HARMONY OF PAST, FUTURE A
WHISPER TO A ROAR AND MELODY
OF NEW ORLEANS IN BETWEEN
By Tommy
Tomlinson
The Charlotte
Observer | August 30, 2006
NEW ORLEANS — Sounds defined the day. But let’s start with a quiet one. The soft scratching of a pen on a banner to honor the dead.
The man writes it out then traces back over it so the words won’t fade.
Louise Thecla Jones Casimire. May 25, 1922-September 05, 2005
4:10 a.m.
His name is Omar Casimire and he does custom paint jobs for houses. A year ago, when the storm came, he and his mother got separated.
He evacuated to Arkansas. She was transported to Baton Rouge. It was too much for her. She just stopped eating and seven days later that was it.
Omar wants to build a park in tribute to the victims of Katrina. But that is a long way off. Right now what he has is a pen and a thought.
Mother, my hands is over your heart.
As he finished Tuesday morning after the ceremony at City Hall you could still hear the bells that people had in their hands.
They chimed them all at once at 9:38 a.m., the moment one year ago that the first levee broke and a great city nearly went under.
There were all number of words spoken in New Orleans on this first anniversary, reams of speeches, stacks of prayers. The president was here and the mayor was everywhere and the news crews followed them all over town.
But some words are still hard for people to say. One of them is the thing itself. Katrina.
In the paper sometimes they just call it “K.” When people talk they tend to say “the storm,” as if it were a beast in a cheap horror novel, ready to rise from the loam if you named it.
And so people find other ways to speak.
Just before noon the Algiers Brass Band gathered in the shadow of the Superdome.
The Superdome was a football stadium - and will be again, starting next month - but now it is also a haunted house.
A year ago, water covered the pavement out here on Poydras Street. A year ago, thousands were trapped inside for days of fear and misery. A year ago, in the dome, three people died.
On Tuesday the Algiers Brass Band picked up their horns and strapped on their drums and marched down the street, playing “Glory Road.”
It’s a New Orleans tradition, the jazz funeral. No other city understands as well how grief seasons joy, how joy makes sense of grief, how one can sound so much like the other.
So here went the band down Poydras, over to Loyola, down Canal, then onto Rampart Street at the edge of the French Quarter.
Spectators came off the curb and fell in with the band, a woman toting a parasol with black feathers, an old man wearing a U.S. Navy cap, and people were crying as they danced.
New Orleans never has made sense. The two choices in government are inefficient or corrupt and sometimes you get both. The tourist trade is based on drinking so much that you forget your vacation. And the whole city is built on a sliver of swamp between a giant lake and the Mississippi River.
But somehow over the years it became one of the most seductive places in the world, dirty but elegant, dangerous but charming, poor in the pocketbook but rich in the soul.
New Orleans is your musician friend, the one who sleeps until noon and never seems to have a real job but can sit down and play something that reminds you there is still beauty in the world.
Sometimes you want to smack him. Sometimes you want to be him.
Logic says don’t rebuild. Logic says New Orleans will never be the same. But logic is not all we live on.
It’s about time for me to come home but the city plays on outside my window, the rough music of rush hour, cab drivers leading with their horns.
I’ve heard so much music these past few days but there’s one sound I’ll remember most.
I was in the Lower Ninth Ward, the place K hit the hardest. The houses were empty or gone and all you could hear were the bugs in the bushes.
All of a sudden an engine sputtered.
I followed the sound and found the Rev. Herbert Brown cutting the grass in his sister’s yard.
The reverend wore a hard hat with the word JESUS. He’s an associate minister with the Church of God in Christ. His house down the road in Violet was destroyed. His sister’s house is waterlogged but livable. So he’s living in there and she’s living in a trailer beside it.
In most of New Orleans the grass has not been touched in a year. Nature looks ready to reclaim the land. But Herbert Brown is not ready to give it up yet.
“I don't know what’s going to happen to this place,” he said. “But we’ve got to do the little bit we can do.”
He cranked up the mower again and in this musical city somehow that made the sweetest sound, a guy out cutting the grass, a step back in time, back to how it was before August 29, 9:38 a.m., one year ago.
Reprinted with permission of the Charlotte Observer.