FliMSiCaL Disco's Bitch
Registered: Mar
2002 Location: Hattiesburg,
MS
|
anne rice gets
involved..
quote:
07:32 PM CDT on Saturday, September 3, 2005
Anne Rice
What do people really know about
New Orleans?
Do they take away with them an
awareness that it has always been not only a great white
metropolis but also a great black city, a city where
African-Americans have come together again and again to form
the strongest African-American culture in the land?
The first literary magazine ever published in
Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets
and writers who brought together their work in three issues
of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the
1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of
free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property
owners, skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves
lived on their own in the city, too, making a living at
various jobs, and sending home a few dollars to their owners
in the country at the end of the month.
This is not
to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of
the famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave
labor on plantations from one end of the state to the other.
It is merely to say that it was never all "have or have not"
in this strange and beautiful city. Later in the 19th
century, as the Irish immigrants poured in by the thousands,
filling the holds of ships that had emptied their cargoes of
cotton in Liverpool, and as the German and Italian
immigrants soon followed, a vital and complex culture
emerged.
Huge churches went up to serve the great
faith of the city's European-born Catholics; convents and
schools and orphanages were built for the newly arrived and
the struggling; the city expanded in all directions with new
neighborhoods of large, graceful houses, or areas of more
humble cottages, even the smallest of which, with their
floor-length shutters and deep-pitched roofs, possessed an
undeniable Caribbean charm.
Through this all, black
culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New Orleans
became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other
American cities have ever been. Dillard University and
Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black
colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation
had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of
life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far
too many Western and Northern American cities to this day.
The influence of blacks on the music of the city and
the nation is too immense and too well known to be
described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans
for work who nicknamed the city "the Big Easy" because it
was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not
fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the
blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the
oppressed.
Something else was going on in New
Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more
slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people
loved; there was joy. Which is why so many New Orleanians,
black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave
a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated
back centuries; they didn't want to leave families whose
rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the
fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city
where tolerance had always been able to outweigh prejudice,
where patience had always been able to outweigh rage. They
didn't want to leave a place that was theirs.
And so
New Orleans prospered, slowly, unevenly, but surely - home
to Protestants and Catholics, including the Irish parading
through the old neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day as they
hand out cabbages and potatoes and onions to the eager
crowds; including the Italians, with their lavish St.
Joseph's altars spread out with cakes and cookies in homes
and restaurants and churches every March; including the
uptown traditionalists who seek to preserve the peace and
beauty of the Garden District; including the Germans with
their clubs and traditions; including the black population
playing an ever increasing role in the city's civic affairs.
Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn't do.
Nature has done what the labor riots of the 1920's couldn't
do. Nature had done what "modern life" with its relentless
pursuit of efficiency couldn't do. It has done what racism
couldn't do, and what segregation couldn't do either. Nature
has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to mind
the end of Pompeii.
I share this history for a
reason - and to answer questions that have arisen these last
few days. Almost as soon as the cameras began panning over
the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free those
trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. "Why
didn't they leave?" people asked both on and off camera.
"Why did they stay there when they knew a storm was coming?"
One reporter even asked me, "Why do people live in such a
place?"
Then as conditions became unbearable, the
looters took to the streets. Windows were smashed, jewelry
snatched, stores broken open, water and food and televisions
carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds. Now the voices
grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and pillage
in a time of such crisis? How could people shoot one
another? Because the faces of those drowning and the faces
of those looting were largely black faces, race came into
the picture. What kind of people are these, the people of
New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be flooded, and
then turn on one another?
Well, here's an answer.
Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't
leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the
vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the
poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great
numbers; and they did what they felt they could do - they
huddled together in the strongest houses they could find.
There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest
Ramada Inn.
What's more, thousands more who could
have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the
helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went
through the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather
those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried
desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the
Superdome, while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals
struggled.
And where was everyone else during all
this? Oh, help is coming, New Orleans was told. We are a
rich country. Congress is acting. Someone will come to stop
the looting and care for the refugees. And it's true:
eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov.
Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was
desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call
for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions
and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for
its own life for so long? That's my question.
I know
that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born
in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who
and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people
knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about
getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps
their very gentleness that gives them their endurance.
They will rebuild as they have after storms of the
past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where
they have always lived, where their mothers and their
fathers lived, where their churches were built by their
ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go
back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can
enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost
long ago.
But to my country I want to say this:
During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you
dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz
Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our
music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a
tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us
"Sin City," and turned your backs. Well, we are a lot more
than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the
most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of
this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are
you.
IP:
70.157.18.252 |