5 years later

Happened to be down in NOLA (New Orleans La) this past weekend, not becuz it was the 5th anniversary, but because Lorna Donaldson, that straw bale maven, was arriving in NOLA and I needed to gather a little bit of pick up footage. The timing seemed to meld with our personal missions perfectly.. Only after I booked my flight did I realize...good lord. Five years to the day. And the TV was , excuse me, flooded with mini and maxi documentaries, all of which I watched. I'm afraid nothing totally lit my jets. No, not even Spike Lee's If God willing an da Creek Don't Rise. Harrowing scenes, and the pain Lee found was painted in living color, and it was terrible to watch but there was something else I wanted to see and exactly what that is, I don't know.

Lorna has been loaned a double shot gun, which is a house design that has an unfortunate connotation, but refers to the possibility (ONLY please, the connotation, but good god, not the reality though it sometimes is) -- of firing a shotgun and having the bullet sail cleanly through the front and back doors, passing through the living room, a bedroom, another bedroom the kitchen a wash room -- every room in the long narrow house. In New York, we call them railroad apartments. The function of the shotgun design is to allow fan stirred breezes to cool things down. And they do. Beautifully. In the mornings of my four day stay, I threw open the inner solid doors, front and back, kept the wrought iron gates latched, turned on all four fans, and did my I Chuan exercises, and it was exhilerating to feel the breezes whipping through the house. Traditionally, the shotguns in the Lower 9th ward didn't have doors (according to mama sue) and the hard wood floors have mostly become linoleum.

The stats say that only 25% of the residents of the Lower 9th have returned. Here are four shotguns I took pictures of. One (right) has been rebuilt to a faretheewell, including a sweet front yard flower garden. The house has been painted meticulously, but amazingly, AROUND, not effacing, the crude 'X' that the City inspectors drew in the days after the storm, noting three things -- at the top, the date, the initials of the inspector and in one space inside the intersecting lines whether any dead bodies had been found. Or dead or living animals. The owners of this house, as with many around the city of NO, have chosen to preserve the X and the hastily written code. No, we don't want to forget how it looked. That 'X' was the best bit of memorializing "art" I've seen.

So many have become overgrown with vines, the land and power of nature drawing them back into the dense Mississippi delta mud. The one at the top of the post I worried had been left to rot, but I'm hopeful still someone might adopt it. There's someone who cares, at least a little. A small business card with the owner's name is wedged into the brand spanking new chain link fence that has put up to guard against the crackheads who are causing mischief up and down the streets. I was -- strangely, I know -- tempted to jot the e-mail address down. I loved the way it was set back from the street, and boasted a second story. Imagine the breeze on that upper balcony. I'd keep the strangling vines.

The one Lorna and I stayed in (above) has been rebuilt, painted a sober New England gray, the 'X' covered over, for what seems to be an investment. In about four months, after which Lorna will mostly likely have left, paying tenants will live in them. But down the road, in the farther along the way future, when the fate of the Lower 9th has been decided, these shotguns might fetch a good price.

So, our lovely double Shotgun begs the question: What will happen when the city of NO decides enough is enough and the 50+ percent of these houses have to be razed? Who is going to lay claim to the land, the real estate of the Lower Ninth? That's what I haven't seen in the gut wrenching films that have chosen to revisit the Katrina disaster. The wailing continues in the poor districts, and among the poor in general. I know from Mama Sue how the debt to that storm will never be paid off. But now it's time to look into the board rooms, and back rooms. Have yet to see some fine journalism on that subject.

But for me, looking at the face of an aging Katrina meant looking at the clapboard shotgun houses. How are they looking five years later?

The main thing this week -- or the one I'm writing about -- is about August's computer. My plea for a donated laptop, so that August could be connected to the plans and ideas for the Garden of H.O.P.E. (Helping Other People with Everything) Being as I worry he's not connected with we planners and plotters and since we do most of our communicating on the internet, shouldn't he be able to read and "talk" back to us?

One lead and conversation leads to another, and after mentioning my wish for a donated computer to a friend I learn about Alan of Alans Affordable Computers and Repair. Alan is noted for his computer donation program. He donates computers to poor school children around the U.S., veterans groups, dozens of computers are sent to people living in Gaza. Alan loved the mission of our Garden down there in St. B.

Long story short. Two nights ago, one came in! in. Keys had been pulled out by the previous owner’s children, the screen is a little funky but very serviceable. It's def internet-worthy, Alan said. Ran down Saturday a.m. to get it. And sure enough – it works!

The great thing is I found a neighborhood cafe (on - line of course) called Kitchen Cafe, around THE CORNER from August's house (I couldn't believe this. There's not much in that part of the Parish and at first I could only find places with names like Latte Cafe up in Meraux and no way August was going to spring for a $3.-- cup of coffee in the "wrong" that is white part of town. (There's that crazy gap – racial gap I mean. It’s closing, in all the corners of the Parish, but there are folks who still feel that it hasn’t, and sometimes I think August fits into that group but I know I don’t know what the real story is. And to be sure there are some who wish that it isn’t) So yesterday, tooling around for the second time on the web, when I found the Kitchen Cafe, walking distance from where August lives on Guerra Drive, there was that feeling of aha! A new spot, whose owner, Selma (as in Selma, Alabama she told me) was in the process of hooking up her router. She has a high counter where people who just want a cup of coffee and to spend time on the internet can sit. And too, Selma is very interested in the Garden, or at least the affordable organic produce that is soon going to be available. I was pleased, talking to Selma, networking like this. Let’s hope things keep on keepin' on like this.

I leave Thursday for New Orleans and will be staying in a house in the Lower 9^th that some very kind woman, a hydrologist, is loaning Lorna, our straw bale maven.

Will try to post something every day if I can figure out how to do it on my phone.

Many pieces still to be put in place, like how hundreds of straw bales are going to be transported from somewhere in the mid-west to New Orleans. Like how they will get from the train yard to the acre in Canaervon. Like who will unload them. Like finding the funds for a ton of compost and finding yet more funds for a nice fence. I insist that it not be chain link. Want those square holes and how wonderful if the posts could be round, to match the posts of our future gazebo.

Wish us luck and send money!

Straw Bale Gardening Here We Come!

Mama Sue has surfaced! Shot me an e-mail to say she's home, looking forward to seeing me. She's been moody. Hmph. That's a euphemism for somethin'

But this post is exclusively about The Garden of HOPE, a name which Sue gave our proposed garden, which she says stands for Helping Other People with Everything. This was a field of dreams for Mama Sue, August, Lettie Lee. Not a baseball diamond, a real garden, a community garden with different fantasies for each person. Mama Sue envisioned a "place of peace." With all her infirmities, she wasn't goin' to do no plantin' but what she wanted was to recreate a bit of the feeling she had as the neighborhood "mama," who kept a pond in her front yard full of minnows, small turtles, gold fish and what all, where kids would stop by, and in delight watch these specimans of small aquatic life. This is how she got the moniker -- Mama Sue. Hurricane K swept it all away. If she could sit in the Garden's gazebo which she envisions is surrounded by a small stream and four little bridges crossing into it, and tell stories to the kids who'd drop by...(the pic you see here is of a gazebo that sits in a pond in a park "upriver" in St. Bernard and this is the idea Sue has for our -- for her -- gazebo in the Garden of H. It's nautical with its round piling-like posts, and such a lovely bit of architecture, but convincing the hard-nosed gardener types who are involved with us that we need a gazebo at all is requiring all our skills of persuasion.)

August envisions a place where he would work the land, and teach the youth of Guerra Drive (August always shakes his head and smiles ruefully when he says "Guerra Drive.") Give 'em something' to do, he says. And we both know that if he could turn one kid on to growing and harvesting, he'd have accomplished something. The Garden of HOPE Is far from Guerra Drive. You need a car (bus lines were swept away by Hurricane K) but they'd get down there with help from a parent or August himself, and in time, the idea would "ketch on." and they could start small gardens on the empty lots all along Guerra Drive - which are abundant, little reminders of the houses that used to exist before Katrina. Thousands of cement slabs waiting to be torn up are all over St. Bernard. The pop. in St. B is down by about half.

Lettie Lee just likes the idea. She's got a black thumb she says -- all her house plants die promptly under her care -- but she's very civic minded and like August thinks that this might be good for the children of St. Bernard Parish.

But our green acre has in all honesty been going nowhere. I've envisioned what it would sound like if it were a sound effect which is like a car in the deep trenches of winter that grinds painfully and you know is not going to start up. Or a computer that whirs quietly and pitifully and won't boot up. I have to be honest, it warn't goin nowhere. We have exactly $400 in our bank account, nitrogen-poor soil that needs major amending, the promise of a free tractor, which has yet to materialize, and receding hopes.

Until Lorna Donaldson, a retired organic farmer from Tennessee got wind of our garden, our dreams for it, and swooped in like a fairy godmother to say she'd help us get the full acre planted this fall. Seeds to be donated by Baker Heirloom Seeds. Yes! Since, like all of us, she watched in disbelief as the BP spill ended most of this season's (we all know it might be much longer) fishing along the Gulf, she's thought long and hard about what can be done -- what she can do.

Lorna is promoting an old, but little used method of growing called Straw Bale Gardening. Instead of soil, you use bales of hay (or straw), covered with a thin layer -- 1 - 2 inches -- of compost. You don't need to mess with soil, bugs are minimal, back aches are less severe because you're not bending down so far. And she will give us enough straw bales to cover the entire acre, and help raise the money for the compost and the fence (didn't have the heart to mention our need of a fence) and provide August a bit of training. But I don't think he'll need more than five minutes. I hope only that there's no disagreement about what our first crop should consist of. The dark greens of course -- collards, and what not, tomatoes, okra (gumbo ingredient) Someone who lives down in St. B told me that African women would stow okra seeds in their hair as they were being hauled away to slavery. So okra has to go in there.

Our plans are to meet in a week and a half, a week from Thursday -- all of us -- Mama Sue, August, Lettie Lee -- over a plate of red beans and rice somewhere in da Parish talking it all through with Lorna and get this ball rolling. Please -- no hitches please!

I'm looking forward to seeing my old friends. Plan on shooting an hour of August describing his boyhood when I have a feeling practically his only pleasure was simple gardening. A 9 year old boy enjoying nothing more than growing beans. August has told me stories about how it was the nuns in the orphanage where he grew up - in the 50's -- who taught him how to grow things. So much detail I've wanted to glean, but which he hasn't parted with. But I've learned that he raised chicks too and the nuns gave him baskets of eggs to take door to door. August has bemoaned (miserably) growing up in an orphanage. He's also told me that he'd be another lost soul if he hadn't. I'm very curious to see what he'll teach these boys on Guerra Drive to do.

A plea here. If you happen to have a laptop, notebook, iPad, netbook that is available to donate to the Garden of HOPE. Totally tax deductible. August is going to have to be in e-mail touch. Is going to have to receive materials from Lorna, and myself and be able to send us information far more easily than he's been able to with his very temperamental cell phone. His phone is frankly a pain in the ass. Thanks!

More info on the garden (and lots of other stuff) can be found on my website: www.oneeyedcatproductions.com/ along with a way to get in direct touch if you happen to have a laptop or $5,000 for a fence. Website still a little rough in places. Why I haven't mentioned it till now.

Family Reunion

Sometimes, as with the demonstration in behalf of the mosque being built in Brooklyn -- and I have to add an update on that soon because the ADL has really pissed me off -- things in my own life become front and center. Going back a couple o years to describe my live as a hapless videographer in a disaster zone which I've been attempting to do -- even that recedes into the settled past. And anyway, Mama Sue has not surfaced. She's back in Texas maybe, still comforting an ex-, whose wife recently died. And I can only wonder...has she reunited with Anthony? Is she dumping Lou? She's the subject of my film, the sole focus of my strange task, and it seems I should try to find out. Then, too, the lines dividing filmmaker and subject have tangled, and we have become (in a way) friends. But it's also possible she's dumping me. Maybe my camera and my eternal questions are one more part of the Katrina aftermath, and when she said at one point "I am remaking me" she hinted that she was going to decide that that included ultimately throwing over her chronicler (me).

But the last week I've been -- whew! -- engaged in a family reunion. A friend wrote in an email, 'Hope your reunion wasn't too stressful, as family gatherings can sometimes be (or maybe always are!).'

The night we were supposed to be watching a slide presentation of our geneaology, which stretches back only three generations before mine (born in the 50's) child of the WWII generation, and grandchild of immigrants from the shtetls), I was curled up under the covers, unable to face the crowd. Cousins gently knocked on the door and offered reasons to ignore the slights and join them down in the hotel dining room. If for no other reason than it would please our Aunt Sylvia -- our elder, at nearly 98. And our younger cousin, who has been washing and cleaning old photos by the hundreds, and wading bravely into geneaological software, was camped out at the side of the road in New Hampshire, similarly unable to face it all.

This was Day One of the family reunion. We, young geneaologist and myself, had been cajoling others to not forsake us, and to attend the presentation of photographs, videos and an extended diagram of our family tree, but as camped-out younger cousin noted, "not everyone is interested in our family history." So we had to plead, and by the end when younger cousin, our slaving over chemical trays cousin herself grew lightheaded, couldn't drive any farther and e-mailing from a library begged for our forgiveness, there I was, weeping. But what is a family reunion without weeping and the *star* freaking out on the roadside?

And then Aunt Evelyn cracked me up, when all was forgiven and we'd washed our faces and came to the table, threw the family geneaology up on the computer screen -- when she said with her trademark startling honesty -- it -- geneaology -- is "boring." And to be honest, it's not that interesting. The chart with little circles for female relatives and squares for males (or maybe it's the other way around) And names in tiny print stretching sideways so far, you have to scroll the page left or right to take them in, the page lurching haphazardly towards one wing or another. Who cares?! That I have second cousins in Akron, or that so and so married and has three children?

Until I learned that my grandmother's brother, Charlie, had scarlet fever at age 4, and became deaf and wound up in a Catholic (or Protestant) boarding school for the deaf (all this was in Montreal, back in the 20's) where he flourished, marrying Pansy, also deaf, and mute as well. We murmured when we learned that they remained Protestants, or Catholics -- out of gratitude we all assumed. Back then, people stared solemnly into the camera, as though they were sitting for an oil portrait, but not my great grandmother, Channa (changed to Anna by immigration). Her smile was crooked, wide, rich. From the gut. What/Who gave her that supremely contented smile? With her big floppy hat, and sun dresses in every shot, we all agreed she could have been part of the impressionist movement of painters. Widowed three times (though first husband is only a rumor. Who was he we murmured) she stood, like a pioneer woman, looking square into the camera, her daughter, granddaughter and occasionally great grand daughter in the shot with her. Young cousin geneaologist remarked repeatedly -- "the four matriarchs!" David Zvi, whose name matches that of a name on a list found in an on-line note, that of a tinker in the tiny shtetl, Pode Illoie, in Rumania, where we had the Rumanian spelling of our name -- Hahamovici -- moved to then-Palestine, and started a family line one of whom marrired into a line that changed their name to Gur. Gur? Like the name of the Hebrews you read about in the Bible?! Was that their idea? Were they Biblically-oriented immigrants? Why did they take on the name Gur? The Hahamys, the offspring of that fleeing resident of Pode Illoie struck out for a life in Palestine, while my grandparents, after a new tax on the Jews of Pode Illoie, scrambled for enough money for steerage to Canada. Pa (as my grandfather was called) sought to bring his sister Fagie over, and with his brother Louis received permission, even though she was not going to be a farmer, which as one document our geneaologist uncovered, was the sole skill sought after by Canadian Immigration. But if she were free of diseases, if she were literate, and if she would promise to work in their coffee and tea business...then she could come. And she did. Our Uncle Dave, who had remained silent whenever asked about his experiences in WWII, a "just war," he said, revealed his memories. When Uncle Dave, a self described Socialist, knew he was dying, he finally spoke about it, answering a dozen questions posed to him by our family historian. It was nearing 1 a.m. and a few of us read his words over each others' shoulders. He had ridden onto the beaches of Normandy two weeks after D-Day. (young cousin, the interlocutor) Q: 'What were you feeling then?' He replied, 'What was I -- a Jewish kid from Montreal -- doing here?' 'He must have other thoughts and feelings' I said aloud. 'That was a cover up for something more.' 'No, that was it!' the historian replied. 'That says it all.' We read, we pored over the pictures, discussed, argued and glanced at the spindly, many armed tree.

The past. It throws as much mystery at you as it provides information. But it's the mystery of it that gives you a kind of thrill. And there's a feeling of arriving at corroboration. History is real, it's true! Finding my place in the common history of the world has a sort of wonder in it and somehow -- it's strange how intense the feeling is -- it fills me with joy. And I feel literally connected. Those long skinny lines, taking left and right turns and dropping down and down like the thread of a spider, until there I am, a circle below a circle and a square. A square (or a circle) next to me, labelled Al. Some day maybe there'll be a descendant of my wing sitting on the floor around a coffee table with a bunch of cousins and someone will throw out a detail about their distant cousin, a generation or two above them on the "family tree." And that as yet unborn being will muse, "I think she was a filmmaker" Someone else as yet unborn: "Oh yeah?"

She's a Survivor

Back to Mama Sue. When I think of Mama Sue now, I see a rapidly aging woman, a woman growing old way before her time. With an eye out for "the Katrina story" I would always ask, was this -- your unravelling health -- or your marital, um, stew -- or your lack of work -- or... -- the result of Katrina or would you have been "miserable" anyway? Strange things to be asking. Looking back, not a necessary question at all.

But Sue, though in her mid 50's, hobbles with rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. And, as a result of Katrina, which she survived through a set of events, decisions, quick thinking, and as Sue would say, with the intervention of "God or the deity of your choice," she developed the nastiest of foot infections and had a few front teeth knocked out. But hair was gelled and she was wearing maybe a touch of mascara when she sat down opposite me to relate her Katrina tale, and I could see she'd been a "beauty." She loved to tell me about her straight chestnut hair so long she could sit on it.

When I moved down to Violet, three years ago, one of the first things I did was invite Sue over for dinner. Sue is now heavy, and due to the pain, she has a stiff kneed gait and she walks leaning forward slightly. After she made it to my door, my landlord called to ask if everything were OK. I don't know what he saw when he saw Sue come into my apartment, but whatever it was it worried him. As I poured the wine, which Sue couldn't drink with all the medication she took, but probably politely raised and lowered, she told me I was her only friend. Thankfully I didn't ask whether that was a Katrina problem. Anyway, I knew the answer.

Sue isn't good at chit chat. It seemed as thought she's cursed with -- the artist's curse maybe. The need to organize her thoughts wholly according to an inner light. Often it seemed she was (is. She is still very much alive! though I do worry about that constantly) musing so hard she'd forget she was in company. I'm painting a picture of a distracted genius. No, not that at all. Maybe Sue is an Outsider Artist. She planted her front garden with plastic flowers after the storm. "Nothing would grow," she said, "everything's dead." (hence the name of my film, mama sue's garden). The front garden was ablaze with bright pink and yellow flowers, and they were pretty! Not tacky at all. Mama Sue has a hearty laugh, she can be wicked, can get hopelessly tangled up in petty BS with a neighbor but who can't, was (is?) a great friend and companion to her daughter, April, who was finishing up her last year of high school. Anyone looking at the two of them, would see a couple in love.

A couple of weeks later, maybe less, I found a large brown envelope under my windshield wiper. Inside was Sue's memoir, 200+ pages of Sue's life. I got to it within a day, and could not put it down. Whether I knew Sue or not, I think I'd have read until dawn. It read like a potboiler, that is fiction, bodice ripping scenes included. Such as married to a dashing navy enlistee and living with him in his idyllic Hawaiin posting. Followed by infidelities and the mean and heart rending lows of husband number two, whose drug addiction and physical abuse never for a minute it seemed stopped her from loving him. To the next guy, Lou, who she hardly mentions at all.

And Katrina, which doesn't appear for a 100 pages, and then reads like a film starring Clint Eastwood, an early one, with so many moments when you think, this couldn't really happen. Like a CE movie, you know from the beginning that she makes it but all the way through you're on the edge of your seat.

Sue loves that she survived the storm on her rooftop. She told me more than once that she'd do it again. The first time she said that I think my jaw dropped. I don't understand people who climb Mt. Everest. But I'm beginning to get it. To know that you can survive the worst natural disaster with nothing but the intelligence of your muscles and quick wittedness. To confront it without -- nuthin.' Just you, as everything that had that ever held you up, let you sit, provided food and warmth, as all of it turns into an obstacle, an enemy even (as her refrigerator did when it floated towards the door and formed a blockade, as her roof did as it shredded between her fingers, while she was attempting to pull, climb, stretch and haul her body onto it) and everything you depended on vanishes one by one and then flies at you in 150 mile an hour winds "as though you had a bullseye painted on your back." Baking in the sun and as the days wore on, joined by two of her dogs, who'd chase away the rats. Other small animals, seeking high ground, were allowed to stay. At night she'd sleep in a pirogue which had floated by. "You sent me a boat God?" Survival of the elements. But surviving with faith, as Sue did, conversing the whole while with God or thedeityofyourchoice. It is something to be proud of. As my editor said the other day -- Sue was a heroine.

overslept

Hey Sue,

I had called you this morning and left a message, then two minutes ago, got a call back from Lou. learned from him that you left for TX this morning. Missed you by a hair! Damn!

2 things urgent. Want to send you the herbal hepatitis capsules. A box of them has just arrived and can get them in Saturday's mail.

Then -- got a call from August. He wants his copy of the contract y'all signed for the land. He wants to start tilling, as you suggested, but is afraid to go out there without that piece of paper. A black man in Canaervon kind of thing. Is sure he'd be arrested and jailed.

So, if you could tell your husband where that piece of paper is, and perhaps August could go pick it up? Is that possible? Or will the two of them be some kind of absurd unhappy about making direct contact. Perhaps Lettie can pick it up from your house and bring it to Aug. That would probably be the simplest

So - hoping you get back to me soon. And hoping you're doing OK! Been leaving messages for you, and got around 12 hours too late to calling.

Regards to Timmy and family.

much love,

sh

The above a message sent to Sue about a week ago, after August got to thinking that if he went down to our lot, without a tractor, but just a hand tiller, or just to mess around, that more than likely he'd be arrested and jailed. And as though getting arrested and jailed for wandering around on a plot of empty land was predictable and by some stretch of logic, acceptable, he added that that kind of thing 'stays on your record.' August was more perturbed about his criminal record it seemed than getting arrested and jailed. I was ready to jump in right there and say, "oh come on." Though I wouldn't say 'you're being paranoid,' or that 'we're not in Jim Crow times any more. You have to give people credit for growing out of their old and base ignorant ways of thinking.'

Thankfully, I say instead, 'let me call Sue and see whether she can run you over the contract.' August was one of the signatories on the ten year lease for this luminous acre hard by the Mississippi levee in the village of Canaervon.

But, I learned the next morning Sue had left for Texas. She'd gone, without telling me, her chronicler, her personal memoirist, that she was going anywhere! Felt as though she owed me an explanation! How dare you move around the country without informing your filmmaker? Well, she had -- had left for Texas to be with her son for two weeks and whatever else she wasn't telling me. I had no way of reaching her, Sue's cell has long ago run out of minutes, so tried in vain by e-mail (see above) tho' haven't gotten an e-mail reply from Sue in weeks and this one is no different. Why do I feel so responsible for the success of this garden? for Sue? For August? That's a question for a shrink/guru, neither of which I have at the moment. Maybe only a filmmaker, who's got 100+ hours of footage on her cluttered study floor would understand. Finally made contact with Sue that evening by phone and was told that the contract was buried in a "black suitcase in my closet." She'd get Lou to find it.

Lou, Sue's husband, is not a paper kind of guy. He doesn't make out his own checks, you never see him with a book, newspaper or pencil, unless he's making a mark on a piece of lumber in preparation for cutting it with a power saw. Lou is very handy and his humanity is in his construction and repair projects. There's even a hint of whimsy in some of them. Lou built a floating chair after the storm waters of Katrina had subsided out of a lawn chair, somehow sticking the legs into two oblong pieces of styrofoam. This adorable contraption floated even with the weight of an average size St. Bernardian! Lou and Mama Sue called it their pontoon chair and Lou sat in it and paddled out into this newly existing body of water to retrieve a sunken trailer. The painted, polished and gleaming black trailer (not the kind you live in, but the kind you use to haul stuff) now sits in his driveway, pride written all over it. Lou still refers to black folk sometimes as "coloreds." Sue rolls her eyes.

Asking Lou to find the contract in the black suitcase in the closet in Sue's den and arrange to hand it over to August, who in turn thinks of Lou's kind with utmost wariness had me tied in knots. Should I instead ask Lettie Lee to pick the contract up and bring it over to August's place? But that would have been solidifying some old habits of thinking, wouldn't it? I wouldn't be helping to change a situation that damn well has to change if we're going to start farming a plot of land with a racially integrated team next to a somewhat racially integrated church in a white neighborhood and I wasn't going to be any part of the old way of doing things!

Katrina had some good effects. When I went that Spring of '07, less than two years after Katrina, with Lettie Lee to Easter Mass, I was surprised to see black and white people in dresses and suits heading together for the doorway of the church. When I asked Lettie about this she told me that there just weren't enough churches that had been able to rebuild for the old segregated patterns to continue. In other words Katrina had shoved black and white into the same church.

He was hesitant. 'August, you'll stick your hand out, take the piece of paper from Lou, say thank you and leave.' He laughed and asked for directions. The next day August was at Lou's house at noon, as Lou had asked him to be. When no one came to the door, August called. No answer. August went home. All of this was told me last night by Lou, who hadn't woken up until 4 pm that day, and didn't hear the doorbell.

p.s. Lou did the right thing -- two days later, he brought the contract over to August.

cell phones

I don’t mean this as a digression from where I left off last week. But I want to convey the fabric of a community, and a snapshot of the times, the moment that I happened on mama sue, or she on me. More on mama sue… coming next week

So, before I get to Mama Sue, and that whole tangled yarn, I have to ask…is it true? That the oil has stopped gushing into the Gulf? I hadn’t heard the news yet while watching footage shot three years ago, of August baiting a hook and casting into one of the still, still rivers of Delacroix Island, which isn’t really an island, but the name of a neighborhood at the southern end of St. Bernard Parish. I couldn’t help but be wistful watching his relaxed way of handling the hooks and lines and setting the rods down on the beach. That day I managed to hook a catfish and he pulled in a striped drum. I was wondering as I logged the scenes of this afternoon hour - so casual I might have forgotten it if I hadn’t caught in on tape – whether August would thread a hook with shrimp pieces again in his life. No, I wouldn’t have forgotten. It was an unusual day, a beautiful, languid, somewhat unnerving day. The water, air, trees, sky all utterly still and it seemed untouched by human beings. And unnerving because I hate fishing. I never go. And here I was with a virtual stranger, who was teaching me how to attach a tiny piece of bait… I was horrified when I actually caught a fish! I didn’t have the strength to haul the thing in. It was heavy, or it was fighting. I couldn’t tell. August, so pleased with me, and himself I think for having taught me how to do any of this, reeled it in. “She caught a fish before August!” he declared. I was a good filmmaker, I thought, keeping focus on the catfish as it thrashed around on the dropped-down gate of August’s pick-up.

And I haven’t forgotten the first afternoon (spring, '07) I returned to my new temporary apartment – a one bedroom on the second floor, above a soon-to-be-renovated row of stores. They, the future stores, all sat empty, holes in sheetrock which would soon accept electric panels, plumbing fixtures. Grimy windows which would one day be clear and showcase some kind of retail activity. Up an exterior iron stair, there were about 6 small, unadorned apartments, all except mine rented by laborers from Latin America. Only one of these construction worker had come with his family – his wife and young daughter – who prepared out of their tiny kitchen (I had the same four impossible electric burners) dozens of tacos every day for sale to the Mexicans who’d relocated up in the NOLA area for Katrina work. The rest shared with one or two other men. Only one of my neighbors spoke any English.

I didn’t know any of these details when I returned home from my first major shop at the newly rebuilt Winn-Dixie, back seat and trunk filled with at least 20 small bags of cereal, soy milk, frozen crawfish pies. It was night, and completely dark. I was startled – putting it mildly – to see at least three small trucks parked in the lot that adjoined our apartment strip, where I too had pulled in, in my Prius. I was surrounded – or so it felt – by a posse of lone-man occupied trucks. All I could think – since I was on Guerra Drive, a street everyone spoke about in dejected terms, shaking their heads – that they were doing drug deals. I froze. Here was I, a gringa woman who lived alone. How could I get out and start carting my grocery bags up the stairs? They would see I saw them making their deals and maybe not that night, but some night not too far in the future, they’d come for me. My thoughts about what “come for me” meant were vague. I think I assumed they’d shoot me. I sat for what seemed like an hour. Then, when the men all seemed to be not going anywhere, I decided that I could either sit all night with my lettuce, or be brave and get out of the car and go to my apartment.

I learned not too long after that evening that these men used the nighttime hours after work to place calls to their families in Central and South America. They were sitting in their trucks, clutching their cell phones and receiving -- who knows? Perhaps stories about this relative or that, reports of illness, death, a new baby, the marriage of a cousin, any news they could strain to hear about their native country in their native language. They were probably describing their day. By March when it started to get warm, I’d look up at at our common balcony, if you want to call that narrow cement strip that ran outside our apartments a balcony, and see many of the men leaning over the metal railing, for hours, the tiny lights on their phones glinting like fireflies. The man who lived in apartment #1, the one who spoke some English, worked part time for our landlord as a sort of super. He’d helped me assemble my sofa bed. One afternoon, he tapped on my door. I opened it hesitantly – still not absolutely sure of things, though by this point I was sure that I didn’t know a thing about my neighbors – and he asked if he could use my laptop to look at the CD his wife had sent. When he sat down at my computer, and the images of four adorable girls, his daughters, the oldest twelve I think, popped into view, he told me that he had left for the United States one afternoon, without letting his wife in on his plans until after he’d reached the States. He hadn’t seen his wife or children in the seven years since.