Excerpts from a Journal

September 1, 2005
Bloomington, Indiana

Nature does not know us. That enduring romantic postulate. It just does what it does.

Katrina's wake, if Jourdain meant what I think he said, will have brought water to the second step to the second floor, perhaps higher before he tried going downstairs. I feel sad to lose the piano and linens in the dining room. But this really is not so bad. I am remarkably stoic now.

They got out of the house yesterday. Jourdain was first—he swam and walked up onto the Interstate and then walked to Algiers. The others were picked up by the Coast Guard once they exited the house. Algiers is dry. But the city is shut down. Total evacuation. For at least a month or two.

There will be looting, of course. Or just vandalism. Chandeliers perhaps. Dishes gone or slammed to the floor?

Now we will indeed re-do the house.

So present. So real. So fragile.

I hope at least that the pictures on the second floor will all still be there.

Jan is, I think, in the worst shape. On Thursday last week, she lost Fred, Jr. On Monday and Tuesday, her house. And they are evacuating Uncle Fred. She is suffering great loss and will be depressed, I think, for a good while. I encouraged her to come here. She's got cabin fever and is at wit's end in the limbo of the Houston(?) La Quinta.

And so many friends have called, emailed, come out of the woodwork. This love is wonderful.

It is strange. When I hold an individual thing in my hands, I can't, don't want to, let it go. But when I stand back, its importance diminishes. This thought in response to the jar of figs before me on my unfinished altar, between trumpet and candle, appropriately framed by Man from the South—recalling that other jar of figs now submerged in water on the floor of the pantry.

The house stood firm, Kandy said.

Daddy must be smiling.

* * *

September 13, 2005

New Orleanian that I am, living and working in Indiana, with my family home flooded and most of my relatives now scattered from Texas to Georgia, I am in distress.

The scandal of the incompetent rescue and evacuation is the tip of an enormous iceberg. It is matched only by the chronically deteriorating condition of much of our city beyond the Quarter and the Garden District and large numbers of its people. Over thirty years of homecomings, I have watched the infrastructure of New Orleans crumble little by little and many black people, especially, working two or three jobs to make ends meet. As everyone now seems to agree, the crisis of Katrina's aftermath was exacerbated by the poverty of Gulf Coast residents.

Watching my television, I imagined that the national press might ask, "Where were these people during the fat dot-com years?" I know the answer: Passed by. Most never even knew there was such a thing as the "dot-com bubble."

For years, cruelly lean budgets, due in part to the homestead exemption and post-"integration" white flight to Jefferson Parish, left the city with no tax base, and state government in Baton Rouge nixed virtually every scheme the city devised to help itself. New Orleans was forced to fund its services with a regressive 10% sales tax, which also pushed the best stores and middle-class shoppers to the Jefferson suburbs . . .

As for the federal government, the Bush administration and its neo-conservative agenda of no taxes, less government, and no social programs is simply the most egregious instance of a Republican philosophy that has taken hold since the Reagan years and gone amuck.

True, Americans are generous when called upon. But generosity is one thing, equity is another. What I see is an American culture of the self. It's all about "me"—others be damned. This creed is in fact supported by our founding documents: we pledge ourselves to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." George W. Bush proposes that this is the century of...