Introduction:
The cryptic title comes from the notes that the National Guard spray-painted on the fronts of houses and buildings in New Orleans in the aftermath of the Storm. “1 dead in attic” is what they found at one particular house on September 5th, 2005. Author Chris Rose is a writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune; what follows is a compilation from his book.
“EPIPHANIES FROM KATRINA”First of all, we thank you. For your money, your water, your food, your prayers, your boats and buses and the men and women of the National Guard, the fire departments, hospitals, and all the other volunteers who have come to our rescue.
…How did we get here? What happened to my tough-lovin’, hard-luck, good-timin’ hometown? Mercy.
I have cowered in fear this year from the real and the imagined. … I have wept, for hours on end, days on end. The crying jags, I guess they’re therapeutic, but give me a break. … People in public are stoic and patient, public meltdowns being as common as piles of debris in this town.
What’s that over there? Oh, just some dude, crying his butt off. Nothing new here. Show’s over, people, move along.
This event has come to define our city, our lives, our destiny. Nothing comparable has ever happened in modern times in America, and there is no blueprint for how we do this. In the days after It happened, everybody went into operational mode: Survive. Wing it. Do good work. Save someone or something. Call your relatives and tell them you’re OK.
You’d have to be crazy to want to live here. You’d have to be plumb out of reasonable options elsewhere. Then, again, I have discovered that the only thing worse than being in New Orleans these days is NOT being in New Orleans. She’s a siren calling us home. It cannot be explained.
“They don’t get us,” is the common refrain you hear from frustrated residents who think the government and the nation have turned a blind eye to us in our time of need. Then again, if they did get us, if we were easily boxed and labeled, I suppose we’d be just Anyplace, USA. And that won’t do.
You probably already know that we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you’d probably hire an exterminator to get out of your yard. We dance even if there’s no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large and, frankly, we’re suspicious of others who don’t.
The only way you could understand is if you have been here, and so many of you have. So you realize that when you strip away all the craziness and the bars and parades and music and architecture, really, the best thing about where we come from is US. It’s a tale so often told that it borders on platitude but it is also the searing truth: We are the music. We are the food. We are the dance. We are the tolerance. We are the spirit.
We are what made New Orleans a national treasure. We’re good people. Don’t be afraid to ask us how to pronounce things – it happens all the time. And when you meet us and look into our eyes, you will see a trace of the saddest story ever told. Our hearts are broken into a thousand pieces.
But don’t pity us. We’re gonna make it. We’re resilient. After all, we’ve been rooting for the Saints football team for over 35 years. That’s got to count for something.
OK, maybe something else you should know about us is that we make jokes at inappropriate times. But what the hell.
So come see us. We will repay to you all the hospitality and generosity of spirit you offered to us in the season of our despair. That is our promise. That is our faith.
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A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church in Worcester, Mass.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
The story of Epiphany is all about strange and wonderful gifts, coming in unexpected, even weird, places. The familiar story of the wise men’s visit with Baby Jesus and his parents – what could possibly be stranger and more unexpected than a newborn baby, so poor and powerless that his mother was forced to give birth in a cowshed, receiving expensive and symbolic – and even unwanted – gifts from rich and exotic strangers? What gifts could be more weird, what place more unforeseen than that?
Well, for the 2-plus years following Katrina, we in New Orleans have been experiencing our own epiphanies, our own revelations of gifts in unexpected places. We have learned some things we most likely would not or could not have learned any other way, including some we didn’t even want to know. I am grateful to my colleagues Tom Schade and Barbara Merritt for this opportunity to share some of them with you.
Yesterday, as my plane circled over New Orleans for my journey here, I could see spread out below me a sea of tarp stretched over roofs, in the color known around town as FEMA blue. And I thought of what all those blue roofs mean to the people in my city – the losses of homes and belongings and precious keepsakes, the deaths of loved ones, the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods, the long diaspora and forced exile, the loss of jobs, the breakdown of the services and resources that ordinary Americans have the right to expect from their local, state and federal governments. In some cases, the blue tarp was the last work done, and the tattered tarp shreds blow forlornly in the wind.
According to the mayor and the U.S. Postal Service, the city is back to 80% of its pre-Katrina population, but this cannot be proven from the thousands of still-abandoned houses in New Orleans, even in the block around First Church’s, some not even gutted out, still full of mold and destroyed furnishings and possessions. (Maybe the mayor is counting the over 12,000 homeless folks living under the I-10 overpass.) One thing we’ve learned is that official pronouncements – like our population is back to 80% of its pre-storm strength, or the pledge that New Orleans will rebuilt even better, or your Road Home money will be coming soon – cannot be held as gospel.
Another thing we’ve learned is that some pre-Katrina values do not hold up. Before IT happened (we have many ways to refer to what happened to us, and many of us can’t stand to hear the K-word any more. So we talk about the Thing and It and the Storm and even You-Know), we were like you – we hated seeing piles of trash in our neighborhoods, fearing a threat to our property values. But now, 2 years later, we thrill to the sight of giant piles of trash and debris and ruined possessions outside a building in our neighborhood. We think, “Another family or business coming back!” and we’re giddy with optimism. A local candy maker has even memorialized these symbols of renewal with a special confection of coconut, raisins, and marshmallows drizzled over with chocolate, called “trash piles.” (They’re delicious – you can order them at BlueFrogChocolates.com. We need the money.)
I guess that leads to an obvious additional lesson that we have gained – that a healthy sense of humor and irony can help you to cope with almost anything. One New Orleans man told his sobbing wife, on looking at their destroyed house, “It’s OK, darlin’, I never liked that house anyway.” We have found ways to laugh at or at least snicker over what has happened to us and the antics of elected leaders at all levels. We put it to music; we satirize it on our Mardi Gras floats. There is nothing so tragic and horrible that we can’t find some way to make fun of it. It’s keeping us sane.
Another thing keeping us sane is our culture, our traditions. We cling to our music, our food, our special way of talking, our festivals. They make us who we are; they remind us of why we’re fighting this fight. I thank you for including so much New Orleans music in this service to make me feel at home.
We’ve also learned that race and class do matter. It was nice, before, to pretend to think that we were all the same, that none of the categories made much difference, but we were only fooling ourselves. After the storm, it was very clear that the color of your skin and the amount of money and education you had spelled life or death, forced permanent removal or voluntary temporary evacuation, homelessness or getting an insurance check. Katrina taught us to be more aware and proactive on race and class.
We’ve leaned that it’s easier to open or reopen a restaurant in New Orleans after a disaster than a grocery store. There are now officially more restaurants in the city than there were pre-K – but fewer than 70% of the grocery stores than we had before. At least 40% of the city’s drugstores have not reopened. Milk costs $5 a gallon, just because they can. We drive past at least 2 abandoned grocery stores to get to one that is open, and none are open 7 days a week, 24-hours a day – in a town where the bars and night clubs never close.
We’ve learned that it’s silly to let things separate a family. In my family, as in many New Orleans families, we have more than our share of char-ack-ters and unique individuals, and before the world ended, we’d get into tiffs with each other that had this one not speaking to that one and so on. At First Church, before, we’d often find ourselves in a not-all-that-friendly rivalry with the 2 other UU churches in the New Orleans metro area. Now, we’ve figured out that all that was a sad waste of time, energy, and emotion. All over the city, feuding families have drawn closer together, just as mine has. And now the First Church, Community Church, and North Shore Unitarian Universalists have banded together in mutual support and comfort. We’ve learned that being a family is more important than highlighting and worrying about differences.
As part of our coming together, the 3 New Orleans-area UU churches have formed a cluster, the Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalists, pronounced “Guh-Noo.” We are putting together a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization to generate grants for shared social justice and community outreach projects, such as our partnership with the New Orleans AIDS Task Force to redo the ruined kitchen at First Church as a commercial catering center for delivering meals to HIV and AIDS clients 5 days a week, which can be used by all 3 congregations for events and projects on nights and weekends. And we are in the process of kicking off an unprecedented shared Capital Campaign for all 3 UU New Orleans congregations to raise funds over 3 years for the arduous task of rebuilding Unitarian Universalism in the area.
Finally, we’ve learned that we are not alone, that people around the country care about us, even if the government seems to be letting us down. Countless volunteers have flowed to New Orleans and to the Volunteer Center housed at First Church, and their hands-on work has been an enormous blessing to the city and to the church. We’ve learned that “the kindness of strangers” is a misnomer – these kind strangers flowing into New Orleans are just friends we haven’t met yet. We’ve responded to the help we’ve re-ceived by extending help ourselves. In the 2 years since Katrina, First Church has collected several thousand dollars for our partner church in Transylvania, for flood victims in Ohio, and for fire victims in California.
In this strange new world not of our making, we are seeking the sup-port and help of our fellow UUs around the country, individuals and churches, to partner with us and make financial pledges to our combined Capital Campaign. And even though the campaign has only just started, we have already received nearly $300,000 either out-right or in pledges. An anonymous donor in California has given $100,000 and has pledged at least another $100,000. As a sign of their solidarity with us, a small UU church in Washington State has pledged $75,000 over 3 years – which indicates to us what might be possible for larger churches. We also hope for continued help from both skilled and unskilled volunteers, to help us rebuild our building and that of Community Church. We feel relatively optimistic and guardedly hopeful – which, we have learned, is about the best you can expect from folks dealing with so much post-traumatic stress.
This is not the first time that New Orleans has come close to total destruction; both the tides of history and tides of water have threatened us before. Back in 1870, New Orleans writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about the conditions after the Civil War to a friend in Cincinnati. I’ll close with you a part of that epistle:
Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.So that’s how things are with us. We may be crazy, and probably are, but we’d rather live in a drowned city we love with a thousand challenges, than live somewhere else clean and pristine and efficient. We are wounded but game, down but not out. We are committed and determined about the restoration and recovery of our beloved, messed-up city. (As one of my wise elder parishioners has said, “We won’t give up on the old girl!”) We are New Orleans and we believe, with all our hearts, that we can make it. We ask for your help, and for your prayers.
