City of Hope

I've been known to bitch about editors, and boy did I complain when Fort Worth Star-Telegram editor Steve Campbell sent me to New Orleans to do a "6-months-later" story about the city's efforts to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. "Whoever heard of a six-month anniversary story," I would complain to anyone who would listen. But Steve, who died way too soon in 2016, knew the time was right. And if I had to pick one story as an example of my ability to string sentences together, "City of Hope" is it.

NEW ORLEANS - This is not the sob story of taxicab driver Roland Moore. It's not about his mother falling facedown on the floor and dying, or his wife's nervous breakdown, or the FEMA money they never got.

It's about the uncanny draw New Orleans can have on a man, how water seems to bewitch the people who live near it, even if sometimes it spills out of its banks and spreads horror like a biblical plague.

It's about the recovery of a city and region where all the dead haven't been buried or even found yet, where people wait all night in their cars to get a tooth pulled at a free clinic, and where black mold might as well be declared the state flower.

Today, a half-year after Hurricane Katrina's rampage, New Orleans will take another small step away from the abyss. Somewhere along a debris-choked street, a storm survivor will start gutting a home. A child will walk into a tent for math class. The owner of a long-shuttered restaurant will prepare to reopen.

To outsiders, they may seem delusional, because no Pollyannaish declarations from a government agency can sugarcoat the awful mess that is post-Katrina New Orleans. Tens of thousands of homes lie in ruin. The hospitals are saturated. And uncertainty about the future, about collapsing levees and alarming coastal erosion, grows with every day that brings the next hurricane season closer.

What if there's another Katrina in 2006?

"Death blow," said one top emergency planner in the city.

But don't tell Roland Moore not to rebuild.

With little more than his bare hands and two credit cards, Moore, 53, has almost completed the restoration of his modest brick home on Gordon Street, three blocks from the banks of the Mississippi River in the devastated Lower 9th Ward.

A couple of weeks ago, Moore spent the first night back in his house since the storm hit. He slept on an air mattress in the room his mother once occupied, his only lamp fashioned from a headlight he ripped out of his flooded taxicab.

He needed a bath and, despite being thankful for it, a better meal than the cold sloppy Joe and green beans left by the Red Cross. But it felt good to be back, to sleep in his own house and cruise the streets where he used to hit up his famous neighbor, blues legend Fats Domino, for quarters. "I growed up here in New Orleans," Moore said. "This is home."

It is a common refrain, from blue-collar neighborhoods in blown-out St. Bernard Parish to the seemingly unscathed French Quarter. Signs advertising house-gutting services and mold remediation dot almost every roadside, and placards screaming out "No Bulldozing!" and "We Will Rebuild" can be found in some of the hardest-hit areas.

'We've always been here'

Robin Gautier predicts that contractors will start rebuilding her St. Bernard home, which flooded to the roof, by June - just in time for the new hurricane season. Why take the risk? The look on her face suggests she finds the question odd. "Because we've always been here," she said.

Jean Raymond would rebuild, too, if only she could. She says her house in Lakeview, the ritzy neighborhood whose inundation helped expose the shoddy engineering of the city levee system, is beyond repair. So she plans to commemorate its demolition with a traditional jazz funeral, bid adieu with a toast, and then find somewhere else to live. In New Orleans.

"C'est la vie,'' Raymond said. "We got to move on.''

Of course, for every Jean Raymond, there is a displaced evacuee somewhere bitterly cursing New Orleans and vowing never to return. If some can't bear to leave America's Creole capital, others have concluded that it was the city that left them, that their way of life disappeared in Katrina's murky floodwaters.

Some parts of the city, particularly the lowest-lying sections of the Lower 9th Ward, have become urban wastelands, where houses ripped from their foundations continue to block roads and where debris still hangs from downed power lines.

New Orleans musician "Big Chief" Kevin Goodman swore to God that he would never live in his native town again if he got delivered from the city convention center, his evacuee hell-on-earth for six days. Before Katrina, Goodman had never heard of Austin, Texas. Now he calls it home.

"I don't want to go back and clean up a mess that I didn't make, no way," Goodman said last week as he hot-glued feathers onto the colorful costume he'll wear for Mardi Gras in Austin. "I don't even want to smell the city.''

Goodman theorized that evacuees who were "rescued" the way he was, only to face chaos and dehydration in a foul shelter, were cured of any lofty fondness for New Orleans. He said people like Moore, the taxi driver, who could and did drive out of the city before the floods came, might find it easier to go back with their nostalgia intact.

Moore could just as easily have gotten stuck, too. Like, many storm-hardened New Orleanians, he had weathered hurricanes before. But he said this one seemed different even before New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin called it "the storm most of us have feared" and ordered a rare mandatory evacuation on Sunday, Aug. 28.

Moore was long gone by then, though his mother, Geraldine Mutin, made the fateful decision to stay behind. At 6:10 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, Katrina made landfall near Buras, La., a village near the mouth of the Mississippi River about 60 miles southeast of New Orleans.

Battering the coast for hours with wind gusts that reached 155 mph and 20-30 foot storm surges in some areas, Katrina left a trail of devastation that has never been seen in the United States. It prompted federal disaster declarations over an area the size of Great Britain - and 3 1/2 times larger than the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

750,000 displaced

Not since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s were so many people - in this case more than 750,000 displaced from their homes, according to federal estimates. Today, Katrina's death toll has eclipsed 1,300.

With more than 1,000 dead, New Orleans got the worst of it, even if many Americans didn't realize it initially. In those first few hours of post-storm calm, many thought the Big Easy, while injured, had dodged a bullet. The New York Times reported as much on Tuesday morning, Aug. 30, in a story entitled, "Escaping Feared Knockout Punch, Barely, New Orleans Is One Lucky Big Mess.''

Recent investigations in Congress have since revealed that federal emergency officials knew a flood disaster loomed by Monday evening, as did the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Relying in part on reports delivered by journalists on bicycles, and published only via the Internet for lack of electrical power, the paper's banner headline said it all on Aug. 30: "CATASTROPHIC."

By the time Moore learned his city was going under, he could do nothing but watch helplessly, first from a hotel in Beaumont, then one in Houston. Back in New Orleans, Mutin, Moore's 69-year-old mother, had been trapped in a housing project by floodwaters. Moore didn't know it for three weeks, but Mutin had been rescued by helicopter and flown to Austin - trips that took a toll on her already fragile health.

Finally, weeks after the hurricane had passed, Mutin was reunited with her son in his Houston apartment. But by then all she could think and talk about, Moore said, was the money the Federal Emergency Management Agency promised but had never given her: $2,000 in cash and $2,300 for rent.

Moore remembers telling her, "Why do you keep worrying those people about that money? You gonna mess around and have a heart attack."

And that's exactly what happened on Nov. 19, Moore said, when Mutin telephoned FEMA for the last time. A couple of hours after telling the agency she still hadn't gotten her money, Mutin called out for her son. When he reached her chair she asked him to retrieve her inhaler. But as he turned and knelt to get it, Mutin lunged forward and landed on Moore, then rolled off his back and fell on the floor, facedown. Never regaining consciousness, she died that afternoon.

A friend later told Moore that his mother had decided to start a new life in Houston but wanted to give him her FEMA money so he could renovate his house back home.

Now the regret Moore feels for joking that his mother was acting like a "gold digger" sits atop a growing pile of struggle and woe: He said his wife recently suffered a nervous breakdown. His credit cards, used to cover bills that include his mother's $4,995 funeral, are maxed out at $20,000. And the Small Business Administration - citing his existing debts - turned him down for a loan two months ago. His mom's FEMA money never did arrive.

For the damage to his house, which Moore says was worth $70,000 before the storm, FEMA cut him a check for $10,000, he said. Considering the gas money for the repeated trips between New Orleans and Houston, the hotel bills, the $225 a gallon he paid for mold killer, the electrician - the list goes on and on - he says it's a drop in the bucket.

Yet, in spite of his bitter denunciations of the politicians who knew or should have known the levees were time bombs, his complaints about FEMA and his disapproval of "these little hip-hop guys" who are buying new cars with their disaster money - none of it could keep him away from New Orleans.

He's a "bayou man," he explains. Catches shrimp in a trawler right around the corner from his house, 40 pounds at a time. Bags freshwater mullets out of the Mississippi, over by the Domino Sugar factory.

Moore thinks he might be the first person to rebuild in his neighborhood, known around here as St. Maurice. But he's sure he won't be the last.

"It's a fisherman's paradise,'' he said. "This place will boom, I'm tellin' ya. I love it.''

'Off the radar screen'

Moore would have little reason to think he has anything in common with Denise Thornton. He's black. She's white. He's from the poverty-stricken Lower 9th Ward. She's from tony Lakeview. His house was valued at $70,000. Hers was somewhere north of $700,000.

But Katrina didn't respect all the racial and geographical divisions that were supposed to keep their worlds apart. Like Moore, Thornton lost virtually everything inside her home. She said contractors used an ax to chop up her destroyed Pramberger grand piano, easily worth $25,000, and tossed it on the lawn with the buckled wood flooring and moldy insulation.

Thornton, who lives about a mile from the 17th Street Canal levee breach, can also work up some powerful anger at FEMA and its leaders in Washington, just like Moore.

"If you cut me I'd bleed Republican," she said, but Thornton scoffs at President Bush's bold promise from New Orleans' famed Jackson Square on Sept. 15 to "do what it takes ... [and] stay as long as it takes" to rebuild the city. "Have you been around my neighborhood? I've got no help from anybody," she said. "[Bush] has not delivered. People have forgotten us. We're off the radar screen."

Like many who are rebuilding, however, Thornton concluded that she would never see her house rebuilt, let alone the neighborhood, if she waited for help from the government. So she used her insurance proceeds and savings to rebuild on her own, and, like Moore, has created a rare oasis in a sea of destruction.

Now she hopes to help others do what she did by turning her home into the "Beacon of Hope,'' a neighborhood community center, soup kitchen and semi-public restroom, all rolled into one. Her first major coup: getting the Red Cross to deliver earlier this month so she could serve 75 neighborhood construction workers and reduce the amount of time they waste searching for food in a disaster zone.

It hasn't been easy to start over from scratch, but Thornton said her rebuilding troubles pale in comparison to the tension-filled experience she went through as an evacuee in the "shelter of last resort,'' - the football stadium her husband supervised as general manager.

"After being in the Superdome for five days, you just get numb to the whole thing," she said.

Exodus of blacks

There is no scientific formula that can accurately predict what New Orleans - now down to one-third of its 2000 population - will look like in another six months, a year or even five years.

A report released last month by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission envisioned just 247,000 people, barely more than half the pre-storm population, living in the Crescent City by September 2008. And a recent study by Brown University predicted that this birthplace of jazz, nearly 70 percent African-American half a year ago, could lose 80 percent of its black population.

The exodus of blacks, and the disproportionate blow Katrina delivered to their neighborhoods, has fueled racial tension in a city that had already been known for it. When Mayor Nagin proclaimed recently that New Orleans would rise again as a "chocolate city," he was roundly criticized and issued a quick apology. But the sentiment Nagin tapped into - the fear that New Orleans will lose its authenticity and become little more than a gaudy caricature of itself - is not uncommon.

In a widely disseminated speech, Tulane University Professor Lawrence Powell raised the specter of New Orleans as an "X-rated theme park," a city virtually bereft of African-Americans. In short, a "city without soul."

"You might be successful at restoring a facsimile of New Orleans, a Six Flags for adults, where the desperate housewives of petroleum engineers show their Dolly Parton formations for a few doubloons tossed from balconies by other convention-goers,'' Powell wrote. "But it will no longer be a place where brass brand creativity gushes forth from the street."

Yet even Powell sees the possibility, however slight, of a silver lining: that Katrina will give policymakers the chance to right historic wrongs, to ease the city's grinding poverty and to begin a restoration of coastal wetlands.

Either way, he flatly dismisses the idea that New Orleans will vanish, if for no other reason than the strong "attachment to place" that has so deeply penetrated the American South.

"Such home-place sentiments have operated with great power, no more so than in the Crescent City, where the locals have never liked lighting out for the territories,'' he wrote.

Jim Amoss, longtime editor of The Times-Picayune, sees the looming changes as another chapter in the city's rich history, which has blended European, African and Caribbean influences into a unique but ever-shifting culture. The latest flavor added to the melting pot will probably come from the influx of Hispanic construction workers, he said.

He also thinks a lot of evacuees who now say they aren't coming back will eventually change their minds.

"I think the city has a really powerful hold on the people who live here and who used to live here,'' Amoss said. "I know a lot of people who swore they would never step foot in this place again, and they're back down the street from where I live."