It Could Happen to You: The Southern Gothic, Slow Violence, and Hurricane Katrina by Brooklyn White A project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Ogden, Utah August 5, 2025 Approved Signature of Committee Chair Rebekah Cumpsty Name of Committee Chair Signature of Committee Member Siân Griffiths Name of Committee Member Signature of Committee Member Christy Call Name of Committee Member 1 It Could Happen to You: The Southern Gothic, Slow Violence, and Hurricane Katrina If the storm doesn’t kill me, the government will. - R.E.M., “Houston” You are my witnesses. - Isaiah 43:10 On September 5, 2005, former First Lady Barbara Bush, mother of then-President George W. Bush, visited the Astrodome in Houston with her husband, former President George H. W. Bush. In the week since Hurricane Katrina made landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi border on August 29, the Astrodome had become a place of refuge for Katrina’s evacuees. The visit was meant to announce the bipartisan Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund – which raised 130.6 million dollars and awarded over 1,260 grants to faith-based and community organizations to help meet the rebuilding needs across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama 1 – to the public, but also to counteract criticism of her son’s administration’s response to the disaster. Picture her snowy white hair and pressed suit* in the late summer heat as she looks across the sports stadium to the people on green and red cots who now have nothing else. Later that day, she infamously said in a radio interview: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.” 2 This is working very well for them. Her words, of course, garnered some backlash, but even The New York Times’s brief article on the incident refused to elaborate on what Barbara Bush was implying. That it was lucky for these impoverished people to have lost everything. * A neoliberal dress suit. Probably navy and with heavy shoulder pads. 2 That living on a cot in a sports stadium that held – at least in grand total – up to 25,000 other evacuees3 in a faraway city was better than living – yes, in poverty – at home. That rebuilding and restarting would somehow be easier now. And that this new reality would somehow be scary for the people who had not lost everything. This was not an uncommon sentiment, though maybe it was not so often said out loud. Richard Baker, a Louisianan member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was overheard saying to lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did.”4 New Orleans, after expelling some of its poorest citizens via federally mandated evacuations in the post-Katrina clean up, would become a blank slate * ready for rebuilding. Many of those who left have still not been able to return. They cannot afford to. † New Orleans’s population fell from 484,674 in 2000 to 230,172 in 2006; in 2020, the population was still below pre-Katrina levels at 383,997 people. In total, nearly 1.5 million people from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were permanently displaced by Hurricane Katrina.5 Hurricane Katrina was not one of the most intense nor was it one of the largest hurricanes to exist, not even just in the Atlantic Basin. ‡ It was not even the most powerful hurricane in 2005.§ While it reached Category 5 status, the highest metric label for hurricanes, it devolved to a Category 4 and then a Category 3 with windspeeds between 140 and 120 miles per hour as it approached the Gulf Coast. 6 This is just to say that Hurricane Katrina should not have been as This is where I will point out that Katrina, stemming from the Greek word καθαρός (katharos), means “pure.” A lot of Christian nationalists cruelly took this coincidence to signify God’s efforts to cleanse New Orleans. † The State of Louisiana would sue 3,500 recipients of the ‘Road Home’ grant for not following the spending rules that were meant to help people rebuild their homes. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development only ended efforts to reclaim these funds in 2022. ‡ Those titles go respectively to Hurricane Patricia and her 215 mile-per-hour winds, Hurricane Floyd’s 580mile-long diameter, and Hurricane Wilma. § That went to, again, Hurricane Wilma, leaving Hurricane Rita in second, and then Katrina in third. * 3 destructive as it was. In modern American history, * Katrina stood out as the deadliest natural disaster until 2017, when Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands with an estimated 5,000-person death toll.7 What can be described that you have not already seen? Streets flooded with murky water, water reaching up to the tops of cars, some of those cars floating lazily like they were meant to be a fallen leaf on the pond’s surface. People wading through the water, sometimes up to their chins, often holding up above their heads some possession or a young child. Submerged highways. Helicopters bobbing overhead. Families stranded on their rooftops, some of them using an axe to break through the thick skin of their attics as the floodwater in their homes rose and rose and rose. A home lifted off its foundation. Please help us. And then there’s the bodies. Bodies face down in the opalescent petroleum-sheened water, swept away from the people who loved them. Bodies covered by tarps on the exposed portion of the highway or any other dry piece of cement. Sometimes it is not a tarp but a waterlogged blanket. There are bodies lodged onto fence posts, tangled in fallen tree limbs. There are wheelchairs that are left abandoned with their dead owners still in them, not due to some malpractice by their loved ones, but because these disabled and – most often – elderly people† were brought to shelter and then died as they waited for rescue, and then there was no place for anyone to take their dead. These bodies would be left untouched for days – and sometimes weeks – in the very humid, nearly hundred-degree heat because neither the State of Louisiana nor the Federal Emergency Management Agency signed contracts with mobile morgues in a timely I say “modern American history” here as the hurricanes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have higher death counts. The era lacked modern infrastructure. There is also a question to the historic reliability of these numbers. † The American Medical Association put out a report on Hurricane Katrina deaths in 2008 that examined 971 bodies of victims; 49% of these dead were 75 years or older. * 4 manner. If any bodies of Hurricane Katrina victims had not been collected by September 24, 2005, there is a chance that they were swept back into the Gulf by Hurricane Rita’s storm surge. 8 The death toll is hard to pin down to exact numbers. To this day, a comprehensive list of each person who died as a result of the hurricane has never been released. It was long held that at least 1,800 people died because of Hurricane Katrina. Recently, the National Hurricane Center reduced the deaths to 1,392, from an earlier estimated 1,833 after combing through nearly a thousand autopsy reports from Louisiana and Mississippi.9 The game was to figure out who died directly of Katrina and who died indirectly. Only direct deaths counted. Drownings and blunt force trauma are the easiest to count as direct deaths. Next might be car accidents caused by flood waters or highspeed winds. Harder to decipher are those who finally succumbed to terminal illness or chronic health conditions in the middle of the disaster. Then, of course, some of the bodies were so badly decomposed by the time an autopsy could be performed that causes of death were basically impossible to determine. Did they count the 23 of 45 deceased whose bodies tested positive for both morphine and midazolam at Memorial Medical Center – which had flooded, lost electricity, and gained an indoor temperature of 110 degrees – as the staff needlessly provided euthanasia to LifeCare patients?* Did they count the bodies of James Brissette, Ronald Madison, † Matt McDonald,‡ and As detailed in Sheri Fink’s Five Days At Memorial, one doctor and two nurses were arrested for seconddegree murder of their patients; a grand jury refused to indict them. While it has been acknowledged that their actions were (probably) in the wrong, it’s like this case was too morally ambivalent to prosecute. From all accounts, Memorial Ward Hospital was a nightmare to be in as all parties waited for rescue teams to finally evacuate them. † NOPD officers fired on Brissette, age 17, and Madison, age 40, and four others on Danzinger Bridge on September 4, 2005. None were armed. The NOPD tried to cover it up. In 2016, five officers were sentenced to prison time after pleading guilty to their charges. ‡ Matt McDonald, age 41, was shot in the back by an NOPD officer on September 3, 2005 for “resisting arrest.” His family initially told that he was killed in a homicide, not by police. There were no other witnesses to his death. * 5 Henry Glover* who were shot by officers from the New Orleans Police Department in the days between Katrina’s landfall and the arrival of aid? † What of those whose cancer treatments had to be restarted too late after their medical records were washed away with the floods? What of the suicides brought on by acute disaster-induced distress? What of the missing people whose bodies were never recovered? The reality is that the standards for determining what deaths get counted as a direct result of a hurricane are not just non-existent but also made up by whomever is trying to do the counting. Louisiana’s last attempt to count its dead was in 2008, where it counted only the death certificates of 986 victims while admitting that their total could be fifty percent higher if the deaths potentially linked to Katrina were included. 10 In a report published in December 2005 and then updated in 2008, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote, “Especially for Louisiana and Mississippi, the number of direct fatalities is highly uncertain, and the true number will probably not ever be known.”11 New Orleans is undeniably a gothic city. Wrought and cast-iron galleries, gates, and spires – often draped with plastic Mardi Gras beads or star jasmine – guard the city. Mausoleums and ossuaries are kept compactly in the city proper behind crumbly brick walls (and even more ironwork), rising from the ground like crooked teeth. They become sprawling necropolises on the outskirts of Orleans Parish, with many graves built right up to the edge of water. The live oaks – whose gnarled, twisting branches are cobwebbed with Spanish moss – are older than the city, survivors of hurricanes, floods, and colonial land-clearing. Gas lamps hang from front porches Henry Glover was shot by an officer on September 2, 2005, as he was retrieving some baby clothes at a strip mall. He bled to death in his neighbor’s car. A different officer set the car and Glover’s corpse on fire to destroy evidence. † Yes, all four of these men were Black. * 6 and the underbellies of galleries, still burning by flame instead of electricity. The tepid light invites the shadows in at night. If you happen to go on one of the many haunted walking tours, you will be dosed with dates and historical factoids and – if you are in the French Quarter – your guide might say something like, “There are probably human bones in the ground beneath your feet,” before moving on to yet another story about murder, ghosts, vampires, pirates, or the Sicilian Mafia. To live in New Orleans is to live in a future built into the past. In the Antebellum era, New Orleans was the wealthiest and third most populous city in the United States.12* The manors in the Garden and Audubon Districts as well as French Quarter are a testament to this: multi-tiered, some with lofty Doric columns holding up a broad pediment, others coated in colorful stucco, most featuring cypress wood shutters that curtain long guillotine windows. Their interiors feature marble, chandeliers, sweeping staircases, and antique furniture. The upkeep of these houses is enormous, as each house must be preserved to its exact historic details – they are heirlooms to the city. The homes without wealthy patrons to restore them to their previous glory more easily show their age: peeling paint, warped porticos, and rotted wood. Young debutantes in overfull evening gowns and gentlemen in waistcoats and hats made of felt and silk once floated in and out of these doorways and fussy gardens – the ease of their lives supported by enslaved labor, those sequestered to unimposing slave quarters behind the manor’s courtyard or even further removed to fields of sugarcane or cotton. One of the most infamous buildings in New Orleans is the LaLaurie Mansion, home to a prominent socialite who was chased out of the city in 1834 when it was discovered that she had been torturing and murdering Now? Not so much. Like the rest of the South, New Orleans economically collapsed after slavery was abolished. The Great Migration would lead Black families to better opportunities in cities in the North and West, and then the city would experience White Flight as desegregation was being mandated during the Civil Rights Movement. Hurricane Katrina only added to the city’s depopulation and economic woes. * 7 the enslaved people she owned. The home was destroyed by angry New Orleanians * and she was exiled to France, but there are rumors that she secretly returned later in life, and that the evil she inflicted still lives in the house – which has since been repeatedly overhauled and remodeled – despite efforts to rid it of its hauntings.13 How many of these other grand mansions hold similar stories? How many secrets do the palatial façades hide? It is not just the aesthetics of the city. Part of what makes New Orleans so distinctive – and so gothic – is that it is culturally different from the rest of America. Supposedly, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, “New Orleans makes it possible to go to Europe without ever leaving the United States.”† Of course, the French and Spanish influences are obvious and even flaunted – the French and Cajun flags are a dime a dozen – but it would be reductive to call the city European. As a large port city on the Gulf Coast, New Orleans has been called “the northernmost Caribbean city.”14 Historically, it has had more in common with cities like Havana and Port-au-Prince than it does with Philadelphia or Las Vegas – the humidity, the storms, and the Atlantic Slave Trade made sure of that. Haiti and Louisiana were once a part of New France; the cultural connection between the two was only cemented when wealthy slave owners left Saint-Domingue in the years of the Haitian Revolution. The slave owners, of course, brought their enslaved people with them and New Orleans’s population grew by 10,000.15 The French Creole‡ population – especially those who were wealthy – would insulate themselves from newcoming Americans for decades after the Louisiana Purchase, becoming fiercely protective of Do you know how vile you have to be for other slave-owning people to condemn you? Considering the only websites I could find that attribute this quote to him are tourist blogs, I am pretty sure he did not actually say that. ‡ “Creole” can take on different meanings and connotations depending on the context. In Louisiana, it refers to people who have French, Spanish, and any non-Anglo European ancestry from the colonial era. Creole is different from Cajun, but Cajuns are still considered Creole. In the 1970s, the term gained racial connotations that equated Creole with Blackness; today, someone might say that “Creole” is for the city and “Cajun” is for the country, but these ethnic identities are not at all limited to race. * † 8 their language and customs. In 1836, tensions between the Anglo-American population and the French Creoles in the city rose to the point where outbursts of violence were not uncommon, so the Louisiana State Legislature divided the city into their own municipalities and designated Canal Street as “neutral ground.”16 Only by the arrival of World War II did Creoles find themselves speaking English more than French, partly becoming more American with wartime patriotism, but also by forced assimilation through a 1921 state constitutional amendment that prohibited the use of French in Louisiana’s public schools.17 Louisiana wanted Americans who spoke English. Still, Creole culture persisted. Due to the relatively more relaxed racial codes of the French and Spanish, interracial marriage – or other kinds of arrangements – were common. Before the Louisiana purchase, neighborhoods in New Orleans were not racially segregated. Creole culture was – and continues to be – multiracial and multiethnic. When Plessy v. Ferguson* upheld the “one drop rule” and the legality of segregation of public facilities through “separate but equal” doctrine, many Creoles resisted a special state law that would have recognized someone with a quarter Black ancestry as white. They cast their lot with the Black citizens who had only recently been freed from slavery. Thus, a triple-tiered caste system was born. Daryl G. Barthé notes in Becoming American in Creole New Orleans: “Creoles in New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th century were foreigners in their own country. Rendered politically powerless as a community, they were disenfranchised and at the mercy of white men who, for the most part, did not speak their language and who resented Creoles for not speaking English” (61). Louisiana would see harsher Jim Crow laws, the rise and revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and This case originated in New Orleans after Homer Plessy, with the support of a Creole activist group, challenged Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, which required separate rail and street cars for Black and white people. * 9 extreme violence against people of color, but many Creole families continued to maintain clandestine contact across racial divides. 18 While white supremacists and Confederate apologists would try to – and, at times, succeed in – coopting Mardi Gras after the Civil War, it was still a vein of celebration for Black and Creole citizens.19 Their festivities and traditions would not be crushed. Two other fixtures of New Orleans set it apart from any other American city: Catholicism and Voodoo. Catholicism is the predominant religion in the city, and its oldest institution.* Creoles, of course, have traditionally been Catholic. The aesthetics – the crosses, cathedrals, saintly relics, and reminders of Christ’s bleeding body – have left its mark. The Ursuline Convent is the oldest standing building in the city and St. Louis Cathedral is the oldest continually used cathedral in the country; both buildings stood as witnesses through the fires, plagues, floodings, and wars. Mardi Gras, of course, is thoroughly Catholic. The fleur-de-lis, representing the Trinity but also the Virgin Mary’s purity, embellishes the city’s official flag and can be found stamped all over: fences, tiles, and business signs. Streets are named after saints, as is the city’s football team. Voodoo – or Vodou – is important to New Orleans, though often misrepresented † to outsiders as some kind of black magic that puts violence at the center of the religion with shrunken heads, curses, and the threatening voodoo doll. In reality, Vodou has its roots in the religious practices of various West African ethnic groups with an emphasis on animism and ancestor worship. It was brought to the Caribbean – particularly Haiti – and then to Louisiana The French Colonial Code Noir mandated that enslaved people be baptized and instructed as Catholics and given Sunday off to worship. Today, many of those with Black Creole heritage are still Catholic. † Mind you, Vodou has historically been misrepresented on purpose to keep white people afraid of Black people and their traditions. * 10 through the movement of enslaved and free people to the territory; Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo are distinct and unique to their environments, changing as needed to laws imposing Catholicism onto its practitioners or to the exposure of other belief systems.20 Again, because the French’s Code Noir was more relaxed than Anglo-American slave codes, enslaved people in New Orleans were able to secretly practice Voodoo disguised as Catholicism; they could sing and dance together in Congo Square and healers could conduct their profession. Marie Laveau, the famous Voodoo Queen, brought these practices out into the open in the 1830s; her status as a free woman of color and then as a successful businesswoman and community leader allowed her to transform Louisiana Voodoo and how it was perceived in the city.21 Because of Laveau, grisgris bags, herbal knowledge, and public religious celebrations became strong features of Louisiana Voodoo. Today, Voodoo is just as visible as Catholicism. Temples, shrines, museums, shops, and practitioners have made the city their own. It is called “the Big Easy” for good reason. There is no rush, no panic, and a parade for just about everything.* Even funeral processions are followed by “a second line” of walking jazz bands whose music invites any bystander on the street to join in dancing and celebrating the life of the deceased – knowing the deceased is not a requirement. 22 The refrain “Laissez les bons temps rouler” – meaning “Let the good time roll” – is common and manifests the general attitude of New Orleanians. But it is an attitude that has been molded from hardship and not innate carelessness. The people of Southern Louisiana have been through a lot. The storefronts that millions of tourists now filter in and out of once displayed enslaved people in their windows, advertising them to wealthy clients whose pockets were lined with blood money from sugarcane There is even an annual parade for the turtles who are pardoned from being turned into turtle soup at Brennan’s, a restaurant that has become a landmark in the French Quarter. * 11 and cotton plantations. These enslaved individuals might have been brought into the city on the Mississippi River, where they might have seen the decapitated heads of those who participated in the largest slave revolt in U.S. history* impaled on pikes as a kind of warning23 – a reminder that this place was built from blood and it would continue to demand blood from those it deemed disposable, unhuman. American hegemony tried to flatten the city, tried to convert its inhabitants to Protestantism, tried to push a narrow racial binary onto a complex multiracial society, tried to curb its vibrance and foreignness – but New Orleans resisted. The joy, optimism, and solidarity found in the communities here has been informed by generations of suffering; they live amongst their ghosts and they dance and drink today because there is no certainty in tomorrow. There is an adage, commonly misattributed to Mark Twain or Tennessee Williams, that goes: “America has only three great cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.”24 Few places, whatever their virtues may be, really compare. I have not yet made any mentions of the city’s music and cuisine – the jazz, zydeco, blues, and funk; the gumbo, jambalaya, muffuletta, etouffee, po’boys, beignets, and red beans and rice – which could easily take dozens more paragraphs to describe, as just the food and music set New Orleans apart from any other American metropolis. But I don’t need to. The city speaks for itself. The tourism industry in New Orleans knows that is has something special, something – at the very least – for outsiders to gawk at. Something strange, something antediluvian. Long, dark histories. Hauntings on every corner. The German Coast Uprising involved an estimated 500 enslaved people from different plantations; a lack of care and historical preservation around this event leaves the rebels’ exact goals unclear, except that they banded together for their own freedom. Nearly 100 of these rebels were killed while fighting the good fight or were executed after the revolt was put down. The Whitney Plantation – the only plantation museum dedicated solely to the experience of chattel slavery – is where the revolt began and preserves the memory of these revolutionaries. * 12 It is America without being fully American. It is a gothic wonderland. It might be easy to get lost in the spectacle of Hurricane Katrina. If you were alive to witness the news coverage, then the aforementioned imagery is not hard to recall. News helicopters were notorious for being more interested in grabbing footage of the bodies and stranded individuals than they were in aiding the situation. Then, when the city was nearly emptied of any remaining residents, the press was ushered in to take more photographs. Photographers came in and took gallery-level images of the ravaged infrastructure: flood-lines on buildings, shattered houses, sunken roads, and piles of indistinguishable debris. Thomas Stubblefield wrote in “The Camera as Corrective: Post-Photography, Disaster Networks, and the Afterimage of Hurricane Katrina:” “While meaningful and important, it is undeniable that this familiar visual logic fuels the short shelf life of public empathy. Not only do such images become interchangeable with the sea of tragedies that comprise modern life, but, in the case of Katrina, so too did they seem to imply that the drama of survival ends when the waters recede” (201). Eventually, the camera crews packed up, the news cycle shifted, and Hurricane Katrina would appear to outsiders to be a contained disaster, growing more and more irrelevant with the passage of time and with each fresh tragedy. But the human catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina did not end after the flood waters finally receded in October 2005, nor did it begin with the early formation of a tropical depression over the Bahamas in August. The story of Katrina stretches further back, through other hurricanes and tragedies and human decisions along the Gulf Coast. It is what writer Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” He clarifies: 13 By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility… The long dyings – the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change – are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. (2-3) Nixon’s theory of slow violence is heavily informed by postcolonial and environmental critical studies. Violence is always clearly violence, but “slow violence” is the lingering consequences of that violence which is less attention grabbing but just as harmful to the victims, who are typically inhabitants of the Global South. Birth defects from Agent Orange, water contaminated by industrial waste, and radioactive fallout from nuclear testing are all fair examples of slow violence – but so are even subtler things like urban neighborhoods that have little to no access to fresh groceries, de facto and de jure segregation, or the credit score system. In terms of Hurricane Katrina, the slow violence is found in a costal ecosystem that is rapidly eroding, in part because of a warming ocean and rising sea levels, but also because of the expansive oil drilling projects happening in the Gulf of Mexico – projects that are destined to beget an explosion, leak, or spill. On average, Louisiana experiences a thousand oil spills annually, and though most of these spills are small, the fact is that the state experiences this at a higher rate than other oil-producing states like California, Texas, and Alaska.25* The spills are * Even though Louisiana has significantly less land than California, Texas, and Alaska. 14 created by the demand and infrastructural need for oil, which is burned every day to produce more atmospheric carbon, which continues to disrupt normal weather patterns and warm the ocean – bringing about stronger hurricanes, whose storm surges have even greater access to the land thanks to bayous that cannot protect the coastline because they have been whittled down to nothing by oil spills and rising sea levels. It is a vicious cycle that will not be stopped so long as the oil industry is profitable and able to put cash into the pockets of lobbyists and politicians.*26 Yet, each year when a hurricane has wrecked some part of the Gulf, who is held accountable except God? The flow of oil does not end there, in pipelines or on ships in those murky coastal waters. It has to be refined, made into something consumable. There are 131 operable petroleum refineries in the U.S. producing 18,423,493 barrels of crude each calendar day; 49 of these refineries are in the Gulf Coast states. 27 There are also 311 petrochemical refineries in the U.S. – which produce plastics, natural gas liquids, and other olefins and aromatics instead of gasoline and diesel fuel – and almost half of them are in Louisiana alone.28 There are over 200 petroleum refineries and petrochemical plants within the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, an area that has been dubbed “Cancer Alley” since the 1980s because those who live there have a 95 percent higher chance of getting cancer than the average American.29 There are also elevated reproductive, maternal, newborn, and respiratory health risks and ailments in this area – which is made up primarily of low-income and Black residents. In 2022, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment identified Cancer Alley A report by Oil Change International shows that just between 2003 and 2008, 23.7 million dollars from oil companies and executives went to Gulf Coast politicians’ reelection campaigns. From 2004 to 2008, 627 lobbyists were employed in these states by Exxon, Chevron, and BP. ** 15 as one of the world’s “sacrifice zones” to highlight the egregious level of pollution hazards and human rights violations.30 Those living in Cancer Alley cannot exactly leave. For one, many of them work in the very plants and refineries that are poisoning them. For another, who in their right mind would buy a home in the most cancerous region in America? The State of Louisiana and the federal government have not agreed to buyout programs suggested by human rights organizations, just as they have done little to curb the pollution emitted by the industry – or its expansion.* Treatment for chronic illness and cancer only makes the financial situation here bleaker. In an interview with The Guardian, one resident of St. James Parish said, “What you are looking at is a dying community. Not because of the residents, but because of the way industry is allowed to come in. And they call it progress.”31 That’s the trick with slow violence. It is often dressed up as progress and disguised with mountains of paperwork, which will always seem like a nonthreat when, somewhere out there, people are dying because of guns and bombs. But the people of southern Louisiana – the people who are descended from the enslaved who worked in the sugarcane plantations that have now been replaced on the same soil with refineries32 – can recognize it for what it is, they know that their leadership has abandoned them. Left them to rot. That is what Katrina epitomizes, this is what slow violence exposes, for Hurricane Katrina is the story of the disenfranchised – but it goes further back than oil. It begins like all American stories with the displacement of indigenous people and the brutality of chattel slavery. From 1699 to 1763, French colonists recorded forty ethnically and * In fact, 19 more petrochemical and oil refineries have been approved for future development here. 16 politically distinct native polities along the Gulf Coast and into the lower Mississippi River Valley, including nations such as the Acolapissas, Apalachees, Avoyelles, Biloxis, Bayagoulas, Chatots, Chitimachas, Houmas, Ishaks, Koroas, Mobilians, Mougoulashas, Ofogoulas, Pascagoulas, Pensacolas, Taensas, Tawasas, Tiouxs, and the Grand and Petit Tohomés. Their populations, which had greatly outnumbered the Creole populus, would be halved by the 1750s.33 The Louisiana Territory received its first enslaved Africans from the French colonies in the Caribbean in 1709 – just a year after New Orleans was founded – and then its first slave ship, carrying 200 men, women, and children from West Africa, in 1719. By 1731, more than six thousand enslaved Africans had been brought to the colony and those of African descent – both free and enslaved – outnumbered those of European descent. 34 Like all early European colonies, there was an uneven male to female ratio. The French men had either sexually terrorized indigenous women or married them – or both – and colonial clergy and leadership worried that the ensauvagement and métissage could be threats to the entire empire. Yet, getting French women to willingly come to the colony was proving to be a challenge. So, Paris’s female prisoners – many charged, almost certainly falsely, with prostitution – were exiled to the colony to be unwilling brides, without due process. Nearly a hundred women convicts arrived in 1715 on a ship called La Mutine, or “The Mutinous Woman.”35 In total, seven thousand female prisoners would be deported from France to the colony, but only 1,300 would survive the marches to the ports and then the overseas voyage; by 1721, records indicate that only 178 of these women were still alive. 36 They would become the founding mothers of New Orleans.* Is it irony or destiny that these criminal “founding mothers” would help establish what would become the state with the highest incarceration rate in the world? * 17 Even slower was the violence that came with the effort to drain the swamps around New Orleans and to corral the Mississippi River, which had a habit of flooding seasonally or rerouting where it flowed. The first drainage ditches and levees were built and sustained with enslaved and inmate labor. French and, later, Spanish colonial leadership ran on-again, off-again public engineering projects that were resurrected with the repeated flooding of some part of the city; neither crown regarded Louisiana as a priority, so funding for these projects was cut when things seemed fine again. Private engineering done on behalf of real estate interests was not widely done until Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803; it was then that American capitalists invested personally in infrastructure to protect their homes, hotels, and businesses. Done either with hired labor or, again, through slave labor. 37 In 1879, Congress created the Mississippi River Commission to oversee federal funding for flood control and authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to be responsible for the building and maintenance of levees along the river. It created the world’s longest levee, which follows along the Mississippi’s west bank, where 380 miles of earth wall and concrete keep the river from flooding.* In 1926, the Corps asserted that the levees would prevent any future flooding; the Great Flood of 1927 proved how wrong they were. † That illusion of control was itself a form of slow violence: trust placed in concrete and policy while underlying risks compounded, unseen and unresolved. When the levees broke again in 2005, it wasn’t just infrastructure that failed, but the cumulative weight of nearly a century of false assurances. It has been a constant battle to keep New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta dry, but it is a battle that is * † This makes the levee system the second longest man-made structure, after the Great Wall of China. More on this later. 18 altering the environment. Backwaters are drying out, native species are declining, and parts of the river that are only supposed to flood once a decade are flooding almost annually. 38 It is a misconception that “the Crescent City” – nicknamed for its shape as it sits between the bend of the Mississippi River and the curve of Lake Pontchartrain – has always sat below sea level. New Orleans was not built up from the sea like Manhattan but has sunk down as the swampy land it was built on was drained of its water, a process known as “subsidence” – but not all of it has sunk; the French Quarter, Downtown, and Garden District sit above sea level. These areas are, and have historically been, wealthy and demographically white. As the city developed, wealthy white colonists first claimed the land that was least likely to flood, then infrastructure development – like levees and drainage pump systems – was biased towards where wealthy white communities wanted to expand. As time went on, the geographically vulnerable land went to the racially and economically vulnerable. Jim Crow segregation laws and racist redlining practices through the twentieth century ensured that Black New Orleanians were largely kept in low-elevation neighborhoods. The Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly are neighborhoods that used to be uninhabitably swampy but became home to predominantly poor Black residents as the city urbanized.39 By the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the disaster was already well underway. This is what slow violence looks like in Louisiana. Violence that looks like policy. Violence that gives technological progress for some, and underdevelopment for others. Violence that arrives slowly, on poisoned, sinking, stolen land. Part of Nixon’s theory of slow violence is the role of the writer-activist in laying bare the longer histories that are left out of media narratives. According to him, the writers essential to 19 this cause “are enraged by injustices they wish to see redressed, injustices they believe they can help expose, silences they can help dismantle through testimonial protest, rhetorical inventiveness, and counter-histories in the face of formidable odds. Most are restless, versatile writers ready to pit their energies against what Edward Said called ‘the normalized quiet of unseen power.’ This normalized quiet is of particular pertinence to the hushed havoc and injurious invisibility that trail slow violence” (6). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin propelled abolitionist discussions in the decade before the American Civil War. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle changed American food safety laws, pushing President Theodore Roosevelt to create the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The photography of Dorthea Lange – most famous for “Migrant Mother” – during the Great Depression documented the severe poverty faced by her compatriots across the country, invoking public sympathy in her time and today. Good art turns heads, good art changes conversations. It can even alter culture. As I have already noted, the media portrayal of Hurricane Katrina was, at minimum, incomplete and often harmful. While legacy media spent their resources on attention-grabbing footage taken via helicopter, the nation’s political leaders were passive to the disaster. Vice President Dick Cheney was busy vacationing in Jackson, Wyoming for over a week after landfall, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – of Alabama – was seen spending thousands of dollars on shoes in New York City, and President George Bush was vacationing between photo ops. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff remarked, “We are extremely pleased with the response that every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy” – days before FEMA had even entered the disaster zone. 40 Republican strategist Jack Burkman defended the administration’s inaction on MSNBC with: “I understand there are 10,000 people dead. It's terrible. It's tragic. But in a democracy of 300 million people, 20 over years and years and years, these things happen.”41 Others would place blame on people for choosing not to evacuate and then, later, for misusing federal money. Even years later, in 2012 in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Representative Steve King of Iowa falsely claimed that Katrina victims had used FEMA money on “Gucci bags and massage parlors.”42 Urgency was quashed, the plight of entire communities diminished. Nuanced conversations, after all, rarely make headlines. A better understanding can be found in the creative projects that came in response to Hurricane Katrina. Award-winning documentaries like Trouble the Water and Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke give voice to actual survivors and witnesses, both allowing individuals to air their grievances with the government’s response and personal struggles in the months after. HBO’s Treme fictionalized the aftereffects and rebuilding of New Orleans in 36 episodes, giving audiences a look at the longer struggle to reconstruct a life around trauma and literal ruins. Dozens of books were also published in the years and months after Katrina, many offering historical narratives to explain how it happened or giving exhaustive journalistic coverage of the specificity by which the humanitarian and clean-up processes were botched. But even more intimate are the novels, which have fictionalized the events of Katrina and fully fleshed out the individual interiority of this experience. The empathy brought by reading from these perspectives then becomes unavoidable. Novelists Jesmyn Ward and C. Morgan Babst were both impacted by Katrina. Ward and her family did not evacuate, while Babst did. Both confront what they witnessed in their novels Salvage the Bones and The Floating World, respectively. These confrontations are unflinching and direct, but they are also able to tie what was boiled down to a moment on television and in 21 newspapers into the longer histories of their families and communities and the systemic justices we all live beneath. These works also face the psychological trauma inflicted by the storm. In her essay “Perseverance,” Babst writes about her decision to leave and then return to New Orleans after Katrina, adding that The Floating World is “a story about what might have happened if some other version of me had not left.” The novel is fractured by both the anachronistic timelines and perspective shifts between members of the Boisdoré-Eschelman family. Joe Boisdoré, a Black Creole artist, evacuates the city with his wife, Dr. Tess Eschelman, a white psychiatrist. Their eldest daughter, Cora, who has a vague history of mental health struggles, refuses to leave with them and is then subjected to the horrors of the city’s flooding. The second daughter, Del, comes home from New York City in the weeks after Katrina to support her family. There is Vincent Boisdoré, Joe’s father, who has Lewy body dementia, leaving him – like Cora – in a separate plane of reality created by his mental conditions. The novel takes place largely in the time after the hurricane, an event which has stripped down its characters and forced them to face the realities they have been avoiding. Tess, as a wealthy white woman, is ignorant to the struggles stacked up against her husband as a Black man from a more economically disadvantaged family. Struggles that also function as insecurities: “Gold digger, he called himself, but that was a word for women. You can do your work, she’d said, and he’d listened to her, Yes, ma’am’ed her like a fucking houseboy” (360). As a father and husband, he takes a more passive role, deferring to Tess in family and financial matters – his Blackness holding him back from taking on a patriarchal role in the family. While their marriage had been devolving, Katrina only accelerated the process; when Joe is unable to get back into the city to retrieve Cora – “When an officer tells you to turn around, 22 you turn around,” he explains (150) – Tess calls him a coward (319). She then reignites a relationship with an old flame and cheats on Joe, who removes himself from her presence to take care of his ailing father. Vincent, once a highly regarded furniture maker, is stuck living in the past due to dementia. He has little awareness of what has happened – even confuses the current hurricane for Hurricane Betsy in 1965 (242) – and cannot always remember who his granddaughters are. It is through his forced relationship with the past, however, that details about the Boisdoré family emerge: that the Boisdorés had been woodworkers for generations, that a relative had purchased the family’s freedom from a French Creole family, and that their last name came from that very same family that had kept them enslaved (180). His relationship with Joe and Tess – whose marriage he does not necessarily approve of because of the uneven power dynamics – also highlight the lingering social and cultural barriers that came from slavery and Jim Crow laws (447). He resents his son for abandoning the family business and for failing to understand that his marriage to a wealthy white woman does not make him anymore legitimate in a society built on the foundations of racism. Through these old resentments and the holes in his memory, Vincent’s progeny still handle him carefully. His character personifies the impossible wishes of the rest of the family: for things to return as they were – but that is complicated by the reality that the past is not as romantic as it seems. And, it is impossible. Katrina made sure of that. Cora and Del, being the youngest members of the family, are less emotionally suppressed than their forebears; both give the most physical reactions to the state of their world after Katrina. On multiple occasions, Del expresses her outrage to her family: “There are bodies being left to rot in the streets, and apparently I’m the only one shocked by this! … Maybe if I’d been here all along I’d be less upset? Maybe I just need time? 23 How long then, until I become a good New Orleanian again. Until the next hundred-year flood? Until the whole state of Louisiana falls into the sea? Wait around and hope that we’ll get a competent government, a functional economy.” (152) What has become of her home and her family has not yet normalized to her. Cora, meanwhile, exists in a fugue state, her body “covered in pink patches like peeled-back bark. Scars, where chemical burns from the floodwaters had healed” (45). When asked about how she survived the hurricane, she says, “I don’t want to remember anything” (44). She only gives vague details of what happened to her in the time she was left alone in the city to Del and has become prone to sleepwalking in response to the trauma. In this way, Cora and Del act as foils to each other: Cora representing those who directly faced Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, Del representing those whose lives are tied to the Gulf Coast but were more indirectly affected. The Boisdorés fare better than most: none of the family members die or are seriously injured and many of their possessions are salvageable, even if the historic home they had been restoring is not. Troy, who Cora meets at her restaurant job, and his sister, Reyna, are less fortunate. Both characters are Blacker and poorer than Cora. Reyna is also mentally unstable, periods of wellness and mania or psychosis ebbing and flowing in her life. Troy sits out the storm with Cora, and when the two go to check in on Reyna and her two sons, they find her agitated and paranoid; Troy does not trust her to take care of his nephews and has her institutionalized for her own safety – “It’s just for now,” she explains to comfort Troy’s nephews, “Those men are going to help her, so that she can come back home healthy and look after you right” (292). But Reyna does not make it out. She later escapes the facility she is being held at, but when she finds that her children are gone, she takes the gun that had been left to Cora and ends her own life – something Cora, in her emotionally vulnerable state, blames herself for until Troy is able to 24 reconnect with her and reassure her otherwise near the end of the novel (481). While Cora had the option – but not the psychological wherewithal – to evacuate, Troy and Reyna lacked the material means to leave. The novel shows them fighting to survive as Troy hunkers in Cora’s neighborhood – which does not flood – and Reyna tries to keep it together, hoping to avoid taking refuge at the Superdome or the Convention Center. Through this representation, Babst is writing for her fellow New Orleanians – those without her advantages – advocating for their complicated humanity by forcing any reader to confront individual circumstances that have been shaped by centuries-old systems of power. The end of the novel is an uneasy conclusion: Tess and Joe’s marriage is over, Cora has left New Orleans to heal and to live with Troy and his family, and Del has decided to make New Orleans home again so that she can better learn carpentry from Vincent – who still needs memory care. This final segment is preoccupied with home. As a doctor at a care facility tells Joe, “The search for home, it’s very common… Sometimes a separation can be healing. Away from the pain of those who love them, away from the anxiety – you’d be surprised at the improvements” (494). This is true for Cora as she settles into a life with Troy and his nephews, far from New Orleans. She explains to Tess, “But you have to understand that with what I experienced – I need to stay away for a while” (489). For Del, however, home is found back where she came from, working with her grandfather, leaving behind the dreams her parents had for her in New York. Joe tries to talk her out of it, telling her “You’re supposed to have your own family first. You’re supposed to go forward before you have to go back.” She retorts: “Back is forward, forward is back” (506). But she is not really going back; the city she left is not the one she has returned to. Everything from the before is as unrecoverable as the buildings, cars, and 25 memorabilia that disintegrated in the floodwaters; but moving forward requires reckoning with the past. Derek Attridge writes in “Literature… solves no problems and saves no souls, but it is effective, even if its effect is not predictable enough to serve a political or moral program.” The Floating World is an elegy for New Orleans. The novel takes the time to meaningfully discuss the long chain of events that led to such excessive suffering, but in the quiet domestic spaces that were never televised. “That’s what got us into this mess, isn’t it?” Cora laments, “Pretending the levees could protect us, that the storms wouldn’t come” (488). “You know there’s a train station a block from there,” Del tells a bartender, “Don’t you think maybe you put your people on a train instead of in a motherfucking football stadium in the path of the storm?” (45). It also takes a level look at the longer damage piled on the plates of ordinary citizens in the months after Katrina, after the water has receded and the aid and news crews have packed up. Some people must return home to rehabilitate ruins; others have to leave for their own sake – and this book offers compassion to all involved. While C. Morgan Babst is not, by any definition, a writer-activist, her attempt at creating a more complete narrative offers insight and healing. That is what good art is supposed to do. George Bush waged many wars in his presidency. The invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq are hard to forget. This came after he declared a War on Terror a month post-9/11. He continued his father’s costly continuation of the War on Drugs. Why not a War on urban * Hurricane Katrina survivors? * See also: Black. 26 Aimé Césaire developed the theory of the imperial boomerang in 1950 in Discourse on Colonialism to explain the violent fascism in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, explaining that it only made sense that these same dictatorial practices had been ongoing in colonial territories for centuries and would return to their lands of origin. “Then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss” (36). Michel Foucault supported this idea in a lecture in 1976, saying, “A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.” The imperial boomerang, reinforced by the establishment of global military bases across the globe, returned to the Bush administration through Hurricane Katrina. On September 2, 2005, troops were sent to New Orleans after George Bush signed the papers to decree it. Louisiana’s governor, Kathleen Blanco, confirmed this to journalists, saying: “These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle-tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets. They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.”43 Anarchy had begun to take root with each day of delayed response and poor leadership on the city, state, and federal level. The National Guard was called “to bring back order” and to enforce a curfew as tens of thousands of refugees waited in the powerless Superdome without adequate food or water. The myth that New Orleans, especially the Superdome, *44 was overcome with violent crime still persists today. The villainization in the media of the mostly Black population of New Del remarks in The Floating World: “Built that thing in the same spot where they used to make slaves fight to the death, you know. Superdome. Thunderdome. Twenty thousand men enter, no man leaves” (45). This is an * 27 Orleans was racist. The fact that people still believe these things is racist. Since the invention of race, it has been used to other that which was foreign to Western Europe – harshest, obviously, on the Africans who were subjected to chattel slavery. Subjugated. Objectified. Abject. As Maisha Wester explains: Black people consistently serve as central figures of various moral panics across different generations and Western nations. A closer inspection of these ‘folk devils’ and the panics around them remind us that the point of moral panic is not that there’s nothing there but that societal responses are fundamentally inappropriate and distracted from the true source of anxiety. (232) America’s first moral panics came through conversations about the abolition of slavery and then the suffrage of Black people. Later, ideas of reparations would unsettle populations whose existences were bankrolled by the violence of slavery. Then: the blues, jazz, rock, disco, hip-hop, and rap – music forms that were reviled for not being “white enough” before they were folded into popular culture and made palatable by white artists. Black people were not the cause of these moral panics – pearl clutching and hand wringing, if not outright death threats – but rather the subjects of the deeper problems. Societal change, progress, and “worrying over the stability and future of the empire” (Wester, 234). It was not any different in 2005. Though there were confirmed reports of looting, * the claims that imperiled citizens were opening fire on relief helicopters, FEMA workers, and the National Guard are all urban legend as there is no historical evidence to suggest that enslaved people participated in gladiator-style fights to the death in the U.S. The Superdome was, however, built over part of the Girod Street Cemetery. * The looting, of course, just amounting to desperate people trying to get supplies to survive and some trying to make off with goods they could not afford. 28 unsubstantiated.45 Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who coordinated around 300 national guardsmen in New Orleans, said of the supposed violence, “It was way over-reported. People confused looting with people going into survival mode. It’ll happen to you and I if we were just as isolated.” On Navy SEAL Chris Kyle’s* claims that Kyle had perched on the rooftop of the Superdome† and shot down 30 looters, Honoré called bullshit: “I was at the Superdome and would know if there was a rifle up there shooting. I can tell you there were no Navy Seals operating as snipers in New Orleans.” 46 Tanks still waded through the water in the city’s streets. It is hard to confirm whether the National Guard shot anyone as Governor Blanco claimed they were prepared to do. It is also hard to confirm that no one was shot by these military troops. Up to 58,000 were deployed in the city after Katrina. “This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” stated Brigadier General Gary Jones, the commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force. NBC described New Orleans as “under siege” or “a war zone.”47 No one seemed to question the militarization of disaster relief. In reality, places like the Superdome and Convention Center, where thousands of displaced people congregated, were sites of misery. Hot, crowded, and without food, water, or electricity for days. People died in these buildings and there was no place for their bodies to go. 48 People were restless and frantic, but they were also exhausted. You can watch footage of people – including police officers – raiding a new Wal-Mart in When the Levees Broke; a talking head laments this lawlessness, but what was it to a big corporation if people took inventory that was Yeah, that Chris Kyle. The American Sniper. Why was America’s best marksman brought from deployment in Iraq to handle hurricane relief in New Orleans? † Much of the Superdome’s roof was heavily damaged or non-existent after weathering 100 mph winds. It is unrealistic that anyone, even a Navy SEAL, would position themselves up there. * 29 going to be written off as a total loss because of flood damage anyway? What did merchandise matter when people were dying?*49 In the documentary Trouble the Water, a young Navy officer describes his role in the city in a brief interview: “It was a real eerie feeling, I thought, but we had to do our job and that was to protect the interests of the government.” The documentary follows its subjects, Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Michael Roberts, through the entirety of Katrina, up to their departure from the city and then their return. They show the camera the boat they used to help people out of their homes, explain that they had no car to evacuate in, and give glimpses into the broader post-hurricane struggles. Kim’s uncle, caught on her camcorder in the days before Katrina made landfall, dies in his house and his body is still there when the couple return weeks later; her grandmother dies in a hospital, and her brother was trapped in Orleans Parish Prison through the duration of the storm. He is released to go to the funeral. Kim and Scott’s home in the Lower Ninth Ward has to be completely gutted; when they drive a box truck to Memphis to stay with relatives, Scott remarks that it was his first time ever leaving Louisiana. Underscoring their experience is the presence of the military. The documentary features testimony from people who were told to leave at gunpoint when they sought shelter at a military base. Police or young men in fatigues occasionally stop them to question them on their journey. “They treated us like we was unamerican, like we lost our citizenship,” Kim says directly to the camera. Added to that are the clips of veterans arriving home on the Gulf Coast from service in Iraq and Afghanistan to discover that there is no home waiting for them. The film’s producer, To be fair, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Lowe’s provided food, water, and temporary shelters to those stranded by Katrina before any government organization did. * 30 Danny Glover, put it this way: It did not turn the region into a third world country, it revealed one.”50 The failure to manage the emergency reflected a country impaired by its own imperialism. Israeli rabbi Ovadia Yosef claimed that Katrina “was God’s retribution” to America because the Bush administration did not offer armed intervention when 9,000 Jewish settlers were forced out of the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Al Qaida responded with a statement: “God attacked America and the prayers of the oppressed were answered.”51 President George W. Bush maintained that there was enough funding and enthusiasm for the U.S. to continue the War on Terror abroad while managing hurricane relief at home. 52 In late September 2005, CBS estimated 100,000 people gathered in Washington D.C. to protest the wars, many holding signs that said “Make Levees, Not War” or “Bush is a terrorist!”53 While hyped-up reports of heathenish behavior in New Orleans filtered through news reporting and casual conversation, the deeper anxiety was that the U.S. had gone too far, done too much, and overplayed its hand in its antiterrorism efforts. Johan Höglund writes in “Gothic, Neo-Imperialism and the War on Terror:” When it produces a world divided into good and evil, civilised and primitive, white and monstrous, the characters of the narratives, and by extension the reading, viewing or gaming audience, are faced with the same choice as that which George W. Bush famously presented to the world in 2001: ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ (381) And in the throes of enormous nationalism, who was willing to admit that something was wrong? Many contemporary writers have worked hard to reclaim the Gothic, an aesthetic built around the grotesque, morbid, and melancholy – but also one made from social anxieties. 31 Gothic-ness is also understood as a set of representational strategies.* Where colonial-era Gothic novels like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Jane Eyre expressed regressive anxieties about miscegenation, immigration, the gender binary, and colonization, more modern iterations of the genre use it as a mouthpiece for the oppressed. Rather than focusing on the fears of the powerful, these postcolonial writers turn to the trauma of the dispossessed, using Gothic tropes like hauntings, abjection, and ruined landscapes not as mere mood or metaphor, but as structural realities. Jesmyn Ward is one of these writers and a contender for Nixon’s vision of the writeractivist. Her novels do not hit you over the head with their messaging, but the political implications are hard to ignore. In an interview, Ward explained that her writing “made it easier for me to understand how we continue to make a way out of no way and how we continue to wrestle with the darkness at the heart of this country and still make something beautiful out of it” (Bradley). Like The Floating World, Ward’s work offers insight and compassion to the lives of the people she has thinly fictionalized. It offers a more complete – and convoluted – narrative of life in the South, which is so often dismissed as old fashioned, ignorant, inutile. Ward’s Bois Sauvage Trilogy operates within the Southern Gothic tradition while allowing for the American legacy of slavery and racial violence to “haunt back.” The novels are set in “Bois Sauvage,” a fictionalized version of De Lisle, Mississippi, where Ward was raised. It is a small town, rural and removed from the nearby New Orleans metropolitan area. These works do not shy away from the harsh realities of life for Black Americans, particularly those living in the rural South. Ward is precise with how she portrays daily life under the ongoing hauntings of Like how the city of New Orleans and poor and/or Black Katrina victims have been represented in media and perceived by other Americans. * 32 colonialism, slavery, and institutionalized racism as well as continued environmental degradation. Where the Line Bleeds, Ward’s debut novel, meditates on the material realities of people living pre-Katrina on the Gulf Coast in the face of climate change. In Salvage the Bones, the second novel in the trio, these overlapping systems converge violently with the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane becomes spectral in the novel and exposes the biopolitical conditions under which Ward’s characters live: their lives are systematically deemed less valuable, their survival left up to chance and individual or communal grit rather than institutional protection. The final novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is the most Gothic, featuring literal and metaphorical ghosts, as a family grapples with incarceration, addiction, and generational trauma in the years after Katrina. Salvage the Bones is the quintessential Katrina novel. It comes from the perspective of Esch Batiste,* a fifteen-year-old Black girl in the early stages of an unplanned pregnancy. Esch’s family has been fractured by grief since the loss of her mother, who died giving birth to her seven-year-old younger brother, Junior. Esch meditates on what it is to be a mother after discovering her pregnancy, an anxiety that is only reinforced by witnessing the family dog, a white pit bull named China, give birth to puppies and settle into tumultuous motherhood – the dog kills her own weaker puppies, is still entered into a dog fight, and then becomes sick after Skeetah, Esch’s second older brother, gives her too much deworming medication. As the only daughter and only sister in her family, † Esch has been forced to take a maternal role in her family from a young age, but there is no solid blueprint for parenthood in front of her as her father has been emotionally absent from all of his children since her mother’s death. Throughout the novel, A variant of the French surname “Baptiste,” meaning “baptist” as in baptism, as in being reborn from water, water brought by a hurricane. † And the only human female character in the novel. * 33 she meditates on the Greek myth of Medea, the famous wife of the hero Jason who killed their sons in revenge after he abandoned her. As the novel leads to Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, maternity becomes the haunting, violent specter – something systemically inescapable for people like the Batistes. When the novel begins, Hurricane Katrina is nothing more than a tropical depression lost somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, but Esch’s father insists that his family prepare for something greater: “This year’s different,” Daddy said as he sat on the back of his trunk. “News is right: every week it’s a new storm. Ain’t never been this bad” (5). Day by day, the family members fill jugs of water and stock up on Top Ramen and canned foods with what little funds they have. Evacuation is not an option for them, and they know that there will be no government assistance. Bois Sauvage is not a place of any domestic concern, and “The Pit,” the land where the family has lived for a few generations, is just as isolated. In fact, the universe that the novel is set in is so contained, there is little sense of life beyond its municipal limits. When evacuation mandate finally arrives, it is through the telephone: A man’s voice speaks; he sounds like a computer, like he has an iron throat. I cannot remember exactly what he says, but I remember it in general. Mandatory evacuation. Hurricane making landfall tomorrow. If you choose to stay in your home and have not evacuated by this time, we are not responsible. You have been warned. And these could be the consequences of your actions. There is a list. And I do not know if he says this, but this is what it feels like: You can die. (102) The government’s approach is impersonal and detached from the economic realities of its population, instead framing evacuation as a matter of choice and not means.. 34 Hurricane Katrina is the climax of the novel, the slow-burning Caribbean storm that has only added more pressure to the narrative; when she does arrive, she wreaks havoc and makes the world, through Esch’s eyes, carnivalesque. Esch and her family have tried to prepare for the storm, but their efforts are futile against the storm, which floods and fully destroys their home. As the storm progresses, the boundary between the family and the ecology around them – the water, animals, mud, and trees – becomes nonexistent. The family is just as vulnerable as any animal that had been left outside to face the brutal storm: “Houses like possums in the dark, half caught up and then left behind by the headlights” (131), “Junior’s back is a young turtle’s shell” (197), and “Daddy’s eyes shine in the dark like an armadillo’s” (212). The floodwaters leave the Batiste family tangled high up in the branches of trees, and the aftermath leaves the landscape unrecognizable (214). Furthermore, the narrative of the story during Katrina allows for “space and time to spin grotesquely free” (Flores-Silva and Cartwright) as the events of the storm are intercut with details about Esch’s mother’s death in childbirth, drawing clear parallels between the violence of motherhood and that of a hurricane. The freeness and anxiety of the moment allow for Esch’s pregnancy, which she has kept as a secret from her family, to come out into the open, and her brothers and father treat her gently. Unlike the story of Medea, a story of sacrifice for vengeance, each member of the family makes sacrifices for each other’s safety – China, so beloved by Skeetah,* is lost, but Esch is saved. The cycle of grief and retribution is broken, and, in the aftermath of the storm, the family emerges alive and unified. * Importantly, Skeetah’s given name is Jason, but that is not revealed to readers until he saves Esch. 35 Katrina functions not merely as an external threat, but as a metaphor for the emotional and generational crises already at work in the Batiste family. Katrina becomes a symbol of abandonment, echoing the absence of Esch’s mother, the failures of the state, and the violent unpredictability forced on Black womanhood. The storm mirrors Esch’s internal turmoil as she grapples with an unplanned pregnancy, the burden of care, and the lack of maternal guidance. It also reflects the larger condition of life in the rural Black South, where disaster is not an interruption but a continuation of historical neglect. In this way, Katrina is not just the climax of the novel but its central metaphor – a feminized, catastrophic force that reveals the fragility of both the land and the bodies who live on it, bodies already subjected to the slow violence of poverty, racism, and environmental degradation. The storm’s aftermath does not offer closure, but it does carve out space for an emergent tenderness and solidarity within the Batiste family, suggesting that survival is resistance. Ward survived Hurricane Katrina with her family, including her younger sister, who was pregnant at the time. Her family had never evacuated for a hurricane because they were too poor, and Katrina was no different. In an essay titled “We Do Not Swim in Our Cemeteries: A Legacy of Not Evacuating,” Ward wrote of her experience as she sought refuge with her family: The small hill we were on belonged to some white neighbors. The neighbors emerged from the house to check out their pickup trucks and cars . . . They eyed my pregnant sister, my gray-haired grandparents and, I thought, our Black skin… They left us to a Category 5 storm in an open field. Over and over again, as I huddled with my freezing sister in the swaying truck, I thought, They didn’t even have any room for us to stand. As Babst does in The Floating World, Ward processes the psychological trauma of Katrina by writing about it. While she could have easily written a memoir, she chose to 36 fictionalize the events. This choice is not incidental: by turning to fiction, she creates through the Gothic mode a space where structural and slow violence can become spectral and personal. “Esch’s story is not Ward’s sister’s, but the inclusion of this pregnancy narrative is neither incidental nor unimportant, for it points to the proximity of life and death – how even as death and destruction loom, life inevitably grows” (Marotte 207). This pressure, the gothic quality of being so near to death, is experiential and immersive. Hurricane Katrina is not mentioned in the other two Bois Sauvage novels but still plays an informative role shaping the characters and the landscape. Where the Line Bleeds takes place through the spring and summer of 2005, just as the two main characters have graduated from high school to limited job prospects – the dock, Burger King, Wal-Mart – but the novel ends before Katrina has even been named: “Got a storm out in the gulf. On the other side of Cuba. They say it’s coming right for us,” Joshua says. A storm pinwheeled across the TV in a neat arc trough the blue of the ocean, blue as air, to land solidly in the gulf… Christophe shrugs, “It’s the third one we done had this summer—ain’t no reason for you to be so nervous.” (208) Really, it ends where Salvage the Bones begins. Still, there are glimpses of the hurricane, such as when they are driving home through New Orleans Parish after picking their mother up from the airport in their shared car: The whole city seemed on the verge of collapsing, of coming apart and spewing into the streets to slide and submerge into the river. Joshua imagined it all gone: the levees, the sea of white aboveground tombs, the French Quarter, the flickering sparkle of the knot of 37 shiny skyscrapers called downtown, and the huddling rows of high-windowed, woodensided houses warped soft by the salty, sulfurous air and the rain. (166) It is some kind of sick foreshadowing that is not realized in this novel, and all the characters go on, unknowingly. There are only weather forecasts for a potential storm, enough to urge the main characters, twin brothers Joshua and Christophe, to retrieve plywood to board up their home’s windows. If a reader did not know any better, the ending of the novel – the twins reunited, sworn to each other’s secrets – has a lot less bleakness to it. In Salvage the Bones, it is revealed, in a rather offhand comment from Esch, that the twins’ house suffers a missing porch and half a torn off roof – Christophe, Joshua, and their grandmother are presumably safe, but this is not explicitly said in the text (185). Where the Line Bleeds functions as a prelude to the catastrophe by highlighting the exact conditions that made it devastating to begin with. The twins spend the beginning of their summer applying for jobs, driving across nearby towns to hand in their resumes, but only Joshua gets work loading and unloading shipments at the docks. Christophe is left with fewer and fewer choices; for both brothers, leaving is not really an option, as their blind grandmother depends on them to care for her. Their mother left when they were young and works in Atlanta, while their father has been in and out of a local rehab facility for his drug addiction. Yet, as Christophe becomes more desperate for work, he begins selling drugs for his cousin and then other local dealers, driving a wedge between him and Joshua. Narratively, Ward holds no judgements on either of the boys’ work but shows the inner turmoil the two experience as they grow apart due to perceived envy and distrust from one another. By the end, both have been seriously injured by occupational hazards and, while they are brought back together, the economy is just as depressed as before. 38 In the undertone of the novel is the environmental degradation brought about by offshore oil drilling. All of the Bois Sauvage novels are evidently environmental, and Where the Line Bleeds foregrounds its predecessors. Much of the book is spent in the car, between gas stations, job locations, and the houses of friends and family. Outside the car sits the salty marshes of the gulf – water described over and over as “gray” – and the pine woods, both being eroded through industry. Further out, off-page but invisibly present, are the oil riggs. On the day of graduation, a classmate tells the two, “I’m going offshore. My uncle already got my application in. I start in two weeks” (18). The offshore rigs* – operating as monstrous machines – represent one of the few viable job opportunities in the region, but they are also bringing undue harm to the region, whether through oil spills, health risks associated with oil refining, or the physical dangers of working on an oil rig. The rigs are both lifeline and threat, adding – in Gothic fashion – tension between the seen and unseen, and mirroring the slow violence the characters are subjected to. The landscape, as always, is not neutral but contaminated and foreboding. This unsettled relationship between cars, oil, and the greater landscape is furthered in Sing, Unburied, Sing as the Stone family travels upstate to the Mississippi State Penitentiary, known also as Parchman Farm for its historic origins as a plantation. The perspective lands first on Jojo, a biracial 13-year-old boy; he lives with his mother, Leonie, and grandparents, Mam and Pop, as well as his younger sister, Kayla. Leonie does not take on a strong parenting role in her children’s lives and struggles with an addiction to meth – which is also why her white boyfriend and the father of her children, Michael, ended up in prison. Leonie’s relationship with her parents is tense and has been ruptured since the death of her older brother, Given, whose ghost she sees Have you ever looked at a map of all the abandoned oil riggs off the coast of Louisiana? It is astonishing. These are the haunted houses of the oil industry. * 39 when she is high on meth. Mam is the lifeforce of the family, with knowledge of herbal healing – implied to come from generational practices of Louisiana Voodoo – that has helped her care for the family, but she is dying of cancer. The journey to Parchman is claustrophobic, the landscape swallowing the car on the road: “Outside the car, the trees thin and change, the trunks shorten and they get fuller and green, the leaves not sharp dark pine but so full, hazy almost. They stand in thin lines between fields, fields of muddy green, bristling with low plants. The sky darkens. The forests and fields around us turn black” (109). Kayla gets sick on the road and Leonie, who has not worked to learn from her mother, struggles to care for her. As Jojo notes, “She ain’t never healed nothing or grown nothing in her life…Leonie kill things” (107-108). Jojo’s worry for his sister only mirrors the hostility of the landscape, the journey, and the systems that have worked against his family. It is later revealed that Given was likely purposefully killed by Michael’s father, who is racist and disapproves of his son’s relationship with Leonie – the relationship bloomed on Given’s death. Michael also only started cooking meth for an income after he experienced an explosion on the oil rig he worked on, which killed eleven other men (79). Upon arriving at the prison, Jojo discovers he has inherited the same spiritual gifts that his mother and grandmother have: he can see ghosts. The ghost of a young Black boy named Richie appears to him, talks to him, and hitches a ride home in the car. Richie was imprisoned at Parchman with Pop – who was wrongfully arrested for his brother’s run in with white men at the nearby juke joint (24) – in the 1940s, and he wants to know how he died: “I guess I didn’t make it… But I don’t know how. I need to know how” (145). When the family returns home, Mam’s condition has rapidly deteriorated – she will die before the end of the book, in a sendoff that invites Given’s spirit back to the family home – but Richie continues to haunt Jojo, urging him to 40 ask Pop to tell his story. Jojo relents, and Pop tells him that Richie was mistakenly caught in another prisoner’s violent escape from the plantation, that the prisoner forced Richie to run away with him. The warden and sergeants capture the prisoner and torture him to death, lynching him. As this is happening, Pop finds Richie, realizing what fate awaits his younger friend: “They was going to do the same to him. Once they got done with Blue. They was going to come for that boy and cut him piece from piece till he was just some bloody, soft, screaming thing, and then they was going to string him up from a tree.” Pop looks at me. Every piece of him aquiver. “He wasn’t nothing but a boy, Jojo. They kill animals better than that.” (200) To spare Richie a brutal lynching, Pop sends the prison dogs after him and they kill him. Since then, he has been plagued with guilt, guilt that he has never shared with anyone else: “I washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain’t never come out. Hold my hands up to my face, I can smell it under my skin” (201). This does not bring Richie the relief he sought: “Richie goes darker and darker, until he’s a black hole in the middle of the yard, like he done sucked all the light and darkness over them miles, over them years, into him, until he’s burning black, and then he isn’t” (202). While he seems to have disappeared, he reappears at the end, guiding Jojo and Kayla to a tree beyond the family’s property, a tree full of spirits: The branches are full. They are full with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves. There are women and men and boys and girls. Some of them near to babies. They crouch, looking at me. Black and brown and the closest near baby, smoke 41 white. None of them reveal their deaths, but I see it in their eyes, their great black eyes. (219) Richie cannot cross into the afterlife just by knowing how he died. He needs more than that. All the spirits in the tree – a tree that recalls imagery of lynching trees, as their deaths were so violent – need something more to make peace with the brutal injustices of their existences. Until then, they will make home with a family that understands what they have been through. Sing, Unburied, Sing thus ties together the thesis of its predecessors. While Christophe is aware of the consequences of addiction or imprisonment for possession, he nevertheless experiments with and sells drugs in Where the Line Bleeds, because he need earn a wage. The threat of imprisonment for Christophe comes about for Michael in the final book of the trilogy. Additionally, the petrolocene depicted in both earlier novels – from the degrading landscape to a natural disaster fueled by climate change – underpins the existence of Jojo’s parents. Michael’s trauma from the oil rig explosion takes both him and Leonie down a path of addiction, which then separates them through his incarceration. Yet, the same oil that destroyed his life is needed to fuel the car so that his family can pick him up on his release date. As is true of the real world it is based on, Bois Sauvage is wrapped up in violence – slow violence. Generational trauma from poverty, systemic racism, and the extraction of earthly resources has given these characters limited autonomy over their lives – their choices of jobs, homes, food and transport, even during evacuations, are limited by their structural impoverishment. But this fictionalization is deeply humanizing. Ward’s contribution offers an insider perspective – giving interiority over detached objectivity. In her hands, the Gothic is a tool that articulates the resilience of Southern Blackness. The power of beauty through darkness. 42 While 1.5 million Louisianans evacuated before Katrina made landfall, among those who did not evacuate were doctors, nurses, hospital staff, police officers, fish and wildlife patrol workers, many in the tourism and hospitality industry, and prisoners.54 Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration in the United States, with 1,067 per 100,000 people incarcerated. * This means that it has a higher incarceration rate than any independent democracy on the planet. In December 2020, the State of Louisiana’s correctional authorities reported 26,964 prisoners located in nine state prisons and held in custody across a network of private prisons or local jails.† This network is made up 111 jails in 64 parishes; many of these jails take in convicted prisoners at a little over 26 dollars per day because the state prison – Angola – is at capacity and does not have any more room.55 Across the country, it is usual practice to not evacuate prisons when a disaster strikes. Some inmates might be evacuated, but it is rare for an entire institution to be abandoned. In 2005, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) – which held 6,500 men, women, and children in its population – did not evacuate, and prison guards and staff were expected to stay put through the storm. That did not entirely pan out. The power went out with the levees and the generators failed; there was no electricity and then there was no clean water. Many of the prison employees abandoned their shifts, and some of the buildings in the OPP complex were left only to the inmates.56 Including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities. I searched for a more recent number, but per a state law (SB 482) that went into effect early last year, the public no longer has access to public records and documents; one must apply for access and the request could be denied for no given reason. I am still waiting to hear back from the Deputy Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. * † 43 Over a thousand testimonies were gathered by the ACLU from prisoners about their experience in the OPP through Katrina and its aftermath. Each is its own nightmare. Inmates – many of whom had not been convicted and were waiting for their day in court – describe being locked in their cells as the floodwaters trickled and then roared into their buildings. They were not let out of their cells even as the water became chest deep, some inmates even describe being handcuffed to their cell bars. Toilets and floor drains were backed up with the water, filling the buildings with putrefying raw sewage. One inmate described hearing sobs coming from the cells around him, another inmate said that he began pleading with God for his life. Though Sheriff Marlin N. Gusman denies it, inmates were even left without food or water or medical care. In a concrete building with little to no circulation. In nearly 100-degree heat. For at least three days. A few prisoners managed to break free from their cells but not out of their prison unit; through broken windows they waved a message on a discarded orange uniform: “We are still here.” 57 Eventually the OPP was evacuated, and inmates were ferried to sit atop Interstate 10 in the sun until they could be carried away to some other correctional facility. There are nearly a dozen aerial photographs of this, hundreds of prisoners covering the surface of the gray concrete like little orange tiles in a mosaic. It has never been said how many prisoners died through all of this, but from reports by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, Human Rights Watch has determined that 517 inmates were never accounted for. 58 The Orleans Parish Sheriff’s department maintained that no prisoner had escaped but later issued arrest warrants for 14 escaped inmates. In 2006, New Orleans reduced their number of defense lawyers to four; the unmanageable case load guaranteed that any civil filings coming from these abuses would be swallowed up with time and paperwork.59 44 I am sure you have already seen that video of Kanye West* on September 2, 2005. Live on an NBC broadcast to raise money and awareness for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, wearing a striped polo, a hotline number flashing at the bottom of the screen, standing next to comedian Mike Myers, his cohost for the segment. Myers keeps glancing at West begins: “I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a Black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’ And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are Black.” West told Myers before they went on air that he would not be reading from the teleprompter; Myers begins again, but West quickly interjects, offscript: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” It took five days for federal aid to arrive and provide any relief. Talking heads and politicians said that it was because it was “too dangerous,” and that relief agencies were afraid of looters.† President George Bush waited until the day of that broadcast to sign a 10.5-billiondollar relief package and to direct 7,500 servicemen to assist with distributing aid. It took Bush nearly two days after Katrina had hit to return to the White House from a vacation in Texas, even though he was warned beforehand that there were worries about levee failure all around New Orleans. It was on that flight back to Washington D.C. that Air Force One stopped in the city and Bush looked out the jet’s window at the wreckage; a photograph of this moment was taken for PR purposes, but it made the president look unsympathetic instead of engaged in any solution. 60 He brought the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, ‡ aboard. More pictures were taken. Nagin was able to shower on the presidential jet – a famously long shower when his city no longer had Of course, now known just as “Ye,” but I think not enough people have caught on to this because there is less and less reason to pay attention to him after his egregious antisemitic statements. † Refer back to Maisha Wester’s idea of American moral panics built around Black people. ‡ Nagin was convicted of twenty felony charges related to bribery and money laundering related to city contracts from his time as mayor both pre- and post-Katrina in 2014. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, which he completed last year. * 45 clean water – and was later criticized for his own inefficiency as a city leader even as he was speaking with the U.S. president. 61 In a speech at the ten-year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall, Geroge Bush said, “Hurricane Katrina is a story of loss beyond measure; it is also a story of commitment and compassion. I hope you remember what I remember.” 62 Michael Brown was appointed by Bush as the director of FEMA in 2003 after the Department of Homeland Security was newly formed. He would resign from this position on September 12, 2005, as the agency’s response was revealing itself to be more and more botched to the American public. "Can I quit now?" he wrote in a leaked email to a fellow FEMA staffer. * 63As the president famously praised him for his (in)efforts: "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job!”† Naomi Klein writes in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: In the summer of 2004, more than a year before Katrina hit, the State of Louisiana put in a request to FEMA for funds to develop an in-depth contingency plan for a powerful hurricane. The request was refused. "Disaster mitigation"—advance government measures to make the effects of disasters less devastating—was one of the programs gutted under Bush. Yet that same summer FEMA awarded a $500,000 contract to a private firm called Innovative Emergency Management. Its task was to come up with a "catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for Southeast Louisiana and the City of New Orleans." (409) When he did quit, according to Klein, he started a private firm that specialized in disaster preparedness, promising to connect private contractors with government agencies (315). † Ten years later, in an interview with The Atlantic Brown would deny that the ineffectiveness of the government’s response was related to the race or poverty of New Orleanians. He would also assert that the response “was larger than on 9/11.” * 46 This contract would cost FEMA a million dollars by the time the project was completed. The company came up with various scenarios about what might happen and how evacuations should be ordered. The plan estimated that up to 60,000 people could die if a Category 3 hurricane struck New Orleans and the levees failed. After all that work, nothing was done. No action was taken. "Money was not available to do the follow up," Brown had later explained of this failure (409).* And the levees did fail. The levees that surrounded New Orleans in 2005 began to be constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the late 1960s after Hurricane Betsy breached the previous set of levees. In total, around 80 miles of concrete surrounded the city – half of which sits below sea level – to protect it from Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, but this project was only 60 to 90† percent complete by 2005. When Katrina’s storm surge hit the city walls, the structures collapsed, even in places where the water levels should have been safe. Later, after thorough investigation, it was apparent that some of the engineers had miscalculated the strength of the soil and that many of the levees were seven feet shallower in the ground than they should have been. Additionally, poor maintenance contributed to the concrete’s instability. 64 In the days after the onslaught of flooding, rumors began circulating that the levees had not failed by mistake but because they had been bombed.65 This is not an entirely ridiculous conspiracy. In 1927, as water levels in the Mississippi River rose, dynamite was used to destroy a levee near St. Bernard Parish – a majority Black It’s just typical of the Brush administration to underfund public services while putting money in the pockets of private contracts that still end up being fruitless. † Bureaucracy is to blame for this. * 47 neighborhood – to ease the pressure on the levees that protected downtown New Orleans and the Garden District – places where wealthy white businesses operated and wealthy white people lived.66 St. Bernard Parish and the Ninth Ward – still mainly low-income, Black neighborhoods in 2005 and now – were the most impacted by Katrina’s floods. It did not help that the booming sound of the levees breaking was like an explosion. It did not help that their neighborhoods would face gentrification as the city rebuilt. * The Black community of New Orleans was – and is – accustomed to being left behind. Though they had given America the gift of jazz music and created communities that were ethnically diverse and culturally rich, the legacy of slavery, the brutality of the plantation system, the failures of post-Civil War Reconstruction, and Jim Crowe laws created a political and economic environment that was hostile at best and utterly violent at its worst. † Nearly 40 percent of those living in New Orleans in 2000 were living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty, making the city the sixth poorest in the United States. While Black people made up 67 percent of the city’s total population, the demographic made up 84 percent of the population that lived below the poverty line. Only a little more than half of the impoverished citizens owned a vehicle, ‡ which was necessary to have to evacuate. 67 So, when the buses that Mayor Nagin promised would take the vehicle-less out of the city to safety failed to arrive, no one was surprised. They were, however, basically doomed. See Richard Baker’s earlier comments. Go read about the origins of Louisiana’s state prison and why it is still called “Angola.” I dare you. ‡ And nearly 65% of the poor elderly citizens were vehicle-less. * † 48 In New Orleans, they bury their dead above ground. At eye level, equal with the living. The ground is too soggy to take in another body. There are nearly 45 cemeteries in New Orleans. Some are private, some are public. Many of the graves are historic. There is an entire industry built around guiding tourists through these cemeteries; it costs only 25 dollars for a walking tour through the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, which is otherwise closed to the public. 68 It is something to behold. There are sections where the Greco-Roman sepulchers are arranged neatly in rows, and then there are areas where the vaults are mashed together, their brickwork crumbling in the humidity. The once-white slate walls of mausoleums tower over visitors, gray granite squares sealing caskets inside, their names etched into the stone. Every day, people weave through the aisles of walking space between gravesites. From above, it must look like its own strange city, every single person – even those native to New Orleans – a tourist to the city of dead. * Statues of saints and weeping angels look down, moss has grown in their mouths and in the corners of their eyelids. After the levees broke in August 2005, the cemeteries were as submerged as anyplace else. The State of Louisiana estimated that nearly 1,500 graves were uprooted or disturbed that summer.69 Caskets were dislodged from mausoleum crypts and sent away with the floodwater like small boats. Felled trees cracked open 200-year-old gothic tombs. Some bodies were separated from their caskets like Barbie dolls ripped from their packaging on Christmas morning. With revision and further research, I learned that Mark Twain beat me to calling these cemeteries “cities of the dead” by 143 years. * 49 The task of identifying the newly dead was enormous enough, but then parish coroners were tasked with tracking down these scattered remains. * Some cemeteries would never recover. There simply was not enough funding to reconstruct busted mausoleums, not enough money to keep their caretakers from picking up and leaving for housing or employment elsewhere. 70 These smaller cemeteries are still there, but they are hidden beneath the drapery of Spanish moss and overgrown grass. These cemeteries rot, too. For over a year, my thoughts have obsessively centered on all things New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, and the Gulf Coast. I could probably spend many more years fixating on this topic, for there seems to be something new for me to learn each time I go digging for information. My fascination with New Orleans is not special. Just ask any transplant living in the city, and they will probably tell you a story of how they came to Jazz Fest or Mardi Gras once and then they were hooked. This place is unparalleled, and as much as I don’t care for Bob Dylan, he puts how I feel very well: “New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going… There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better.”71 The city is not without its flaws. In the comment section of a TikTok that I desperately wish I could find again so that I could properly cite it, someone wrote something like “Living in New Orleans is like living in Gotham, except we don’t have a Batman.” Tom Piazza notes in Why New Orleans Matters: “For some reason… Louisiana politicians in general, and New The remains of Tonette Waltman Jackson were only identified this year after she was swept away by Katrina’s floods. Until now, she had been buried under the name “Jane Love” in a town over from the one she had lived in with her family. * 50 Orleans politicians in particular, have turned the official corruption and patronage that always come with government into an art form… I think it is difficult at this point for Louisianans to fully trust any politician who isn’t trying to bilk them. They don’t understand their motives otherwise” (88).* The city has competed for the title of “Murder Capital of the U.S.” for decades – though the past two years have seen a significant drop in crime overall, making this year the safest since 1970.72 There are also some gaping infrastructural problems: enormous pot holes in roads and sidewalks, frequent flooding, broken traffic signals, patchy contracts for waste management, and habitual power outages. †73 This spring, ten inmates escaped from OPP and one inmate has yet to be found; just this summer, the wrong inmate was mistakenly released after a “clerical error.”74 No public official is really ever trusted, there is a sense of disbelief that city leadership actually wants to make things better for their residents.‡ The city might fool you into thinking that it has recovered since Hurricane Katrina, especially if you stick to the touristy areas. These neighborhoods are maintained the best because tourism is New Orleans’s lifeblood, employing just under 20 percent of the city’s workforce.75 But, despite the billions of tax dollars that were poured into private contractors to rebuild the city, things have never been the same. Spiritually, the city still feels the trauma of Katrina. Bureaucratically, public schools are almost nonexistent, and gentrification is unhindered,76 while many buildings have sat vacant for 20 years – including Charity Ward Hospital, which was supposed to be transformed into a housing project years back. Tulane University has continued Piazza highlights, for example, the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election, which was between Edwin Edwards – who later served prison time for racketeering, extortion, and fraud – and David Duke, a former grand wizard of the KKK. Edwards won with a campaign slogan that read: “Vote for the Lizard, Not the Wizard” (89). † Apparently, it takes the city an average of 355 days to repair a pothole after it has been reported. ‡ If you think your city hates your mayor, you should go to the r/NewOrleans subreddit and see what they say there. * 51 its financial support of the project but government funding is patchy.77 Things move slowly in “The City that Care Forgot.” There are still cultural gaps from the mass exodus from the city in 2005. Businesses closed, musicians left, and family relocated – part of the heart of New Orleans has been left scattered across the U.S. In my fixation, I was referred to Emily, a woman who was displaced by Katrina in 2005 with her young son and nearly 600 others who came to Utah after Katrina. She indulged me with an interview, told me about her stepfather who refused to evacuate from his trailer in Port Sulfur – a tiny unincorporated community on the tip of Louisiana’s boot in Plaquemines Parish – and what it was like to reunite with relatives at a Red Cross center in Alexandria. Shortly after, she was whisked away to Salt Lake City and has never been back. She held back tears when she spoke of home and how badly she missed it. She works multiple jobs to provide for herself and her family, so there has never been enough money or time off to go back. Additionally, her son’s special education needs would not have been met in Louisiana – there are just more resources in Utah. Her children never got to know Louisiana as home. She doesn’t even get the chance to have a complicated relationship with where she is from because that choice was taken from her. As The Floating World puts it, “None of us can go back there anymore, can we” (482). What takes the place of home when home is stolen from you? I also have to mention that the 15-billion-dollar hurricane protection system – the new levees – are sinking into the ground faster than the sea levels are rising, at about an inch per year. Construction on the project was only completed in 2022.78 Monitoring and maintaining this network of levees, pumps, and canals will cost a fortune and require vigilance. Meanwhile, the Louisiana coastline is disappearing, with a football field of wetland eroding into the Gulf every 52 hundred minutes; since the 1930s, 2,000 square miles of land have been lost to the ocean due to environmental degradation.79 Part of the problem is that the Mississippi River has been overengineered, filled with cement and routed for human convenience; as a result, the sediments carried by the river are sent out into the middle of the Gulf instead of building up coastal land. A large-scale effort to fix this, the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project, was just recently terminated with the approval of Governor Jeff Landry.80 Failure to invest in coastal restoration projects, continued mismanagement of the city’s infrastructure, and the unending slog of the petrol industry could put the whole region underwater in the next century. What is most concerning is the possibility that we did not learn from Hurricane Katrina, that there is any chance that what happened 20 years ago will happen again. The current presidential administration plans to phase out FEMA by the end of this hurricane season. The federal response in 2005 was horrible, an injustice that people are still feeling the effects of now, but it cannot be argued that the State of Louisiana would have done a better job without federal interference. What will happen to other coastal communities when the next hurricane hits and FEMA no longer exists?81 Will your state be prepared – financially, materially, and in terms of physical labor – to administer relief if a disaster were to strike where you are from? If so, are you prepared to witness what will happen when a neighboring state is not capable of such things? It could happen to you. Tom Piazza wrote about watching New Orleans, his beloved home, flood from a faraway television screen: These images were not, and are not, abstractions. These are the neighbors and friends and family of everyone in New Orleans – and, by extension, the United States. The expression “There but for the grace of God go I” has fallen into some disuse recently, but it is useful, whatever your God looks like. The person who suffers is you. (xv) 53 It is not enough to “take care of our own,” to pretend that we owe each other nothing. Believing in an hierarchy of love – ordo amoris, the Catholic doctrine that Vice President J. D. Vance misdirectedly brought to national attention 82 – is easy when you are not, or at least think you are not, in a position that requires love. The kind of love that pushes others to take action. The kind of love that seeks to reform, restructure, and remold the world for its betterment. May that kind of love burn in us, may it bite into our skin and refuse to let go. May it transform how we see the world. Until then – until we are all radicalized towards one another’s welfare – we will have to turn to our stories, to art for comfort, guidance, and remembrance. We can learn from our hauntings, returning to the past to move forward. As Esch prepares to bring new life into a world that has only shown her harshness, she commits to building something lovely, something strong, something hers: I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sunstarved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes. (194) We owe it to each other to listen, to witness, and to pass the word on. 54 Works Cited Babst, C. 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