The View From Lott's Porch

When I think about the human disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, there are two moments that stand out in my mind. The first is George W. Bush's press conference in Mississippi on September 2, during which he bounced uneasily from foot to foot like he couldn't wait to get out of there, looking sullen and furrowed, observing with tense jocularity that Trent Lott's house had been lost, too, and that "we" were going to rebuild him "a fantastic house" and that he, our President, was looking forward to rocking on the porch when that day came to pass. The second moment was the now-famous interview with Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff on National Public Radio. Media junkie that I am, I had the TV and the radio on at the same time. As pictures of the horrific conditions at the convention center, including the image of that poor old woman who had passed away in her wheelchair, were being broadcast to the world, Chertoff was insisting that he had no knowledge of any extreme conditions or deaths at the center. "Our reporter has seen [it]," insisted the host. "I can't argue with you about what your reporter tells you," said Chertoff.

I confess that I find myself filtering this horror through a very personal lens. It overlaps with the task of clearing out and selling the house I grew up in, the house my mother was born in, my grandmother's house, a house that has belonged to my family for a hundred years. My distress at having to give it up is confused with the scenes of Katrina's devastation that most of us--if not Chertoff--are witnessing. Against that appalling backdrop I find myself clinging to a sense of place, even though I am not truly or traumatically displaced. Mine was an African-American family that owned a home in times when so few did. As one of the neighbors put it tartly when discovering we were selling: "I'm African. We don't sell our land."

So I think about this as I look at the devastation of the Ninth Ward, for just one example, an area that has perhaps more African-American property owners than anyplace else in Louisiana. As I drove back and forth from the house I grew up in, carrying out pictures of my college graduation and my Latin notes from seventh grade, I heard a black woman on the radio describe how jarring it was to see the media describe her neighborhood as one riven by poverty and desperation. She was about to get her MBA, her brother already had his MBA, their extended family owned nine homes there, had insurance and owned cars in which they had fled for their lives. But it was the Ninth Ward; it was indeed being dubbed "poverty-stricken," "corrupt," "drug-ridden"; and politicians like Dennis Hastert were talking about bulldozing the entire area.

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