With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastation, I discovered that I am a member of the post-Katrina diaspora. At a meeting of the Unified New Orleans Rebuilding Committee, I listened as several national and local city planners and architects presented their ideas for helping each neighborhood in New Orleans recover. I heard one of the consultants recommend that each neighborhood work to help those citizens who were lost in the “diaspora” return. The diaspora, such a melancholy and significant sounding term for what I experience mainly as a sensation of floating above the ground, my roots hovering loosely above the city of New Orleans and above the city of Houston. In my mind's eye, I see myself disembodied, a truncated tree whose roots hang precariously above the earth beneath them, sometimes briefly touching the ground in one city, sometimes in the other. At times, my roots simply sway aimlessly.
New Orleans was founded upon and still sits upon muck, swampy, porous muck. It is not even solid enough to contain its dead; tombs must be built above ground to avoid the water table that lies so close to the surface. Yet, for 300 years, we of New Orleans have lived here, captivated by its culture, its music, its sense of history, and its sense of place. Believing, as we do, in its soul, we have withstood heat, crushing humidity, mosquitoes, yellow fever epidemics, and hurricanes. Never in all that time have we seen the likes of Katrina. She has tested us and our resolve. She has created a diaspora of proportions never thought of by true New Orleanians. Our citizens are caught up in the dilemma, do we leave or do we stay? Some who are gone even ask, do we return?
Houston, where many of us migrated, is founded on solid prairie. Its drainage system is not always adequate, and during heavy rainstorms some of its streets flood. Yet, its earth is solid beneath our feet. There are no levees surrounding the city, taunting us with the possibility of rupture. Unlike New Orleans, it functions. Citizens pay property taxes, providing schools, clean streets, and neatly cared for, often beautifully landscaped, neutral grounds and parks. It has everything money can buy, but I have yet to find its soul. Its citizens are from everywhere. I wonder, is no one born in Houston?
In my new apartment there, the solid ground beneath me provides much sought-after security. Its people, acclimated to newcomers, openly welcome me in a friendly, outgoing manner. It is pleasant and reassuring. Its opera, symphony, ballet, museums, and theater feed my mind and my aesthetics. Yet, I stand on its streets, its sidewalks, and its parks and remember New Orleans. I am drawn back to the city of my birth, back to my ancestors' home. It seems as though everyone who lives in New Orleans has been born in New Orleans.
So I return there, over and over again. After all, I have an intact house, even though my neighborhood was partially flooded and only half repopulated. The image of my roots floating aimlessly between Houston and New Orleans haunts me. It is the bubbling muck of New Orleans that sucks at me, grasps at me, and threatens to recapture my soul. I struggle to avoid its seductive power. I wonder how many of us caught in the post-Katrina diaspora suffer the same ambivalence, the same pull to return combined with the same fear of disaster. Can any of us take the chance that should we return, we could re-experience that searing loss of all that we once dreamed of and owned? Taunting us with memories of its soul, like a decadent mistress, it beckons us. “Come to me,” New Orleans whispers. “Remember what I gave you, and what I still offer.”
I have but to drive down the lakefront street to my home to see what she offers: blighted homes, debris cluttered sidewalks, uncut grass, and decaying swimming pools whose surfaces flutter with hatching mosquito larvae. Many of its citizens suffer from chronic anxiety and depression. In the never-flooded fully repopulated areas uptown and in the French Quarter, life seemingly goes on as it did before the storm. I say seemingly because those who live in that section of the city religiously avoid driving 20 blocks north from their area toward the lakefront and the breached levees. It is the only way to deal with the reality of 200,000 people migrated and an area of gutted, dusty, empty, and decaying homes seven times the area of Manhattan. Homes awaiting the bulldozers, the developers, the return of the displaced. This new Pompeii must be seen to be believed. It must be avoided to maintain sanity.
Sitting at one of the choice marble-top tables along the wrought iron railing of the Café du Monde, I look around. Even though it is the middle of the week on a sultry August
Sylvia J. Schneller, M.D., is a training analyst at the New Orleans-Birmingham Psychoanalytic Center. Although involved in the supervision and teaching of candidates, she no longer accepts new patients. Instead, she devotes her time to writing fiction and creative non-fiction.
day, I should have had to fight the crowd to obtain this spot at the edge of the covered patio. After all, this is the best place to watch the clown ply his balloon trade. Many times I have enjoyed watching my grandchildren beg him to make them a rabbit, a sword, or, more significantly, a purple, green, and gold figure. The numerous vacant tables bring home the reality of post-Katrina New Orleans.
The French Quarter is eerily silent. The streets are clean of the all too familiar litter that usually fills the curbside gutter after the all night party. None of the shopkeepers are outside with their brooms sweeping away the debris. A lone trumpet player serenades the few patrons with a sad, wailing sound. His selections, spirituals; among them, “A Closer Walk with Thee” speak volumes for the mood of the moment. A few tourists, pleased with the entertainment, drop dollar bills into his trumpet case. A group of young people in their mid-teens slowly walk down the ramp from the Moonwalk. The vacant, embarrassed look on their faces as the clown attempts to engage them in his usual banter over balloons, makes me wonder if they are one of the numerous groups of young people who have come to New Orleans from all over the country to aid in the recovery effort. Facing a day of sweltering heat gutting a mold-infested home does not lend itself to frivolity.
Looking across the street at the umber colored Pontalba apartments, I experience the city's seductive pull. As I brush the powdered sugar from the beignets off my t-shirt, I remember many other such occasions, occasions filled with laughter. Be careful never to wear a black dress or shirt when going to the French Market for coffee and doughnuts was the dictum from my youth. You'll never be able to get the sugar off.
I am flooded with other memories: the insistent sound of jazz music filling the streets at night, the haunting song of the steamboat's whistle as it leaves the dock, the mingling aromas from food booths lining Jackson Square during the French Quarter Festival, the sight of ships plowing through the current as I sit listening to music on the lawn by the Aquarium. So many sights, smells, and sounds of New Orleans.
The image of my uprooted self comes forcefully into my mind. My truncated being, blown toward Houston, trails its roots behind it in the wind. The longest and strongest of the group reaches back to New Orleans, its tip sinking into the dark, black, muddy soil. Halfway to Houston, I am still attached by the tip of that one root to New Orleans's past and its hoped-for future. It will take another Katrina-like wind to wrench it fully from the ground.