ARTICLE
BY
Michael
Depp
© Michael
Depp 2005
Our
New Geography
The geography of class
in New Orleans, like everything else in New Orleans, was an anomaly.
Maybe you saw that if you took one of those tours of the Garden
District or the French Quarter – all of that Old World charm,
those Greek Revival mansions, that elaborate wrought iron lacework
and then, just a little too close, the public housing complex.
The shelled-out-looking Section 8 apartment block. The cramped
shotgun houses overgrown with cat’s claw, collapsing wood
frames, rotting weatherboards.
Other cities ghettoize their
poor; ours wove them down our every street, sometimes our every
other house. It was impossible to marginalize our poor by neighborhood
or district; they were six out of our every ten neighbors. Their
sheer numbers forbade invisibility. Everybody saw them. Everybody
knew.
But New Orleans was a city
of parallel realities. There was the gated enclave of Audubon
Place, perhaps the city’s only white and wealthy homogenous
street. It ran along the rim of Tulane University, whose students
scarcely strayed far from the campus, the Maple Street bars nearby
or the streetcar lines running into the French Quarter. Then there
were the solidly middle class, tree-lined expanses of Gentilly
and Eastover, home to many of the city’s Creole and well-to-do
African-American families. Many of them would never know the other
black families who lived in the mixed industrial stretches of
Central City or Bywater. “The black community,” as
I hear it uttered so often in news coverage of our collapse, is
an absurd and irrelevant locution; monolithic communities here
did not exist.
My street. Annunciation Street
– one of many indications that New Orleans was not afraid
to think of itself in Biblical terms. From the French doors of
my 160-year-old bargeboard cottage I overlooked three identical,
decaying shotgun doubles. In one unit, I watched a woman unravel
under the strain of hand-to-mouth poverty and the dizzying fits
of some kind of mental illness. Her elementary school-aged son
and daughter rode endless, existential circles on their bicycles
in front of their house. They stayed out until midnight on their
lightless front porch and often missed the school bus that blared
its horn and then sped off each morning.
Two doors to my right a towering
center hall mansion was often the subject of glossy magazine and
newspaper stories praising its impeccable restoration.
New Orleans was not segregated in physical space. It was profoundly
segregated by psychological space. The levees of class and race
turned out to be far more impermeable than those that held in
the 17th Street Canal.
The nation watched images
of our people clinging to rooftops, brandishing AK-47s and festering
in masses of misery outside of the Superdome and the Convention
Center, and the nation was shocked at our poverty, incredulous
at our desperation.
Those of us who lived here
knew what was simmering for decades in this city – the inequality
in public education; the stark, ever-widening gap between the
poor majority and the wealthy; the rising crime; the murder rate
again hitting a crescendo; another round of our elected officials
and their inner circles facing indictments and investigations.
We knew exactly how many of our neighbors wouldn’t be able
to find a raft out, or to swim, when the tide rose.
Some of us tried to talk
about it before the storm hit, but we had a hard time getting
a conversation started. So much bitter mistrust and seething anger
poisoned our attempts, and so many just weren’t interested
in what needed to be said. Stewards of power and privilege held
fast to their interests. The discussion stalled.
The kids across the street
from me circled on their bikes, and didn’t do their homework,
and I saw – everyone on the street saw – what was
happening to them.
After the storm, I wonder
what happened to them, and, really, I know what happened to them:
If not drowned then in some shelter teeming with others like them,
somewhere at the city’s, or the state’s, periphery.
And thinking of them, the
strange new geography of New Orleans’ diaspora hits me.
In Baton Rouge, Houston, Jackson and other places where our poorest
neighbors have been deposited en masse, the threads they wove
everywhere into the city’s fabric have been pulled out and
jumbled all together, while I can only see their misery now across
the distance of television images – they are no longer my
neighbors.
Taken out of our peculiar
New Orleans landscape, our city’s poor may finally find
themselves at the margins, the homogenous ghettos, which eluded
them here. I wonder if the last traces of their autonomy –
their visibility – will disappear from them there. Certain
neighbors will be happy to see that they are nowhere to be seen.
And when I take the plywood
boards off my French doors and look across the street, I wonder
if this will be my first glimpse into our new city.
Michael
Depp
© Michael
Depp 2005
Michael Depp is a New Orleans-based writer and editor. He is a
correspondent for Reuters, as well as a contributor to, among
others: NPR's "All Things Considered," Poets & Writers,
McSweeney's, The Chronicle of Higher Education and many other
things. Michael is also editor-at-large of The Louisiana Weekly
and editor of West Indies Publishing.
http://www.michaeldepp.com
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