Katrina: After the Flood (37 page)

“If you go in those areas, God bless you,” Nagin said when releasing what he called his “general guidelines” for rebuilding. “We’ll try to provide you with support as best we can. But understand we’re concentrating city resources in the areas that are in the immediate recovery zone.” Barbara Major was among those speaking out against this idea of favoring healthier parts of New Orleans over those most devastated. Sure, planners had smart ideas for rebuilding the city more rationally, but they failed to understand a fact about neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, and New Orleans East. “Black people only moved there because all the high ground had been taken,” she said.

I.
More specifically, the maps would indicate the minimum elevation of the first floor of any building to be eligible for the government’s flood-insurance program.

II.
Another estimate put the garbage left behind by Katrina at 12 million tons—or seven times the volume produced when the Twin Towers fell.

III.
Katrina’s gusts, Jeff Duncan wrote in the
Times-Picayune
, “peeled the thick black rubber sheets from the Dome’s exterior like an onion, dislodged three massive ducts, and punctured eight smaller holes in the surface.”

IV.
Nagin also thought it would be cost-free to the city given all the outside contractors making millions off the cleanup. The city hired a company to attract sponsors to underwrite some of the expense. Nagin hoped to raise $2 million, but only a single corporate sponsor stepped forward: Glad, which gave an unspecified six-figure donation along with a hundred thousand trash bags. Two days before the first parade, the City Council unanimously approved a bill to spend $2.7 million on police overtime and other city services without specifying the source of the money they were authorizing.

V.
That according to Muriel Lewis, director of the National Association of Katrina Evacuees.

17

CHOCOLATE CITY

Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, was in New Orleans for the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend to speak at what his organization was calling a Black Family Summit. Weeks earlier, Nagin had promised the local Baptist church where the event was to be held would have electricity, but at the last minute Farrakhan’s people needed an alternative venue. Four months after Katrina, even the mayor didn’t have the clout to turn on the lights in a church only minimally damaged by the storm.

The hotels in New Orleans were running at capacity that weekend. Evacuees were in town for an event sponsored by the city’s big social aid and pleasure clubs, which have been fixtures of the city’s black community dating back to Reconstruction. A group of them had joined together to put on a giant second-line—a New Orleans tradition where groups of musicians led revelers through the streets. They would be parading through Tremé that Sunday on King’s birthday. Thousands had traveled home to New Orleans, at least for the night. “We’re coming home!” the revelers started chanting. “We’re back.” Yet just as the musicians stopped playing, gunfire broke out. Three people were brought to the hospital for gunshot wounds.

Farrakhan and Nagin met later that night in the minister’s suite at the Windsor Court. There, inside one of the city’s pricier hotels, the two spoke about the shooting, but their main focus was the black diaspora—the hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians living elsewhere. This man whose words had proven so inspiring to Nagin a decade earlier implored the mayor to bring his people home. It is your obligation as an African-American mayor, Farrakhan counseled, to make sure New Orleans remains a black city. The two spoke for nearly three hours.

Nagin had a light schedule on the Monday holiday—just a morning ceremony at City Hall. There, Nagin would say a few words to honor Dr. King. Long ago his communications director had abandoned the idea that the mayor might deliver a speech if one of her people wrote it for him. “For Ray,” Sally Forman said, “there was no greater sin than sounding scripted.” He was an elected official more interested in “leaving a lasting impression,” Forman said, “than presenting any memorable ideas.” She had delivered a typed-out list of suggested bullet points to his office, but even then there was no telling if they would be used. His tendency to go off message had even become something of a public game between them (“Sally’s going to need the smelling salts for this one,” Nagin would say from the podium)—but the mayor had a more serious point to make. “Don’t make me speak all English,” Nagin snapped at Forman early in their relationship. “Don’t make me look weak.”

Mitch Landrieu, the lieutenant governor, was at City Hall that morning. Impossible to miss, he stood near the podium with a fussing baby in his arms. It had always been personal between Nagin and Landrieu, as the latter seemed bothered by the mayor’s slights of his sister Mary. Just before Katrina, Nagin ran into Landrieu at an event. “Mitch got right up to Ray, yelling at him,” Forman said. “I really thought it was going to end in a fistfight.” A widespread rumor had Landrieu running for mayor against Nagin that April. Others around Nagin thought that his late-night meeting with Farrakhan explained the speech the mayor gave that day. Forman, however, believed it was the pending election that inspired her boss to make the “impromptu decision that he’s not going to offer the same old same old with Mitch standing there.”

Nagin, dressed in an open-collared, striped shirt, wore a black armband around one bicep. “I greet you all in the spirit of peace this
morning,” Nagin began, addressing the majority-black audience. “I greet you all in the spirit of love this morning, and more importantly, I greet you all in the spirit of unity.” People looked at one another, puzzled. This was not a Ray Nagin any of them knew.

He could talk about what made King great, Nagin told the crowd, but instead he wanted to tell them about his conversation that morning with the slain civil rights leader. “I just wanted to know what would he think if he looked down today. What would he think about Katrina?” The mayor brought up Gretna in his imagined conversation (“I said, ‘Mr. King, when they were marching across the Mississippi River bridge . . . and they were met at the parish line with attack dogs and machine guns firing shots over their heads?’ ”). He brought up the suffering at the Superdome and Convention Center and also the “knuckleheads [who] pull out some guns and start firing into the crowd.” With each incident, King expressed his disappointment via Nagin. (“And Dr. King said, ‘I wouldn’t like that.’ ”)

Nagin isn’t one for long speeches. He mentioned black-on-black crime and the decline of the African-American family and then got to his point, echoing the theme of self-reliance that Farrakhan and his acolytes had been preaching all weekend: it would fall on the black community to help itself. “God is mad at America,” Nagin said. “He’s sending hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it’s destroying and putting stress on this country. Surely he’s not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretenses. But surely he’s upset at black America also. We’re not taking care of ourselves. We’re not taking care of our women. And we’re not taking care of our children when you have a community where seventy percent of its children are being born to one parent.

“We ask black people: It’s time. It’s time for us to come together. It’s time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don’t care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. . . .” And then he added: “This city will be a majority African-American city. It’s the way God wants it to be. You can’t have New Orleans no other way; it wouldn’t be New Orleans.” After a smattering of applause a self-conscious Nagin concluded, “So before I get into too much more trouble, I’m just going to tell you, in my closing conversation with Dr. King he said, ‘I never worried about the bad people who were doing all
the violence during civil rights time.’ He said, ‘I worried about the good folks that didn’t say anything or didn’t do anything when they knew what they had to do.’ ”

SALLY FORMAN DIDN’T THINK
it was a big deal when Nagin referred to New Orleans as a chocolate city. He had used the phrase before and nobody had ever cared. “I don’t think Ray had any idea it would blow up like that,” she said.

But Nagin’s expensive campaign consultant, Jim Carvin, knew. Carvin had been on the winning side of six consecutive mayoral contests in New Orleans, including Nagin in 2002, but Nagin’s speech left Carvin wondering about his chances at number seven. “It’s always difficult when your candidate says something without discussing it with you,” a droll Carvin says in the film
Race
, a documentary by Katherine Cecil about the 2006 New Orleans city election. “It was strictly shoot-from-the-hip Ray Nagin.” Within hours of Nagin’s speech, the cable news stations were carrying the story that the mayor of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans had just described Katrina as God’s wrath. Soon the “chocolate New Orleans” line replaced the God theme. That line dominated the news for weeks. Within days, it seemed every tourist shop and street vendor in town was selling a T-shirt depicting Nagin as Willy Wonka and New Orleans as a chocolate factory. (One version:
NOW WITH
50 PERCENT MORE NUTS!
)

“It’s part of our culture to talk about chocolate cities,” Nagin told CNN the day after his speech. He mentioned the song “Chocolate City,” George Clinton and Parliament’s ode to Washington, DC. Washington was the country’s first “chocolate city,” Nagin explained, followed by Newark, Detroit, and New Orleans. Nagin would apologize for his comments—but only up to a point. “I crossed the line when I brought God into the discussion,” he confessed to the
New Orleans Tribune
. “But I see no problem talking about New Orleans remaining diverse.”

Uptown saw “chocolate city” as the end of Nagin. He was no longer the erratic mayor who maligned his own city by exaggerating the crimes that occurred after Katrina and then flipped, flopped, and stalled whenever he needed to make a decision. Now he was the buffoon. “Congress can finally stop accusing us of being corrupt,” wrote Clancy DuBos, the
chief political writer for the
Gambit
, the city’s alternative weekly. “Nagin has finally given them a fresh argument: that we’re stupid, incompetent, and led by a mindless racist.”

Polls revealed a black New Orleans split over Nagin’s speech. Eighty-two percent of the poll’s respondents said they weren’t offended by the “chocolate city” reference, though a majority agreed that he “could have said it better.” Fifty-nine percent of blacks said they had a favorable view of Nagin (compared to 13 percent for Bush, 24 percent for FEMA, and 40 percent for Blanco). Warren Bell, a lifelong New Orleanian who had been the city’s first black news anchor on local network TV, thought the whole event had been overblown. “New Orleanians refer to this as a chocolate city,” Bell said. “Certainly the chocolate people did.” Bell, who by that time was working in the president’s office at Xavier, was no fan of Ray Nagin’s, but he also viewed the mayor’s reference, whether deliberate or not, as a brilliant political stroke: a way for the mayor to use his megaphone to signal to his African-American constituents scattered across the country that he supported their right to return. “The people for whom that was designed to appeal . . . are glad he said it,” Bell said. “I think that endeared him to more black voters.”

INCUMBENT MAYORS DON’T LOSE
in New Orleans. Clancy DuBos, the political writer, searched back sixty years to find the last sitting New Orleans mayor denied a second term. But then, it had been a hundred years since a city had been devastated like New Orleans (San Francisco, 1906; Galveston, 1900). Six months earlier, Nagin was sitting on a $1.3 million campaign war chest and looking at what DuBos dismissed as “nuisance opposition.” Post-Katrina, twenty-three people filed to run against Nagin. “A 20-Ring Political Circus,” the
Washington Post
said of this election taking place at the end of April, eight months after the flood.

A real estate appraiser joined the race, as did a radio DJ, an aircraft mechanic, a paralegal, and two preachers. Manny “Chevrolet” Bruno, who ran against Nagin in 2002, was also a candidate. The motto of this unemployed actor working as a bookstore clerk was “A troubled man for troubled times.” He proposed that the city legalize hashish and create a red-light district like Amsterdam’s to pay for a state-of-the-art levee
system. He suggested polygamy as a solution to the city’s repopulation problem. Even one of Nagin’s former chiefs of staff (his former
chief administration officer
in the local parlance) announced her candidacy.

Most of Nagin’s twenty-one challengers were white. That was no surprise to Lance Hill, who described the 2006 mayor’s race “as the white community’s best opportunity in thirty years to take back political control of New Orleans.” It wasn’t just an academic from Tulane seeing it that way. “There’s a lot of people in the black community,” City Council president Oliver Thomas said, “saying that people in the white community are trying to pile on.” Even evacuees around the country could see for themselves what was happening during an election covered by CNN, Fox, and MSNBC as if it were a national election. Chris Matthews would serve as co-moderator at the last big debate, broadcast nationally by MSNBC, before the election runoff.

Ron Forman, who had announced his candidacy a few months before election day, was the early favorite. He had the
Times-Picayune
’s endorsement. He also had the money, which he’d made sure to line up before entering the race. “I told them, ‘Look, guys, I don’t have the wealth,’ ” Forman said. “ ‘If I’m going to step up, you have to step up with me.’ ” Three days later, he said, he had raised $2.5 million. Like in
Night of the Living Dead
, Forman joked, “people just keep showing up at my door each night, carrying stacks of checks, each one of them for five thousand dollars.” Pre-Katrina, Boysie Bollinger donated $5,000 to Nagin’s reelection campaign, but then various subsidiaries of his (Bollinger Gulf Repair, Bollinger Marine Fabricators) gave another $45,000 to Forman that winter. Jimmy Reiss and his spouse also gave Forman $10,000 between them, and Reiss served as a chief Forman fund-raiser. For Reiss his efforts served as penance for any role he had played in the creation of Ray Nagin. “Absolutely the wrong guy for the job at the moment,” Reiss said. The plan to seize back control of City Hall seemed on track.