Katrina: After the Flood (16 page)

CASSANDRA DIDN’T WANT TO
leave ahead of Katrina. None of the sisters did. They spent Saturday evening phoning one another, each at home watching the storm coverage and hoping for consensus. “We’re leaving,” “We’re staying”—they changed their minds all night. The old maps of New Orleans described the area as “cypress swamp,” but it had never come up that they lived at least several feet below sea level. They decided to leave only after Nagin on Sunday morning declared the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation order. “I’m thinking, Wait, this is unprecedented? I’m outta here,” Robyn said. They broke into two groups. Cassandra, Tangee, and Contesse formed one caravan, Robyn and Petie another. They would head west and north and reconnoiter in Baton Rouge.

Petie had been the last holdout. She had a two-year-old Doberman in heat and a pit bull puppy she was training. Her husband, who worked on a ship that ran supplies to the oil rigs, was at sea and motoring toward safe waters. “You all can take Garrett,” Petie said of her son, then fifteen years old. “I need to stay.” The sisters took turns calling to talk sense to Petie while Robyn stuffed the backseat of her Honda with half her closet. “You’re packing all this stupid stuff,” Petie told her. Petie eventually relented but then only brought a nightgown, a single pair of pants, a couple of shirts, the sandals she had on, and, inexplicably, a pair of ridiculously impractical and expensive beaded shoes she had just bought. Robyn had been hoping to hit the road by 1:00 p.m. but punctuality isn’t a Wall trait. It would be closer to 4:00 p.m. when Robyn pulled from the curb, followed by Petie, her son, a dog in heat, and a puppy in a Toyota 4Runner. Facing terrible traffic, they tried to take a shortcut that had them, six hours later, stopping for the night on the outskirts of Jackson, Mississippi, hundreds of miles from where they were supposed to be.

The other three sisters left New Orleans at around 1:00 p.m. yet didn’t reach the outskirts of Baton Rouge, seventy miles away, until 10:00 p.m. It was a little past midnight when the group of them arrived to take the
last two empty rooms in a charmless Microtel at the crossroads of the city’s two busiest highways. Eventually, they’d take up almost an entire floor as Petie and Robyn joined them later in the week, along with their mother and stray members of their extended family. For at least a few of them, the Microtel would be home for more than six months.

THEY STARED BLEARY-EYED AT
CNN. Those first few days were an enervating drone of anchors, a miasma caused by the same few images playing in an endless loop. They didn’t dare turn off the TV out of fear of missing something. With the rest of the country they learned that Uptown (and their mother’s home) had largely been spared, and also the Quarter and the central business district. They learned that big sections of the Lower Ninth Ward had been destroyed and that Lakeview was covered by water. Eventually they started turning channels, but not once did any of them hear a newscaster mention New Orleans East. A well-off black community did not fit television’s narrative about poor blacks and well-off whites. They constituted one-fifth of the city’s population, Tangee said, “but it was as if our community didn’t exist.”

The sisters ran into neighbors they knew or at least recognized at the Walgreens and at the Walmart buying cheap clothes. “You hear anything?” they’d ask, but no one knew anything. A couple of the sisters even ran into their state legislator while visiting the mall. “She had the same weird look on her face that we all did,” Robyn said. All they had were rumors of government plans to bulldoze the East and a plot by the government to seize people’s land to build a new airport. “There was even talk of entire subdivisions sinking back into the swamp,” Contesse said.

Ten days after Katrina, Tangee and Robyn ran into a neighbor named Mack Slan at the Shoney’s near their hotel. Slan was eating breakfast with his wife and mother. The group of them were having the same conversation nodding acquaintances were having in Baton Rouge and all over the country until one of them brought up the idea of organizing a meeting. Slan knew a local Baptist minister, who agreed to let them hold a meeting in his church’s community center. “Are You from New Orleans East?” read the handwritten flyer they posted at every Days Inn, La Quinta, and Super 8 they came across driving the area’s highways.
People were invited to show up that coming Monday, September 19—three weeks after the storm—at the True Light Baptist Church.

The first meeting was “more like a reunion,” Tangee said. At least seven hundred people, the sisters and Slan agree, showed up at a gathering marked by a lot of hugging and crying. Hundreds more showed up the following Monday, when Tangee surprised even herself by proposing that they defy the blockade keeping New Orleans East off-limits even to residents. “Tangee would shut down the I-10 if she thought it would bring attention to our issues,” Mack Slan said. “She was always ready to rumble. Cassandra, too—though she’d show up wearing high heels.”

The next day, a convoy of more than seventy cars, many of them luxury sedans with a new-car sparkle, took off in the early-morning hours from a Lowe’s parking lot just south of Baton Rouge. “As a group, we decided that it was our constitutional right, that there was no law in the land that could prevent us from seeing our homes,” Tangee said. In the end, they’d get an escort into the city from a police commander.

I.
A common rule of thumb among environmental engineers holds that a surge will lose at least one foot of its height for every three miles of marshland it encounters.

8

HE SAID, SHE SAID

Ray Nagin had coffee with Minister Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, his last morning in Dallas. The two had first met a few months earlier, when Farrakhan was in town to give a series of talks. Nagin had sought out Farrakhan. Nagin had attended the Million Man March in Washington, DC, ten years earlier, in 1995, and had been surprised that he felt as moved as he did when all those black men stood together on the Mall and recited, in unison, their commitment to improving “myself, my family, and my people.” Nagin remembered the experience when he saw on one of the city’s intel sheets that Farrakhan was coming to New Orleans. He had enjoyed their first meeting and was pleased when he heard the peripatetic minister’s voice on his BlackBerry. They met at the Dallas airport before Nagin flew home to New Orleans.

Nagin had been monosyllabic with Jimmy Reiss and friends that Saturday. With Farrakhan on Monday morning, Nagin spoke as an intimate. Farrakhan, Nagin said, was keen to hear about how the levees had
been breached. They had been dynamited before
^I
—was there any wonder some in the black community suspected it had happened again? “Did they bomb the levees?” Farrakhan asked Nagin. Rather than offer an emphatic no, Nagin repeated the official story as he had heard it: the loud, explosive noise people had heard in the Ninth Ward was most likely the sound of water, mud, and debris roaring through the community and demolishing homes. “We’ve yet to see any evidence to the contrary,” the mayor said carefully.

The two spoke for about an hour. Their meeting ended with Farrakhan offering a friendly warning. You’re now a high-profile black man in America, he said, and therefore a target. “Be very careful,” the minister advised, adding,
“Salaam alaikum”—
“peace be unto you” in Arabic.
“Salaam alaikum,”
Nagin repeated, adding a “sir.”

That night the mayor ate dinner with George Bush.

NAGIN NEVER CALLED KATHLEEN BLANCO
back. Blanco only learned the mayor was in Dallas because her people were picking up chatter about a big, invite-only meeting there. “Five days with my family at that point would have been nice,” she said.

The two would see one another face-to-face if the president or some other notable was in town and protocol demanded that the mayor and the governor both be there. But otherwise there was little direct contact. “It wasn’t just me,” Blanco said. “He stayed holed up in that hotel room, scared to death . . . having no idea what to do.” Through intermediaries, she offered a helicopter to bring him to the state capital. She passed word that she was in New Orleans a few times a week, helping to oversee the state’s part of the disaster recovery. “If he had gotten himself into Baton Rouge,” Blanco said, “if he would just agree to meet with me.” Eventually, Blanco hosted a lunch for Nagin at the executive mansion,
but that meeting had been arranged by their respective communication directors for the television cameras and photographers.

“It hampered their recovery,” Blanco said. “It meant everything took longer.” And it also harmed the reputation of a governor for whom New Orleans’s fate was also largely her own.

IN A DIFFERENT WORLD,
Blanco might be seen as a kind of superwoman. She alone had taken Katrina seriously among top leadership in the Gulf Coast. That Thursday, Blanco was supposed to be in Atlanta for a meeting of the Southern Governors’ Association. Though she was slated to be sworn in as the group’s chairwoman, she canceled the trip to stay closer to home. By Friday night, Blanco had declared a state of emergency. That was a day ahead of both Nagin, who was worried about the impact of a mandatory evacuation on the city’s tourist trade, and Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, where an estimated three hundred people died in the storm and thousands were left homeless. It was two days ahead of Bush.

The president mentioned Iraq eight times in his weekly radio address that Saturday but did not bring up Katrina. The National Hurricane Center was doing its job by warning emergency-response directors across the region about the monstrous Category 4 or 5 storm bearing down on New Orleans, yet in Washington, a FEMA supervisor with twenty-five years’ experience bemoaned a lack of urgency inside the agency’s Washington headquarters. “They weren’t ordering buses for [an] evacuation,” he would tell a pair of reporters from the
Wall Street Journal
. “They weren’t . . . into the fray as FEMA has the power to do.” Nagin spent much of Saturday—five hours—on the set of
Labou
, a kids’ film being shot on location in New Orleans.
^II
Afterward, he had dinner in Lakeview with his wife and daughter.

Blanco, in contrast, was counting down the hours to a massive storm. On Saturday, she put both her staff and the Louisiana National Guard on alert and set herself up in the state’s Emergency Operations Center.
Concerned that the storm wasn’t being taken seriously enough in New Orleans, she pestered Nagin and instructed her people to enlist the help of any legislator representing a New Orleans district. Her staff also pushed some of the city’s better-known ministers to encourage people to evacuate during their Sunday-morning sermons. On Sunday, George Bush reached Blanco on her cell phone to tell her that New Orleans needed to be under a mandatory evacuation order. She told the president he had reached her at a press conference in the city where Nagin was doing just that.

Blanco had grown up with hurricanes in Cajun country in the southwestern corner of the state. Born Kathleen Babineaux, she was from Grand Coteau, Louisiana, a tiny hamlet where French was still the primary language. Her grandfather owned the area’s country store, and her father sold and cleaned carpets. She grew up hunting (in her run for governor, her campaign would release photos of her dressed in camouflage and holding a rifle to burnish her bona fides among rural voters) and attended an all-girls Catholic school that included group prayer several times a day. When she earned a degree in business education from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, she became the first Babineaux to earn a four-year degree.

Raymond Blanco was the head coach of her brother’s high school football team. In 1961 when they first started dating, she was nineteen and Raymond twenty-six. He showed up three hours late for their first date, but she recognized that he had a big heart so there was a second. “He was everybody’s caretaker,” she said. He had gotten a job as defensive coordinator for the University of Southwestern Louisiana football team by the time he proposed with a $500 engagement ring he could buy only because he had gotten hot playing blackjack at an illegal casino along the highway. The newly married Kathleen Blanco took a job teaching high school, but that lasted less than a year. She was pregnant and the rule was that a public school teacher couldn’t be showing in the classroom. She would remain a stay-at-home mom for the next dozen years, raising six children. The family finances improved when, in 1969, to help quell campus unrest, Raymond became the university’s dean of students. To earn extra money, Raymond, whom everyone still called Coach, did political commentaries for a local Lafayette television station and worked as an adviser on political campaigns.

The governor-to-be first got involved in politics in the early 1970s, when the couple still had kids in diapers. At first it was short commitments, such as the time she volunteered to work on Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential run, but by her late thirties, she was working as regional deputy director for the US Census Bureau. When the incumbent state representative announced his retirement in 1984, Blanco, with Coach’s encouragement, started passing out candidate petitions. She won, and at the age of forty-one, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (the maiden name was added to remind locals of her Cajun roots) was representing Louisiana’s Forty-Fifth District in Baton Rouge. Four years later, she won a seat on Louisiana’s powerful Public Service Commission, the first female commissioner atop this statewide agency that oversees everything from utility and garbage-collection rates to towing outfits and bus companies. She was still halfway through her six-year term when she announced her intent to run for governor, but then suspended her campaign three months later. She wasn’t ready, she declared. Four years later, in 1995, she was elected to serve the first of two terms as lieutenant governor. She’d take over as governor after a close election against Piyush “Bobby” Jindal in 2003.