In 1960, the year I was born, my grandmother Loretta Landrieu paid fifteen thousand dollars for a patch of land along Lake Pontchartrain, about thirty miles out from New Orleans, near the town of Slidell. That “camp,” which was a small house that looked like a triple-wide trailer, had a long wooden pier that jutted out into the saltwater lake. By the early 1970s we were nineteen kids in all, counting the ten children of my aunt and uncle. We grew up swimming and skiing on the lake, as well as playing baseball, football, and volleyball on the grass. We would fish off the pier with cane poles. My grandfather Joe Landrieu hovered like a sheepdog, watching each of us with an eye that didn’t miss a lick. As soon as someone caught a fish, usually a croaker or catfish (or, God forbid, a stingray), the gaggle of us exploded in excitement—poles clattering, fish lines flying about. And as we circled the triumphant one gripping the pole with that fish on the hook, amid a mess of lines piled on the pier, “Paw Paw,” someone would call, “my line is tangled!”
Most people would look at a ball of twisted fishing line, clear it away, and start anew. Not my grandpa. He would sit there stoically, sometimes thirty minutes at a time, and methodically untangle the clump. He wasted nothing. I never heard him yell or curse; he rebaited our hooks and put us back in place on the pier, making sure that we held our cane poles—until someone caught the next fish and our tiny world broke into squeals and excitement all over again. As time went on and my grandparents passed away and the children became adults with children of their own, my father bought out my uncle’s share of the place. He and my mother would never dream of leaving the house where we grew up on South Prieur Street; but they relished the time at the lakeside camp, where the gradual addition of rooms could accommodate the growing number of grandchildren, though not all thirty-eight at once. To this day, the camp holds our family together.
In 2002, it had been fifteen years since my election to the State House, which met a few months a year and was not full-time work. I had built a solid business with a solo law practice. That year, I traveled the state stumping for U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu in her campaign for a second term. Mary had a tough race against Republican opponent Suzie Haik Terrell. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, former President George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush, and Bob Dole and Rudy Giuliani all campaigned for Terrell. They wanted that seat for a 52-vote GOP majority. Mary won the race by carrying Acadiana, sugarcane country, attacking Bush’s support for the Central American Free Trade Agreement, a move that augured steep losses for growers and Louisiana’s farm sector. In a state tilting red, she was reelected by forty thousand votes.
I was forty-three and ready to move beyond the legislature. The gubernatorial election of 2003 drew a crowded field on the Democratic and Republican sides. I sought the lieutenant governor’s seat, which had been a springboard to higher positions for previous holders. A former lieutenant governor, Melinda Schwegmann, whose husband owned a New Orleans–area supermarket chain, and former congressman Clyde Holloway, both Republicans, entered the race, as well as a few others.
I traveled the state calling for a strategy to attract more business and boost tourism, the office’s major function. I wanted to bring people together and spoke openly of embracing the New South, with diversity a strength as we came together across the lines that once divided us. My rhetoric was not earth shattering, but in the dozen years since the Duke nightmare I wasn’t sure how many whites had turned a corner, so to speak. Nor did I grasp how difficult it would be to achieve the agenda, in light of events that lay ahead. Nevertheless, the campaign message resonated, despite some rooted resentment about my father’s role in integrating New Orleans. I won the primary with 53 percent, hence no runoff—a rarity in a state where Democratic officials kept migrating to the Republican Party. I carried most of the sixty-four parishes and won 80 percent of the vote in my home parish of Orleans.
The lieutenant governor manages the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, which also has an appointed secretary. You can also do whatever is assigned by the governor, but the tourism duties give a certain degree of self-definition. I embraced growing the “cultural economy.” Tourism and culture was one of the largest employment sectors in the state.
As a onetime struggling actor, I knew that the contributions made by back-of-the-house workers—from set designers and sound techs to photographers and makeup artists—made a real difference. We implemented a grant program for creative people on a range of projects that was designed to get funds directly into the cultural economy without layers of bureaucracy. I saw creative people—directors, writers, painters, sculptors, and folk artists—as the backbone of the glitzy tourism industry. New Orleans had 130 art galleries, one of the highest number per capita of any city. A grant of several thousand dollars made a difference to an artist needing supplies to create works for an exhibition.
Early in my term I began streamlining how the department functioned, while expanding its mission. In my campaign travels I had been struck by the beauty and history of Louisiana; I was also disappointed by the lack of diversity in what we honored in our parks, museums, and cultural spaces. For all of the achievements of African Americans, we had little to show for that formally. I appointed the first African American assistant secretary of tourism, Chuck Morse. We knew that securing legislative funds for an entire new museum would be a stretch, so we decided to consider the state as a living museum and created the African American Heritage Trail, promoting and explaining important destinations and learning experiences from New Orleans to Shreveport and in between, sites like churches, gravesites, museums, and plantations. Later, we created a marketing fund dedicated to attracting African American visitors. We put a huge focus on promoting growing major events, from the Essence Music Festival to the Bayou Classic to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. These efforts solidified Louisiana as the number-one destination for African Americans in the country.
But the office I won was soon hit by a force that none of my staff or I could have imagined.
On August 27, 2005, a Saturday, I sat in Lawless Memorial Chapel at Dillard University for the funeral of Clarence Barney, the longtime leader of the Urban League in New Orleans. Marc Morial, Dutch’s son, who had served eight years as mayor of New Orleans before becoming president of the National Urban League in New York, sat next to me. Both of us worried about the news of a massive storm building in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Katrina was growing in scope and intensity more than any storm we had ever seen. Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco were discussing whether to order a mass evacuation. That would mean a huge allocation of state and local resources for first responders and public shelters. Many people weren’t waiting to be told to leave. By Saturday afternoon a record outflow of vehicles from the metropolitan area, including Jefferson, St. Bernard, and low-lying Plaquemines parishes, had caused gridlock on the highways headed east, west, and north. Everyone was racing away from the monster gaining force in the Gulf.
At four in the morning on Sunday, August 28, Cheryl and I gathered the five children and headed west to Baton Rouge; a drive that typically took ninety minutes became a seven-hour bumper-to-bumper grind. Gracie was in her senior year at Dominican, where Emily was a junior. Matt was a freshman at Jesuit; Benjamin was in middle school at Christian Brothers, and Will was in grade school at Lusher, a public school. Like everyone else in emergency mode, we assumed that a few days after the hurricane passed, we’d head home, like we always did.
On Sunday, Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco called for mandatory evacuation, the first ever for New Orleans. When I got to the Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge and saw the staggering size of the storm on computer models and National Weather Service data, I telephoned my parents, who were still at home in New Orleans. I asked my father what they were planning.
“We’re going to ride it out. Son, you know, we’ve been through this many times.”
“Look, Dad, you’ve gotta go.”
“Son, we’re not leaving.”
“Would you put Momma on the phone?”
My mother came on. “I’m at the Emergency Operations Center, Mom. I’m looking at this storm.” I told her it was worse than Hurricane Betsy in 1965—which flooded a huge area of the Lower Ninth Ward, killing 81 people in Louisiana. I said it was going to be more severe than Hurricane Camille in 1969—which had killed 259 people in the Gulf South and hit the Mississippi coast like a sledgehammer, splintering beachfront homes and businesses.
“Oh, honey, we’re really thinking about staying.”
“Mom, this is your lieutenant governor speaking, and I am basically ordering you to leave because you’re going to get killed!”
“Well, son, you tell that lieutenant governor it’s none of his business!”
We didn’t get very far after that. With events converging around me, I called a sibling to echo my message and had to let it go.
The Emergency Operation Center was what I imagined the White House Situation Room to be in times of crisis. Governor Blanco and her key advisers, various department heads, and officials of the State Police and National Guard were hunkered down. We were going to have to open the Superdome as a shelter of last resort. There’s an irony here that’s often missed. The vast damage caused by Hurricane Katrina and the flooding after the levees broke left enduring images of catastrophe, but with 1.5 million people leaving the greater New Orleans area over a two-day period, despite the traffic, the Katrina evacuation was the most successful in American history. Imagine how much worse the human suffering would have been had most of those people stayed.
Hurricane Katrina was a disaster unlike anything Americans had ever seen in real time, on television. The flooding exposed a global audience to epic damage, great suffering, and a breakdown in government operations without precedent in recent American history. We also saw uncommon heroism and resilience as people did their best to help others. But for all of the striving to restore togetherness in times of crisis, there is a deeper, more difficult story to Katrina that also tells us about America as a nation. It is not a story about coming together to face all obstacles, when goodness prevails. It is a coming-apart story. The underbelly of it all.
In 2005, the overriding concern by many hurricane experts was that a storm path would swirl upriver from the Gulf along the Mississippi, producing a funnel, spilling waves over the river levees and causing widespread flooding. Katrina took a different route. Pushing east of the mouth of the Mississippi, the winds sent a mammoth sheet of water toward eastern New Orleans over fragile wetlands interlaced with thousands of canals carved for offshore oil production. One side of that large lane straddled a levee along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway; the other levee shouldered the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR-GO). Katrina did not hit the Mississippi River but swept across that denuded area between the Intracoastal and the MR-GO as if it were a bowling alley, a giant water wall barreling toward the city. It was those canal levees that gave way, not the river’s.
Environmentalists had long decried the shredding of the wetlands, a coastal forest and hurricane buffer of yesteryear. One man I knew well had railed against MR-GO for years—Henry “Junior” Rodriguez, the St. Bernard Parish president. A descendant of eighteenth-century Spanish settlers called Los Isleños, who once inhabited islands in the lakes south of the city, Junior Rodriguez is massive presence at three hundred pounds. With a silver mane and a fondness for cowboy boots, Junior is a native son of an area where many families rely on commercial fishing, or earn their livelihoods on the river or in the oil industry. Junior Rodriguez is a force of nature. To say that he hated MR-GO, dug through coastal wetlands in his political territory, is a huge understatement; he shouted about it to anyone who would listen. He said other things I prefer not to put in a book. Building MR-GO destroyed twenty thousand acres of marshland as the Army Corps of Engineers dredged an artery five hundred feet wide to create a shipping channel to move cargo from the Mississippi River to the Gulf. It was finished in 1963.
In 2001, Christopher Hallowell published Holding Back the Sea, a prescient book on the crisis of Louisiana’s wetlands: “Erosion from ships and storms has gouged it 2,000 feet wide and made it a freeway to New Orleans for any hurricane that happens to come from the right direction,” wrote Hallowell. “The surrounding marsh, now vulnerable to storms and salt water, has all but died . . . along with 40,000 acres of mature cypress trees. Now, storm surges can invade the marsh through the straight-arrow channel and smash into New Orleans.” That is exactly part of what happened with Hurricane Katrina.
As I stood in the operations center in Baton Rouge, calling officials, allies, and friends across the southern parishes, Junior Rodriguez was on my mind. His cell didn’t answer. The levees, we learned later from federal investigations, had been compromised through faulty design and maintenance by the Army Corps of Engineers. Since then, the levees have had a major $14.6 billion upgrade. Yet even today, if you know that a mammoth storm is heading toward the New Orleans area, the smart thing to do is go far away as fast as you can.
I was in regular contact that Sunday with Doug Thornton, the manager of the Louisiana Superdome, and officials in parishes near New Orleans. The Superdome had taken in twenty-five thousand people—for the most part, poor people who had no cars or means to leave. And it was bad in there. In my last call to Thornton at about 2:00 A.M. on Monday morning, he yelled over the din, “It’s really bad in here! Water’s coming in from the roof!” Then the phone went dead.
I finally got through to Junior Rodriguez in Chalmette, the parish seat of St. Bernard. He was on the second floor of the municipal complex, the first floor was under water, and he was nervous. “The water is rising. We don’t know how far it’s going to get.” Junior’s phone went dead.
I caught a few hours of sleep overnight in the Emergency Operations Center. On Monday, we got word from General Bennett Landreneau of the Louisiana National Guard that the storm surge from the Gulf had crashed into the St. Bernard Parish levee.
On Tuesday, the day after Katrina hit, I went into New Orleans with Department of Wildlife and Fisheries first responders—tough, capable people who knew how to navigate rivers. They had boats, which were crucial. We headed toward New Orleans from Baton Rouge on I-10, and on passing Louis Armstrong airport, began to see downed power lines and cars sitting on the side of the interstate as people waited for rescue. We had to snake along River Road to get from Jefferson Parish into the city, and as we made our way onto Magazine Street, with the zoo on our right and Audubon Park on our left, the city had the eerie silence of a ghost town. Over the next few days, as we drove back and forth from Baton Rouge to get boats into flooded neighborhoods and pull people to safety, the city I adored for its greenery had turned upside down—there were branches and upended roots everywhere. And it had an awful stench. You drive through your day and take sounds for granted—birds warbling, cars chugging, children yelling at play. New Orleans was brown and still, as if a bomb had hit, shutting off sound.
We made it downtown to the Superdome, where I had memories of Saints games, concerts, and extravaganzas during Carnival season. Now people were bunched on the sidewalks out front, trying to escape the heat and miserable conditions in the Dome. Doug Thornton gave me a list of immediate needs—water, ice, food, and transportation to carry people stuck in that fetid environment out of the flooded city, out to someplace else. I jotted down the things he needed and kept moving.
Because of Louisiana’s history of hurricanes and flooding, I had long been interested in emergency response mechanisms, how to connect on-the-ground assets with the highest reaches of government. Trivial as it may seem, you need a clear command and control, clear coordination, and clear communication. I needed to get solid information back to the EOC in Baton Rouge. But because cell towers were down, there were no communications with Baton Rouge until I could get back physically. Five years later, when I became mayor of New Orleans, I was obsessed with coordinating City Hall and law enforcement on crowd control, given the major ball games and entertainment events we have throughout the year—and even more so in advance of storms. The wave of mass shootings had not hit New Orleans in 2005, though when it did we made policy changes with the police. Not a day goes by that my team doesn’t hear me talk about downline logistics, that the weakest link will destroy the best strategy. Without a stable line of communications, you invite failure.
When you see the city you love so wounded, your first thought is to rescue as many people as you possibly can. But on leaving the Superdome we had to go next door to the Hyatt Regency hotel, behind City Hall, to meet with Mayor Ray Nagin and coordinate with the city. The mayor and Governor Blanco were very different personalities; it was no secret that they got along poorly. She was a former teacher, legislator, and hands-on veteran of state government; he had been a cable company executive with a background in sales. Blessed with charm and a natural charisma, Nagin vaulted into office with no experience in governing, nor in getting along with officials you may not like. In politics you have to deal with people you do not like if you want to deliver for the common good. I had gotten along well enough with Nagin, but when I found him on an upper floor of the hotel, I became concerned.
“What do you need?” I said.
He sat in a chair, unable to focus. He seems out of it, I thought. Standing in the Hyatt Regency room with Nagin, I knew we had work to do. The city had a bus fleet for evacuation needs. “Where are the buses?” I asked.
“We don’t have the keys,” he said. I had not yet seen TV footage of the city’s bus fleet engulfed by the flood, or learned what went wrong in that chain of command.
I spoke to one of his staffers. “I’m here on behalf of the governor. Figure out what you need and let us know.”
Rumors abounded in the chaos of those first few days; there was widespread talk of looting, and a report that some thieves had broken into an Uptown drugstore, shuttered after the storm. The New Orleans Police Department communications system was broken. Hospitals were on high alert to guard their pharmacies. Nagin’s rhetoric cast himself as a victim of politics and a city beleaguered by addicts “probably” with guns. We now know this was not the case.
“Many of the more toxic rumors seem to have come from evacuees, half-crazed with fear sitting through night after night in the dark,” David Carr wrote in the New York Times on September 19, 2005. “Victims, officials and reporters all took one of the most horrific events in American history and made it worse than it actually was.”
We drove through the French Quarter and onto St. Claude Avenue, heading into the Ninth Ward, where we knew the flood situation was dire; it’s one of the lowest parts of a city already below sea level. The Wildlife and Fisheries agents were waiting with boats after we crossed the St. Claude Bridge over the Industrial Canal into the Lower Ninth Ward. Water was so high people were stranded on rooftops. We set out in boats, helping people out of the flooded houses, getting them to high ground. I couldn’t stop thinking about Junior Rodriguez and his people to the south, in St. Bernard Parish. With the Wildlife and Fisheries agents doing rescue work, and volunteers from the “Cajun Navy” arriving with their own vessels and magnificent bravado, I took a boat and started navigating down the flooded road, about three miles to the St. Bernard Parish government complex in Chalmette. It was surrounded by water. I made it onto the second floor, where traumatized officials had spent the worst night of their lives. The heat was severe. Junior Rodriguez was like the boxer played by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, sopping wet in his underwear, the silver hair in dank curls, his jowls dripping. State Representative Nita Hutter and several other officials were there as well. I pulled Junior aside. “I’m here for the governor. What do you need?”
“The whole parish is destroyed,” he said in a ragged voice. Word had come of thirty-five people drowned in a nursing home. “Mitch, I need water, food, and dynamite.”
“Dynamite?”
I think Junior Rodriguez wanted to blow a hole in a levee to discharge water out of the flooded area, back into the Mississippi.
“Junior, I’m not asking the governor for dynamite.”
Creating a hole in an already compromised levee struck me as dangerous, but I suspected where he’d gotten the idea. During the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the New Orleans business elite persuaded the governor and federal authorities to dynamite levees downriver, intentionally flooding St. Bernard Parish in order to spare the city from inundation. The move, which proved to be unnecessary, caused massive damage to low-lying farms and towns, as John M. Barry chronicled in Rising Tide, a celebrated history.
New Orleans meanwhile was enjoying itself. The fine families, as if on a picnic, traveled down to see the great explosion that would send dirt hundreds of feet high and create a sudden Niagara Falls. Cars jammed the road down to St. Bernard, and yachts crowded the river.
But not just anyone could witness the explosion. The men who had decided to dynamite the levee controlled those permits. Residents of St. Bernard could not witness the destruction of the levee, of their parish.
Junior Rodriguez was a friend, and in the steaming despair after what he and his colleagues had endured, I kept the focus on getting a supply line for immediate needs like water, food, and rescue. I wanted to do more, but the hideous reality I learned that week is that in a time of crisis, you can only do what you have the capacity to do, and there were thousands of Juniors in desperate straits. My job was to get accurate information to the EOC, and then go help the people I found in immediate need. Junior could have left, caught a ride with me to the Hyatt or a cool place in Baton Rouge; he stayed. I made trips back to the Lower Nine and St. Bernard every day that week.
As the sight of people trapped on rooftops of the Lower Ninth Ward became a recurrent image in TV coverage, I heard African Americans fume that whites had dynamited the Industrial Canal floodwall, causing people to drown in the haunting, apocalyptic scenes captured on our screens. There was no evidence of this: in fact, a barge had crashed through the canal floodwall, sending off a loud sound like a thunderclap before the oily waters rushed in. And in those early days, several places in St. Bernard caught fire, with booming explosions. People in the Lower Nine had heard of the dynamiting of the levees in 1927—a major news event back then, part of the memory passed from one generation to the next. Some African Americans in the poorest part of the city seized on the idea of a white conspiracy during that achingly slow federal rescue in 2005.
On Monday night I got back to Baton Rouge and went to check on Cheryl and the children. More people had arrived—two of Cheryl’s sisters, other family members and their children, and a couple of dogs. As TV news showed that the levees had buckled and the city was filling with water, I figured that my parents’ house on South Prieur Street had flooded, learning much later that it had taken some seven feet of water. My sister Madeleine and her husband, attorney Paige Sensenbrenner, lost their home in Lakeview; my brother Martin had his Lakeview home inundated by the flood. Some days later, Cheryl and I learned that floodwater under our house Uptown had caused the downstairs floor to warp, and a pine tree had fallen on our roof, causing rainfall flooding upstairs. It took many months of dealing with adjusters and contractors before we got back in the house. Ours was a fairly typical experience for an extended New Orleans family. The storm spared no one.
And by Tuesday no one had heard from my mother or father.
The breakdown in FEMA’s response is now infamous, and it had a crippling impact on President George W. Bush’s standing, but all sorts of people did come to New Orleans in our darkest hour, people arriving from far-off places to help when help was needed most. As I shuttled back and forth to Baton Rouge, visiting my family, relaying information and supplies to the governor and people in the EOC, stocking our vehicles with water, food, emergency items, and then heading back to New Orleans, the ordeal of getting people into dry places showed me human decency at its fullest.
A big guy with a ruddy face was cooking on a grill outside of Harrah’s casino on Poydras Street downtown. The police and National Guard were blocking people from getting into the city because of the pressure to evacuate those stranded in the Superdome and another emergency shelter, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, which had become horror shows in news coverage. The city would be off-limits for weeks as the floodwaters slowly drained. Entergy, the public utility, would work crews through the night to get the city back on the grid, street by darkened street, for months afterward.
I introduced myself to the man with the grill. “What are you doing?”
“God called me to come! I’m from Daphne, Alabama, and I’m cooking for whoever is hungry.”
“Good for you! Keep cooking!”
The next day he had two grills, barbecuing away, first responders and nomads waiting in line with paper plates. He waved me over. “Now look, Lieutenant Governor, I’ve got trucks of food coming from Alabama and the State Police wanna stop ’em.” He had found a way to get contraband food into the city and feed people. We cut through red tape to keep him cooking; he wound up with four grills outside his Winnebago, feeding thousands in those awful days.
My siblings and I were frantic to find my parents, calling people across the state, when my sister Melanie, who lives in Mandeville, just across Lake Pontchartrain, located them in Crystal Springs, Mississippi. They were at Tiny’s house. “Tiny is a lady who was a barmaid for Mr. Sam Albano, a friend of my daddy’s who had a bar and my daddy was his lawyer,” Melanie told Newsweek. “She’d been calling them to come and visit, so that’s where they went.”
Realizing it would be months before their water-battered house on Prieur Street could be restored, my parents bought a small boathouse on the Tchefuncte River in St. Tammany Parish, across Lake Pontchartrain. They eventually got the Prieur Street house rebuilt and returned to live there. Cheryl and I, meanwhile, got the children situated in Baton Rouge schools for the fall semester, with a hectic transportation schedule in the weeks to come. At least we were all safe, and together.
The rescue work I did in the boats we hauled from Baton Rouge was a bone-chilling experience, but what sticks in my mind are those examples of pluck and wit from African American residents in the Lower Ninth Ward. As we maneuvered through water up to our windshields, people called from balconies and rooftops. You pull up to a duplex where twenty-five people are sun parched and desperate, and you only have room for fourteen in the boat. The people who cannot walk get priority; others lay them on sheets, carry them into the vessel, and go back inside. You promise to come back. They wait, we return.
At one house, near the gaping hole in the Industrial Canal floodwall, a man stood at the second-floor window as our boat pulled up. He was in his T-shirt and underwear.
“Do you want to be rescued, sir?”
“You the lieutenant governor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The lieutenant governor going to rescue me?”
“Yes, sir. But can I ask a question?”
“Sure.”
“Did you hear the mayor and governor say to evacuate?”
“Yep.”
“Did you hear us tell you the storm was coming?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why are you here?”
“We don’t believe anything you politicians say.”
“You believe me now?”
“Well, I’m coming!”
If an epic disaster teaches a politician humility, the other end of the learning curve is a hands-on experience in getting government to deliver for people when they need it. Working with first responders showed me a spiritual magic that caused our self-made divisions to dissolve in time of crisis. Nobody cared who was driving the boat or riding. No one was concerned about whether people in the boat were black or white, rich or poor, who was from New Orleans or who was not. We had a common enemy and a common solution: we had to help people get to a better place, which gave poignant meaning to the phrase “We are all in the same boat.”
I’m convinced that most of us in elective office have a basic belief in how government should best serve the people, even those who don’t vote for you. Nothing levels the ideological differences like a natural disaster, which forces people to pull together. In that massive outflow of people from the New Orleans metro area, Baton Rouge, which had been smaller than New Orleans before Katrina, more than doubled in population to some eight hundred thousand in a matter of days. This put a huge strain on the resources of Mayor Kip Holden, a friend of mine from our years in the legislature. One night, after I had driven back to the operations center, Andy Kopplin, the chief of staff for Governor Blanco, grabbed me in the hallway and asked if I would intervene with Mayor Holden and State Senator Cleo Fields of Baton Rouge to allow five busloads of New Orleans citizens to stay in a park facility. Holden didn’t want more people in the crowded space, said Kopplin. Fields was demanding that Holden let the buses unload there. Holden and Fields were both strong willed and not close allies.
“Can I exercise the full authority of the governor in this?” I asked Kopplin.
“Yes.”
Holden was dealing with a crisis of massive overcrowding and took the position that he could not accommodate more people. I went to the back of the EOC and found General Landreneau of the Louisiana National Guard, a career military man who had made forceful TV spots denouncing David Duke as a Nazi in 1991. “General, do you have five guys to drive buses?”
“I will go get them.”
He got the men out of sleep, brought them to me, and said, “Do whatever the lieutenant governor tells you.”
The five guardsmen and I drove across the river to West Baton Rouge and connected with the sheriff, Mike Cazes. When the caravan from New Orleans arrived, the people in the buses were tired, wet, hungry, and homeless since the flood. Cazes provided them with bologna sandwiches and potato chips. Small hitch: It turned out that none of the five National Guardsmen had experience driving buses. Neither did I. The exhausted bus drivers had come through hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic, and though they were too tired to go on, they didn’t want to surrender the keys to the vehicles—no doubt for insurance reasons.
“On the authority of the State of Louisiana,” I said, “give me the keys.”
The men looked at one another, looked at the National Guardsmen, and handed them over.
“Now, we need lessons in how to operate the vehicles.”
We eventually loaded the people back into the buses and headed across the Mississippi River bridge along I-10 going west away from Baton Rouge and into Cajun country. An hour later we reached Lafayette in time to put all the people on a train to Houston, where the Astrodome had become a shelter for people displaced by Katrina. Soon thereafter, I flew to Houston and met up with Governor Blanco to visit the people we had evacuated, and many others living on cots in the Astrodome. The officials in Houston, led by Mayor Bill White and Harris County Judge Robert Eckels, helped us greatly, which we will long remember and will be forever grateful.
As Katrina evacuees headed off to Atlanta, Nashville, Denver, New York, and everywhere in between, the state established an emergency contact system, trying to collect as many names, cell numbers, and e-mails of displaced people as possible. The staff at my office cast lines across a broad geographic area to help people connect with FEMA for emergency help, and allow us to go and physically meet with as many people as the governor, I, and other state officials could, in order to help them begin to make their way back home. People were also locating friends on Craigslist, newsletter lists like The New Orleans Agenda, and through the Times-Picayune Web site.
When pictures hit the airwaves of thousands of poor people, mostly African Americans, huddled at the Superdome or the Convention Center or walking through water, stranded, abandoned, wet, hot, hungry, thirsty—the nation suddenly found a mirror, and we did not like what we saw. How could there still be such poverty and desperation—in America the superpower? The country was hit with a shock like the one on 9/11. Most people could not imagine that so many poor people lived in rocking, good-times New Orleans, or that they had no means of transportation to escape a flood. They had always been in plain sight, in some ways like the Confederate monuments we walked and drove past every day. Always there, rarely noticed. Now, in full view, those desperate souls were impossible to ignore—a legacy of the racially driven politics that controlled the city long before the civil rights era. The War on Poverty, so derided by the right, had lasted barely more than a decade, whereas a century had passed between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a century of disenfranchisement, political and economic. You cannot undo the legacy of enforced poverty in the blink of history’s eye. New Orleans did not have a public high school for African Americans until 1917. We have made great strides since then, but the city in 2005 had a poverty level of nearly 30 percent and a poorly funded social safety net. The building of a just, equitable society takes honesty, determination, and grit to withstand the reactionary forces.
It is true that Katrina in many ways did not discriminate. It hit white, black, rich, poor, old, and young. The water was high in many affluent neighborhoods. But Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who led the military troops that stabilized the city, said it best: “Who is affected more when it’s cold? Poor people. Who is affected more when it’s hot? Poor people. Who is affected more when it’s wet? Poor people. Who is most affected when the economy is bad? Poor people. Poor people are the most fragile.” And in New Orleans, most of the people who were poor were also African American.
Long ago, the Ninth Ward housed plantations that stretched from the Mississippi River to the lake. After the Civil War, desperate to find land and housing, poor immigrants and formerly enslaved African Americans began moving to the area in the 1870s. Because of its topography, they risked flooding and other troubles to move there. It wasn’t until the 1920s that there became an “upper” and “lower” Ninth Ward, divided by the Industrial Canal, which was dredged to assist the port in shipping. The Lower Ninth Ward then became even more segregated from the rest of the city. By the time Hurricane Katrina struck, it was nearly 100 percent African American.
Katrina gave the Lower Ninth Ward, nearly 100 percent black, and Lakeview, which was over 90 percent white, a water beating of equal proportion—upward of fifteen feet in both areas. Twelve years later, Lakeview has recovered, buoyantly so. It’s at its highest property values and lowest crime rate, and is back bigger and stronger than ever before by nearly any measure. The Lower Ninth Ward is one of only two neighborhoods with less than 50 percent of its pre-Katrina population—a haunting shadow of what it was before. It had been a vast working-class area before the storm. Sicilians and other white ethnic groups were part of the social quilt until the 1960s, when the school desegregation crisis caused many white families to leave, some of them going over the city line into St. Bernard Parish. As the Lower Nine became more African American, the area weathered the crack epidemic that hit many inner-city enclaves in the late 1980s, with drug gangs seeking a foothold. Ironically, the level of home ownership in the Lower Ninth was remarkably high, near 60 percent.
Poor folk lived in homes whose mortgages had long been paid, but no one covered the insurance. Many did not have the money to open probate or successions; the homes were passed down through families without legal documentation. Though the storm did not discriminate in whom it hit or hurt, the ability of a person to bounce back, heal, or rebuild was determined by one’s strength or vulnerability at the time of impact. Should we fault the people in the Lower Nine who neglected house insurance? I would raise another question: Should the government deny people repair costs from a federal levee failure because proof of ownership does not meet a banking standard? If people can prove that they lived in a house that was theirs, shouldn’t that count? We shouldn’t blame poor people for losing what they had, when the levees broke and destroyed their homes because of massive human error by the Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency.
Angela Glover Blackwell, the founder and CEO of PolicyLink, has written that because of Katrina, “America was forced to recognize that, for Black America, far too little has changed since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Despite antipoverty efforts, our nation had not addressed the fundamental factors that keep people poor. To lift people out of poverty and make good on the promise of opportunity for all, we must honestly and authentically confront our nation’s deepest fissure and most entrenched barrier to equity: race.”
Blaming the poor for their poverty shows an America with a warped soul. The legacy of poverty is hardest for people struggling to get out of it. In New Orleans, the rooted underclass turns on a legacy of racial discrimination as it does in parts of many other cities—Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston, to name a few. But when the chips are down and we face a common threat, Americans work together across all lines that separate us, and surprise ourselves with how alike we are. And we need to do more of that. What we need is a political consensus to provide pathways to learning and earning for those who are poor but willing to do the hard work.
The most powerful message driven home by Katrina was one that seemed to surprise people I met outside New Orleans: the fierce determination of people who wanted to go back to neighborhoods that had been trashed by the flood. The richest and the poorest people both had families, roots, and lives that celebrate the seasons with parades, festivals, and food. The homes of the poorest were gone, but why would they not want to return to their city? For all of the poverty, they wanted the only lives they knew.
Riding in those boats, helping people get out, I saw women and men holding garbage bags stuffed with whatever they could carry. In that blistering heat, most people wore T-shirts; we saw people floating by in tire tubes, pawing the water without oars, fleeing for their lives. At one apartment building we reached, a little lady was holding a clock. Helping her onto the boat, I said, “Ma’am, what you doing with that clock?”
“Mitch, baby, I done lost everything. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I don’t know where I’m going. But I know one thing . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Well, what is that, ma’am?”
“I know what time it is.”
She was holding on to that one piece of the place she had lost. I have mentioned that lady in countless speeches in saying why, in recovery, we cannot hold on to things. We have to let go and we can’t build back the same way we were before. We have to build a city for the future. Several years ago, we were cutting the ribbon for a renovated CVS pharmacy on St. Claude Avenue in the Lower Ninth, a neighborhood slowly coming back. By this time I was no longer lieutenant governor. I was the mayor now, I was rebuilding the city, putting resources that I could allocate into the Lower Ninth, which some people even today are willing to write off. I was in the middle of a press conference when I heard somebody yelling from the back of the media, “I got something to say! I got something to say!”
This is New Orleans, where drama lurks at every turn. A woman walked up to the podium and said, “I’m the clock lady!” I got choked up on the spot. This woman was seared into my memory. She said her name, Margie Shorty. She’d been in Philadelphia for ten years, and just moved back. “I live around the corner!” Right near where she used to live. We hugged.
I am still haunted by those days a dozen years ago, the memories of an abandoned city, and the eerie silence broken by the cries of people trapped by the rising water, waving tattered sheets from the rooftops, yelling, “We are still alive.”
Tented emergency rooms hastily erected in the shadow of the Convention Center. Makeshift beds on the Superdome floor, people wet and close, children crying, hope fading. Three thousand souls stuck in a sweltering shed in the Port of St. Bernard, waiting. . . . People like apparitions emerging from the water, defiant, heads rising, then shoulders, the full person holding a black garbage bag. Some people made it out. Vera Smith lay dead on the corner of Magazine Street and Jackson Avenue. For days the street was where she lay, a thin, white sheet shrouding her frail body, a simple epitaph written in black permanent marker: “Here lies Vera. God help us.” Grandmas and grandpas died in storm-battered hospitals and nursing homes. They were left on cots in a crowded chapel that became a substitute morgue. Each year, we pray at the tombs of the eighty-five bodies that to this day lay unclaimed in the Hurricane Katrina Memorial. These fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors died as our city was torn apart.
In those four horrific days, there was anarchy in the streets. And yet we found salvation, light, and hope from the angels among us. There were so many. I saw young black boys—whom some might have dismissed as the stereotype of criminal youth—pushing an old white man in a rusted wheelchair, to find water. I saw an old white woman hold the hand of a crying black girl who had lost her mother. I met a minister from Dallas who sneaked into the city to feed people; and strangers, pressed together by circumstance, leaning on one another for comfort and support.
Our inundated homes were tattooed with Xs by National Guard soldiers who went house to house to identify who was inside, living or dead. Many people had to gut their houses to the bone. Three feet of water on the second floor; mud caked everywhere; the unforgettable stench of a rotten refrigerator; mold spreading along floorboards and growing like ivy up the walls and across the ceiling. A mighty Mardi Gras Indian headdress swept away. A favorite blanket or dress left behind, now gone. So many photo albums, letters, birthday cards, and recipes lost in the water, forever. A loved one who was never supposed to die in the attic.
Everything was brown, then gray. Our lives had lost color, but we endured together.
For a time, we carried the pain as a part of ourselves. Every day the sorrow was there, unwilling to dissipate. Every conversation came back to the storm, every lonely walk made us wish our friends could come home. In time, our sorrow began to wane. Bit by bit, time smoothed the jagged edge of our memories. Families returned, communities regrouped. The grass turned green. Flowers bloomed. We could not do it alone. Faith-based, national, and college groups streamed in from across the country with supplies, working to gut houses and help us stand again. Neighbors helped one another. Together we took down drywall, stretched blue tarps across torn roofs, and began to rebuild. People reached out and came together in living rooms, churches, and community centers throughout the city. We cried and laughed, broke down and held others up, felt fear, felt guilt, felt frustration. We were battered, bruised, and scarred. But with grit, determination, and help, the people of this city rose out of the water, bearing the burden together that none of us could bear alone. Our resilience leads us down the path to resurrection.
When my father was mayor in the 1970s, he had 6,000 city employees. Nagin had as many as 6,300 in 2005 before Katrina; he was forced to lay off thousands after the flood. Sales tax revenues had crashed, leaving scant budget for salaries. Whatever Nagin’s state in the hotel room that day, he had recovered to handle himself with the media and project a sense of control. I am not saying this cynically, or tongue in cheek. Many people I knew lost houses, cars, in many cases their savings in order to fund home or business rebuilding against what insurance covered; all of that took a heavy emotional and sometimes psychological toll. Countless people told me that prescriptions for antidepressant medications had skyrocketed in New Orleans. Those weeks and months were a nightmare I never want to experience again.
In the months after the storm, I turned the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism into an emergency recovery agency. With whole areas of New Orleans off the grid, and some neighborhoods in several feet of water for weeks after Katrina, I allocated space in the lieutenant governor’s suite of rooms for the New Orleans City Council to meet privately and conduct public business as needed. My assistants threw in efforts to help people with flooded homes find temporary housing.
In the weeks it took to drain the city, Mayor Nagin and his team were overwhelmed. At the state level, it soon became clear that we were going to be investing in one of the toughest recoveries in American history. The extent of damage was mind-boggling enough; but the loss of political trust by the people was an open wound. Major foundations and nonprofits wanted to put fuel into the recovery, but City Hall under Nagin was ill equipped to send proposals with targeted needs, captured in clear prose, with well-developed budgets. The wasted opportunity made for long delays in rebuilding. I learned of one official in a major federal agency who had authority over a budget and who personally asked Nagin for a proposal, which he waved off, saying, “We’re not able to handle that yet.” Many of the foundations over time decided not to work directly with City Hall, and instead only with outside nonprofits and community groups. As lieutenant governor, I began engaging with them myself to preserve lines of cooperation and communication for when City Hall could handle it.
The Bush administration, Nagin, and Blanco were each plagued by distrust and dysfunction. The lack of coordination, agreement, and a unified strategy left Bush in a state of relative indifference, as he became obsessed with the Iraq war, while Nagin was counting on the White House to provide a great inflow of relief funds. As he waited, Nagin formed the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, relying heavily on Joe Canizaro, the downtown developer for whom my dad had once worked. Canizaro invited the Urban Land Institute, an organization of developers, architects, and planners, to draft a plan for rebuilding the city. Most people were still struggling to get back in the fall of 2005, but enough citizens showed up at the BNOBC hearings to rail against the new “urban footprint” that would let whole areas of flood-wracked New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward, and the Broadmoor neighborhoods turn into unoccupied green spaces—buffers against future floods—while people in those areas were displaced. As protests rose, Nagin backed away from the ULI plan, saying that everyone had the right to return to where they wanted to live. He had no plan of his own.
Governor Blanco, meanwhile, launched the Louisiana Recovery Authority, chaired by Norman Francis and Walter Isaacson, the author and a New Orleans native son who had recently become the CEO at the Aspen Institute. As the LRA became a crossroads for foundation support, Blanco and the congressional delegation pressed for federal legislation that eventually produced the Road Home Program, to give grants to homeowners and businesses whose insurance policies left them short of rebuilding funds. The slow pace at which all of this took place was a case study in how not to respond after a national disaster. Many of us in government realized that the Stafford Act, the enabling legislation for FEMA and crisis response, was woefully outdated. FEMA needed a drastic overhaul; but that is not to shift blame from Louisiana.
Everyone working with Nagin knew he had been traumatized and was not providing the vision or leadership to spark a genuine recovery. His team was as erratic and disorganized as he was. In January 2006, he made his notorious “chocolate city” speech on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday—saying that the Lord had spoken to him, and New Orleans would always be majority black. This is not the city that I knew—we were not a white city or a black city but a multicultural city. Like the Lost Cause arguments, this rang false to me. True, he was running for reelection; and African Americans had indeed borne a disproportionate share of the losses in the storm. The city needed massive help, but foundation grant officers were uneasy at the spectacle in City Hall. The city had failed to access federal pipelines. The “chocolate city” speech was a clear pitch to African Americans stuck in Atlanta, Baton Rouge, or Houston, or sitting in FEMA trailers, angry at the Bush administration, angry at government period. Nagin, who had donated a thousand dollars to George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, and had won the mayoralty four years earlier with 70 percent of the white vote and only 30 percent of African Americans, now pinned his reelection on black voters, casting himself as the man they needed to keep hold of City Hall. The election turned into a racial litmus test.
Maybe I made a bad decision to enter that race and run against Nagin, and I have only myself to blame, but I hated to see the city I loved so broken. I had to find a way to make the African American base I had built see that a vote for me was not a vote against their self-interest. Had Nagin done a halfway decent job I would not have run for mayor; but I couldn’t bear to sit passively at the sight of so much neglect, a fractured infrastructure, and flood-battered streets where six months after the storm dead cars layered in dirt still sat under the Claiborne Avenue overpass like carcasses waiting for a far-off burial. I felt that I could kick-start the recovery and begin to rebuild a city that had been torn apart.
It was, bar none, the worst campaign experience I ever had. People were tired and angry, the mood in the city fierce and intense. Although the recovery had hit a brick wall, Nagin was hungry to find redemption in the public eye. National civil rights groups organized voter transportation to get New Orleans evacuees in Atlanta, Houston, and other cities the opportunity to vote, either where they were staying under special arrangements or back in the city. I watched the support for Nagin build as we entered the runoff, and realized that the turn of events was beyond my capacity to control. Race trumps everything at a certain point. Many African Americans felt scorned by the Katrina debacle; they were afraid. He played on their fears of their city being taken from them—he would stand up to the Man and “take it back.” Ironically, Nagin’s top contributors were from wealthy, old-line white families who thought they could control the mayor. Voters were strewn all over the country. People voted from satellite locations in cities all over, literally. I campaigned in Atlanta and Houston, of all places. It was surreal.
In the end I got clipped and beaten. I was hurt, mostly because this was one of the few times I realized people viewed me as white. I was confused because these were the same African Americans my family and I had always fought so hard for. I had good public standing and could one day run for governor, but I felt sure I would never be mayor of New Orleans.
The recovery limped along without the major infusion of dollars needed to bring back streets, parks, and public spaces; the Road Home Program did provide grants for people to rebuild their houses and businesses, and to slowly gain a sense of normalcy to certain neighborhoods. But I dusted myself off and went back to work in Baton Rouge, and was not surprised when Mayor Nagin did not reach out to us for help.
My whole family went about doing what everyone else was—dealing with claims adjusters and contractors and the red tape necessary to get our homes rebuilt. After we got our moorings back, we created a family fund to rebuild the camp on Lake Pontchartrain. I thought of my grandpa Joe, patiently untangling those fishing lines we had jumbled together—steady of hand, determined to see his work through. It helps to have an example like that in your past.
I learned a lot during Katrina and its aftermath, about myself and my city. It’s easier to reach for what was, rather than strive for something new. This is something true about people regardless of race or class. Katrina taught us that while we had come a long way in civil rights, the inequities that still existed were a result of the lingering shadow of Jim Crow. Race was an issue we’d have to confront directly if we were ever going to move our city and country forward.