My Bayou: New Orleans through the Eyes of a Lover

Words that Float

97 Words that float The making of the story and the story itself intertWine so that I can’t always tell one from the other. When I began writing my meditation on death-by-water during the winter of early 2005, I didn’t consciously anticipate that Hurricane Katrina would come in late summer and drown over a thousand people. During the months leading up to the hurricane, Sallie ann Glassman made paintings that depicted a hurricane-darkened sky threatening to crush New orleans. a collage artist friend of mine dreamed about floods and crafted a work that showed a man wearing swim goggles rising from a dark pool of water with the caption overhead: “So where does this leave us?” a sculptor in my neighborhood made ceramic pieces to evoke a massive deluge; she too did this work before the storm. Jimmy, the drunk I shot pool with occasionally, had been walking around muttering, “Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink.” How did any of us know what we were saying with our words and images? We didn’t, not in any rational way. Perhaps we smelled her coming. Like good smart dogs, we may have picked up the scent of danger in the distance and then started barking. or in our cases, ruminating on dark possibilities for reasons we couldn’t explain. Dogs don’t exactly know why they’re barking either. But it’s a good idea to pay attention when they do. Ever since the deluge by water, we here in New orleans have been Constance Adler 98 deluged by words. So much has been said and written about Katrina and our sad, broken city, and still the stories flow. Just as the tragedy itself has not finished unfolding (as of this writing, eight months after, they have found more bodies in the Ninth Ward and Lakeview), so too the struggle to frame it with words continues. It was nearly a year before I could begin to add my drop to the sea of words. For a long time after the storm, I felt paralyzed , muted by the crushing scenes of loss in the streets and houses around me. From the moment Katrina forced us to leave our home, I felt the grip of a powerful riptide dragging me into deep and unfamiliar water, where it left me to swim or sink into sadness. It took time to pull myself to shore, so that I could lie still, try to breathe, and understand what had just happened to all of us. you can’t write about a riptide when you’re in it. There is a story that I clipped from the newspaper that has been curling and yellowing on my desk. It’s the obituary for Cecile Dupont Martin, who died in the storm. I can’t stop looking at her photo. She wears a pink plaid blouse, has blue eyes and a lopsided smile. She looks like a fairytale grandma you could carry around in your apron pocket. The article came from a series in the Times-Picayune titled “Katrina’s Lives Lost,” a meticulous process of drawing all the lines of every face, every life that ended. The stories are more like mini-profiles than the traditional dry-toned obituaries. The reporters interviewed family members to cull together the telling anecdotes that would make the person’s life story more vivid. In addition, each story also attempts to piece together details of the person’s death. There is an excruciating tension in these stories, a dogged forcing of the truth, as if the story is daring us to look away, forbidding us to go back to sleep. Cecile Dupont Martin’s life story includes the information that she was born in 1910, grew up on Dumaine Street, and played the piano. She and her sister gave concerts on WDSu radio in the 1930s. She was a diminutive woman, who baked pfefferneusses, cultivated roses, and worked as a schoolteacher. Cecile Dupont Martin’s death story includes the information that she and her daughter Judith weathered the storm in their Lakeview home. Judith takes over the story at this point. She tells the reporter that she tried My Bayou 99 to take her mother into the attic because the water level was rising above their heads. The reporter quotes Judith as saying, “I pulled her up onto the steps. Suddenly, she said...