This begins with the refugees. Will they be given an opportunity to rebuild their lives with dignity, or regarded as so much pitiable refuse, to be passed from town to town? Despite Barbara Bush’s rosy judgment of stadium life (“So many of the people in the arena here,” she said, “were underprivileged anyway, so this — this is working very well for them”), it is an unsustainable situation, with zero privacy and less possibility of purpose. As of last week, Robert had heard that it might be six months before people would be able to return to New Orleans, and though there was more than enough food and donated medical supplies in the Astrodome to keep everyone there alive, he didn’t know how long Houston’s hospitality might last. “This is gonna wear thin on their nerves,” he said, staring off at the lines of cots arrayed across the Astrodome floor. “There’s a lot of people here.”
Before the week was out, Robert’s prediction proved correct: The governor of Texas proposed that 7,000 of the refugees be transferred to cruise ships docked at Gulf-state ports.
Here lies Vera
I heard the story of Vera independently from two different men who were trying to stick it out at their homes in the Garden District. Both were white, and, at least on the distorted scale imposed by the storm, both were quite well-off. Each told me about the black lady who died over on Magazine Street. The details of their accounts differed slightly, but the essentials were the same. A bus shelter fell on her, one of them said, “crushed her dead.” The other didn’t know what killed her, only that she was dead, and that her body lay in the street for two days before anyone bothered to pick her up. Both agreed that the Samaritans who carted off her remains were turned away at the morgue, so they brought her back to Magazine Street and buried her where she had fallen.
I found her as promised, beneath a shallow mound on the sidewalk at the corner of Magazine and Jackson. Across the street, the third story of a brick building had collapsed into the road. The grave had been carefully lined with five layers of bricks borrowed from the rubble. A sheet of white plastic had been stretched across the bricks, and a cross had been planted at the head. “Here lies Vera,” someone had written on the plastic sheet. “God help her.”
The next morning I happened to pass the grave again. The authorities had been by. The bricks were scattered, the cross and plastic tarp were gone, replaced by a sheet of plywood. The body was gone too. A thick, brownish-red liquid was left pooled in the dirt. On the plank, someone had spray-painted a warning: “Brothaz, Death Contamination.”
May the poor of New Orleans, both the living and the dead, be treated with greater respect.
