeowners, weeping and distraught; psychiatrists report
that previously stable patients are now preoccupied with death and
suicide.
Source:
NYTimes
(December 26, 2005) posted 29 December 2005
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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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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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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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
/
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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update 21 January 2012
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