By Jewell Parker Rhodes

I scheduled a visit to New Orleans without realizing that it was Easter Week: the holiday symbolic of Spring, renewal of faith, the dead restored to life. Surely three years after the levees broke, the city would be revitalized, reborn.

Even before I ever visited New Orleans, the city stirred my imagination. As a junior in college, seeking creative inspiration, I delved into a Creole cookbook, with images and text, that evoked the fevered landscape, the cathartic power of drums, and the nineteenth century Voudoun Queen, Marie Laveau, whose religious practice reflected the blend of Catholicism and traditional West African spirituality that flourished in parts of the Americas during and after slavery.

Creatively possessed, it took me thirteen years to write Voodoo Dreams, a novel detailing Laveau’s passage from a vulnerable girl to a confident woman who, according to legend, fought for social justice, cared for yellow fever victims, and advanced the rights of women. For research, I had visited New Orleans frequently, interviewed Eartha Kitt (who longed to play Marie Laveau), spoke with spiritual guides in the vibrant French Quarter, and toured the cemetery where Laveau is buried and where modern believers still leave offerings.

Two decades later, I began writing a trilogy about a twenty-first century Laveau descendent, Marie Levant, who is a doctor in Charity Hospital and heals both medically and spiritually. The first novel in that trilogy, Voodoo Season, was published the day the levees broke in New Orleans. It was then I conceived that the third novel in my trilogy would have to be Hurricane Levee Blues.

As with Voodoo Dreams, I felt I was being called to testify about the racist and sexist underpinnings of New Orleans-the great, unique American city, formerly controlled by the French, then the Spanish, a “mixed blood stew” of native peoples, slaves from the African Diaspora, Acadians, and Creoles, the lawful and the lawless, the merchants and the pirates, and sinners who begged for forgiveness and those who sinned with abandon.

As I walked in the French Quarter, I couldn’t quite imagine that its elevation was any greater than the Ninth Ward or St. Bernard’s Parish, but it is. Even resting beside the great Mississippi, the Quarter was spared the ravages of rising, putrid waters.
Bourbon Street was still loud, drunk, and happy. But half empty.

I could actually navigate the street. Unfortunately, the Bourbon Street desperation of sex-shows, alcohol-gouging tourists, and teenagers, on bottle-cap cleats, tap-dancing for tourists, remained. Only now, the desperation was worse. Sin wasn’t paying the bills. You could hear waiters complaining about fewer tips. Barely-dressed women on sidewalks solicited with xeroxed fliers. New Orleans’s famed and gorgeous haute couture transvestites were absent. Fewer people were singing, dancing to the strains of zydeco, jazz, blues, and rock. Some bars even closed early. Beyond Bourbon Street, fine dining didn’t require a reservation. Tourists weren’t buying Mardi Gras beads, or t-shirts, or even voodoo dolls.

St. Louis Cathedral still stood, dignified, doing a brisk forgiveness business inside. Outside, tarot readers sat in portable lounge chairs, bored. Maybe, “It’s the economy,” I thought.

The French Quarter real estate office advertises condos and homes, all in constant need of renovation, priced at $740,000 and above. Homes, especially the multi-storied with wrought-iron balconies, are in the millions. The residential streets immediately surrounding the Quarter are gorgeous, with hanging plants, private courtyards, and gleaming windows with brocade curtains. The citizens, I saw, were all white.

Yet, as if someone had drawn an invisible line, cross one mere street, a simple hop, skip, and a jump, and the homes shrink, some are shot-gun style, most are single story, ravaged by Katrina and flooding. Most homes were boarded up, with X’s on doors, or spray-paint numbers for how many dead were found inside. Other homes were gutted from fire; others, littered with debris, the flotsam and jetsam of lost lives.

Then, unexpectedly, in a block of storm-destroyed homes, there was another home, immaculately restored with fresh wood, siding, and paint. Families sitting on their porch, children playing, riding tricycles past abandoned homes. All the citizens that I saw in this horrifically ravaged neighborhood were black.

How do you raise a healthy family in a neighborhood that goes entirely dark at night, except for the seemingly random, rebuilt home or two? How do you thrive next to public health hazards-homes overtaken with rats, bacteria left from the toxic soup of raging waters? How many of these homes are used for illegal activity? Just as I thought this, thee officers, hands on gun, exit a patrol car, and approach a damaged house.

Outside the Quarter, in downtown New Orleans, are abandoned luxury condo projects, deserted office buildings, clinics, movie theaters, small business, and more. Tourists don’t walk here. All signals point to a slow death, a city beyond revitalization.

But more startling than the depressed downtown was the fortress of Charity Hospital-a city unto itself, thirty-feet high, with multiple wings for medical care-entirely empty. Nineteenth-century nuns founded Charity which, for decades, trained Louisiana State University doctors, and cared for the uninsured. No one was ever turned away from Charity. The hospital was permanently closed. A major public health asset was gone. Right next door, Tulane University’s hospital with its rich endowment, mainly insured patients, still thrives.

When I reached the Ninth Ward, I expected to see the same destroyed, unkempt homes just beyond the Quarter. I saw mainly open space. Cypress trees, grass, and sprays of honeysuckle bushes were thriving. I felt like I was in the country. Then I saw row after row, concrete slabs, home foundations, overtaken by weeds. Empty street after empty street, hundreds of homes, lives, were destroyed. Razed. A black community nearly completely erased.

I found about nine homes built or in the process of being built on tall stilts, with solar panels. Less than five other homes have been rebuilt in traditional styles. Three years since Hurricane Katrina, and children can count on their fingers the number of rebuilt homes. And I have nothing to explain why, here, homes were leveled to minimize public health risks while just across town, it still looks like the flood happened only yesterday. I drove the short distance, up to the levee, now fortified with more concrete, and touch the wall. (A wall that did not hold during the storm because of inadequate levee funding by the federal government and planning or lack of planning by the Corps of Engineers.)

When New Orleans was envisioned, there were thousands of miles of wetlands between the city and the sea. The Mississippi was diverted, for shipping, and as a consequence, all the thick, nutrient-rich soil stopped building coastline.

New Orleans has always practiced segregation or de facto segregation. Blacks and poor people were given bottomland; whites and rich people were given elevated land. The Quarter, with its history of commerce and entertainment meant to satisfy the aristocrats, gamblers, mercenaries, and thieves who brought wealth into the city, would’ve been protected. But the slaves and poor who were no less essential to the area’s cultural wealth in music, food, language, art, and spirituality were left to fend for themselves. So, it still seems true.

In the 1930′s, oil and manufacturing companies began another rape of Louisiana. Digging waterways that allowed salt water to destroy swamp grasses, and dumping deadly chemicals throughout the bayous of Louisiana created barren, deadly environmental pockets, including an area north of New Orleans, known as “Cancer Alley” (occupied, primarily, by poor blacks). It wasn’t until 2000, that the EPA, under President Clinton, finally, won significant legal victories regarding environmental racism.

***
As my visit was coming to an end, the weather on Easter Sunday was windy, overcast. I didn’t see many worshippers in Sunday best hats or children skipping in shiny, patent leather shoes. It was hard to believe that, for New Orleans, resurrection was imminent. I saw a little black girl in a bright, silk purple dress with a bubbly, ruffled slip. She strutted with confidence, steps ahead of her parents on Riverwalk.

Children like her are the city’s best hope.

Laveau mythology recounts that Marie-a woman of whom little was expected because of nineteenth-century racism and sexism-rebirthed herself and her city, and entered into legend as a woman who “never did die.” She continually, resurrects; so, too, New Orleans. In large measure, it will be the “Katrina children” who, having grown up in a soil of inequities and injustice, who will best reclaim their city. These young people, I have no doubt, will make miracles. In the meantime, the rest of us should do everything in our power-to support, fund, and provide practical help for citizens living in an American city that must not be allowed to die.

Jewell Parker Rhodes is the Piper Endowed Chair, Artistic Director for Piper Global Engagement and Founding Artistic Director, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her latest novel, Hurricane Levee Blues, will be published, as will Ninth Ward, a children’s novel, in 2009.