| In February of 2006 I was asked by the Washington
Post to do an online chat about my book Why
New Orleans Matters and the
questions raised by the need to rebuild New Orleans. The following
is the Post's transcript of that chat.
Transcript
Why New Orleans Matters
Tom Piazza
Author | Friday, February 24, 2006; 1:00 PM
Tom Piazza,
author of 'Why New Orleans Matters,' was online to discuss the
indispensable history and culture of his quintessentially American
city.
"New Orleans is a city of elegance, beauty, and refinement," Tom
Piazza writes in 'Why New Orleans Matters.' "[But] it is also
a city of violence, poor education, and such extreme poverty you'd
have to see it to believe it." Nevertheless, he maintains that the people of New Orleans, who
have spun a culture out of their lives that has been recognized
around the world as a transforming spiritual force, are not dispensable.
And any scenario of a rebuilt New Orleans that does not find
a way to welcome them back and make jobs and a new life for them,
he asserts, will be an obscenity.
In a recent
interview Piazza stated that, in his eyes, "New
Orleans is...a small model of all the best of America. You
have a truly multicultural city, in which all social and ethnic
and economic levels of society have somehow managed to fashion
a distinct and beautiful culture out of the tensions among their
differences...In a larger sense that is the story of the United
States culture also, but in New Orleans the expressions of
that culture have included jazz, rhythm and blues, a distinctive
cuisine and so much more. And an attitude towards life that includes
a spiritual resilience which has spoken to people around the
world-for a couple of hundred years."
Tom Piazza
is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of
seven books, including the Faulkner Society Award-winning novel
My Cold War and the short-story collection Blues
And Trouble,
which won the James Michener Award. In 2004, Piazza won a Grammy
Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents
The Blues: A Musical Journey. He is a regular contributor to the
Sunday New York Times and The Oxford American. A transcript
follows.
Tom
Piazza: Hi, and thanks for joining
in on this discussion. I'm answering these questions from
my apartment in New Orleans, which is finally habitable after
six months. During that period I have spent about half my
time in New Orleans, and the rest on the road in Missouri,
Connecticut, Rochester NY, Middlebury VT, New York City,
Tallahassee FL, San Francisco and many other places. While
some of these destinations invited me to read from my fiction,
all of them wanted to hear about how New Orleans is doing.
The intense concern of so many people was very moving, and
made me hopeful about the future of my city.
I had
a number of questions waiting for me, so I will just dive
in with the first one in the queue.
New
Braunfels, Tex.: Why do you call New Orleans the "best
of America?" To me, it is the worst of America - I lived
there 25 years.
It is
the murder capital of the United States, witchcraft and
vodoo thrive there as well as postitution and gambling.
If this city is the best I hate to think of the worst city.
Mardi Gras is a pagan celebration and I think the Lord
has had about enough of New Orleans.
Thanks
for letting me sound off.
Tom
Piazza: Thanks for your question. I'll try to answer
as well as I can.
First
of all, you lived in New Orleans for 25 years and all you
remember is witchcraft, voodoo, prostitution and gambling?
It sounds as if you were hanging out with the wrong crowd.
I
called New Orleans "a small model of all the best
of America" because
I have found here a vivid expression of my conception of
what the United States can be at its best - a truly multicultural
place, in which all social, ethnic, and economic elements
of the society have somehow managed to fashion a distinct
and beautiful culture out of the tensions among their differences.
This embrace of diversity is a beautiful thing, when you
can find it.
In the
11 and a half years that I have lived here, I have seen
most of the downside aspects that you mention, along with
horrible racism, corruption, official incompetence, crumbling
public schools and so on - much of which, be it said, you
can find in most urban areas of the U.S. to some degree.
I
have also seen human beauty, generosity of spirit, humor,
astonishing grace in adversity, and a heroic affirmation
of life itself through music, cuisine, dance and fellowship
unequaled anywhere else in my experience.
If New Orleans'
particular mix of good and bad is not to your taste, that's
fine. But I think we need to be careful about seeing the
Hand Of God at work in events that confirm our own ideas,
tastes, or prejudices. As we know from the Book of Job, if
not from our own experience in daily life, the hard rain
falls on the good and the bad, the just and the unjust alike.
If there is in fact a God, it is the height of hubris to
think that you can fathom His reasons for doing what He does
on this earth, and near-blasphemy to imagine that He is serving
your own ideas of who needs correction or punishment.
By the
way, I notice from the lead story in the online edition of
today's (February 24) New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung (the city
website calls the town "a little bit of old Germany")
that a local custodian at Smithson Valley Middle School
in nearby Spring Branch has been arrested for alledgedly
possessing large amounts of child pornography. That's only
25 miles from you; you might want to bring an umbrella
later if you are going out.
One more thing in the Acts Of
God department: the catastrophe in New Orleans is the result
of human incompetence and error - not, so far as I can tell,
divine malice. The Hurricane Katrina winds and rain were
disastrous, there is no question. But the massive and, again,
catastrophic destruction that we have seen in the city is
mainly the result of the flooding that took place - from
the failure of the levees. And the primary responsibility
for that tragic turn of events, and for fixing it, lies directly
with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and they have admitted
as much. And we need to hold them, and those whose job it
is to oversee them, responsible until they have repaired
the levees and made a good start on restoring the coastal
wetlands that protect the entire Gulf Coast (including Texas)
from the worst effects of these storms.
Washington,
D.C.: Hi
Tom,
It's
been 8 years ago since me and a girlfriend of mine attended
the Essence Magazine Fest in New Orleans and I will never
forget that little city. The people, the food, the music
was great. We had a wonderful time at the Superdome and
the French Quarters. I am certainly glad that I got the
chance to see and experience New Orleans before Katrina
hit.
I had
no clue how poor New Orleans was in its certain "wards" of
the city and now that it is 95% white due to those who
were not affected by the "mysterious" breaking
of the leeves in the mostly Black populated areas of the
city - what should we expect to see now? Does the government
have plans to bulldoze those "poor" areas and
make way for money-making-entertainment, or will there
be plans to rebuild better homes and bring back the people
who made New Orleans the city it once was.
Tom
Piazza: Hi, D.C.
My answer
to your question will also address concerns raised in a
couple of other questions submitted to me.
As you
can imagine, there is a huge and complicated arm-wrestle
going on right now over these exact questions. It is my
view that the city needs, in every sense, to actively encourage
the return of its citizens from all economic and ethnic
backgrounds, and from all of its neighborhoods. There have
been enormous problems involved in doing this, which have
amounted to a kind of logistical gridlock.
Here
is an example of what I mean: The trailers promised by
FEMA as temporary housing for displaced people have been
slow to arrive, when they have arrived at all. Those fortunate
enough to have a trailer delivered have often found that
there is no electricity to serve the trailer. The best
estimate I have heard is that about three quarters of the
city is still without electricity. This includes areas
in which there is no electricity restored at all, as well
as areas in which there is electricity in principle but
houses are unable to get hooked up to it. The local power
utility, Entergy New Orleans, has declared bankruptcy and
is operating on what could generously be called a skeleton
crew - hence drastically insufficient personnel to perform
the hookups, not to mention all the other necessary public
electrical work. By the way, the parent company of Entergy
made something like $800 million in profits last year and
yet will not bail out Entergy New Orleans. Problems of
this general sort exist in almost every area of the rebuilding
process.
In any
case, people who want to come back and rebuild their lives
and property even in areas that have not been seriously
compromised are having trouble finding places to live while
they rebuild. Rents and property values have gone up astronomically
in the areas that did not flood. Obviously this is going
to weigh most heavily on the people with the fewest resources.
You suggest,
correctly I think, that there is a racial dimension to
the way some of these problems are being approached. The
politics and economics of race in New Orleans, as elsewhere,
are enormously complex. It is easy both to overstate and
to understate the significance of race in this process.
By the way, the rough division of black and white population
in the city is more like 65% white to 35% black, roughly
the mirror image of the pre-Katrina ratio.
Here
is my feeling about this. There is no question but that
the heaviest weight of this catastrophe has fallen on the
poorest citizens of New Orleans. The heaviest weight of
any catastrophe usually falls on the poorest citizens.
In New Orleans, the poor are overwhelmingly African-American.
As I said in WHY
NEW ORLEANS MATTERS, most of those poor are
people who work, or were working, very, very hard at low-paying
jobs just to make ends meet. All of them were and are members
of our community, in New Orleans and as Americans.
The question
of their return sits at the moral and spiritual center
of the discussion of post-Katrina New Orleans. But it is
not a straightforward question, partly because until we
have a clear picture of viable, rebuilt levee protection,
it is close to murder to invite people to rebuild and reoccupy
areas that could flood again. These areas, by the way,
include not just the largely poor and African-American
Lower Ninth Ward but the largely white, upper-middle-class
neighborhood Lakeview and upper-middle-class, mostly African-American
New Orleans East, not to mention overwhelmingly white,
working-class St. Bernard and Chalmette.
So it
is not a straightforward issue of race, but it is plainly
inflected by racial politics. Some, for example, have raised
the above-mentioned flooding concerns as a way of saying,
in code, that it is better that the residents of the overwhelmingly
African-American neighborhoods not return. I would raise
it to say, straightforwardly, that it is a national disgrace
that the Federal government has not moved more aggressively
to do what is necessary to rebuild the levees and, just
as importantly, restore the coastal wetlands that weaken
hurricanes and absorb much of their impact as they approach
land.
Everyone
in New Orleans, and everyone who wants to return to New
Orleans, has a major case of the jitters right now because
nobody knows what will happen during the next hurricane
season.
There
are other major questions on the topic. Most of the evacuees
in the post-Katrina shelters had school-age children with
them. Most public schools in New Orleans are closed indefinitely.
If they return, where will their children attend school?
Most of the evacuees had no health insurance; presently
Charity Hospital, which was the main public source of health
care for the poor is closed indefinitely, and the number
of beds in the hospitals that have reopened is down sharply.
How will they get health care if they return? Where will
they work? How will they care for sick or elderly family
members?
It is
not enough to use these questions to say, "Sorry -
too bad about your old life, and good luck in your new
one, as long as it is someplace else." That is just
a way of not answering the questions in the first place.
We need to use them to take a look at our priorities as
a nation - a good, hard look at what we see in the mirror,
and not just on the television screen.
One more
thing that I do need to say before moving on to the next
question: your quotes around the work "mysterious" are
misleading. There was nothing mysterious about it. Engineers
have been telling us for years exactly what would happen
to the levees sooner or later, under certain conditions,
and they have also told us how much it would cost to fix
them. Nobody wanted to hear it, especially the second part.
Some people, additionally, have suggested that the levees
were blown up during the hurricane up to intentionally
flood the largely African-American areas you mention. I
have seen absolutely no evidence of this, and neither has
anyone else. I am not saying that it is inconceivable that
that kind of thing could happen, only that I don't believe
it happened this time. The levees crumbled on black and
white alike, poor and well-off alike. The outrage should
be directed at the miserable and ineffectual response at
the local, state, and federal levels alike.
New
York, N.Y.: What
can those of us who care about New Orleans' history and culture
do to help it through this period? Thanks.
Tom
Piazza: Thanks for your question. There are a number
of things that anyone can do, no matter where they are.
One is to contact, by phone or e-mail, our elected officials,
especially on the Federal level, to let them know that
New Orleans is important to you, and that it is important
that the Federal government live up to its stated responsibilities.
That is number one.
Secondly,
give money to organizations that have helped and continue
to help in the rebuilding effort. Habitat For Humanity
has been terrific, as has The Salvation Army, each in its
own way. The website www.nola.com,
which is the online version of the N.O. Times-Picayune,
is full of good leads and info on relief efforts. Also,
the website www.leveesnotwar.org has
a useful list of relief organizations and advocacy organizations
for issues like coastal wetlands restoration. There are
others, and In the next couple of weeks I will be try to
post as large a list as I can on my own website, www.tompiazza.com.
Thirdly,
come to New Orleans if you can, and don't just visit the
comfortable and obvious places. Go to Lakeview, the Lower
Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, Gentilly, and the other hard-hit
areas, then go back home and tell people what you saw first-hand.
There is no way to really comprehend it without seeing
it yourself. And the more people who know that, the better.
Medford, Mass.: Tom, whether or not New Orleans is the type
of town you say (and the view from the outside certainly
matches the description in your first question) why should
we rebuild it? Why up here on a hill in Medford, Massachusetts,
should we be paying to rebuild a city that is below sea level,
that, except for human efforts, would not exist in its current
form? It's politically unpopular to say, but I can't think
of a good reason.
Tom
Piazza: Hi Medford, and thank you for the question.
I have heard this question a lot, and I will answer it
as well as I can.
First
of all, no city we know of would exist "in its current
form" or any other form, if it weren't for "human
efforts." I don't mean that to sound flip. I mean
it to say that everything worthwhile that humankind has
achieved involves a rear-guard action against entropy.
And without continual effort it would all quickly revert
to weeds and waste. Anyone who owns a house, tends a garden,
raises children, shaves, or does just about anything else
knows this to be true.
So our
intitial stance has to accept the fact that we are always,
in this sense, pushing back against nature. Secondly, the
sad fact of the matter is that many of the major cities
in America are improbable to say the least. Where are we
going to make a stand and say that, as Americans, all of
our country needs the efforts of all of us, whether up
on a hill in Medford, Massachusetts or down home in Tuscaloosa
our way out west in Texas?
If we say we don't help New Orleans, then what do we do when those silly people
in San Francisco get destroyed again by an earthquake? Do we tell them, "Sorry,
you are pretty dumb to build on a fault line"? Do we say the same thing
to St. Louis and Memphis, both of which are on or near the New Madrid fault?
What do we say when Los Angeles gets an earthquake, or is ravaged by wildfires
and mudslides? Or when Mississippi and Missouri and Iowa flood again the way
they did in 1993? Or to Florida, when hurricanes strike there, or to New York
and Washington DC if, God forbid, some other city becomes a target for a terrorist
attack. Do we say, "Too bad for you -- you were too stupid to live in Medford?" I know
this sounds sarcastic, and I guess it is, but I have heard
far too many people advance this attitude, which to me
sounds as if they are just writing off the "United" part
of the United States. To paraphrase Ben Franklin (I think)
-- we must all hang together or we will certainly hang
separately....
Plus,
New Orleans is one of the most important American cities,
culturally, historically, and economically -- the site
of the signing of the Louisiana Purchase, birthplace of
jazz music, location of one of the great treasure houses
of vernacular American architecture.... we go to great
lengths, or we used to, to protect our cultural patrimony.
We need to continue to do that, it seems to me, and New
Orleans is the main place we should be focusing our efforts
right now.
Arlington,
Va.: Certainly, it is the poor and disadvantaged
segment of New Orleans' population that has suffered worst
thanks to Katrina. Are they best served, however, by efforts
to rebulid and return, rather than resettling where they
are? Are they more likely to escape poverty in a new community
than if they return to N.O., which will certainly be in difficult
circumstances through the near future, no matter how much
renovation is undertaken? Should we be directing our public
resources to help the resettlement effort rather than hoping
for rebuilding?
Tom
Piazza: Hi, and thanks for the
question.
This
is a very important question, with profound implications.
The starting place for an answer is this: we need to move
toward an answer by asking the displaced residents themselves
what they need, and what they want. We need to have a much
better and more honest and more open dialogue with New
Orleans' scattered population than we have managed to have
so far.
Many
of those who are displaced may well decide that they have
found themselves in a better situation than that in which
they had lived before the storm. Many others may decide
that the most important thing to them is to return to New
Orleans, to the traditions and culture that they knew,
to whatever extent that culture and those traditions can
be revived.
In either
case, the effort should be aimed at listening, with respect,
to what they say, and then helping them, within reasonable
bounds, to achieve their goals, rather than imposing a
kind of abstract decision on them from above, arrived at
by experts who have no true understanding of the residents'
original milieu.
It seems
to me that this is the necessary starting point for any
conversation about this question, and the only way for
people who have already suffered close to the worst things
that a human can suffer to be able to rebuild their lives
with dignity.
Tom
Piazza: And one more thing in response to that last question.
My strong feeling is that as many people as want to return
to New Orleans, no matter who they are, should be able to
come back, and a place actively made for them. At the same
time, the questioner has a point: the fate of those who were
displaced needs to be addressed more seriously as well. As
most of you probably know, those with the fewest resources
are in many cases hanging on by the skin of their thumbs
in hotels across the country, waiting for FEMA to pull the
plug on them. I don't know what the answer is to this situation,
but the fact that noone else seems to know either scares
me.
Washington,
D.C.: I'm prone to agreeing with you
that "New
Orleans is one of the most important American cities, culturally,
historically, and economically," but I'd like to hear
your thoughts on why this is so. Thank you.
Tom
Piazza: Hi --
In answering
your question, I thought I would paste in a thought from
a questioner from Salt Lake City:
"perhaps
you might remind people about the economic significance
of New Orleans as a major worldwide shipping port, (and)
that the Gulf Coast is second only to Alaska as a source
of seafood."
Thank
you, Salt Lake City. All very true. Certainly anyone who
is affected by the import and export of grain, textiles,
hard or dry goods of any sort, electronics, automoblies
-- which is to say anyone in the US -- depends on the health
of New Orleans as a port. Likewise seafood, espeically
shellfish. For that matter, anyone who uses petroleum products
should recognize the importance of New Orleans, and Louisiana
in general, to the supply of oil on which we depend for
heat and mobility -- not just imports through the Port
of New Orleans but the offshore rigs miles out that are
supported by New Orleans' economic and technical infrastructure.
From
a cultural standpoint... it is hard for me to get that
into a small space. It took me over 160 pages to get it
into WHY NEW ORLEANS
MATTERS! But I will say this: beyond
it's just being the Birthplace of Jazz, which is, after all,
a fact of its past, New Orleans is today, still, one of the
most remarkable cultural ecosystems in the world. The interaction,
not just historically but in real time, in the present, between
the deep cultural strains of France, Spain, Africa, the Caribbean,
Italy, Germany, Croatia, Cape Verde, Ireland, and so many
other cultures, has produced a music -- many musics, as I
say in the book -- a cuisine, a style of dance, of architecture,
of humor, of celebration and of mourning that, taken collectively,
is one of the glories of human history.
The side
of New Orleans seen by the casual tourist during a weekend
spent on Bourbon Street is not New Orleans, although it
is a face of New Orleans. New Orleans is deep, and it must
live, or something truly irreplaceable will be lost forever.
Omaha,
Neb.: I
hear some people say things like, "They shouldn't
live there; it's not our problem....Why should we pay?" Can
you help me with a concise response to this?
Tom
Piazza: Hi, Omaha. I hope I answered this in a previous answer.
Basically it boils down to the Golden Rule, I suppose.
Tom Piazza: and another word on that, Omaha -- the other
thing to remember is that the largest part of this problem
-- the flooding -- was a result of the failure of the Army
Corps of Engineers. If anyone you know cares at all about
having a working federal government, that government must
be held accountable for its mistakes as well as its successes.....
New
Orleanian in DC: Tom-- Thanks
so much for your book, and this chat. As a New Orleanian
who has chosen to live elsewhere due to the dearth of professional
careers for people of my age (26), one of my hopes is that
Katrina will bring about a positive change in fixing some
of the issues with New Orleans, and attracting (eventually)
more industries and businesses, so that I (and my friends)
can go home and succeed there. Do you see this happening?
Tom
Piazza: Thank you, New Orleanian.
I see
everything in New Orleans in a state of flux right now,
and it is very hard to predict where anything is going
to land. This makes it, by turns, exciting, scary, depressing,
invigorating, depressing again, and inspiring to live here
right now. I think that many of the things that make New
Orleans most charming and valuable are closely tied in
with things that have held it back from improving the quality
of life here. This is known as a tragic situation. The
best we can hope for is that some things will improve,
and that the poorest citizens will not be left behind in
the process.
Tom Piazza: I can't believe that this time has gone
by so quickly. I do need to close out now. I hope the chat
was interesting to you. It was stimulating to me to have
to answer these questions in real time. Unfortunately there
were MANY more questions than I could answer in this short
time. Anyone who would like to get a response to an unanswered
question may feel free to contact me through www.tompiazza.com
and we can continue the dialogue as time permits.
Thanks,
and all good wishes to everyone. Long live New Orleans.
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