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The San Diego Union-Tribune

An uneasy city has spirit to survive


September 18, 2005

Staff writer Gregory Alan Gross covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for the Union-Tribune.

On my last trip back home, I slept on the floor of a middle school with a few hundred National Guardsmen, without electricity or running water, only blocks away from streets turned into toxic canals by Hurricane Katrina.

EARNIE GRAFTON / Union-Tribune
Gregory Alan Gross (center) rides with members of the California National Guard during their search operations of a flooded New Orleans. A staff writer for the Union-Tribune, Gross reported on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
But those are not the memories of New Orleans that keep me awake at night.

On Napoleon Avenue between Loyola and Daneel streets is a block-long grassy rectangle.

As a high school senior, I came to know every inch of that field. Our campus had no field of its own, so when we wanted to play out our NFL fantasies, that's where we went.

If our field of dreams was occupied, the game venue shifted to the side streets – Magnolia, Amelia, Gen. Taylor, Cadiz. The hoods of cars were in-bounds, something our neighbors didn't always appreciate. Sidewalks were out.

When the last touchdown had been spiked off the pavement, you could walk down to Freret for a post-game "po'boy." A couple of bucks bought you half a loaf of fresh French bread, sliced lengthwise and filled with anything from the usual cold cuts to fried oysters.

If you were more hot than hungry, nothing was better than a snowball, a hand-sized conical cup of white paper, filled with a dome of coarsely ground ice and flooded with the sweet syrup of your choice. You knew them by color – yellow for pineapple, green for lemon-lime, purple for grape, and of course, the neighborhood standard, strawberry-red.

After that, it was down to my father's house on Valence Street, right off Freret. Valence, the same street that was home to the Neville Brothers and their family.

It's all gone now, drowned under lurid green liquid stench, buried under poisonous sludge, collapsed into piles of waterlogged kindling. Every house, every school, every church. The oyster bar where my parents got engaged. The corner park where I first learned the joy of snowballs. The warehouse where we would try to sneak a peek at next year's Mardi Gras floats.


It never occurred to me that my birthplace would die before I did.

At the same time, a part of you wonders why you're mourning.

New Orleans cultivates its image as the party capital of America. This city will drink you under the table and blow those trumpets till the cows come home, then come back for more the next night – or so the city fathers would have you believe. It's all one big Carnival mask, and New Orleans never takes it off.

Until now.

There is no smile on the face of New Orleans exposed by Katrina, as a stunned America quickly learned. Beneath the mask of good times is grinding poverty on a par with the hillside slums of Tijuana and Rio de Janiero, all held in place by hardened layers of prejudice.

But only one of those layers is racial. Issues of ethnicity and class entwine around this city like a pair of snakes, inseparable and suffocating to hope.

Think back to those televised images of the people caught inside New Orleans by Katrina, the ones lined up inside the Superdome and outside the convention center. Nearly all of them were black, yes. But not just black.

They nearly all were dark faces, weren't they? Very dark faces, in fact. That's no accident. In New Orleans, there are degrees of blackness.

Every big city has its social ladder. New Orleans has two, one white and one black. Most of the folks left behind when Katrina struck are at the bottom of both. If you're an African-American with no money and dark skin, you may not have much of a future in this town.

If you're white with no education or ties to the city's white elite, your prospects are only marginally better. As Ken Bellau, a lifelong New Orleans resident and former NOPD cop likes to say:

"Around here, it's not what you know or who you know. It's who I know."

Two centuries of living with that reality have created a permanent undercurrent of rage. Behind the frozen smile of its cultural Carnival mask, New Orleans is quite possibly the angriest city in America. And it has the body counts to prove it.

Over the past two decades, New Orleans, with a population of less than a half-million people, has consistently had one of the highest murder rates in the nation. Last year, the rate was nearly 10 times the national average. By night, neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward and blocks of poverty like the Magnolia and Iberville projects become urban killing fields too dangerous even to walk near, much less enter.

It's the oblivious tourist and the glib TV announcer most likely to call this place "The Big Easy." Those who live here tend to know better.

For all that, though, New Orleans is likely to survive. Endurance is a local tradition.

The best and the worst of its residents are the descendants of the people who built a great river port in defiance of the bayou and its hellish environment. They grew the cotton and sugar cane that made the money to build those glorious Southern mansions – and then they built the mansions. They outlasted both colonialism and the Confederacy.

They built the PT boat that carried John F. Kennedy to wartime glory and the landing craft that carried "the greatest generation" to victory in World War II. They invented jazz. They turn funerals into street parades, complete with music loud enough to wake the spirit of the dearly departed.

And they have endured their share of hurricanes.

The day after I returned from New Orleans, I was watching network news coverage of Katrina when I saw something astounding: a three-second video clip of four middle-aged black men sitting around a card table under the shade of a tree in a flooded neighborhood.


But they weren't just singing. They were singing songs of the Mardi Gras Indians, a black New Orleans folk tradition unique to this city, born of the annual Carnival and maintained in that age-old spirit of defiance, a determination to celebrate life in spite of adversity, in spite of prejudice, in spite of anything.

In those three seconds, I realized that my grief for New Orleans was premature. You can't kill this place. You can drown it, burn it, lay siege to it, level it, but you cannot drive it under. The willful spirit of the people who live here will not be submerged.

Not even by walls and waves of contaminated water.

Greg Gross: (619) 293-1889;

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© Copyright 2005 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.