Opening remarks by Poynter Dean Keith Woods at the recent conference on Covering Hurricanes co-sponsored by Poynter and the Dart Center:
I’m happy to be back home in Louisiana, but I haven’t been away for long since the storm. I was here when the wound opened by Katrina was still fresh and gushing, days old and immediate. The unimaginable present. I’ve been back to sift through moldy, washed out memories, and then I came once more to put the past to rest. I’m here now with my colleagues to talk with you about the future.
I’ve been captivated by the stories you’ve told and the stories told about you these past 100 days or so. But more than that, I feel an insatiable urge to know what will happen next and a profound need to tell stories of my own. That’s what we do, after all, and the task at hand will never be any clearer than that, never any more crucial than now, no matter how bleak the state’s picture; no matter how the many industry buyouts and sell-offs and layoffs cast a pall over the printed word. You’re still driven to do what you do. Tell stories.
Our communities have undergone irrevocable change from a hurricane’s flood or the human flood that came later. How do they rebuild the neighborhoods in Lake Charles? How do they absorb the people or solve the traffic in Baton Rouge and Houston? How do they make a critical decision about elections in New Orleans when the city’s people are holding angry meetings and marches … in Atlanta?
You are the best hope to link them together through your storytelling. Like you, I’m hearing the stories every day from family and friends. And at times, these last 100 days or so, I’ve lived the story too.
Driving through the region since August 29th has been an exercise in bringing past and present together over and over for the most miserable of reunions. This child of Hurricane Betsy saw the images of bobbing heads in house-deep water and remembered that my father’s first trip to our brand new house on Bartholomew Street was by boat.
I saw the pulverized foundations left behind by Katrina in Biloxi and remembered a Sunday’s drive along Highway 90 in Mississippi almost 40 years ago during which my father retold the stories of the Hurricane Camille parties that were underway in the houses where only stairs remained.
The first time I drove into the city after Katrina, I turned off Claiborne Avenue toward the river to visit the corner of Touro and Urquhart streets, where I grew up and where, across the street, I got my first and most exquisite kiss from Gwendolyn Buckhalter. There, I found my old best friend Herbert Woodard, sitting on his porch like nothing had happened to cause the whole neighborhood to empty out except for him and drug dealers across the street. He was talking on the cell phone to his cousin, Gwendolyn Buckhalter. She and her son had lost their home and everything else in Gulfport, Miss. They were living in a FEMA trailer on the beach while a storm named Wilma churned in the Caribbean.
I went to my father’s 9th Ward house in mid-October for the ritual wading through of destroyed things, an experience that links people across this region to a single narrative. I’d taken my stepmother back so she could get a few things. But I’d gone there hoping to feel. I wanted to be overcome by the scope of it all, because driving through neighborhoods and seeing the city turned upside down had only left me in awe.
We’d stumbled, slid and climbed through the redecorated living room, the bedroom defiled by what rose up from the toilet in the bathroom; over the refrigerator toppled and spun around in the tiny kitchen, oozing now with maggots; and into the den that was always too hot, too stuffy, too crowded with things whose meanings only the two of them knew – a place I didn’t like to go even when it didn’t have that cutting scent of mold now wafting from the walls.
It was only the pictures I wanted, just the old slides; just the videotapes that captured the older grandchildren before their younger uncles and aunts got enough money to buy camcorders of their own. I wanted to touch them and remember and cry, finally, for home.
But so little was recognizable – even the layout of the room was lost to memory – that it was hard to know what I’d cry over. The contents of the house had been swallowed whole by a monster, left to swim in its corrosive digestive juices, then vomited back to fall in no place in particular. What of this would I grieve?
The videotapes had dissolved in the salt water. I found one slide where once hundreds sat in trays, lying like a threat for the next son or daughter who dared bring a new boyfriend, finance or spouse to 3150 North Roman Street to be set upon by my father and his sentimental slideshow.
My eight siblings and I alternately coveted and reviled the collection, and now only one slide was intact. I held it up to catch the sunlight coming through the bars on the back screen door. It showed nothing. Whatever had once been there, the water had washed clean.
In October, the stories were in the pictures found and lost, and those stories were being told at kitchen tables in Lafayette and Baton Rouge as people passed around the new slide shows – pictures of what it looks like when your life is swallowed whole and rudely spit up.
As October ended my father died, and a new story revealed itself to me. It’s the story of a whole generation of people in this region who might have lived longer – months, years, maybe a decade here or there – if they hadn’t lost everything, including the hope that at the very least they could be home when it was time to die.
Their stories are woven into a narrative of the hundreds of elderly people who perished while waiting for help, or drowned in the storms or while fleeing them, or from the stress of trying to do anything that needed urgency or limber joints. What does it do to a place, to a community, to a people, when so much memory and wisdom and rootedness is wiped out like that?
My father died in a hospital in Baton Rouge. In the days that came before, we’d taken a whirlwind tour of end-of-life decisions and had shifted numbly to wondering how you bury someone in an empty, flooded city. The Catholic diocese was burying only three people a day in the city’s cemeteries so that the grave workers could spend the rest of their time working on their wrecked homes. So many funerals were needed, the lady in charge of burials told me on the Saturday before my father died, that the next week was already booked, save for one possible opening on Thursday. I argued with my oldest sister when she insisted that I call back to see if we could reserve the date.
It was over by 9 a.m. on the morning of October 31st, and as November began my family got a glimpse into another experience of so many of your readers, finding our way to a funeral home recommended by the people who used to bury our people, making sure the undertaker understood the peculiar challenge of getting a casket made somewhere else to fit into the shifting holes of a New Orleans crypt.
My father got into funerals and their details and their traditions. He was an obituary-reader and attended family funerals no matter how thin the blood. He was a faithful Catholic, a patriot, and, owing to both, a stickler of detail. So he wouldn’t have appreciated the off-the-wall funeral sermon of the whacky priest from St. Francis Xavier church in Baton Rouge, and he wouldn’t have approved of being driven at breakneck speed down I-10, presumably so the funeral directors wouldn’t get caught in the noon rush-hour traffic now a daily reality in Baton Rouge. My dad would have watched, as I did, as the soldiers creased the folds of the flag they took from his coffin. He would have stood solemnly, as I did, to hear the soldier standing 30 yards away play taps.
And he would have noticed the sign that his city was sick with an unfamiliar disease; so sick that, here, two days removed from All Saints Day, when old people left their sick beds to clean up family graves, weeds and garbage were everywhere. My father would have known that his city was suffering with something so powerful it could knock the tradition out of a culture.
The story you are working to cover is no smaller than that and no bigger.
It’s at every intersection of once was and will be; at every meeting between who we thought we were and who is now staring back in the mirror. It’s the story of my brother, who had a FEMA trailer delivered and strapped down on his property the same day his Lacombe house was ready to be reoccupied, and the story of my stepmother, who was trying to decide yesterday whether to make her annual homeowners insurance payment to Allstate, which had yet to contact her about the house on North Roman Street that the city says she won’t be able to occupy for a year.
It’s all the stories of politics and government and contractors and developers and elections and whether the Saints go or come and traffic and crime and racial suspicion; all of that in service of the people, wherever they may now call home, trying to decide what they can do. Maybe even what they should do. Those are your people. And they are you. We hope that our visit with you these next two days will help you to serve both with distinction.
Thank you.
