“Your city is gone.”
Four words spoken by a free lance photographer to Sun Herald reporter Anita Lee.
“Your city is gone.”
Four words that rang out across the Gulf Coast, from my hometown of Bay St. Louis to Pass Christian to Long Beach to Gulfport to Biloxi to Bayou LaBatre to Mobile and beyond.
“Your city is gone.”
Sense Memories: Recalling the Stories They Told in the Storms
By Jill Geisler
After Katrina, Seeing Still is not Understanding
By Kenny Irby
And what about tomorrow? What was normal is no longer. The town I knew as a youngster where I learned of the joy of childhood innocence, the joy of discovery, the joy of what would be life-long relationships, that town no longer exists. Just as so many of your towns, and the towns of your readers and your viewers and listeners, no longer exist. Now, there is only a new normal to build together.
“No one’s story is unique,” Ryan LaFontaine wrote in the Sun Herald. “All of us have been left with shattered hearts. My hometown is mangled and my neighbors are in pain. My house can be rebuilt, but my home may never again be the same.”
“Your city is gone.”
This was the kind of story you pray you never have to chronicle. But from all I have read and heard, you did it honorably and courageously, in the finest tradition of journalism, and made us proud. People desperately needed to read and hear your words and view your pictures, on all the platforms available. They needed places where they could come together with others to share their grief and their fears and their tears, places where they could join in a communion of feeling, places that were islands of news and information in the middle of a sea of rumors.
They needed to be able to grasp the magnitude of what happened and to see the faces and to hear the stories of those heroes who saved lives, and later those heroes from across the land who came to simply help in any way they could. They needed to read and hear of 13-year-old Phillip Bullard who saved his family. Of the 102-year-old woman who wouldn’t leave her home because she said no one else is 102 and they would never understand why she stayed. Or the words of Catholic Bishop Thomas Rodi: “The difficult thing about suffering is that it comes at a time we didn’t choose. But we can choose whether we let it burden our hearts, or expand them.”
You gave them that place to come together. You gave it to them, even though many of you had no homes to return to, no clothes to change into, no time to shed your own tears.
You know the script. It has been written before: Reporters and visual journalists get there first. They witness it all. They show no emotion, make jokes, never cry. They get the story and then move on to the next assignment. And for the most part, they do not deal with the aftermath, with the trauma of having looked into the mouth of hell, or with having been up close and personal with the largest natural disaster in the history of our country.
If you haven’t taken that time to cry, to grieve, perhaps this is the weekend to pause for a moment and to look deep inside yourself, especially since the nightmarish images are still around like billboards, advertising grief and reminding us every moment, every hour, every day that our city is gone.
“I mean, I mean…” Gov. Haley Barbour was searching for words to describe what he was seeing. ” I mean there’s nothing there in many places. Nothing left. It’s destroyed. That’s what I mean.”
I know what he meant. As I drove and walked the streets of Bay St. Louis several weeks after Katrina all I could say was, “Oh, my God.” Slabs of concrete, stairs to nowhere, the remains of houses scattered across the landscape as if they were millions of Lego pieces ready to be assembled into what would be once again loving homes.
This was the place where nine generations of Favres have lived, where my seven older brothers and sisters were born in our home on Main Street before mom decided to go to a hospital for my birth and those of my younger brother and sister, where I made my first communion and was confirmed and graduated from St. Stanislaus. This is the place where at 16 I helped my brothers carry my dad’s coffin while the beautiful voices of the St. Augustine Seminary’s choir sang in the background, where I delivered the eulogies for my mother and two sisters and where we buried two brothers, where I wrote my first newspaper story for my dad’s weekly, the Sea Coast Echo.
This was the place of a boyhood that shaped the years that have followed, a place back then of 10-cent sodas at the drug store and 25-cent Saturday movie matinees and 50-cent haircuts , a place where practically everyone knew everyone else and you never passed anyone on the streets without greeting them by name.
This was the place where I experienced my first hurricane in 1947, before they named them, a day when more than 100 people, washed out of their Cedar Point houses, ended up in our farm house which the water didn’t reach. It was the place where I came home to once before after another hurricane, Camille in 1969, to witness what was left of Bay St. Louis after what most believed to be the worst storm in our history. And this was the place I came back to after Katrina, a hurricane whose deadly fury was far greater than that of Camille.
Two brothers and a sister still live there, as do dozens of nieces, nephews and cousins. Most, like many of you, have lost their homes. All will return to build again.
As a Sun Herald editorial proclaimed, “It’s up to us restore the way of life that we have always appreciated. It is up to us. We dare not stay either in shock or in mourning forever.”
“Your city is gone.”
Now, you will have to help readers and viewers and listeners decide what normal will be from this time on. Will it be the postcard scenes we have seen so often of people walking hand-in-hand on the beach just minutes before nightfall? Will it be the casinos and motels and hotels jammed again with people who have left their own burdens behind?
Will the new homes and businesses that will be built create a new architectural vision for the coast? Will most people stay or return, or will there be a whole new roster of names in the next phone book? And, as Sun Herald editor Stan Tiner wrote, will our common coda be that we are still standing together? Or will we be looking out only for ourselves?
“Our people have great spirit,” my nephew Edward Favre, mayor of Bay St. Louis, told me after we had hugged and chatted for a while. “We will rebuild together. It will take years, but we will be back.” And that’s what I have heard over and over again. And it’s what you see on the handmade signs in the now vacant lots where homes once stood.
Isn’t this one of the reasons we came to journalism in the first place? To help people find their way in a time of crisis? To assist as best we can to calm fears and promote a civil dialogue? To let everyone know what they can expect next and to provide a forum for all voices to be heard in that discussion?
It hasn’t been a good year for many of our colleagues around the country. We have lost hundreds upon hundreds of newsroom jobs in 2005, space and resources have been cut, morale has been damaged. But what you have done, and what our colleagues in Louisiana and in neighboring states have done, not just for Katrina but for all of the deadly storms, speaks so loudly and so clearly about the contract and the scared trust we share with those who look to us for the news and information they need to live in the present and prepare for the future. You have honored that trust.
This story will continue to be written for years. And it needs to continue to be written, as it has been, in the language of the heart, the language of hope, and, yes, the language of love—love for our communities, love for our heritage, love for what was and what can be.
“Your city is gone.”
There is a lot of healing yet to be done, outside in the streets and inside your own buildings, for those who stay and those who don’t, for those who have lost so much and for those of us, such as me, who share the pain of the losses felt by those we love so dearly. There are a lot of memories of the past and the ugly images of Katrina’s wrath to deal with. So many dead to remember in our thoughts and prayers.
And so many voices we heard that will echo in our heads for years and years.
“It’s over. They are with the Lord.”
“Baby, don’t die. If you die, I will die.”
“Has anyone seen…or have they found…”
“I haven’t had a chance to cry. I have to find my mother and put her to rest.”
“I don’t know how we survived. I guess it is all in the praying I did.”
Or the words of Phillip Bullard’s mother: “I am living because of the grace of God and the courage of my son.”
Or the fireman searching homes: “I am hoping and praying I don’t find anyone.”
Or the voice of a niece, appropriately named Angel: ” I can only thank God that, although homes have been destroyed and mementoes lost forever, my family endures. Pictures can be copied, furniture can be replaced, and homes can be rebuilt, but lives cannot be reclaimed.”
“Your city is gone.”
But as you take the measure of your own hearts and souls, of your own work, your own contributions, give yourselves a report card filled with the highest grades. You have served with grace and class and caring, and we thank you.
There is so much left to be done. There are more sacrifices needed, more waves of fears left to be calmed, more bridges of agreement to be built across the many gulfs of different opinions about what needs to be done. And we cannot allow anyone, especially the men and women in Washington, to forget what you have witnessed. If Mississippi is forgotten, then the land, filled with the remains of what was everyday life, will be soaked again and again with our tears.
We will carry those 24 hours of hell with us for years to come—the headlines, the descriptions of the destruction, the pictures, the voices, the cries for help are all indelible marks burned into our memory banks. The water is long gone, the wind is a mere whisper of what was, and there are as many hopes and dreams and ambitions for the future as there are dreamers.
There is much left to be done. A new normal to create. A new tomorrow. New cities.
“Your city is gone.”
Please help her to be reborn again.
