A fictional account of New Orleans eight months after Katrina
From Woodruff Park by T. S. Aschenge
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Copyright 2007 by T. S. Aschenge
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Good Friday 2006
Beloved.
At midnight we made our second sojourn back to what had risen to become the very bosom of my culinary pedagogy, emerging as it would decades ago at Johnson and Wales University in Charleston South Carolina; whence was curried my fondest appreciation for the abundantly imported local cuisine of New Orleans. So too, with blood traveling in both directions, Charleston was to become the city that would bless me with cherished Gullah roots. Now, nearly eight months removed from that rather extraordinary day whence Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flood waters would come to rip so many bitter and painful lesions into the very womb of our community nationwide, we traveled once again to visit her wrath first hand.
Dawn threatened on the horizon high above the waters below the twin bridges of Lake Pontchartrain, as the yawns of early morning greeted our bus with an eerie scene like something straight out of Sleepy Hollow. Here for miles in both directions, mummified in solemn despair, is a road now sentenced to perpetuity. Today, for an entire planet to witness there lies here in open view the petrified remains of thousands of leafless cypress trees fallen, as if taken by wind. Their gloomy pale grey-white countenance and the long somber blue noir movie montage that slowly creped in open view, as we negotiated each new acre of this dark barren terrain, where the living dead stare back at you, cast in these lifeless battle-worn branches crouched as if stolen zombie-like in this bizarre and startled grimace and now prostrate in a posture of helpless submission. Somehow, although mum, they would act to alert us of what we were soon to fully discover. That New Orleans is today a city frozen in time.
'Stolen off the coast of Africa, she came fierce and unrelenting, biting a bitter wound of her own into the very soul of our culture nationwide. As if bringing us a mandate from Maat, she came riding upon the bird of Sankofa, betraying the very symbol of cleansing'.
Nevertheless, it is not Katrina the great storm of 2005, which has left us with such a deafening pause. However, they are the endless tornadoes of holocaust creating and re-creating this Diaspora within a Diaspora, and once again committing so many of our people to fend in weary solitary anguish for their lives, through what has now grown to become such a grossly contorted leviathan of collective pain and suffering; replete with so many intermittent and unrelenting winds of near universal indifference. On this day, once again, bundled amidst our general disillusionment and the pain that we now do share so deeply with those who have lost so much, we carried only our fateful determination itself bursting with hope and honest curiosity as we traveled through the vast modern ruins of this legendary American city.
As we continued on through what was once the middle class enclave of the Upper Ninth Ward, where a few Negroes in New Orleans had been fortunate enough to live just a little bit higher up on the hog, indiscreetly to our immediate right standing sentinel Sphinx-like, as if itself secreting some ridiculously absurd joke, while unabashedly haunting a humble half acre all of its own, the mind-boggling stark irony of universal destruction, and the blatant reverberating sense of official disregard for the human condition, was instantaneously punctuated by acres of broken wood, concrete and mortar, glass, and broken spirits, now amazingly juxtaposed by a new fabulous and more pricy model city of what the homes of the Upper Ninth Ward are promised to look like in the future. Fronting this strange and bizarre scene of prospect opulence, huddled with open arms in the midst of the neglected and now petrified aftermath of omnipresent suffering, one beholds the quickly disregarded ruins of three centuries of Black skin color caste, and Talented Tenth Civil Rights Intergrationalism; today ‘sat down’ and swept away with such a cold and resounding indifference. Who Knew?
Once again, we traveled in near teary-eyed disbelief coddling our individual pain for the immense suffering of our people. This time though, we were all but thirteen in number. Nonetheless, we were determined to help to resolve a measure of the vast and lingering pain amplified by the immense excruciating despair still felt by so many. On our first trip, denied the satellite feeds offered to Iraqis estranged from their homeland and now living here in the United States, we simply acted in earnest to return hundreds of registered voters back to New Orleans in order that they may have an honest opportunity to vote in their own municipal elections. Yet, little did we know that this second trip would turn out to become more of a reconnaissance mission of its own.
The Right Reverend Jasper Huckleberry chartered the bus for us. He was both the junior pastor of The Greater Prosperity Baptist Church in Atlanta, and the Chairman of the Board of A.K.R.O.N; today one of a slew of so called civil rights organizations who actually owe the true pedagogy of their leadership style to the NAACP. Miraculously, for nearly a century here is an organization that has been successfully ‘faking moves’ as a white owned Black organization fronting Black leadership in Blackface alone. Miranda and her daughter had not actually seen their home since the very day that they had evacuated the city on their own eight months ago and one day before the storm. Melissa, a graduate student at Tulane, traveled along with her nineteen year old lover Raquel, who had lost her two year old baby on the day that they were both finally rescued from the roof of their home on the edge of the Lower Ninth Ward roughly eight days after the flood waters began to rise. The last thing that she could remember, was fatefully handing over her precious child to what she thought was the safety of a rescue worker. Yet, processed like so many other children in the midst of this single horrific disaster, and often collectively handed over first with no tags and little if any instruction, only a mother’s massive hope that another human being might actually do right by her and her child, she too was duped like so many thousands of others, as one might covertly load a slave ship bound for the unknown. Her child with merely a babble of her parent’s name was somehow stolen from her only to become one of the tens of thousands still missing; and she now lived each pressing moment of her life with a profound and reverberating pain deep in the pit of her heart at the loss of her child.
Traveling along in full Panther regalia replete with berets, twin brothers Tupac and Zaid were heading back home as new members of the National Black Power Summit that was now actively seeking to locate the tens of thousands still missing since the storm. Gloria-Elise, Daphne, and Mama Sims along with her high school age daughter Sonia, were all members of the Greater Prosperity Church Choir. The Reverend had intended that they would come along solely to act as captains for the evacuees. However, this turned out to be a much smaller group than what had been expected. Disparate for a paycheck, four evacuees, Jessie, Marvel, Cowboy, and Mama Kurl, all who had been displaced during the storm, and where now residents of Atlanta, finally would find piecemeal employment as activist with A.K.R.O.N, and they rode along with us as well. Acquiescing to her gentle prodding I spent the whole night seated next to the always elegant Elder Sephora. As a longtime resident of Georgia, she and her family actually still owned extensive property in the vast heartland of New Orleans, none of which by the way, had sustained even the slightest flood or wind damage throughout the storm. Sephora said that this was so because that they were all well prepared and 'uniquely' protected. “It was told to us many years ago that this storm was coming!” Although easily recoiling in submission to my fondest adulation for her, I was at first rather surprised to discover that she was well acquainted with who I was as well, and as would she counsel, “Where my true destiny lie.” “The old souls she would say have returned to us!” You see, Sephora was one of those rather beloved people who are quite renowned in our community. She was always delicately adorned from head to toe in white linens and she forever carried her natural sweet butter love for Black people as someone we often called ‘gifted’. She was somewhat of an oracle to her people; an ardent truth teller, a predictor of the future, a preacher woman of sorts, and she was also a respected Yoruba High Priestess. She was loved much more than she was feared, and this day she was traveling she told me, with a special purpose in mind.
This trip bore a unique intergenerational witness as well for the Black community nationwide. As although still stubbornly extant back of its strident cultural transmission for more than forty years of entrenched political estrangement, Willie Lynched in the unnaturally restrained disengagement of the sheltered discourse between Black Nationalism and Civil Rights Intergrationalism, on this day all of this and more was suddenly ‘sat down’ and swept away in the overwhelming euphoria of the dire heart wrenching concern for the masses of our people.
Nonetheless, that night as we set off from Atlanta, the rather demure and seemingly unassuming Reverend Huckleberry would appear to attempt to set the tone for our sojourn by initiating along with the other members of his church, a retinue of Christian prayers and Civil Rights freedom songs. Yet, their efforts were quickly usurped after a long and rather heated discussion broke out over the government’s implicit culpability in this great disaster. “They bombed the levees and intentionally killed all of those people!” somebody said. “They did so in 1927, they did it to us during Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and they did it to us again during Katrina! We had made it through the storm. There was damage of course, but nothing like what was to come. We lived right there and we heard the explosions. They dynamited the levees!” Someone else spoke of seeing men in Black kaki military uniforms early on roaming the streets with guns and harassing people. “It was as if they were waiting to hear the governor’s Shoot to Kill!” said Mama Kurl. She then began to recall the story of how while awaiting rescue, her neighbor was rumored to have been raped and her neighbor’s husband shot dead by a marauding group of these strange mercenaries in black; who would remarkably become the actual first responders somehow so conveniently on the scene even before the levees were actually blown.
At this point, Raquel began to suddenly brake out into a soft and yet painfully restrained sobbing obviously still deeply bemoaning the unknown whereabouts of her child. The Reverend Huckleberry then began to boldly admonish everyone not to rush to conclusions, and to concentrate instead on creating a sanctified sacred space within their own hearts for Christian love and forgiveness. His rather odd and peculiar comments piercing what had been such a sharp and heated exchange essentially worked to cast a rather tense omnipotent pale of quiet and perhaps confused disbelief on the entire bus, save that of course for the lingering sobs of anguish echoing from Raquel. After awhile, the Reverend rose from his seat and discreetly parked himself directly behind her, and began to gently rub her shoulders. Somehow, he was able to cleverly maneuver his seemingly genuine solicitations of empathy toward her loss, into a stern personal admonition which appeared to openly suggest that her flagrant lesbian lifestyle was the actual cause for her loss in the way of punishment for her sins in the first place. This caused her to sob even louder and prompted Melissa, who was not one to tolerate such an overtly untoward intrusion into her own affairs, to simply go off. She asked the Reverend politely to please go back to his seat and to stop harassing them. She was quickly joined by The Elder Sephora and by the twins as well, who yelled out in concert for him to leave the girls alone. As one may expect, I sat there in silence simply observing the whole scene. Nonetheless, these comments brought down a loud crescendo of shouts for restraint admonishing respect towards the Preacher man and his position within the church; which easily degenerated into an even larger argument that in turn prompted the now visibly ruffled Reverend to threaten to halt the trip altogether and to return the bus to Atlanta.
By this time, we were pulling into a rest stop in Mississippi, and as we stepped to the pavement in front of the visitor’s center, Sephora pointed out to me a large confederate flag flapping in the wind high atop a flagpole in front of the building. As fate would have it, a familiar curious looking bird was doing his business right atop this pole and brazenly using the flag to wipe himself. “A friend of yours?” she asked. To which I could only grin in affirmation. I never did ask her if she was actually acquainted with the eagle spirit of Asi Yahola. However, her observations would naturally confirm for me that she somehow knew that I was always being followed by the Bird of Sankofa. In fits and spurts this quarrel would still continue on, eventually spilling outside of the bus. That was when faced with the threat of a setback hovering over the entire group, Sonia, Mama Sims impressionable young daughter, looked directly into the Reverend’s eyes right in front of the whole crowd and boldly outed his infidelity to his own wife, even suggesting the possibility that she herself may indeed be carrying the Reverend’s child. From that moment on, with this callous sacrilegious disclosure hovering over him, a restrained and yet peaceful sense of resolution seemed to pervade the rest of the trip. The Reverend now appeared simply resigned to keep to himself, choosing instead to sleep on the very last seat in the back of the bus. After a time, it was rumored that he reeked with alcohol.
That morning, as we traveled through downtown, we all agreed in unison not to stop for breakfast and to continue instead to make our way on to the Lower Ninth Ward. Situated in the Delta, this is a city that is actually shaped like a bowl or a tea cup if you will, and the Lower Ninth Ward sits directly in the very bottom of the bowl. This is the ‘Hood’, the Black ghetto, and the prolific and reverberating core of the Black culture of New Orleans. While standing there, it is easy for one to witness the actual venerability of what was once the largest constituency of registered voters in the parish of New Orleans.
There is no way to fully explain the first hand witness of viewing such universal destruction even eight months after the neglected aftermath of such an enormous catastrophe. We remained awestruck throughout as we slowly negotiated a vast visible flatland of total destruction that appeared for all intents and purposes to be an immense war zone. Block upon block of a painfully demolished wasteland now frozen in time, where the only signs of progress frowned coyly through the conspicuous markings on each door; a clock driven code indicating how many times the Army Corps of Engineers had visited the property, and of just how many casualties were actually found inside. Filled with such great emotion, we decided to stop the bus for a moment and to just walk through the incredibly vast ruins of what must have provided an unimaginable amount of despair for an unbelievably massive amount of people.
Just a few blocks into the township a number of us began to slowly congregate in front of an unusual lot featuring the odd sight of a house that like so many others was totally demolished and flattened to the ground. Yet, there in open view as if standing as a lone and reluctant holdout from the disaster, a walk-in wardrobe closet fanned its wares defiantly in the wind. The contents of which left little doubt that if its owner did indeed survive, she probably still manages to dress quite well. Anyway, this little gathering spot became an ample opportunity for the Good Reverend to attempt to recover whatever air of piety that his character may have still held in tack, and he asked us all to gather into a tight circle for prayer. He prayed it seemed for over twenty minutes, with a whole lot of ‘Hallelujahs!’ and ‘Thank ya Jesus’!’ thrown in for good measure. Finally he said Amen, and before we could begin to disperse from the circle, the Elder Sephora interceded calling us all back together. Now she said, we would pour libation. She calmly explained to the group that inherent within the African Cultural Universe, contrary to the popular maniacal Euro-centric images of ghostly intrigue, the Ancestors, whom she referred to as the Dumbla Wedo, existed as an integral and respected core of our total living community. Their presence alone spoke to our living continuity upon the planet, a way of looking at time that was wholesome and universal; and it was due time she said for us to show them the love and respect that they truly deserved, especially those who had been so abruptly swept away right here in the midst of the calamity of this flood. It was now up to us she said, to provide them with the previously neglected provisions for their healthy transition into the afterlife.
Each of us was then handed a small piece of white chalk to wipe all over our arms and faces in a ritual of purification. She then instructed us to call out the names of those that we had known or simply admired that have now departed and as yet were still held dear to us; as she poured out in turn a small amount of water into the ground for each of them. “Ashe! Ashe! Ashe!” came back the immediate affirmation as we each responded calling out the names of those who still posted a meaningful place in our lives. Then afterwards, after everyone had satisfied their own volition, as if grasping all of our energy together in one direction, she lifted up her arms out wide and above the circle while collectively pouring out one long steady libation. She then cried out loud into heavens above the vast wasteland of the Ninth Ward, for all of those who had been so terribly swept away in the awful rushing floodwaters of this calamity to please come forth and make their presence known. “You, Bantustan of Bantustans, You bring forth your dead!” she said. All of a sudden, the sky turned a deep haunting grey. Slowly, the earth began to rattle and in a moment there began to appear hundreds and then thousands of horribly broken victims of the holocaust. Many of them appeared to us at first with the most bizarre of head wounds, broken and deformed bodies with arms and legs that miraculously began to heal completely as they walked towards us. Quite a number of them crawled out of the midst of the ruins looking like huge and strangely contorted balloon people who instantly coughed up a collective river of water. Taking a step toward them, I looked back at the preacher and said “Now, dem some holy ghost for you!”
Caught perhaps within the cultural lock box of religion, and simply unable to reconcile their ardent Christian upbringing with this strange new revelation, nonetheless obviously genuinely frightened completely out of their wits, the Reverend Huckleberry, Gloria-Elise, Daphne, Mama Sims, and her daughter, all in one great simultaneous instant -------‘got somewhere’. They were not to be seen again by any of us until later that evening.
Afterwards, the whole environment took on the air of a large and festive block party, and for the very first time I discovered so much about the truly beautiful people of New Orleans. This was in fact the fertile cultural crescent womb of our people. The Elder Sephora instructed the twins and I to go and gather a squad of very strong men in order to search the ruins for food and materials acceptable for a family feast, and for us to also gather whatever funeral provisions that we could find ample for the proper transitioning of the dead. When we returned hours later, we were surprised to find that the woman had neatly organized themselves into disciplined brigades and were setting a large and elaborate banquet table that amazingly would end up surrounding the entire perimeter of the township. A large jazz band belted a loud festive funeral march throughout the ingathering ‘Nawl-leans’ style. Another group of women were carefully stuffing backpacks with provisions for the dead. Soon thereafter, we discovered also that Raquel had suddenly taken off running throughout the crowd with Melissa steadfastly in toe, in a frantic desperate search for anyone who may have had even the slightest knowledge of her missing child. Unfortunately though for her, it was not to be, and she would return to us much later even more distraught than she had been throughout the entire trip.
We all sat together for hours and we ate a spectacular feast with the dead. We listened attentively as we heard thousands of individual stories of how these victims became trapped in their own homes by the rushing flood waters. Strangely enough, those who fled for their lives were actually deemed ‘refugees’. Almost to a one, they would confirm that they had heard what were certain to be, explosions but hours after the storm had left, and moments before the floodwaters would begin to rise. After we ate, we all graciously said our teary-eyed good byes, and Sephora instructed them all to return back to their earthly portals of death, whence the way was soon to be made for them to finally make a proper transition. Each of them was given a black granite stone with a face in their own likeness, and a backpack full of provisions for their solemn journey into the afterlife.
Moments later, as the new moon began to gravitate high in the heavens over the Lower Ninth Ward, a now decidedly somber unassuming and yet an overwhelming sense of calm would seem to fill the air, and Sephora gathered the remaining nine of us back into a circle once again; this time in order that we may pour yet another libation. Now, she yelled out passionately, soliciting one of the nine members of the council of Maat, calling upon the dreaded Nymph of the Great Waters, Auyarashia, High Priestess of the Atlantic Ocean, and the wayward comforter to the millions of disregarded souls fallen in the midst of the Middle Passage. “Come forth, O Mighty One!” she said, “You Sista, beloved of the sea! Come forth and carry your children home! Loose them, and let them go!”
All of the sudden, beyond the clouds high above the ruins of New Orleans, the steady and familiar roar of an insurgent waterspout began to take remarkable autonomous shape from out of nowhere in the middle of the sky; creating a sparkling bright azure luminescence back of the deep cerulean heavens. Like the Phoenix once again rising magnificently out of the ashes, it quickly assumed the likeness in the most hauntingly mammoth proportions of the erstwhile object of my youthful indiscretion nearly thirteen years ago. There she was again, the beautiful seductive and alluring Auyarashia, Queen of the Dammed, and the spirit of Blue Fountain. She calmly looked to the earth below, so regal and commanding in her role now as a general, and then as if taking measure of the situation she called out for her vast legions of warrior angels to stand forth in formation and to collect the weary dead of the Ninth Ward, fallen of the storm; in order that she may safely deliver them home to the watery crypts below Woodruff Park. A community now fallen twice by water.
All of a sudden, with all the pageantry of a large and spectacular military parade, there then miraculously appeared in the sky directly behind her, various battalions of the most incredible warrior angels, all in full radiant regalia betraying the specificity of their types. First there came forth the drummers, fronting a large marching band and dressed like Zulu warriors. They steadfastly pounded out a resounding marshal beat that echoed throughout the heavens as if bouncing off of the Universe itself in order to rally all of the other legions behind them. Then they came, each in turn breaking formation only to swoop down into the ruins and completely out of sight, returning moments latter back as a collective in perfect military formation without ever even slightly missing a beat; each now carrying a battered and broken victim of the flood. Next, as if their sole purpose was simply to cause the twins to loose their minds with uncontrollable glee, there came a thundering Black Power Battalion, regal thugged-out sistas and brothas forthrightly representing the victims of yet another inconvincible American holocaust of a few generations ago. In perfect cadence they shouted out loud, “Aint no party like a Black Panther party, because a Black Panther party don’t stop!”
And on and on they came, one by one, these various battalions of amazing warrior angels issuing forth from the abundant reservoirs of Black suffering and triumph, taking spectacular flight overhead, only to variously swoop down with the most perfect agility in order to gather their portion of the dead; and then carrying them on their backs into the world beyond. At last, after the Preacher Angels, the old Scholars of the New Awakening, the thugged-out Gangsta Angels, and after so many more, brining up the rear Harpy, back once more in the guise of the eagle spirit of Asi Yahola flew by commanding a unique Seminole battalion of his own. They chanted in perfect cadence with their heads piously turned to the rear soldiering in the manner of the Bird of Sankofa; they were singing, “On the day that I die, I’m gonna live with the Spirit in the Sky!”
We watched in phenomenal awe, while the remaining casualties were being flown to safety overhead, and down on the earthly firmament below, our joyous second-line ultimately had to come to an end; and as if in the act of pardoning such painfully petrified remains, that once eerie omnipresent sense of spiritual oppression was finally lifted completely away from the Lower Ninth Ward; leaving only the bare skeletal remains of vast destruction.
After a time, we all began to casually make our way back towards our bus just a few blocks away, only to be duly reminded of Raquel still ruefully entombed by her suffering. A number of us made several honest attempts to comfort her, but to no avail. However, this would soon become no longer necessary, as she would suddenly react with the natural instinct that only a mother’s love could truly muster. Seated to the front of the bus in plain view, Reverend Huckleberry and the other members of Greater Prosperity were completely awash in joy as Mama Sims rocked a little baby girl in her arms. Apparently, as we had spent the last few precious hours currying a somber determined ritual of loving retribution, they too had discovered a solemn purpose of their own, and miraculously they had somehow located Raquel’s missing child. That night, filled with such an overwhelming sense of triumph we all slept quietly as we traveled once again back over twin bridges of Lake Ponchatrain, and on to our homes down in the valley of the Rolling Hills.
Dawn threatened on the horizon high above the waters below the twin bridges of Lake Pontchartrain, as the yawns of early morning greeted our bus with an eerie scene like something straight out of Sleepy Hollow. Here for miles in both directions, mummified in solemn despair, is a road now sentenced to perpetuity. Today, for an entire planet to witness there lies here in open view the petrified remains of thousands of leafless cypress trees fallen, as if taken by wind. Their gloomy pale grey-white countenance and the long somber blue noir movie montage that slowly creped in open view, as we negotiated each new acre of this dark barren terrain, where the living dead stare back at you, cast in these lifeless battle-worn branches crouched as if stolen zombie-like in this bizarre and startled grimace and now prostrate in a posture of helpless submission. Somehow, although mum, they would act to alert us of what we were soon to fully discover. That New Orleans is today a city frozen in time.
'Stolen off the coast of Africa, she came fierce and unrelenting, biting a bitter wound of her own into the very soul of our culture nationwide. As if bringing us a mandate from Maat, she came riding upon the bird of Sankofa, betraying the very symbol of cleansing'.
Nevertheless, it is not Katrina the great storm of 2005, which has left us with such a deafening pause. However, they are the endless tornadoes of holocaust creating and re-creating this Diaspora within a Diaspora, and once again committing so many of our people to fend in weary solitary anguish for their lives, through what has now grown to become such a grossly contorted leviathan of collective pain and suffering; replete with so many intermittent and unrelenting winds of near universal indifference. On this day, once again, bundled amidst our general disillusionment and the pain that we now do share so deeply with those who have lost so much, we carried only our fateful determination itself bursting with hope and honest curiosity as we traveled through the vast modern ruins of this legendary American city.
As we continued on through what was once the middle class enclave of the Upper Ninth Ward, where a few Negroes in New Orleans had been fortunate enough to live just a little bit higher up on the hog, indiscreetly to our immediate right standing sentinel Sphinx-like, as if itself secreting some ridiculously absurd joke, while unabashedly haunting a humble half acre all of its own, the mind-boggling stark irony of universal destruction, and the blatant reverberating sense of official disregard for the human condition, was instantaneously punctuated by acres of broken wood, concrete and mortar, glass, and broken spirits, now amazingly juxtaposed by a new fabulous and more pricy model city of what the homes of the Upper Ninth Ward are promised to look like in the future. Fronting this strange and bizarre scene of prospect opulence, huddled with open arms in the midst of the neglected and now petrified aftermath of omnipresent suffering, one beholds the quickly disregarded ruins of three centuries of Black skin color caste, and Talented Tenth Civil Rights Intergrationalism; today ‘sat down’ and swept away with such a cold and resounding indifference. Who Knew?
Once again, we traveled in near teary-eyed disbelief coddling our individual pain for the immense suffering of our people. This time though, we were all but thirteen in number. Nonetheless, we were determined to help to resolve a measure of the vast and lingering pain amplified by the immense excruciating despair still felt by so many. On our first trip, denied the satellite feeds offered to Iraqis estranged from their homeland and now living here in the United States, we simply acted in earnest to return hundreds of registered voters back to New Orleans in order that they may have an honest opportunity to vote in their own municipal elections. Yet, little did we know that this second trip would turn out to become more of a reconnaissance mission of its own.
The Right Reverend Jasper Huckleberry chartered the bus for us. He was both the junior pastor of The Greater Prosperity Baptist Church in Atlanta, and the Chairman of the Board of A.K.R.O.N; today one of a slew of so called civil rights organizations who actually owe the true pedagogy of their leadership style to the NAACP. Miraculously, for nearly a century here is an organization that has been successfully ‘faking moves’ as a white owned Black organization fronting Black leadership in Blackface alone. Miranda and her daughter had not actually seen their home since the very day that they had evacuated the city on their own eight months ago and one day before the storm. Melissa, a graduate student at Tulane, traveled along with her nineteen year old lover Raquel, who had lost her two year old baby on the day that they were both finally rescued from the roof of their home on the edge of the Lower Ninth Ward roughly eight days after the flood waters began to rise. The last thing that she could remember, was fatefully handing over her precious child to what she thought was the safety of a rescue worker. Yet, processed like so many other children in the midst of this single horrific disaster, and often collectively handed over first with no tags and little if any instruction, only a mother’s massive hope that another human being might actually do right by her and her child, she too was duped like so many thousands of others, as one might covertly load a slave ship bound for the unknown. Her child with merely a babble of her parent’s name was somehow stolen from her only to become one of the tens of thousands still missing; and she now lived each pressing moment of her life with a profound and reverberating pain deep in the pit of her heart at the loss of her child.
Traveling along in full Panther regalia replete with berets, twin brothers Tupac and Zaid were heading back home as new members of the National Black Power Summit that was now actively seeking to locate the tens of thousands still missing since the storm. Gloria-Elise, Daphne, and Mama Sims along with her high school age daughter Sonia, were all members of the Greater Prosperity Church Choir. The Reverend had intended that they would come along solely to act as captains for the evacuees. However, this turned out to be a much smaller group than what had been expected. Disparate for a paycheck, four evacuees, Jessie, Marvel, Cowboy, and Mama Kurl, all who had been displaced during the storm, and where now residents of Atlanta, finally would find piecemeal employment as activist with A.K.R.O.N, and they rode along with us as well. Acquiescing to her gentle prodding I spent the whole night seated next to the always elegant Elder Sephora. As a longtime resident of Georgia, she and her family actually still owned extensive property in the vast heartland of New Orleans, none of which by the way, had sustained even the slightest flood or wind damage throughout the storm. Sephora said that this was so because that they were all well prepared and 'uniquely' protected. “It was told to us many years ago that this storm was coming!” Although easily recoiling in submission to my fondest adulation for her, I was at first rather surprised to discover that she was well acquainted with who I was as well, and as would she counsel, “Where my true destiny lie.” “The old souls she would say have returned to us!” You see, Sephora was one of those rather beloved people who are quite renowned in our community. She was always delicately adorned from head to toe in white linens and she forever carried her natural sweet butter love for Black people as someone we often called ‘gifted’. She was somewhat of an oracle to her people; an ardent truth teller, a predictor of the future, a preacher woman of sorts, and she was also a respected Yoruba High Priestess. She was loved much more than she was feared, and this day she was traveling she told me, with a special purpose in mind.
This trip bore a unique intergenerational witness as well for the Black community nationwide. As although still stubbornly extant back of its strident cultural transmission for more than forty years of entrenched political estrangement, Willie Lynched in the unnaturally restrained disengagement of the sheltered discourse between Black Nationalism and Civil Rights Intergrationalism, on this day all of this and more was suddenly ‘sat down’ and swept away in the overwhelming euphoria of the dire heart wrenching concern for the masses of our people.
Nonetheless, that night as we set off from Atlanta, the rather demure and seemingly unassuming Reverend Huckleberry would appear to attempt to set the tone for our sojourn by initiating along with the other members of his church, a retinue of Christian prayers and Civil Rights freedom songs. Yet, their efforts were quickly usurped after a long and rather heated discussion broke out over the government’s implicit culpability in this great disaster. “They bombed the levees and intentionally killed all of those people!” somebody said. “They did so in 1927, they did it to us during Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and they did it to us again during Katrina! We had made it through the storm. There was damage of course, but nothing like what was to come. We lived right there and we heard the explosions. They dynamited the levees!” Someone else spoke of seeing men in Black kaki military uniforms early on roaming the streets with guns and harassing people. “It was as if they were waiting to hear the governor’s Shoot to Kill!” said Mama Kurl. She then began to recall the story of how while awaiting rescue, her neighbor was rumored to have been raped and her neighbor’s husband shot dead by a marauding group of these strange mercenaries in black; who would remarkably become the actual first responders somehow so conveniently on the scene even before the levees were actually blown.
At this point, Raquel began to suddenly brake out into a soft and yet painfully restrained sobbing obviously still deeply bemoaning the unknown whereabouts of her child. The Reverend Huckleberry then began to boldly admonish everyone not to rush to conclusions, and to concentrate instead on creating a sanctified sacred space within their own hearts for Christian love and forgiveness. His rather odd and peculiar comments piercing what had been such a sharp and heated exchange essentially worked to cast a rather tense omnipotent pale of quiet and perhaps confused disbelief on the entire bus, save that of course for the lingering sobs of anguish echoing from Raquel. After awhile, the Reverend rose from his seat and discreetly parked himself directly behind her, and began to gently rub her shoulders. Somehow, he was able to cleverly maneuver his seemingly genuine solicitations of empathy toward her loss, into a stern personal admonition which appeared to openly suggest that her flagrant lesbian lifestyle was the actual cause for her loss in the way of punishment for her sins in the first place. This caused her to sob even louder and prompted Melissa, who was not one to tolerate such an overtly untoward intrusion into her own affairs, to simply go off. She asked the Reverend politely to please go back to his seat and to stop harassing them. She was quickly joined by The Elder Sephora and by the twins as well, who yelled out in concert for him to leave the girls alone. As one may expect, I sat there in silence simply observing the whole scene. Nonetheless, these comments brought down a loud crescendo of shouts for restraint admonishing respect towards the Preacher man and his position within the church; which easily degenerated into an even larger argument that in turn prompted the now visibly ruffled Reverend to threaten to halt the trip altogether and to return the bus to Atlanta.
By this time, we were pulling into a rest stop in Mississippi, and as we stepped to the pavement in front of the visitor’s center, Sephora pointed out to me a large confederate flag flapping in the wind high atop a flagpole in front of the building. As fate would have it, a familiar curious looking bird was doing his business right atop this pole and brazenly using the flag to wipe himself. “A friend of yours?” she asked. To which I could only grin in affirmation. I never did ask her if she was actually acquainted with the eagle spirit of Asi Yahola. However, her observations would naturally confirm for me that she somehow knew that I was always being followed by the Bird of Sankofa. In fits and spurts this quarrel would still continue on, eventually spilling outside of the bus. That was when faced with the threat of a setback hovering over the entire group, Sonia, Mama Sims impressionable young daughter, looked directly into the Reverend’s eyes right in front of the whole crowd and boldly outed his infidelity to his own wife, even suggesting the possibility that she herself may indeed be carrying the Reverend’s child. From that moment on, with this callous sacrilegious disclosure hovering over him, a restrained and yet peaceful sense of resolution seemed to pervade the rest of the trip. The Reverend now appeared simply resigned to keep to himself, choosing instead to sleep on the very last seat in the back of the bus. After a time, it was rumored that he reeked with alcohol.
That morning, as we traveled through downtown, we all agreed in unison not to stop for breakfast and to continue instead to make our way on to the Lower Ninth Ward. Situated in the Delta, this is a city that is actually shaped like a bowl or a tea cup if you will, and the Lower Ninth Ward sits directly in the very bottom of the bowl. This is the ‘Hood’, the Black ghetto, and the prolific and reverberating core of the Black culture of New Orleans. While standing there, it is easy for one to witness the actual venerability of what was once the largest constituency of registered voters in the parish of New Orleans.
There is no way to fully explain the first hand witness of viewing such universal destruction even eight months after the neglected aftermath of such an enormous catastrophe. We remained awestruck throughout as we slowly negotiated a vast visible flatland of total destruction that appeared for all intents and purposes to be an immense war zone. Block upon block of a painfully demolished wasteland now frozen in time, where the only signs of progress frowned coyly through the conspicuous markings on each door; a clock driven code indicating how many times the Army Corps of Engineers had visited the property, and of just how many casualties were actually found inside. Filled with such great emotion, we decided to stop the bus for a moment and to just walk through the incredibly vast ruins of what must have provided an unimaginable amount of despair for an unbelievably massive amount of people.
Just a few blocks into the township a number of us began to slowly congregate in front of an unusual lot featuring the odd sight of a house that like so many others was totally demolished and flattened to the ground. Yet, there in open view as if standing as a lone and reluctant holdout from the disaster, a walk-in wardrobe closet fanned its wares defiantly in the wind. The contents of which left little doubt that if its owner did indeed survive, she probably still manages to dress quite well. Anyway, this little gathering spot became an ample opportunity for the Good Reverend to attempt to recover whatever air of piety that his character may have still held in tack, and he asked us all to gather into a tight circle for prayer. He prayed it seemed for over twenty minutes, with a whole lot of ‘Hallelujahs!’ and ‘Thank ya Jesus’!’ thrown in for good measure. Finally he said Amen, and before we could begin to disperse from the circle, the Elder Sephora interceded calling us all back together. Now she said, we would pour libation. She calmly explained to the group that inherent within the African Cultural Universe, contrary to the popular maniacal Euro-centric images of ghostly intrigue, the Ancestors, whom she referred to as the Dumbla Wedo, existed as an integral and respected core of our total living community. Their presence alone spoke to our living continuity upon the planet, a way of looking at time that was wholesome and universal; and it was due time she said for us to show them the love and respect that they truly deserved, especially those who had been so abruptly swept away right here in the midst of the calamity of this flood. It was now up to us she said, to provide them with the previously neglected provisions for their healthy transition into the afterlife.
Each of us was then handed a small piece of white chalk to wipe all over our arms and faces in a ritual of purification. She then instructed us to call out the names of those that we had known or simply admired that have now departed and as yet were still held dear to us; as she poured out in turn a small amount of water into the ground for each of them. “Ashe! Ashe! Ashe!” came back the immediate affirmation as we each responded calling out the names of those who still posted a meaningful place in our lives. Then afterwards, after everyone had satisfied their own volition, as if grasping all of our energy together in one direction, she lifted up her arms out wide and above the circle while collectively pouring out one long steady libation. She then cried out loud into heavens above the vast wasteland of the Ninth Ward, for all of those who had been so terribly swept away in the awful rushing floodwaters of this calamity to please come forth and make their presence known. “You, Bantustan of Bantustans, You bring forth your dead!” she said. All of a sudden, the sky turned a deep haunting grey. Slowly, the earth began to rattle and in a moment there began to appear hundreds and then thousands of horribly broken victims of the holocaust. Many of them appeared to us at first with the most bizarre of head wounds, broken and deformed bodies with arms and legs that miraculously began to heal completely as they walked towards us. Quite a number of them crawled out of the midst of the ruins looking like huge and strangely contorted balloon people who instantly coughed up a collective river of water. Taking a step toward them, I looked back at the preacher and said “Now, dem some holy ghost for you!”
Caught perhaps within the cultural lock box of religion, and simply unable to reconcile their ardent Christian upbringing with this strange new revelation, nonetheless obviously genuinely frightened completely out of their wits, the Reverend Huckleberry, Gloria-Elise, Daphne, Mama Sims, and her daughter, all in one great simultaneous instant -------‘got somewhere’. They were not to be seen again by any of us until later that evening.
Afterwards, the whole environment took on the air of a large and festive block party, and for the very first time I discovered so much about the truly beautiful people of New Orleans. This was in fact the fertile cultural crescent womb of our people. The Elder Sephora instructed the twins and I to go and gather a squad of very strong men in order to search the ruins for food and materials acceptable for a family feast, and for us to also gather whatever funeral provisions that we could find ample for the proper transitioning of the dead. When we returned hours later, we were surprised to find that the woman had neatly organized themselves into disciplined brigades and were setting a large and elaborate banquet table that amazingly would end up surrounding the entire perimeter of the township. A large jazz band belted a loud festive funeral march throughout the ingathering ‘Nawl-leans’ style. Another group of women were carefully stuffing backpacks with provisions for the dead. Soon thereafter, we discovered also that Raquel had suddenly taken off running throughout the crowd with Melissa steadfastly in toe, in a frantic desperate search for anyone who may have had even the slightest knowledge of her missing child. Unfortunately though for her, it was not to be, and she would return to us much later even more distraught than she had been throughout the entire trip.
We all sat together for hours and we ate a spectacular feast with the dead. We listened attentively as we heard thousands of individual stories of how these victims became trapped in their own homes by the rushing flood waters. Strangely enough, those who fled for their lives were actually deemed ‘refugees’. Almost to a one, they would confirm that they had heard what were certain to be, explosions but hours after the storm had left, and moments before the floodwaters would begin to rise. After we ate, we all graciously said our teary-eyed good byes, and Sephora instructed them all to return back to their earthly portals of death, whence the way was soon to be made for them to finally make a proper transition. Each of them was given a black granite stone with a face in their own likeness, and a backpack full of provisions for their solemn journey into the afterlife.
Moments later, as the new moon began to gravitate high in the heavens over the Lower Ninth Ward, a now decidedly somber unassuming and yet an overwhelming sense of calm would seem to fill the air, and Sephora gathered the remaining nine of us back into a circle once again; this time in order that we may pour yet another libation. Now, she yelled out passionately, soliciting one of the nine members of the council of Maat, calling upon the dreaded Nymph of the Great Waters, Auyarashia, High Priestess of the Atlantic Ocean, and the wayward comforter to the millions of disregarded souls fallen in the midst of the Middle Passage. “Come forth, O Mighty One!” she said, “You Sista, beloved of the sea! Come forth and carry your children home! Loose them, and let them go!”
All of the sudden, beyond the clouds high above the ruins of New Orleans, the steady and familiar roar of an insurgent waterspout began to take remarkable autonomous shape from out of nowhere in the middle of the sky; creating a sparkling bright azure luminescence back of the deep cerulean heavens. Like the Phoenix once again rising magnificently out of the ashes, it quickly assumed the likeness in the most hauntingly mammoth proportions of the erstwhile object of my youthful indiscretion nearly thirteen years ago. There she was again, the beautiful seductive and alluring Auyarashia, Queen of the Dammed, and the spirit of Blue Fountain. She calmly looked to the earth below, so regal and commanding in her role now as a general, and then as if taking measure of the situation she called out for her vast legions of warrior angels to stand forth in formation and to collect the weary dead of the Ninth Ward, fallen of the storm; in order that she may safely deliver them home to the watery crypts below Woodruff Park. A community now fallen twice by water.
All of a sudden, with all the pageantry of a large and spectacular military parade, there then miraculously appeared in the sky directly behind her, various battalions of the most incredible warrior angels, all in full radiant regalia betraying the specificity of their types. First there came forth the drummers, fronting a large marching band and dressed like Zulu warriors. They steadfastly pounded out a resounding marshal beat that echoed throughout the heavens as if bouncing off of the Universe itself in order to rally all of the other legions behind them. Then they came, each in turn breaking formation only to swoop down into the ruins and completely out of sight, returning moments latter back as a collective in perfect military formation without ever even slightly missing a beat; each now carrying a battered and broken victim of the flood. Next, as if their sole purpose was simply to cause the twins to loose their minds with uncontrollable glee, there came a thundering Black Power Battalion, regal thugged-out sistas and brothas forthrightly representing the victims of yet another inconvincible American holocaust of a few generations ago. In perfect cadence they shouted out loud, “Aint no party like a Black Panther party, because a Black Panther party don’t stop!”
And on and on they came, one by one, these various battalions of amazing warrior angels issuing forth from the abundant reservoirs of Black suffering and triumph, taking spectacular flight overhead, only to variously swoop down with the most perfect agility in order to gather their portion of the dead; and then carrying them on their backs into the world beyond. At last, after the Preacher Angels, the old Scholars of the New Awakening, the thugged-out Gangsta Angels, and after so many more, brining up the rear Harpy, back once more in the guise of the eagle spirit of Asi Yahola flew by commanding a unique Seminole battalion of his own. They chanted in perfect cadence with their heads piously turned to the rear soldiering in the manner of the Bird of Sankofa; they were singing, “On the day that I die, I’m gonna live with the Spirit in the Sky!”
We watched in phenomenal awe, while the remaining casualties were being flown to safety overhead, and down on the earthly firmament below, our joyous second-line ultimately had to come to an end; and as if in the act of pardoning such painfully petrified remains, that once eerie omnipresent sense of spiritual oppression was finally lifted completely away from the Lower Ninth Ward; leaving only the bare skeletal remains of vast destruction.
After a time, we all began to casually make our way back towards our bus just a few blocks away, only to be duly reminded of Raquel still ruefully entombed by her suffering. A number of us made several honest attempts to comfort her, but to no avail. However, this would soon become no longer necessary, as she would suddenly react with the natural instinct that only a mother’s love could truly muster. Seated to the front of the bus in plain view, Reverend Huckleberry and the other members of Greater Prosperity were completely awash in joy as Mama Sims rocked a little baby girl in her arms. Apparently, as we had spent the last few precious hours currying a somber determined ritual of loving retribution, they too had discovered a solemn purpose of their own, and miraculously they had somehow located Raquel’s missing child. That night, filled with such an overwhelming sense of triumph we all slept quietly as we traveled once again back over twin bridges of Lake Ponchatrain, and on to our homes down in the valley of the Rolling Hills.
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