Washed Away

Shirley Washington and her family lived in New Orleans East in the 9th Ward in a handsome two-story house made of brick with plenty of room for company. Over the years, I had made many visits, and she cooked — gumbo, jambalaya — and told me stories about the city and about family that her first cousin — my mother — hadn’t. When I asked Shirley why she didn’t follow people out to L.A., she laughed. “Oooh no, you all got earthquakes out in California,” she said. There was never any L.A. to New Orleans folk, or San Francisco or San Diego, just California. I pointed out that she had to endure dangerous hurricanes much more regularly than I had to endure dangerous earthquakes, an observation she waved off like a mosquito. “They’re not bad,” she said. “They don’t really come up in the Gulf that far. If it gets to raining you just stay inside and wait till it passes, that’s all.” This time the hurricane didn’t pass New Orleans without doing its best to bury it. And Shirley, who had always hunkered down in her house during storms in the 70 years she’s been there, finally left. Unlike lots of people in the 9th Ward, she had the means to evacuate, going first to Baton Rouge and ending up in Little Rock. She doesn’t know where she’s going next, but she’s told my mother that she’s never going back to New Orleans. Back home. “That’s it for Shirley,” my mother said with a sad finality.

My mother was close with Shirley. They grew up together on and around Roman Street in the 7th Ward, the most intensely Creole part of town. In 1954 my mother left to get married and settle in L.A., like many of her relatives who were uprooting themselves year by year, lured slowly but steadily West by jobs, houses and the fantastic rumor of no Jim Crow. Shirley was one of the few in my mother’s family who stayed. I saw photos of her when I was a kid, this New Orleans cousin in sepia and black and white, a somber-faced girl of about 7 dressed in Sunday clothes, with hair curling to her shoulders and a deeply weary air that seemed to me terribly Southern. I knew nothing of New Orleans, not geographically anyway, and Shirley helped me place it, put it somewhere. She was the muse of a past I didn’t quite know, could really only guess at — my mother, preoccupied with her increased freedom and the advent of shopping malls, wasn’t much help in that regard. When I was younger and people asked where I was from, I’d say Los Angeles, and quickly add, but my family’s from New Orleans. I have people there. I finally met Shirley on my first trip to New Orleans in 1984, when I was 22. She was short and coffee-colored, with glasses and long dark hair that didn’t look much different from her photos. She was happy to see me, but hardly overwhelmed. I was Gloria’s daughter, the family she already knew; it was as if we had been neighbors all along, albeit neighbors living 2,000 miles apart. About a month ago, my husband and I received an invitation to attend her big 50th wedding anniversary celebration. It was supposed to be last weekend. Like so many things outside the act of survival, that too will have to wait.

Like I said, I can’t imagine New Orleans without Shirley in it. But then, I couldn’t have possibly imagined the New Orleans I’m seeing now — a wretched, wrung-out city of poverty, hovering disease, abandonment and rage. This has been noted already and will be noted hence, but virtually all of the thousands of faces bearing the misery, wandering the highways, lingering on streets and cramming into buses going nowhere, are black. Not Creole, historically the lighter-skinned and more fortunate class of coloreds in New Orleans and Louisiana, but black — African black, dusky Sudanese and Ethiopian and Nigerian black. If anybody in this country still doubted the correlation of skin color and economic circumstance, the grim state of good-times New Orleans has put those doubts to rest; the wrath of nature has flushed out the truth that we all refused to see and now it lies unsubmerged, gasping for breath, rotting and stinking in the sun and humidity along with everything else. The parallels between the Crescent City’s dispossessed and African refugees fleeing any number of disasters on any number of occasions — bare feet, hollow eyes, stricken looks, carrying nearly naked babies — are sharp and unmistakable. It’s official: black America is a foreign country. Being Creole, I knew the color-coded truth of New Orleans all too well, had seen the projects in town that looked like they’d been decaying since the Civil War, alarmingly dilapidated structures that made Jordan Downs and Imperial Courts here look like resorts. I loved New Orleans, but instantly got the difference between it and L.A.; I knew why Shirley stayed, and why so many others, including my mother, did not. For black people of all colors, it was a place that was unquestionably home but also a place that shut them out. The shutting out was always only a matter of degree.