Post-Katrina New Orleans Rises in Treme
The story of post-Katrina New Orleans all but begs to be told in series form, and it’s a blessing, not a curse, that the artistic community waited until President George W. Bush left office to tackle it. Had the new HBO series Treme aired two years ago, it likely would have piled up the lectures against the Bush administration for its actions in the wake of the disaster. Heck, Kanye West would have had a cameo.
Instead, the series puts the focus right where it belongs, on a deeply proud city coming to grips with a calamity no one should ever have to endure. David Simon‘s Treme, debuting tonight on HBO, follows New Orleans residents a mere three months after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
The city is limping back to life — witness a rag-tag group of musicians assembling to bring music back to the neighborhood. Their street carnival is a clumsy affair: no one is wearing a uniform and musicians filter in and out of the lineup as they please. But their faces beam with pleasure with every note, and the citizens they pass lose themselves in the music. It’s a beautiful way to start a series.
Antoine (Wendell Pierce) plays the trombone for any gig he can secure, while juggling emotional ties to his ex-wife LaDonna (Khandi Alexander) and kids from his two relationships. Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) is a local disk jockey and former musician who lives and breathes New Orleans culture, but he’s also a first-class jerk. It’s a ripe role for the character actor, and one which may nudge him into a new, deserved level of fame. Davis’ semi-girlfriend, Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens of Deadwood), runs a bustling restaurant but can’t find enough help to keep the customers satisfied.
The only overtly political creature in Treme is Creighton (the great John Goodman), an English professor who’s proud of his city and doesn’t mind telling it to interviewers who dare dial him up. In one politically charged scene, Creighton blasts a smug British journalist who questions whether a city like New Orleans is worth being rebuilt in the first place. Creighton rages against the government for its handling of Katrina, firing off rounds of blame in all directions: “The flooding of New Orleans was a federal f***-up of epic proportions,” he rages, before hurling the man’s microphone into the river. Conservative audiences will wince here, expecting a “blame Bush” diatribe at any moment. But Creighton’s anger is as turbulent as the hurricane itself, and just as unfocused. It’s a contrived scene, but Goodman displays the fury many felt as the layers of society failed to rally in time to save the city. To tell this story and not have this element represented would have been a cheat.
Ummmm, I’m not seeing the word “racism” any where in this review. Surely given the end-all be-all position that race has assumed in today’s culture and politics, the issue *should* be addressed in any story about Katrina and its city. After all, isn’t that the reason New Orleans was left to languish: because white middleclass America didn’t feel like digging into its pockets to rebuild the black ghetto’s of the unemployed of New Orleans?
The 9th ward, the poorest and most devastated, boasted 90% of the families were working families.
The poor in this country are overwhelmingly working poor.
And your complaint suggests hidden bias. Shallowly hidden.
The show will play poorly in Houston because it was one of the main destinations of Katrina refugees. With many exceptions, we found them to be generally stupid, contemptible crybabies. Only stupidity can explain how one can locate his house below sea level, at the foot of the largest river in North America, in a region threatened by hurricanes every summer, and expect the place never to flood. Only stupid voters would re-elect a mayor who had proven his incompetence as convincingly as Ray Nagin did. When the Katrina refugees arrived, Houston’s murder rate took a sudden jump. This is no surprise, considering that New Orleans had and still has one of the highest murder rates in the country. Yet, only stupidity could explain why the refugees would persist in committing murders after moving to a state which issues death sentences as liberally as Texas does. If other Houstonians feel as I do, they are entitled to. Notice the contrast between the efficient response of Houston and other Texas cities to Hurricanes Rita and Ike, and the wholesale whining of the Louisianans. Katrina damaged Pass Christian worse than New Orleans, but you don’t hear their residents blaming the federal government for their troubles. A year and a half ago, wildfires threatened wide areas of California, but their state and local officials simply evacuated those in danger instead of bitching and moaning about the federal government. It is time for the New Orleanians to show the same brains and gumption as other parts of the country do when they suffer natural disasters and while they’re at it, cut out the bogus cries of racism. Imagine the uproar if Houston’s Mayor White had announced his intention to keep Houston a white city; notice the lack of outrage when Mayor Nagin said he planned to keep New Orleans a “chocolate city.” Remember the conspiracy theories that the federal government deliberately blew up N.O.’s levies? Remember the racism accusations of Spike Lee, Kanye West, and Louis Farrakhan, even though most of the people who died in Katrina were white? New Orleans needs to learn self-reliance and this video pity party by HBO is not going to help with that.
I lived in New Orleans for three years. It does not deserve to be saved, and will not.
This is not an unusual position. Reading Louis Armstrong’s auto-biography, painfully pecked out by himself with no ghostwriter on a typewriter, or Jelly Roll Morton’s interviews with the Library of Congress, now available again, both had the same reaction. Despite New Orleans being the birthplace of Black culture and gentry.
Both Armstrong and Morton (“Fences” playwright August Wilson shamefully libeled the long-dead Morton, who never passed for White) hated the overt Segregation and discrimination, but had just as many issues with the collapse, then in evidence, of the Black society around them. Armstrong’s drunk, drug addict mother periodically placed him in a Black orphanage — he was given a trumpet formerly belonging to a dead boy (who died of TB!) Violence and depravity of the worst sort characterized New Orleans even when it had a functioning Middle and Working class among Blacks.
Why did New Orleans collapse? Why was almost no one evacuated among the Black poor? Because of the people themselves.
Any Black with brains and ambition, like Armstrong, left the city as soon as possible. You can see this during Jazz Fest when (during the 1990′s) Black suburban America would descend upon the City for a cultural heritage celebration, and leave as soon as it was over, all the while staying in “safe” White areas. Note: the Black brain-drain exodus happened during Segregation. Armstrong left around 1919 IIRC.
Several areas outside the city, such as East New Orleans, home to UNO, the late Steven Ambrose, and Ellis Marsalis (who taught there as well), were like Irvine CA only Black. Safe and suburban. When I first rolled into the city, one Black crack addict had beaten another to death with a pipe in the park at the intersection of Carrolton and Claiborne, right at the boundary of the university area and Mid-city. This was my introduction to New Orleans.
I recall reading article after article after article in the Times-Picayune about just what would happen to New Orleans if a hurricane hit, which was what did happen, and the need to fix the levees. This was in the mid 1990′s, a full ten years before Katrina. The majority Black city, ruled by the dumbest of the dumb, the most corrupt, the most short-sighted, did nothing because the people did not demand it. Being mostly poor, urban, and profoundly stupid. What tiny Black middle class existed sought to insulate itself from the stupidity as much as possible. Again, most with brains had sought to leave. And did. Neither Branford or Wynton Marsalis lives in New Orleans.
Nagin, and the idiot Governor, screw ups and dithering are what you expect in a city (and State) oriented around the most short-term corruption and idiocy you can imagine. I can recall a Catholic priest murdered for five dollars in a cafe near the Treme area, in Fauburg Marigny. Other stories included a relative of the Neville family, a drug dealer and small time hood, shot in six different incidents before being finally killed in the seventh. One time I was at a small shop off Carrolton, in the University area, and saw a boy no older than nine, walking past. I wanted to see what he’d do so hurried around the corner and then doubled back to watch him. As I expected (the boy was coming home from school complete with backpack) he carefully checked each car, trying the door handles, to see if he could steal something from them. He did not look starving, and had on expensive sneakers. His backpack was new and his clothes clean and new. The area was nice, no crack houses around.
This is New Orleans. There is no hope. The people are born and raised criminals, as the above incident illustrates. As a practical matter, Mexican immigrants many of them illegal, are replacing the Black native criminal class. They’ll be bad, but likely bad in different ways. I.E. the predictable ills of the Barrio will replace that of the Projects. This is a pity because New Orleans was indeed the birthplace of Black High Culture, the Gentry, including by the way the bizarre “Freemen of Color” who owned slaves before the Civil War, living in Uptown near Jefferson and Magazine. The Gift of Jazz was a magnificent accomplishment that has enriched lives world-wide forever. However, the city is just a failure. Because its people would rather beat each other over the head for a bit of crack than do anything constructive. One famous murder scene on Magazine, in the “nice” antique part of town, filled with antique shops, Uptown, had a 12 year old Black boy on a bike gunned down. When the police arrived, the people around had stripped him of nearly everything, including the bike and the boys’ sneakers! Let us not forget Annette Franks either, the corrupt policewoman who murdered her own father and partner.
[The reason for New Orleans is geographic. Navigating into the often silted up mouth of the Mississippi is treacherous, with many false channels. It is easier to sail into Lake Ponchartrain, portage over to New Orleans, and then move up the River. The railroad nexus connected to the shipping on the River makes perfect sense. But the people are a disaster.]
Hmmm… might be worth seeing but since I don’t get HBO I’ll probably never see it. Thanks for mentioning it though.
For me the real question in any “Post Katrina” story would be trying to explain why things are still not put back together, or if they ever will/should be. Plus show some of those who, as mentioned above, left for Texas and decided they liked it there better.
In 2008, Hurricane Ike came ashore flooding Galveston Island. Our downtown had about 8 feet of sea water; my neighborhood had 3 feet of sea water.
The older homes tended to built high enough off the ground to have suffered little if no damage. Many of the homes built after World War II had food damage that required the removal and disposal of all many of the building components such as drywall and electrical service. Dirty, smelly, sweaty work.
For weeks afterward, the smell was indescribable with the debris piled into the streets waiting pick up – rotten meat, warped wooden furniture, mildew caked mattresses and carpets.
Some of the people were unable or unwilling to deal with the mess and soon took their few remaining possessions and relocated. Some sold their houses at a price that was 75 to 80 per cent less than the pre-Ike value. In a couple of cases almost whole neighborhoods were razed to the slabs.
It was bad. But we worked to clear the debris and repair the damage. Slowly and steadily, we are coming back.
Yet, I never hear the national media covering how my community was devastated and is rebuilding. All I ever hear about is New Orleans and Katrina.
I am hoping to see am in-depth story that compares the Katrina and Ike and how each storm affected the local communities and what each city did in advance of the their respective storms – what was planned for, how the plan was executed, what each city did right and what each city did wrong.
Such a story, if done honestly without regard to the political taboos, could help other communities in the need for disaster planning and preparation. I do not hold my breath waiting for any honest reporting of Katrina as such a report would have to follow the facts and not the narrative we get as part of the news.
#5 Poole: did your community lose 250,000 homes? Yes, 250,000 COMPLETELY DESTROYED BUILDINGS!!!!
Great review. Too bad your posters are so stuck in their political bubbles to EVER admit they abandoned one of America’s great treasures. This is the story of the people that refused to let the city or its culture die. I can’t wait to see it. I was in the city this weekend and it was fabulous.
The long term cause of New Orleans’ disaster was building below sea level (not the Federal government’s fault) and poor construction/inspection/maintenance of levies (combination of local and Federal government’s incompetence). The more immediate cause of New Orleans’ problems in handling Katrina was poor local and state government – which were elected by the New Orleans residents themselves. You got the government you elected; in fact, you still have it. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for them.
We gained some lovely residents, both short and long time as a result. Some families that joined my children’s school were wonderful people. Houston also gained some criminals and malingerers; we continue to deal the fall out from them.
It sounds like HBO will whitewash this. I have better things to do with my time.
The pure racism and hate here is appalling, hundreds of thousands of homes and people destroyed and killed, many still considered ‘missing’, and all people care about is their nice white cities getting too many browns in it. I live in Houston but my city has made me ashamed with all the people who would rather turn their backs on our brothers and sisters then treat them like humans.
I’m a Louisiana native, and I got bad news, we remember, it WAS a federal f*** of epic proportions and to whitewash it as just us lazy darkies deserving it is horrific. Finally, how dare you mock us for living in the city in the first place ‘ugh it was under sea level you deserved it’? So what all your fat, white, friends in ‘middle America’ deserve it when their trailer parks get slammed into a tree by twister? Should we all just pack up and leave our homes, our FAMILY homes, because one day it may flood, or should we expect the fed and army to do their damn job and keep our levees safe?
It’s just not a black-white issue. Slidell and Biloxi were hit as hard, actually harder, and somehow they’re recovering much more quickly. Neither one is particularly white. And blaming the Federal government for the levees is easy, but the repairs on the levees were under local control; they spent the money on riverboat moorings instead of levee maintenance and upgrades.
If you want to blame the inadequacies of New Orleans’ government on race, that’s your racism showing, not anyone else’s. As far as I can tell, New Orleans politicians are uniformly crooked and incompetent, regardless of race.
John Brown: “The pure racism and hate here is appalling, hundreds of thousands of homes and people destroyed and killed, many still considered ‘missing’, and all people care about is their nice white cities getting too many browns in it. I live in Houston but my city has made me ashamed with all the people who would rather turn their backs on our brothers and sisters then treat them like humans.”
You must live some place other than the Houston I do. Houston initally took in over 125,000 Katrina refugees, provided emergency shelter for many of them without asking who was going to pay for it; so many Houstonians volunteered to help the refugees, they were turned away; by the end of that first week, Houstonians were told to stop donating clothing and other household goods to the shelters because too much was being donated. John Brown, you should be ashamed of yourself, not your city, for trying to originate another Katrina myth.
Also, Houston’s not white; substantially less than 50% of the population is white.
It was your Mayor and your Governor who failed you first and most.
Houstonian,
Try educating yourself. New Orleans was not built below sea level, it was made to be below sea level due to the actions of the federal government to prevent flooding and to keep the Mississippi from silting in so American commerce could flow. You know, I don’t even care anymore. America abandoned my hometown and then made every excuse under the sun, including this sea level BS, to deflect responsiblity. I, along with every other New Orleanian and many good Americans, did everything in our power to save the city and her culture. We do not need your support. Do as your mother I am sure tried to teach you (without any success I see). If you cannot help, don’t try to hurt. If you do not have something nice to say to help, keep your mouth shut the next American disaster. Your fellow Americans will appreciate it. Their plates will be full rebuilding their communities. They don’t need to waste their time with un-Americans like you.
“made to be below sea level due to the actions of the federal government …”
How? Sea level did not change due to the Federal government and the Federal government did not dig out New Orleans – problems with the levees appear to be a combination of Federal and state government issues along with local corruption. The Federal government foolishly built levees that encouraged people to build on land that was below sea level. Many of the areas flooded were built with the knowledge they were at risk for flooding and should never have been built on.
Get your facts straight, as of back in August 2007 the Federal government had spent over $127 billion on New Orleans. I can’t find a recent total, but I’m sure it’s billions more. I sure wish America would abandon Houston like that. Private donations were in excess of $100 million – including $2,500 of my dollars; how much did you donate to Hurricane Ike victims? (Yeah, zero, right? like any liberal always ready to blame somebody else and expect the Federal government to bail you out of your bad decisions using everybody else’s money.)
FYI.
The flood waterstood in New Orleans for weeks. My house was flooded because of the levee breaking not a natural disaster. And pray tell me where in the US can any one live with a risk of a natural disaster