From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Once the Levees Break

Once the Levees Break Let’s face it: New Orleans is a strange place. New Orleans reminds me of my crazy uncle, the husband of my dad’s twin sister. A dentist by profession, he moved his family to the Georgia barrier islands and opened an office. His office hours were arranged to fit his golf and party schedule. He didn’t mind working, but he wanted to have some fun along the way. New Orleans is like that. It’s appropriate that you can get a good cup of gumbo virtually anywhere here. Gumbo is a hearty soup which incorporates French, Spanish, Native American, Caribbean, and African-American cooking influences (along with a hint of Italian in some places). These same ingredients make New Orleans’ culture unique among American cities. Founded by the French in 1718 on high ground between the Mississippi River and the Indian trade routes, New Orleans was until the early twentieth century the main southern port of entry into the United States. The Spanish owned it for a while but gave it back to the French, just in time for it to become the centerpiece of Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Just after Jefferson took title to New Orleans, unrest in the Caribbean sent thousands of refugees from Haiti to Cuba and then to New Orleans. The refugees were pretty evenly divided among whites, slaves, and a new group, “free people of color.” All of them spoke French. These arrivals from the Caribbean in 1809 doubled the city’s Frenchspeaking population. They also caused New Orleans to become 295 America’s “blackest city,” darker than Charleston’s fifty-three percent. But unlike Charleston, New Orleans’ “colored” population had many hues. These hues affect the city’s culture still. Many natives talk like my new friend from Jeanerette, Margaret Roberts. However, a lot of them sound like New Yorkers. Most first timers to New Orleans are surprised to hear New Orleaners sound like they’re from Brooklyn. Visitors believe that New Orleaners either talk with a southern drawl like you hear in Mississippi or sound like a Cajun. Not true—many speak Yat, a hard, flat, Yankee-sounding dialect. Half of the metropolitan area is below sea level, which has always been a concern for these city dwellers. In late August 2005, their worst fears were realized. After taking a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina, the levee system, built in response to a 1965 hurricane, failed. Over eighty percent of the city flooded. Some places had fifteen feet of water. Twothirds of the flooding was directly attributed to the levee failures. The worst flooding occurred in the Lower Ninth Ward, a lower-income neighborhood . There, the floodwaters came from three different directions; but the worst of the floodwaters came from the breaches of the Industrial Canal. The floodwaters from the canal came with such ferocity that they carried a barge from the canal and deposited it in the neighborhood. The news coverage—with pictures of people stranded on the roofs of their houses, the dire circumstances of those who retreated to the Superdome and the Convention Center, and the nearly 1,000 deaths from the flooding—showed that Katrina was one of the major events of the new century. Lots of things have changed in Katrina’s aftermath, but New Orleans is rebounding. The metropolitan population, which fell by almost half after the storm, is now close to pre-Katrina levels. The school system— which was largely dysfunctional before the storm—has become a laboratory for modern educational theories. Seventy percent of its public school students now go to charter schools, the nation’s largest percentage . With the large infusion of federal dollars for rebuilding the levees and other infrastructure repairs, New Orleans weathered the great recession better than a lot of places. In fact, it was the fastest-growing large city between 2010 and 2011. 296 One reason for New Orleans’ rebirth is its culture: a 2007 New York Times article, “36 hours in New Orleans,” said it best: What other city, after being half-drowned and left to starve, foiled by bureaucracy and attacked by the auto-immune disease of rampant crime, could stagger to its feet to welcome visitors with a platter of oysters on the half shell and a rousing brass band? What place barely two years after Hurricane Katrina could provide street car rides and impromptu parades...