Nomads of Esplanade

Text Box: Reporter's Notebook
The Nomads of Esplanade By KEN WELLS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 2, 2005 NEW ORLEANS—Tyrone Williams comes wading out of the water from the deep end of Esplanade Avenue on Saturday morning, towing a battered, green aluminum boat and looking for opportunity. “See this scrap?” he says, pointing to a large cylindrical metal object he’d recovered from flood waters and tossed into the boat. “In a few days, that’s gonna be worth a dollar. And a dollar’s gonna be worth having. I’m going to find me some more.” The 30-something Mr. Williams, his jeans soggy, his black sneakers in ruin, his shirt soaked through with sweat, is clearly an optimist. It’s been a rough few days, to say the least. He’s among the Nomads of Esplanade, the hundreds who were driven up into second floor apartments by Hurricane Katrina’s flood tides five days before; driven out of their dwellings when the storm subsided by lack of food or water or by fear; driven out again by nights of chaos and violence after seeking shelter in the Louisiana Superdome of the New Orleans Convention Center long, long blocks away. “Better to be here than there,” says the 30-something Mr. Williams, showing off an a spider bite on his leg (now infected from the putrid water he’s been wading in) that he picked up during one of his black, black nights in the Dome. To an outsider, however, here doesn’t look like such a great place to be. Esplanade is a storied thoroughfare framing the northern boundary of the French Quarter, then slanting west-northwest for miles through racially mixed neighborhoods of period houses in various states of renovation or decay, and budget apartment buildings where mostly poor black families live. Here, a few blocks from the Quarter where the avenue dives under an up-ramp for Interstate 10, Esplanade is under a lake of smelly, black, semi-toxic water, a foot to three feet deep for as far as the eye can see. The submerged pumps of a nearby Spur gas station are apparently leaking, filling the air with a potent mix of gasoline and swamp odors. Dogs, two of them puppies, bark from a fenced in back yard, their owners nowhere in sight. Abandoned cars sit waterlogged. Most have been stripped by looters of their batteries and their gasoline. A yellow stucco café sits abandoned and forlorn, water flowing through an open door. Every house has water in it. Everyplace you look, people are emerging, sloshing through the water, for food, for drinking water, for a way out of this dispiriting, storm-made urban swamp. A surreal queue forms a hundred yards away: people, knee deep in water, waiting to call out on the only working payphone for blocks. A man wades ashore, pleading for a quarter for the phone. *** Frank Churchville and Kenny Ellison have come from Alabama to help. Mr. Churchville is perched up in the bed of a white Ford F150 pickup truck, sporting a black t-shirt that has “Police” emblazoned across it in big white letters and, in case anyone misses that hint, a big black shotgun, locked and loaded, perched in his lap. The unfathomable reports of shootings, looting and carjackings that have hampered Katrina recovery efforts have not escaped him and he sits watchful as a hawk. He’s a cop back in Mobile; Mr. Ellison a contractor there. Never mind that Mr. Churchville had the roof torn off of his own home by Katrina and Mr. Ellison’s home also suffered damage. As soon as they started hearing the dire reports from New Orleans, they lit out, among the estimated 1,600 such volunteers who have come in with boats to search the still flooded ramparts of the city for Katrina’s trapped and dead. “People here—well, look at this mess,” Mr. Churchville says surveying the surroundings. “Katrina knocked us around but nothing like this.” They are manning the truck while three other volunteers who have come with them are out looking to rescue the old and infirm and distribute a load of water and Meals-Ready-to-Eat, the plastic-packaged dry rations, they’d been given by the National Guard. The two men have kept some of the rations on their truck, parked on the boggy Esplanade median, and they soon find themselves with lots of business—people wandering up out of the water, many still in a daze, often with questions neither Mr. Churchville nor Mr. Ellison can answer. “How can we get out of here?” pleads 19-year-old Janessa Bailey, who has walked three long blocks through the filthy water. She’s an attractive, soft-spoken African American woman with a fevered, stricken look on her face. “Do you know anything about the buses? Are they picking up people anywhere near?” “We’re here to find people who are stranded, ma’am, and we have some food and water to give,” replies Mr. Churchville gently. “But we don’t know the answer to those questions.” This is among the scores of neighborhoods that, for now at least, are without official attention while the city struggles to finally empty the human catastrophes that are the Dome and Convention Center. “I’m pregnant,” she says, “and I haven’t eaten in four days. I’m so weak.” Tears well up in her eyes. Mr. Ellison steps forward. “I have an orange,” he says. “Look, you take it.” It’s an orange from his personal stash. He also gives her four cans of fruit cocktail. She sits on the rail of the boat trailer hitched to the truck and opens the fruit cocktail with some difficulty. She takes a few bites and recovers a bit. Someone suggests there will be buses picking up people later today on the interstate ramp nearby. She nods, clutching her food and a bottle of water, and heads back into the water toward the home she shares with her grandmother. Anthony Jordan, 26, peddles out of the water on his maroon mountain bike, looking equally shell-shocked. He’d returned home this morning after fleeing the horrors of the Convention Center, his four children and wife in tow. He can scarcely tell what he saw and heard there. “There were bodies in there freezer there,” he says. “Fights. People screaming. Gunshots. We heard a young girl got her throat cut. There was a man in the bathroom waiting to rape people. We heard they beat him up bad—killed him--the people, not the cops. What kind of person is that? We took a mattress out of a hotel and we ended up sleeping on the steps of Harrah’s Casino. Now we’re back, but to what?” Mr. Jordan, a maintenance supervisor for a nearby parking garage, starts to cry, then stops to compose himself. “My children can’t survive here, they really can’t,” he goes on. “ We have some canned goods, some noodles and about six gallons of water left. The kids are breaking out in rashes. One of them has asthma…They’re scared. My seven-year-old son Sean knows what’s going on and he keeps saying, ‘Daddy, get me out of here.’…You know, I took a vow to love, honor and protect my family and that’s what I’m trying to do. But I need some help.” He looks around absently. Mr. Ellison offers him some water and he takes it and peddles off, vowing to check out reports that buses might indeed start collecting people from the highway. The morning floats by, getting hotter and hotter, an occasional breeze the only relief. A man comes by in a yellow kayak filled with possessions and his dogs. Another boat floats in, towed by a shirtless man and holding a frail-looking elderly couple. They, too, want to know where they should go. Mr. Ellison suggests finding high ground a few blocks away and walking perhaps to a police checkpoint for advice. They go off. Another man walks out of the water and declares he has something to say. “Katrina destroyed all the bullshit about the government helping us,” he says. He rambles on and on until his partner nags him to go home. Mr. Churchville and Mr. Ellison have run out of both food and water. They will pack up as soon as their boat returns, reload the provisions and go off in search of another neighborhood to help. *** We catch up with the Rev. Calvin Brown and Ernest Dejean on a littered overpass where all roads end and the catastrophic flooding of the city’s Lower 9th Ward begins. A white, fiberglass motorboat boat lies abandoned, canted on the concrete roadbed. Their own small canoe sits nearby in shallow fetid water. They’ve been using iron shovels for makeshift paddles. Before us is a creepy, sprawling dark lagoon sprouting wrecked and sodden houses, water still above the window lines. It’s eerily quiet and still, the sun glinting off the mirrored surface. The lagoon stretches for miles in either direction. When a slight breeze wells up, the odor repulses us backwards away from the water’s edge. In a city where no one in official capacity at any level of government seemed able to deliver help to people until about the fourth day after the storm, the Rev. Brown and Mr. Dejean, a member of the pastor’s nearby church, had formed their own two-person rescue effort immediately thereafter. The first floor of their church is flooded but they’ve been spending fitful nights sleeping on palates on the second floor. Mr. Dejean on his own had found a floating tire innertube and had paddled through the sunken neighborhood for two days, dragging out survivors under increasingly difficult conditions, the stagnating water being not a small one. The Rev. Brown then got the canoe and between them they figured they’d pulled about 60 people to safety and seen the bodies of many, many people who hadn’t made it out. Other rescuers with power boats had finally joined the effort but, having combed the Lower 9th Ward for all that they believed were living, they’d gone on to other places, saving the dead for later. No one has any idea how many dead the Lower 9, as it’s called here, holds. But the numbers are thought to be large. But the Rev. Brown and Mr. Dejean are not yet prepared to give up on the chance that they have living neighbors still, as improbable as such a thing seems. This is Saturday and the neighborhood—where water had risen10 or 11 feet in a matter of minutes—has been underwater since Monday morning. It’s since been dry and relentlessly hot, a long time to go without food or water if you’re stuck in an attic, which is about the only place a living person could still be. This neighborhood won’t be rebuilt until it is bulldozed. Mr. Dejean, an energetic man with a salt-and-pepper beard and sporting a red tank top, holds up his bare arms to show the deep and glowering friction burns above his elbow from his tire paddling ventures. His own family is unaccounted for, though he believes them safe, having ridden out Katrina in a hotel and then later moving to the Superdome. But he and the reverend are going to paddle off again into the dangerous, odiferous soup. “It’s our community,” he says. “What else can we do?” *** Large parts of New Orleans are fine, save for where random fires burn unattended by firefighters. We pass a burning auto-parts store and a burning coffee warehouse. Firemen are in the city but there’s no water pressure at the moment. The French Quarter is dry and never got more than about a foot of water in it. Trees are down every where but some police are about and it wasn’t looted like the stores along nearby Canal Street. The Faulkner House Bookstore, a local treasure where Willie Faulkner lived as young writer, is intact. Molly’s Bar is open and serving warm beer. It even has a working phone. Andy Jackson still rides high above Jackson Square and the statue of Football Jesus, just off of Pirate’s Alley behind St. Louis Cathedral, is still sporting his fingers raised and spread in what irreverent locals call his touchdown pose. (He’s actually offering a blessing, according to religious locals. A gargantuan falling tree nicked off one of the fingers but didn’t touch the statue otherwise and some here have already declared this a miracle of sorts and believe Touchdown Jesus helped turn the storm east away from the city.) Out along St. Charles Avenue in the city’s historic Garden District, most neighborhoods escaped Katrina’s wrath, other than downed trees and power lines and relatively minor flooding. Some houses sport signs, spray-painted on impromptu plywood window guards, declaring, “We Shoot Looters.” The place, though, is eerily abandoned. Not so yet at the infamous Convention Center, where we pull up in mid-afternoon to a scene that is by far the most heartening of the day. The National Guard is everywhere; the vast crowds of frustrated, embittered people shown on TV have thinned down into an orderly crowd of a couple of thousand. Mounds of litter clog curbs and sidewalks and the reeking stench of the center—an accidental human stockade without resources or order for most of its time as storm shelter--can be smelled blocks away. But long lines of buses stretch around the far corridor and people are in orderly lines waiting—finally—to get on a bus and get out of town. No matter that their future is uncertain. The motto of the crowd is: Anywhere but Here. By nightfall, in fact, both the Convention Center and the Dome will be empty. We find the 70-something Agnes Celestine, sporting a jaunty straw cowboy hat and shading herself under an umbrella, seated on a wrought-iron bench while her daughter secures a place in the bus lines. She can’t wait to get on board. “It was undignified,” says Mrs. Celestine of their three days at the Convention Center. “It just wasn’t fair. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. To have to walk on human feces. To hear about rapes. We heard a man was killed—a man who killed a child. Well, if it’s true, he should’ve been killed. I now know this world is coming to an end and this is the beginning of the end.” Then she manages a smile, as though she doesn’t quite believe her own dire speech. She’s just exhausted, is all. “I’m ready to go. I’ve got nothing here—what I have is on my back. Just get us out of here.” She fans herself with her hand. She continues: “We praise God for what He did and we thank the people who helped us, like the people who are helping us now.” The Arkansas National Guard is here, several hundred strong, and rank and file the evacuees here praise them. A man comes up to us and, not wanting to give his name. He’s spent Thursday and Friday night at the shelter and says: “The Guard saved the day. The truth is these people have sat here since the day of the storm and help did not really arrive until 3 p.m. yesterday (Friday.) Then, the military dropped meals and then the Guard really took over and the buses started arriving. People could finally see that—at last—something was being done for them and the mood of the crowd changed instantly. You can’t blame them. The situation was horrible.” It’s still strange. There aren’t yet enough medics about and the Guard is forced to improvise to get the sick and injured to ambulances. A woman is wheeled out a rolling office chair; another is strapped to a hand truck. A man is pushed along the street in a shopping cart, his legs draped out the front end. A half hour later, Mrs. Celestine, walking with a cane, boards a yellow school bus. It will stop in Baton Rouge and then she and her daughter will go on, likely to someplace in Texas which already has 125,000 Louisiana refugees. She smiles and waves from the window. Behind, her though, a woman leans from the window, sobbing. “Call my daughter, Stacy,” she says, shouting out a phone number. “I don’t know what’s happened to her and she doesn’t know what’s happened to me. Please, please help me.”

Below, Anthony Jordan peddled from the water looking for help for his family. Left, a kayak rescue from the flooded streets.

Photos © Ken Wells 2005