Katrina: After the Flood (9 page)

“Are you okay?” asked Sally Forman, who noticed the strange look on the mayor’s face.

“This is God’s plan for me.”

“What is?”

“To rebuild a new New Orleans.” They smiled at him in quiet agreement. At least that’s how the mayor imagined it when he re-created the moment years later.

I.
Mary Landrieu later swore that when she flew over the Seventeenth Street Canal breach the next day, there was no longer much to see. “All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane,” she told the journalist Paul Alexander, author of
Machiavelli’s Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove
. “I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop.”

3

BEHIND ENEMY LINES

Lance Hill wasn’t leaving town just because Ray Nagin had decreed it. If anything, a mandatory evacuation order from Nagin was a reason to
stay
in New Orleans through Katrina. “A black man playing front man for the white establishment,” Hill said of Nagin, and one who hadn’t bothered helping those without means remove themselves from harm’s way. That July, city officials had distributed a DVD in low-income communities around the city. Its purpose was to let people know New Orleans was too broke to help even the infirm or the disabled in the event of a major hurricane. Our main message, the DVD’s producer told the
Times-Picayune
, “is that each person is primarily responsible for themselves.”

Hill, who is white, worked for Tulane University as an adjunct history professor and executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, a center devoted to better race relations in the South. His wife, Eileen, was a public school teacher. They were graying empty nesters with enough spare cash to get themselves out of town and seemingly the good sense to make it happen. But Hill, who had moved to the New Orleans area in the early 1980s, had embraced the local
machismo that dictated that real men stay put when a hurricane threatens a community. “You don’t leave until everyone leaves,” he said. “You take care of the little old lady down the street. You take care of anyone needing help.”

One in four families in New Orleans was living on less than $20,000 a year at the time of Katrina. That same proportion of the population did not own a car. The storm came at the end of the month, when people living paycheck to paycheck are typically low on funds. It also hit just prior to the start of school—an expensive time of the year for parents. An estimated seventy thousand people—nearly 15 percent of the population—remained behind in New Orleans during Katrina for many reasons, but money played a big role. According to a study of the thousands of evacuees who ended up in Houston-area shelters, 67 percent of those who needed to be rescued from New Orleans had a job, but 68 percent had neither cash in the bank nor a usable credit card. Two in every five evacuees indicated that they were either physically disabled or were caring for someone who was. Eighty percent were renters and their median income was under $15,000.

The rich would have no problem leaving ahead of Katrina. They jetted to Aspen or Deer Valley or, on Saturday morning, they pointed their luxury sedans east and decamped to Destin, Florida, the preferred beachfront playground of Uptown’s elite. They flew to Dallas, where they had a satellite office, or they remained because they could. Some New Orleanians were so rich that they faced almost no risk in staying in town. They lived on the high ground in homes along St. Charles Avenue or in Audubon Place, a gated community where the average home goes for a few million dollars. Their homes were well-constructed fortresses that had survived prior storms. Many had a generator powerful enough to keep at least one air conditioner running and the ice cubes frozen. That week in New Orleans, even as families camped on highway overpasses or stood stranded on rooftops, the occasional helicopter flew over Uptown to the green expanse of Audubon Park. That was the area’s makeshift heliport for any of the city’s well-heeled burghers who decided it was time to get out of town.

Lance Hill didn’t have helicopter money, but he lived Uptown not far from Audubon Park and St. Charles Avenue. He was another white
man on the wrong side of fifty, pear-shaped and bald, walking the streets dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. “If you were Uptown and white right after Katrina, people assumed you were rich,” he said. “People let their guard down. I got to talk to everyone that way. To cops, to Guardsmen, to anyone I’d meet on the street.” So this former activist turned scholar who ran a center dedicated to the ideal of a more equitable, racially inclusive world passed among the city’s barons and its princes, its eccentrics, and its captains of industry.

“I was in the middle of people who were openly planning for a city that was whiter and more affluent than before Katrina,” Hill said. His newfound friends were the city’s blue bloods with roots stretching back multiple generations. Membership to the topline Mardi Gras krewes such as Comus and Rex—those mysterious pleasure clubs that helped establish the social order in New Orleans—and also the Boston Club, where city business was often worked out over tumblers of bourbon, was theirs by birthright. Hill eavesdropped on their conversations that week and concluded their vision was of a New Orleans a lot like the one their ancestors had enjoyed, long before the city’s black community came to dominate local politics. Katrina was their pretext for ridding New Orleans of enough blacks, Hill said, so that whites were once again in the majority, “and I was sitting at the table, literally on occasion, sipping cocktails while they were discussing how they were going to accomplish this.”

LANCE HILL, BORN IN
the Midwest, was twelve years old when he wrote a poem about black and white living together in a color-blind world. While still in high school, he worked as a busboy at a local college. There he organized a strike for higher pay. In 1968, Hill, then eighteen, the son of a mechanic and a nurse, led an unsuccessful push to integrate the town’s swimming pools. He matriculated at Kansas University but was expelled after one semester for organizing demonstrations in opposition to the Vietnam War. He joined a revolutionary group, read Karl Marx, and went to work in a factory with the aim of politically awakening its employees.

“In the early to mid-1970s, a lot of people in the antiwar student movement started to look at the industrial working classes as the agents of change,” Hill said. “That’s where I ended up.” Hill worked a series
of jobs in Kansas City—as a machinist, a welder, a printer—all in the name of inspiring a broader movement among the country’s blue-collar masses. At night and on the weekends, he read books about labor history and other social movements, including those on the right. That’s when he started reading about the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups that together would become the focus of his scholarship.

In 1979, Hill and fellow political activist Eileen San Juan arrived in Louisiana. The couple’s first stop was Hammond, a blue-collar town sixty miles north of New Orleans, where Hill found work as a welder in a local shipyard. The job served as a harsh introduction to some of the differences between the Midwest and the Deep South. In Kansas City, he had always enjoyed lunch at the welding shop where he worked. The neo-Nazis and the black nationalists and the lunch-bucket whites sat at the same long table, eating and arguing and ribbing one another over their beliefs. In Hammond, black and white ate separately. In a shipyard that employed hundreds, he never saw a black person in a supervisory position. Whites still casually used the N-word. Hill stood six foot three and weighed almost three hundred pounds. People who didn’t like his politics just left him alone, but it didn’t go unnoticed when he started giving a ride home to a black coworker.

After two years in Hammond, Eileen was offered a job teaching in the Orleans Parish schools. The couple, along with their son and Hill’s two stepchildren, moved into a trailer park in the New Orleans suburbs. Hill said he had lost faith “in this grand theory that socialism would come through the working class.” He started a grass-cutting business to bring in extra money and returned to school to earn his college degree.

Back on a college campus, Hill threw himself into any number of popular causes, including the nuclear-freeze movement and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. His obsession, however, remained white supremacists, and the New Orleans metro area proved fertile ground for study. A neo-Nazi group was based in Kenner, near the airport. In nearby Metairie, a white-flight suburb that saw its population soar in the 1960s and 1970s, he found a group calling itself the National Association for the Advancement of White People—a name chosen as a deliberate jab at the NAACP. Hill subscribed to the newsletters of each group and even visited the offices of the NAAWP. Posing as a sympathizer, he met the
group’s leader, David Duke. A budding historian, Hill would save and catalog the materials sent to him by Duke’s group.

Hill began working toward his PhD at Tulane in 1987. The next year, David Duke announced that he was running for a seat in the state legislature. Duke had been a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, and his new group, the NAAWP, preached racial superiority. Yet in seeking to represent the western suburbs in the Louisiana House of Representatives, Duke fashioned himself as a mainstream Republican, opposed to affirmative action and higher taxes and in favor of the mandatory drug testing of welfare recipients. Duke won that election and two years later shocked pundits when he captured 58 percent of the statewide white vote in a run for the US Senate. Duke lost that election but was again in the national spotlight a year later when he ran for Louisiana governor. Duke made the runoff in the race. Hill was among those behind a group called the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, created to pressure mainstream Republicans into opposing Duke. Duke lost his bid for the governorship but again won a majority of the state’s white vote.

The years following Duke’s failed gubernatorial run were gratifying ones for Hill, even if not quite as glamorous. He earned a doctorate in history and cofounded, in 1993, the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane. At this center dedicated to the improvement of race relations, Hill and others developed a tolerance curriculum used to train teachers throughout the Deep South. A dozen years later, Hill, fifty-four, was preparing for a heavy calendar of training sessions for the upcoming academic year when Katrina hit.

FOR MOST PEOPLE IN
New Orleans, the days after Katrina were a harrowing experience. In Broadmoor, a mixed-race community in the western half of the city, a lawyer named Bill Hines was trapped in his home, surrounded by water, with his son, his brother-in-law, and a Tulane law student. They numbered eleven by the time a boat rescued them four frightening and sweltering days later. “You had the guns going off at night and looters were coming by in boats,” said Hines, the managing partner at the city’s largest law firm. “It was
Lord of the Flies
.” Yet Hines knows they were among the lucky ones. In the Lower Ninth Ward,
Robert Green Sr. was trapped with his family in a home that the floodwaters had pushed off its foundation. He lost his mother and three-year-old granddaughter. “He had to watch both of them die right in front of him,” his pastor later reported.

Yet for Hill, who had no idea of the disaster taking place elsewhere around the city, those first days after Katrina were more a swashbuckling adventure. “We were completely cut off,” Hill said. “I basically ended up adopting this group of nice old ladies who didn’t want to evacuate because they had pets.” On Wednesday, the National Guard and other outside police agencies started going door-to-door in Uptown, encouraging anyone still in town to leave. “That caused old people to think they needed to hide,” Hill said, “which was the last worst thing you could do with midday temperatures in the nineties.” At the homes of people who had shuttered themselves in, he would blow a whistle, yell, “I’m leaving water on your porch,” before heading to his next stop.

Hill learned about the travesty unfolding at the Convention Center while chatting with people he met on the street. On Friday morning, he drove to this massive facility only a few miles from his apartment, where he found several blocks of people standing five and ten deep, looking in vain for help. “People tried to get me to take older folks and children not doing well to the hospital,” he said. “I had to explain that all the hospitals were closed, even those Uptown.” Seeing the phalanx of armed soldiers who had stationed themselves across the street infuriated him. The soldiers stood at a distance, as if there only to keep order rather than to help. Hill remembers one white Guardsman standing in the middle of the street, refreshing himself with a long slug of water. The soldier, in full uniform and carrying a heavy rifle, was no doubt thirsty, but he seemed oblivious of the people, nearly all of them black, watching him. “He’s drinking in front of all these parents with babies and young children screaming from extreme dehydration,” Hill said. He doesn’t see the hordes of dark-skinned people as quite human, Hill thought to himself.

The sight of so much suffering caused Hill to shift into a high gear of superactivism. He couldn’t save the sick, but at least he could distribute water. He drove his family’s venerable Oldsmobile to the western suburbs, where the main thoroughfares were clear and some of the big-box stores were open. The car was a wide boat with a massive backseat
and large trunk—perfect for ferrying cases of bottled water. Hill spray-painted the word
AID
on the doors and added a few red crosses (and later had to phone his father: How do you remove spray paint from a car?). The challenge was getting back into the city. He had his laptop with him, along with a portable printer and a voltage converter, allowing him to set up a veritable office in the backseat. Using official Tulane-issued stationery, he said, “I wrote a letter addressed to myself giving myself permission to be in the city tending to property damage.” Arriving at a checkpoint behind the wheel of an older car with a throaty muffler, missing hubcaps, and leopard-design seat covers, Hill aimed for nonchalance. He pretended to be chatting on his cell phone as he handed over his made-up letter and ID to a boy soldier. The Guardsman didn’t know what to make of the scene and phoned his commander: “Captain, I think we have the president of Tulane here.” Hill was allowed back in the city.