The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (24 page)

Accessing expanded unemployment benefits, funded by the federal government, post-2008 was made difficult by the state’s refusal to modernize its unemployment insurance system. And despite the fact that close to four out of every five Medicaid dollars spent in the state are provided by the federal government—since poorer states get more of their Medicaid expenditures reimbursed by D.C.—for able-bodied adults it’s harder to qualify for Medicaid in Mississippi than in most other states in the union. Childless adults have no access to the program; out-of-work parents only qualify if their total income is less than a quarter of the federal poverty line.
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This is a poverty that cloys to entire communities. Said Nekedra Blockett, a social worker at the St. Gabriel Mercy Community Center in the desperately poor Delta town of Mount Bayou, in Bolivar County,

A lot of the clients that come into our center have various different reasons of their poverty. Some have been laid off from their jobs, some have disability, some have applied for disability and they can’t even receive that assistance. Quite a few of them don’t have income at all. A lot of them survive through federal assistance, maybe food stamps. A lot of the women with younger children may receive TANF—they may have to take a class or do volunteer work, twenty to twenty-five hours per week. That’s how a lot of them survive around here. You know, looking at it in their way, sometimes it
hurts. It’s a chain, a cycle. Some people may come from a poor family; as they grow up they take on the same cycle. This community had a lot of farmers who owned land. You don’t have too many people in this area who farm now. A few of them actually make it out, they might leave here and find a better living for them and their family.

Blockett’s colleague, Sister Donald Mary Lynch, talked of clients who came to their center just to use toilets and bathrooms, because they had no running water in their homes. “It does happen on a regular basis. Many of these families are single-parent homes. Many of the young men end up in prison, so they’re not in the homes. Many of the young girls get pregnant in high school, so they don’t finish high school. Their education limits their job opportunities. And without jobs they don’t have money. That’s how the cycle continues. They live in government-subsidized housing, there’s a lot of it here in Mount Bayou itself, and also in the county.”

Blockett continued: “Today, I had a client that came in; her only income is her disability, which is $674 a month. She came to us today because she had to take her daughter in, with her two grandchildren, into her home. She comes to me for food today, and she needs assistance with the light bill. She only had $26. She needed some medicine; she was in pain. Right now, she’s having to make the choice of food, shelter, medication, different things like this. Many of them [Blockett’s clients] are illiterate; a few have a high school education, and it’s rare they have a college.”

The lucky ones might snag a job at Parchman Prison, a huge penal complex in the nearby countryside that housed 3,000 inmates; or they might drive further afield, to the casinos one and a half hours north of town—where locals worked nonunionized jobs, with few benefits, at near-minimum wage. Most, however, stayed closer to home. And, said Blockett, they either remained jobless, or they ended up with dead-end work at fast food chains and big box
stores. “[They work at] McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Walmart and Kroger. Some Dollar Generals. Different things like that.”

HURRICANES, TORNADOES, AND SOME AWFULLY BIG BILLS

Were he to return to life, Michael Harrington wouldn’t be pleased that modern-day poverty in a place like Mississippi, or in the Appalachian towns studied by Jim Ziliak, or in the urban community of North Philadelphia, still survived; but, nevertheless, as a student of the history of poverty he would understand it. What he wouldn’t fathom is why other, more affluent regions were adopting Mississippian attitudes to the poor. Nor, I suspect, would he easily come to terms with a host of other triggers for economic collapse in twenty-first-century America. In particular, as someone who came of age during the heyday of can-do American liberal governance, he would be bemused by the country’s paralyzed political processes, and as a result of this paralysis, by its inability to get on top of both natural and manmade disasters; he would be both surprised and horrified at how profoundly tragedies doled out by nature and by corporations can quickly morph into scandal.

How, for example, would a post-war American optimist—even one with as keen an eye for the underbelly of America as Harrington—have interpreted Hurricane Katrina, and the destruction both of the physical infrastructure of much of New Orleans and also of a huge number of lives? How would he have reacted to the orgy of impotent finger-pointing that was indulged in by local, state, and federal officials both during the flooding itself, and then in the months and years following—as swaths of land were left to decay and the rotten wooden hulls of thousands of homes were simply left to pockmark the devastated city?

There’s a loneliness to this landscape, a Mad Max edge. It looks like a world abandoned to its own devices, with street after street of
destroyed, gutted houses, and acres of overgrown lots where once stood stores and homes, churches and schools. It is an utterly apocalyptic landscape; yet it is also a strangely invisible one—off the beaten path, away from the decadent, jazzy splendors of Bourbon Street, a place of national shame that, for those fortunate enough not to have lived in the area, is all too easy to forget exists.

It is, explained Darren McKinney, a middle-aged resident on disability and food stamps who had spent the years since the hurricane hit working with a nonprofit group to salvage some of the wooden homes of the Lower Ninth, “like a ghost town at nighttime.”

Taking a break from working on one graffiti-covered skeleton of a building, on Caffin Avenue, in the last weeks of 2011, McKinney sat on a concrete slab that used to be the base of a house, and looked around. “That was a barber shop, that was a grocery store. That slab right there, it used to be a doctor’s office. That place used to be an after-school place for kids. This here used to be a church right behind us,” said Darren, pointing to the rear of the empty lot. “I stood, watched the water come up fifteen feet, fifteen to twenty feet in this area. St. Claude and Delaware, I watched it. I watched the little birds and fishes in the water, people yelling at nighttime for help. I lost my step-mamma, a couple of my best friends in the storm.” Surveying the damage, half a decade on from the storm, Darren struggled to put a positive spin on things. “Up in this area, you might have 30 percent of the people back. It’s getting better—’cause every day I see a new person moving into the neighborhood, someone moving back in. The neighborhood coming back; but it’s going to be another five to six years to get some action back into the neighborhood again. You just gotta think positive.”

Of course, much of New Orleans’s troubles, much of the texture of its poverty, predates Hurricane Katrina not just by decades but by centuries. It is a city long plagued by violence, by racial and economic divides as stark as any in America—fully half of the residents of Orleans Parish were low-income even prior to the hurricane—and by
endemic levels of corruption. Yet all of these were worsened by the calamitous events of the late summer of 2005. Disproportionately, it was African Americans who were left behind in the city as those with cars evacuated. Disproportionately, it was African American neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward that suffered the most physical damage and then were least likely to be speedily rebuilt after the disaster. By contrast, more affluent areas, like the fabled French Quarter, which had grown up on high land over the years, suffered less damage during the flood and returned to relative normality within months of the waters draining out of the city. For tourists, in town to splurge on
les bons temps
—booze, food, and extraordinary music—the city presented a near-intact public visage within a remarkably short stretch of time. But, barely a couple of miles from Bourbon Street, entire city blocks were still obliterated years later, concrete foundation slabs resting at odd angles amidst overgrown grass, graffiti-covered house shells still waiting to be torn down.

And, while the number of African Americans who died in the flood was roughly proportionate to the percentage of the New Orleans population who were African American, disproportionately it was the poor, and elderly, of all races who were the ones to die in the flood itself and its chaotic aftermath. In a city where the public health system had already suffered epic cutbacks—losing a majority of its public-sector hospital beds and in-patient mental health facilities in the years preceding Katrina—the disaster simply overwhelmed the first-responder system. It was one’s economic status in New Orleans that was the best predictor of whether one would survive or succumb to the flood; and, after the flood, for the survivors it was one’s economic status that generally determined one’s access to housing, to healthcare, to all of the basics of life in a shattered community.
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Fully a quarter of local residents had no health insurance, and for African Americans that number was higher.
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As for work, a year before the disaster, the unemployment rate stood at 12 percent, roughly double the national average.
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Despite the construction boom generated by
the hurricane, in the years immediately following Katrina, unemployment remained stubbornly high: More than one in ten workers in the shrunken city were unemployed in the first few years.

And, later, during the post-2008 recession, when the city’s unemployment numbers actually dipped below the national average, demographers believed that at least in part this number was an illusion; it was based on the fact that so many former residents who lost everything during the flood—a large number of whom counted amongst the city’s poorest and least employed residents—had yet to return to the city.
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Yes, the Big Easy’s unemployment rate
had
gone down, but the total number of abandoned homes still hovered in the tens of thousands. In 2010, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that the advocacy organization UNITY estimated that the homeless population had doubled in the years following Katrina, and that 6,000 New Orleanians were living in these abandoned buildings.
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As for child poverty—one of the key measures of societal health—in pre-Katrina New Orleans, U.S. Census Bureau data showed that about 40 percent of African American children under the age of 5 were living in poverty. That number was terrifyingly high—but not as high as the estimates six years later. Post-Katrina, the Census Bureau found that more than 65 percent of black children under the age of 5 in New Orleans, many of them still living in the blitzed landscape of the Lower Ninth and other devastated neighborhoods, were living at or below the poverty line.

Hurricane Katrina is where old poverty meets new, where the intergenerational poverty of the inner city becomes magnified by natural disaster and political ineptitude. It is where the plight of the poor is most clearly exposed—as an ongoing experience in vulnerability, as people thought of as being somehow disposable. It is where people without cars were left to die by a city that hadn’t worked out how to effectively evacuate its poor residents using mass transit vehicles,
and where residents in low-lying, impoverished flood zones were left peculiarly at risk of disaster by underinvestment in a crumbling, publicly owned and operated, levee system.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast communities were hit by a second disaster, this time entirely man-made. On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil well, owned by BP, exploded, and huge quantities of oil began spilling into the sea. For local fisher-and oystermen, the impact was immediate and devastating.

Down in Pointe á la Hache, a small, ramshackle, oceanfront community reachable by an ancient ferry from the mainland south of New Orleans, oysterman Byron Encelade had only recently managed to rebuild his small fleet of boats—hurled inland to the highway, over the first set of levees, by the force of Katrina’s waves and winds back in 2005. Prior to the hurricane, he’d had five boats; now he was down to two. But the oysters caught from those two vessels, combined with money he’d made transporting catches to markets around the region, had been enough to give him a fairly secure income. “I was able to recover,” said Encelade, his voice soft, slightly hoarse, his hands expressive in their movements, standing on his boat, sandwiched between a small stove and a built-in bed, in the docks. “I took my trucks, made myself a little more diverse, focused on the transportation part of my business, and was able to keep myself going till I could get my fishing boats back. This boat here we’re sitting on, I invested over $100,000 in it. It was sitting out there in the woods—and FEMA did not help me. I took my eighteen-wheeler out to the highway to move my boat because no-one would help us.”