The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (8 page)

Next up was our flood insurance. I remembered seeing the renewal notice in the mail but I didn’t remember if I’d given it to John, much less if we’d paid the thing. “You’re sure we renewed it?” I asked him at least twenty times, and at least twenty times he responded that we absolutely had, before adding what he’d just finished telling me, that the house was not going to flood. Once convinced, I moved on to Antoine. “What if something happens to him?” Antoine is a survivor, John said, nothing is going to happen to him. “Yes,” I said. “But Nagin only announced the Superdome as the ‘shelter of last resort’ this morning. What if he doesn’t know to go there?” He will know, John said, he will hear it on the street. “Okay, but what if he got picked up? The jail is not on high ground. What if he drowns in that place?” He won’t drown, John said, because he’s not in jail. Didn’t Rose just call yesterday? Didn’t they tell her he wasn’t there?

I had to concede that he was right on all points, and I knew I was driving him at least as crazy as I was driving myself. It was, therefore, a great relief to both of us when we arrived at the “secret” shortcut Elizabeth and I had discovered during our Ivan evacuation: a series of two-lane back roads she knew from Katie’s prolific soccer and volleyball playing days, all marked with blue-and-yellow signs saying “alternative hurricane evacuation route,” which no one, apparently, had noticed. All of a sudden, we were practically flying, going fifty and sixty miles an hour through leafy little towns whose gas stations still had gas and whose stores sold beer on Sunday. There is nothing like an unexpected ice-cold Budweiser to lessen life’s anxieties, and nothing like other peoples’ real problems to stem one’s own neurotic tide.

We had switched from Louisiana to Mississippi Public Radio and if John was right about the storm jogging to the east, the people we were listening to would almost certainly be wiped out. When the mayor of Waveland, a Mississippi Gulf Coast town of about 6,700 people, was interviewed, I almost burst into tears. It had already been destroyed once, by Camille in 1969, he said, but unlike his neighbors, who’d been enjoying the considerable economic benefits of thriving casinos, Waveland’s economy was just now beginning to rebound. Only last week they’d broken ground on a Lowe’s building supply store, a big deal that would bring forty-something new jobs to the community. I prayed that man would be all right and started counting my blessings. We were not, for example, in the Superdome, or looking for an available hotel room as far as five or six hundred miles away. We were heading instead toward safe and extremely comfortable harbor with people who loved us.

I turned into my parents’ long gravel driveway in Greenville almost twelve hours after we’d left New Orleans, roughly three times the normal journey. Even though it was well after midnight, my mother and father were waiting for us in the kitchen, where the TV, predictably, was on. We hugged and kissed and carried what little we’d brought with us back to my brother’s old room, and John repeated his belief that New Orleans would be spared the brunt of the thing, an assessment with which my father agreed. “You really think it’s going to jog to the east?” I asked one more time, just before we dropped off to sleep. “Yes, I really do.” Early on in our relationship he had told me a little white lie to make me feel better about something, and when I realized what he’d done I got so mad I threw an orange at the wall behind his head. From that moment on, he’d given up trying to spare me any realities, harsh or otherwise, and it had never been in his nature to shoot from the hip, so I believed him. When the alarm woke us the next morning (we had set it for 6:30, just after the predicted landfall), it turned out he was right.

I
N WHAT WOULD
turn out to be a fairly constant tableau for the next several days, the four of us huddled with our coffee in front of the kitchen TV, which was set, at my father’s insistence, on Fox News. Shep Smith, a good Mississippi boy, was manning the mike from New Orleans, but there wasn’t much to look at beyond still-dark scenes of a soaking-wet Bourbon Street and the blown-out windows of the Hyatt Hotel several blocks away, where the mayor—along with some of our crazier friends—had chosen to ride out the storm. There was relief, of course, but also the inevitable guilt. When you dodge a bullet, it usually means someone else has taken it, and the scenes of destruction from the Mississippi Gulf Coast were increasingly horrific. Before the day was over, we’d learn that not a single structure in Waveland had been left standing.

What we would not learn until the next day is that the levees in New Orleans were already giving way and that the flooding of 80 percent of the city (145 square miles—an area almost seven times the footprint of Manhattan) had begun. At that point, like everybody else in America (except, as it turns out, the FEMA director’s assistant, among others), we were still under the happy impression that the worst thing that might happen was the mayor getting rained on in his otherwise comfortable hotel room. Also, given the fate of our neighbors on the coast, things like the possible ruination of a green silk Chippendale sofa had ceased to be even a remote preoccupation. In any event, there was nothing to do about any of it—our Louisiana cell phones weren’t working and all the long distance circuits were busy. After the overwhelming pressures of the house renovation (and the normal but constant pressures of work), the state of being completely incommunicado, as well as utterly powerless, was an unexpected luxury. I’d spent an entire year obsessing over things like whether the front door mail slot should be unpolished brass or dark bronze and going insane over the improper placement of doorknobs; now there was absolutely nothing I could even try to control. So we took a holiday of sorts, settling in at the kitchen table while my mother turned her attention to people who were actually in need.

My mother has been referred to more than once as the patron saint of Greenville, Mississippi, a description that is only slightly hyperbolic. She tutors in the public schools and mentored for years at the Salvation Army, where she was assigned dozens of “Girl Guards” with whom she still maintains close relationships. She has been president of the Boys and Girls Club, the Junior Auxiliary, and the Garden Club, where she turned her considerable energies toward helping to save a bald cypress grove from extinction. She was the second woman to be elected an elder of the First Presbyterian Church, where she also teaches Sunday School and runs the annual fundraiser that benefits, among others, the Palmer Home, from which we took in an orphan every summer. When I was in grade school, the neglected children of one of her Junior Auxiliary families (their mother was an alcoholic named Mrs. Crumley who traded the family’s J.A.-provided milk for whiskey), always seemed to be in my bathtub, where she sponged them down with pHisoderm to soothe their chronic impetigo; a few years later, when the first wave of post–Vietnam War refugees landed in America, a family of seven named Muon lived in our pool house for a year. Now she had taken on the task of feeding the several hundred evacuees who had bedded down on the floor of the local convention center. At one point during that first day, I left the kitchen and returned to hear her on the phone, working up a menu for the multitudes: fried chicken, baked beans, sliced tomatoes, fruit, and two desserts, “so they can save one for later.” I knew better, but I had to ask: “You are going to peel and slice fresh tomatoes for almost a thousand people?” (She always insists on peeling her tomatoes, an admittedly refined but slightly obsessive extra step that never ceases to blow my mind.) She looked at me like I was the one who was crazy. “Yes,” she said. “You cannot believe how pretty the Arkansas Travelers are right now.”

By nightfall, the storm had knocked out power lines as far north as Greenville, so we decided to try our luck at Doe’s Eat Place, the legendary, if slightly ramshackle, former grocery store and honky tonk that serves the best steaks and fried shrimp I have ever eaten anywhere. The first photograph of me ever taken, when my mother was still pregnant and sitting on the wooden front steps, was there; I celebrated my fortieth birthday in the “side room” (there’s a sign above the entrance designating it as such, just in case anyone is confused), and when John and I got married, friends took over the whole place for a party two days before the wedding. Since Doe’s stove and ancient open broiler are both powered by gas rather than electricity, my mother predicted they would come through for us yet again, and sure enough, when we pulled up outside, I could see Little Doe at his post just inside the screen door, flipping succulent sirloins and porterhouses over the leaping flames. Inside, it was as packed as always, but the party atmosphere was heightened by groups of similarly relieved Greenville émigrés to New Orleans (many more had made the trek since the Percy brothers first decamped), and by the cheap dimestore taper candles, leaning rather frighteningly at an angle inside empty water glasses, where they temporarily replaced the usual fluorescent bulbs as light sources. Though there has never been a printed menu, we ordered pretty much everything that would have been on it: salad and hot tamales (a Delta tradition, and made here with beef suet and steak trimmings), fried shrimp and broiled shrimp, rare porterhouses, homemade French fries, and toasted garlic bread. Between bites we visited with folks at every table, drinking to our good luck with a handful of the red Burgundies I’d thrown in the car when we left. When we got home, we were stuffed and happy and ready for bed, which we found with the help of a flashlight.

The next morning, the electricity—which meant the television—was back on, and well before seven, Mama was banging on our door. “Get up. The whole city is under water.” Now I really, really love my mother, but she is prone to serious exaggeration, and the only reason I did not go back to sleep was because the chance to tease her about what was surely an overreaction, a primary pastime of my father and my two brothers and me, was too good to miss. Except that this time there was no making fun. The “whole city” may not have been under water, but we could see enough already to figure out that plenty of it damn sure was. I grabbed a cup of coffee and took my position in the huddle while we watched the biggest man-made disaster in the history of the country unfold. At eleven o’clock, wine replaced coffee as the beverage of choice. When Mama asked if we thought it was too early to open a bottle of wine, no one bothered to answer—by the time I pulled the glasses down from the cabinet, she had already retrieved the wine from the fridge. The tortuous slow boil had begun.

By Wednesday, the water was no longer rising (stopping, finally, just nine blocks across St. Charles from our corner), while scenes of rampant looting gave us something different to worry about. Reports of attacks on rescue helicopters sounded like scenes from
Black Hawk Down
, and fires raged out of control less than three blocks away from our house. Almost every hour brought a new fear, but our worst ones were assuaged when my friend Bob Rue, an Oriental rug dealer who had stayed in the city, left a message at my father’s office via his ancient BellSouth landline: “House looks okay. Tell them I’ll be watching it.” I’d met Bob long before I even moved to New Orleans—he’d sold his rugs at the garden club antiques show my mother had helped put on for years, and they’d become big buddies. Every trip, he declined the hotel room the club offered to provide for him, choosing instead to sleep on the floor in the convention center, much as the evacuees were doing now, on top of his rolled-up rugs. It turned out to be good training—in the days following Katrina, he alternately camped out in his shop on St. Charles and on the porch of his girlfriend’s house in the Garden District—all the while acting, as I would later discover, as a one-man neighborhood posse.

Our house might have been okay, but there was no shortage of bad news. Conditions at the still crowded Superdome and convention center were beyond hellish, and so many people had been stranded on one particular stretch of the I-10 overpass for so long that a clearly sleep-deprived Shep Smith resorted to repeating the name and number of the closest intersection over and over again, in case anybody in any position to help was watching. Charmaine Neville, the singer and daughter of Neville Brother Charles Neville, told of being raped at knifepoint before driving a commandeered bus filled with other terrified citizens upriver to Baton Rouge. Charmaine’s estranged husband, a musician who sometimes painted with McGee, had put up the third version of blue in our dining room, and I started obsessing about the sorry condition of his truck, which I knew could never have made it out of town.

I started obsessing about a lot of things—Antoine, of course—but also why in the hell the levees had broken when the storm had turned out to be a weak Category 3. (My father, who had been a surveyor for the Corps of Engineers when he was a kid, and, later, the owner of a barge and towboat company on the river, stood in front of the screen as helicopters dropped countless—and fruitless—sandbags into the breach at the 17th Street canal, shaking his head and bitching about the politicization of the Corps. “They should not have broken,” he said more than once, confirming with some authority what I already thought.) Then there was the question of what on earth had made the majority of Louisiana’s electorate vote for Kathleen Blanco, who had not yet managed to call out the National Guard, and who appeared on the screen far too often, patting her hair and asking everyone to pray. At one point, the governor angrily told a reporter she had no idea what day it was, so I did pray—that she would cease to go near a television camera for the duration of the crisis. The mayor had already lost it on the radio, and when Bush finally turned up after his initial flyover, he told “Brownie” he was doing a “heckuva job.” In the face of all that, plenty of people besides us were forced to resort to wine—and whiskey too, as it turned out. On Wednesday, when John and I went to our favorite local liquor store, the Cask and Flask, to restock our dwindling bar, there wasn’t a bottle of Scotch left in the place.

Meanwhile, those of us more firmly rooted in reality than our elected officials had already gotten back to work. I had assignments from
Newsweek
,
Vogue
, and
The Spectator
in London—there is nothing like being a resident of a disaster zone to make one popular with one’s editors. And then there were the standing assignments I somehow had to find the focus to finish, like a profile of Reese Witherspoon, who had been thoughtful enough to email
Vogue
to ask if I were okay. John, who is managing partner of his law firm, was charged with temporarily relocating the entire practice to Baton Rouge. So I started typing while he stayed on the phone, tracking down the lawyers and secretaries and paralegals, finding office space and lining up furniture. Both tasks were made easier by the efforts of my father, who, as soon as it became evident that our evacuation wasn’t temporary, arranged for two new cell phones on a network that was working, as well as wireless Internet, a printer, and a second landline in my youngest brother’s room, which became my office.

If Mama is Mother Teresa, Daddy should have been FEMA director. He thrives in a crisis and his political instincts are infallible. (In the aftermath of Camille, Richard Nixon became the first sitting president since Teddy Roosevelt to set foot in the state of Mississippi thanks to his advice, which Bush would have done well to heed. “If you’re not going to stop, don’t bother to fly over,” my father told White House aide Bryce Harlow. So Nixon stopped—and in the next election he carried Mississippi with the widest margin of any other state.) Every day at noon he’d call from his office and ask, “What you need, kid?” before arriving home with the day’s
Wall Street Journal
and a helpful new surprise: a stack of legal pads, a stapler and some Post-its, and, best of all, a checkbook from the local bank with my name on it. “There’s five thousand dollars in there,” he said as he slapped it down on my brother’s old bed. I almost fell over. He may be efficient, but he is notoriously unextravagant. It was the strongest evidence yet that these were desperate times and a fine alternative to the real FEMA. McGee, who had already decamped for Tennessee, reported that she had actually stood for hours in a FEMA line before being told that since she had insurance she was ineligible for any immediate relief.

Not that she needed any. McGee was ensconced in the empty Nashville house generously offered by her friends the rocker Steve Winwood and his wife, Genia (she and McGee had gone to boarding school together), and she’d found work with a local decorator. But she was not the only one with places to go. By Thursday, John and his office manager had miraculously gotten the firm’s move squared away, and after a quick shopping trip that enabled him to look like a lawyer (all he’d brought with him were jeans, Nikes, and a couple of shirts), he drove to Baton Rouge, where he moved in with my cousin Linda Jane and her husband, Scott. Also, since no one had any idea when the New Orleans schools would reopen, Lizzy had enrolled in boarding school—Elizabeth had allowed her to go online and choose one on her own, and she found one she liked, St. Margaret’s in Virginia.

So on Friday, five days into it, things were pretty quiet when the phone rang in our house. It was early evening, Mama and Daddy were both out (he at a meeting, and she, naturally, at the convention center feeding giant casseroles of eggplant Parmesan to the folks still there), and I was about to pour a drink (by that time we had procured more Scotch) to celebrate having finished two of my assignments. When I picked up the receiver, a vaguely familiar male voice on the other end asked if he had reached the Reed residence. I said yes, so he identified himself as Leon Pearce and explained that he was looking for John and me. It took a second to register, as Leon is the rarely used formal name of John’s older half-brother Skeet, a retired San Diego motorcycle cop who lives part of the year in a tent in a state park in Southern California, part of the year in a cabin fifty miles below the Canadian border in St. Marie, Montana, and the rest of the time on the road or in San Diego with his saintly girlfriend Cindy, who accepts all his mail and takes his phone messages, since he is adamant about not owning a cell phone or a computer. I had met him only twice, once in New Orleans and once at our wedding. “Skeet,” I said, after finally making the connection. “It’s me, Julia. Where are you?” I had in mind either California or Montana, but his answer was a tad more dramatic: “the Greenville Inn and Suites.”