Katrina reveals the faces of the poor

I promised last week I’d tell you about a picnic I attended where a

local couple, Ron and Nancy Anderson, talked about how women and men

can “grow affair-proof hedges” around their marriages.

Since I wrote that column, a wrathful storm named Katrina

intervened.

I’ll tell you about the picnic and Nancy Anderson’s book,

“Avoiding the Greener Grass Syndrome,” next week. This week, I can’t

go on as though Katrina never showed her face and showed the world --

and us -- our nation’s poor.

New Orleans is a part of me. It stole a piece of my heart when I

was young. Like San Francisco, it’s known for stealing hearts.

I was born in Mobile, Ala., which was the capital of French

Louisiana before that distinction was transferred to Biloxi, Miss.,

in 1720 -- three years before it was shifted again to New Orleans.

The Crescent City sits right outside Mobile’s back door.

Many a weekend morning, my family would get up before the sun,

pile in the car and get on Highway 90. We’d travel through

Pascagoula, Ocean Springs and Biloxi.

At Biloxi, we’d stop to take in its famous lighthouse and the

antebellum homes along the beach before heading for Gulfport, Pass

Christian and New Orleans, driving along a highway lined with ancient

oaks draped in Spanish moss.

We’d pull into the Crescent City about the time that Cafe du

Monde, the city’s famous open-air cafe near the riverfront, was

beginning to bustle. We’d plop down in its white metal chairs, still

cool from the night air, and fill up on steaming cafe au lait and

beignets -- square, hot, exquisite, hole-less doughnuts served under

a thick, snowy blanket of powdered sugar.

These days, Cafe du Monde -- which has been around since 1862 --

has a website (o7www.cafedumonde.comf7) that tells visitors it’s

open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, closing “only on Christmas

Day and on the day an occasional hurricane passes too close to New

Orleans.”

As I watched the early televised photos of Katrina overwhelming

the city, I felt unspeakably silly when I realized the cafe was the

first thing I thought about. So much other historical and cultural

treasure, so much humanity had been lost.

On a visit to New Orleans a year or so ago, my husband and I

picked up a rental car at the airport instead of taking a cab. On the

way, we were rerouted by construction from familiar avenues into a

tangled grid of narrow streets. Soon we found ourselves passing by

clapboard houses with crooked porches and peeling paint.

On nearly every porch, several black residents were gathered,

chatting and watching the street. As we slowly drove by, trying to

get our bearings, we looked out at the faces of our accidental

audience, who were apparently amused by our presence.

I was in a part of New Orleans I’d never really seen before, a

part of New Orleans I wouldn’t see again until after Hurricane

Katrina struck.

I grew up partly in the segregated South, where people of color

couldn’t sit at the same lunch counter as me or attend the same

public school. Some years, though, I spent in other parts of the

United States, because my father served in the Marine Corps. In those

places, people of all races shopped in the same commissary and went

to the same movie theater. Their children ate lunch together at

school.

Back in my hometown, when I asked about the differences, I was

usually told, by black and white folks alike, “That’s just the way it

is.”

As I watched the televised coverage of the chaos at New Orleans’

Superdome, I startled myself when I blurted, “When is someone going

to ask why all those people are black?”

I’m not crazy about generalizations, so I quickly said to my

husband, “Well, I know they aren’t all black. I did see a white man

somewhere in there.”

But by and large, what I had said was true. And those who were not

black likely shared something in common with those who were: They

were poor.

A little more than a week later, columnist Eugene Robinson wrote

in the Washington Post, “Think about what just happened -- a

record-book hurricane was bearing down on the most vulnerable city in

the country, and it didn’t dawn on officials at any level that many

people didn’t have cars in which to flee, money to stay in hotels or

upstate friends with enough space to take them in.”

I hope Robinson was right. I hope the reason thousands of people

were left to meet Katrina face to face was that it didn’t dawn on

anyone there were people without the means to get out of town. If it

dawned on someone and they didn’t do a thing about it, we have worse

problems than those Robinson mentioned. “It’s as if we don’t even see

poor people in this country anymore,” he wrote. “As if we don’t even

try to imagine what their lives are like.... To be poor in America

was to be invisible, but not after this week, not after those images

of the bedraggled masses at the Superdome, convention center and

airport.”

In New Orleans, “race and class overlapped to such an extent that

it was difficult to pry them apart,” he observed. “Were people

forgotten or treated with disdain because they were black or because

they were poor?”

Robinson guesses it was because they were poor. That’s my guess,

too, and I wonder this: Why, pray tell, were so many of the poor also

black?

Don’t tell me “that’s just the way it is.” God help us if we don’t

know by now that’s not the way it ought to be.

God’s second commandment, Jesus said, is “Love your neighbor as

yourself.” A storm named Katrina has given us abundant opportunity.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].

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