“As Sheep Without a Shepherd”: A Retrospective
Anthea Butler
Three years after writing “As
Sheep without a Shepherd” for the online journal The Revealer you might wonder if I am still just as angry about the response to
Hurricane Katrina as I was back in early September of 2005. Have no fear, I still am. My anger has turned
into disgust and bitterness tempered with occasional
glimmers of hopefulness. Since the fateful landfall of Katrina and the breaching
of the levee, the lives of thousands of people in New Orleans are changed. Some have not
returned to the Crescent
City. Others have, only
to become discouraged with crime, poor living conditions, and the sadness that
seeps around residents as they try to preserve a semblance of their lives in a
town that will never be the same.
Structural issues
are worse now than when the waters were rising. After all this time, insurers
have not paid out many of the insured, and lawsuits abound. The lack of affordable
housing in New Orleans
has led to riots. Magnolia Terrace and other projects have
been condemned, even though they are not appreciably damaged. There are over 12,000 homeless persons in New Orleans, most living
underneath freeway overpasses. The city council is currently considering a law
to make it a crime to sleep outside. I am not
surprised that the level of crime, depression, suicide, and despair has risen
in the city of laissez les bon temps rouler.
Children and teenagers have limited resources in public schools, and are
victims or perpetrators of peer violence.
And I am certainly not surprised that the Federal Government and FEMA
have been profoundly inept in their assistance to those displaced, or that the
trailers they provided to some are now leaking toxic formaldehyde. None of these things surprise
me, even though they are very disheartening.
What
has surprised me, and has been uplifting, is the response of people who return
to tough it out in New Orleans. Much has improved since my first trip back to
New Orleans in
November of 2005. It was a gut-wrenching experience. The smell of death and
decay permeated my nostrils as we walked on abandoned, chaotic streets in the
Ninth Ward. (Although prior to Katrina many in the Ninth would have been
considered impoverished by traditional standards, the service jobs and cheap
housing made for a slice of the American dream within the shadow of privilege
and wealth.) The French Quarter, largely untouched, seemed frail, with few
revelers, and bartenders looking as though they could drink their own stock.
Breathing was difficult, and the piles of trash and the detritus of lives piled
in front of demolished homes made for a surreal scene.
I’ve
been back to New Orleans
several times since writing the Revealer article, and I’ve found pockets of
hope as people slowly try to move back into homes. More businesses are open,
and there are patches of life as people sit out on their porches and visit,
even if the talk is often poignant and sad. Tourists have returned to the
French Quarter, the streetcars are open, and the ubiquitous blue tarps have
decreased. Yet outside of the Garden
District and the Quarter, New Orleans
is still largely a sad wasteland of unmet need and missed opportunities. Those
who were able and willing to return have tried to rebuild. An estimated 197,000 impoverished African
Americans, however—a large share of New Orleans’s original population—have
been unable to return. The replacement workforce consists largely of Latino
workers, who currently face many of the same prejudices and issues that the
African American community faced: low wages, expensive housing, and poor
working conditions.
These
are losses and damages we can track, however imperfectly. The loss that is harder to
measure, but promises to be staggering, is the history and living memory of the
Creole and African American population of New
Orleans. I appreciate the losses of all of the
citizens of New Orleans. For those of African descent, however,
abandoned to a diaspora of disconnection and despair,
an entire history has been washed away. The oral
histories of families that have been in New
Orleans for three generations or more are gone. According to Social Security estimates, half
of the elderly population did not return to New Orleans. The history that they lived, and
relate to their relatives, is gone. New
Orleans, which was 68% Black prior to Katrina, is only
57% Black now. Local churches have
closed, congregations have tried to re-establish themselves, with varied success,
and the historical memories of the older congregants who died in the
floodwaters will never be recaptured. Xavier, the
nation’s only historically Black
Catholic University,
has struggled with its campus and library collection. Historic Black Catholic Churches like St. Augustine fought and
won reprieves from closure after Katrina, but as of April 2008, 25 Catholic
parishes are still on the closure list of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
It remains to be seen how history will deal with the decimation of much of
the lower middle class and the poor of New
Orleans. The city’s restructuring seems to be headed
in the direction of a theme park and playground for well-heeled tourists, with
the storied history of both slave and free mingling in the historic streets of
New Orleans preserved here and there for local color, if at all. The sharp
contrast of the Catholic ethos mingled with the African Traditional religions
of spiritualism and vodun, the Jewish population
mixing it up with the Protestants, and all partaking of the freewheeling
atmosphere and joy of the Mardi Gras season: none of this is the same when
those who lent not only their sweat but their soul to the festivities go
missing. Before Katrina New Orleans was the model city for those of us who
study religion, with its healthy mix of ritual practices permeating the streets
in defiance of the traditional oppositions of the sacred and profane.
History danced second-line with the present.
In the sanitized New Orleans
of today, the past is instead a sad and happy memory that waves to us weakly as
it disappears, day by day.
So yes, I am sad,
and I long for New Orleans
to return to its former vibrancy. As a historian, however, I am a pragmatist at
the end of the day, and I know that New
Orleans can never be what it was. A picture that
sticks in my mind encapsulates the remark that perhaps got me into the most
trouble in my Revealer piece. I
equated President Bush with the Antichrist for not sending aid faster. Harsh,
but I meant it at the time. I will not
repeat that remark here. Rather, I will simply recall Presidents Bush’s speech
in Jackson Square,
where he pledged the government’s help to the people of New Orleans. The past three years have passed
an unkind verdict on the President’s promises. What stays with me now is the
image of President Bush on the Square, in a city without electricity, the St.
Louis Cathedral lit up with generators like a Disneyworld
castle in the background. Not far from that spot is the port of New Orleans,
where the slave ships rolled in. In the
news footage of Bush’s shameful performance, the strangely lit cathedral,
beautiful in its own right, looked to me like a whitewashed tomb. And the
darkness was deep behind it. To the slaves that came in on the boats, the
church perhaps looked the same way. Then
as now the promise of light seemed to beckon beauty,
but the reality was a kind of death.