Maybe we were a bit young, but do you remember when Katrina hit New Orleans? Our families sat around television sets and anxiously watched as the flood wall failed and New Orleans was besieged by a flood that destroyed communities and families. The area they kept showing on the news was “the poorest neighborhood in New Orleans”; this was the Lower 9th Ward.
This, however, wasn’t the whole truth.
Backstory time:The Lower 9th Ward is a predominately black neighborhood of the working middle class. It is a community that was founded upon the river work that New Orleans was built upon. They were longshoremen who would paddle the boats that would move commerce up and down the river. As work continued to grow, more people came to the area. The Lower 9th has, historically, the highest rate of homeownership (somewhere in the area of 98 percent).
These are not merely facts. Through discussion with Mr. Ronald Lewis, owner of the House of Dance and Feathers, I was able to glean some of the knowledge that is commonplace now in the New Orleanian culture. Brief backstory; the House of Dance and Feathers is a small museum in the Lower 9th that documents the Mardi Gras and Native American culture in New Orleans. (For more, check out their website http://houseofdanceandfeathers.org/) I sat with him for more than an hour discussing what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now. This was not just a discussion based on facts and statistics. This was personal;it was real. A primary, first hand accounting of what the neighborhood used to be like and how everything has changed. At the end of our conversation I asked him, “what is it you wished people knew about the Lower 9th?”
“That we are people too, we’re not animals.”
We’ve just now rounded the bend of the 10th anniversary of Katrina. The stories have changed slightly, but not in the right way. Now the headlines read “This Poor Community is Bouncing Back”. Never once do they talk about who lives there or what they have accomplished. Never do they mention how even though they are leaps and bounds beyond where they were, they still have a far way to go.
The whole idea is summed up by a quote from Mr. Nick Fox, a guide through New Orleans. [Talking to a news anchor] “If you want to prove that you care about this city, you’ll come back in 6 months and see how we’re doing.”
The news crews, with their cameras and “heartfelt” comments were just a nice fluff piece to commemorate what happened. There were plenty of cameras around the city when the anniversary struck, but they truly don’t care about the well being of the area. They wanted to do their part, fill their segment and move on. It’s almost like they needed to do it because everyone else was doing it.
After being there, standing in the streets of the Lower 9th down in the Big Easy, I became incredibly aware of a certain fact: there are some things you just aren’t told about the world. Even when you talk to the locals in an area, people who have moved there or tourists, they’ll tell you to avoid certain areas of the city. But when you go there, when the right person says “you should check it out” and suddenly you’re open to a whole new world.
Be open to that whole new world, you will be shocked more times than not.
