New Orleans: Raze or Rebuild? (Page 2)

God's Wrath in Gulfport

In Gulfport, Mississippi, God's wrath hath smitten the evil gaming industry. All the giant floating multi-story casinos have washed away--and much of their cash is unaccounted for. So, too, have all the houses on the beach been wiped out. An area two blocks from the beach is cordoned off because the shore is strewn with tons of rotting chicken and pork from a grounded freighter. Perhaps that cordon is also protecting the casinos' cash.

At a shuttered gas station, I meet the young white night watchman, Joseph. He owns a seven-foot-long Monitor lizard and is going to great lengths to keep her warm now that the power is down. "I have my plan for evacuation," he says. "Those people in New Orleans shoulda too, but if you say that, then you're a racist."

Later it comes out that Joseph thinks New Orleans is a cesspool that should be filled with even more water, that he doesn't like Vietnamese people and that he's licensed to carry a gun at all times. "I tell you, we're on the verge of another Civil War in this country."

A white woman pulls in to buy cigarettes. "I think New Orleans is a satanic city," she says earnestly. "I mean, I am not super-religious, but it's a horrible place full of very satanic people." She thinks voodoo and Mardi Gras might have something to do with Katrina's path.

Trying to get gas north of Lake Pontchartrain, back in Louisiana, we pull in to a cops-only refueling depot and chat with a producer from Universal Studios in Florida who is now a volunteer parking attendant for the rescue effort. He's red with sunburn, fidgety and sweaty, his lingo laced with military jargon.

"My orders are to secure this area," he says. "The situation is still pretty volatile here--there are a lot of evacuees from New Orleans around." He nods to the woods as if Charlie is out there on the proverbial tree line. "I am trying to locate a truckload of NYPD ammunition that went missing." Everything about him says this is war. "You guys be careful out there." Gun shops in Baton Rouge are reporting sales of up to a thousand a day.

Outside a Red Cross shelter in Covington, there is a softer version of this siege mentality. When I interview some African-American evacuees, no less than four different white middle-class Red Cross staff intervene at various points, once even attempting to have me evicted from the area by police. In paternalistic tones, they explain to the black people I am talking with that newspapers and magazines do not give aid.

"Yes, ma'am, I know," says a woman named Raven. "I want the whole world to hear my story." And the stories they tell are harrowing.

A heavy-set older woman named Rosie Lee Riford is on the verge of tears. "I am so worried. I feel like killing myself," she says. Her grown son, who uses a wheelchair due to a childhood gunshot wound, refused to leave the Saint Downs housing project. She was forced to leave without him as the storm took aim at New Orleans. Now that neighborhood is flooded. "I never hurt anybody or did any wrong. I just keep asking God, Why? Why'd you do this?"

For Latino immigrants, the situation can be even worse. A Nicaraguan house painter named Juan tells me he will have to go home to Managua because he has lost everything: car, apartment, the business where he worked. He says the Red Cross cannot register him for benefits, so he eats at Latino churches. He bravely holds back tears.

Not far from the Red Cross is a group from Veterans for Peace, who came here from Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, and who are now coordinating a large-scale supply depot and distribution center. At the Vets' Internet tent sits Tenshenia Downs, a young, well-organized mother from East New Orleans. She is trying to find her relatives and set up housing in Atlanta. She spent a day on her roof with her three kids and was then evacuated by a National Guard flatboat and taken to the Superdome.

"It was like a prison," she says. "It was hell. They had pedophiles up in there. People living like animals." She recounts the backed-up toilets, urine-flooded halls, the elderly near death, the fistfights, panic, lack of food and limited water.

"They wouldn't let us leave," she continues. "But when I heard about the third rape, I just took my three kids and went. We waded through that water to I-10 and walked over the river to Gretna." From Gretna she walked and hitched rides with truckers and "a real nice white couple" here to Covington. "I lost it all: everything in my house and a new car, no insurance." And the beauty spa where she worked, Bella Donna, is gone.

She says she'll try and start over in Atlanta. Bizarrely, there is no Red Cross or FEMA clearinghouse of information yet established; instead, Ms. Downs is pointed to the MoveOn.org website for housing and job postings in Atlanta.

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