there, and back again (part two)

The day we left New Orleans, one of our hosts took us through the garden district and the french quarter, where we ooo-ed and ahhh-ed over the houses and apartments with lacy wrought-iron work, long floor-to-ceiling windows, and the pinks, turquoises, lavenders, oranges, greens, and yellows each one is painted. The smell of garbage mixed with sweet jasmine and magnolia was everywhere, so that the city really does become its very own perfumed body in a dank bar.

But our host was melancholy, not just because he was driving us with a wicked hangover, but because the city is in pain. As if seeing the city again for the first time, he repeatedly told us who was missing: "Normally, this street would be packed. Normally, this restaurant has a line of people waiting for their cafe ole that wraps around the block. Jackson Square used to be teeming with astrologers, fortune tellers, buskers, pick pockets, street kids, tourists, punks, stilt-walkers, clowns, mimes -- but no more. This place, here, shut down. This place also shut down. This entire block is no longer in business."

Melanie had said that she was leery of doing any kind of disaster tourism, and I agreed. It seems ugly and disrespectful to be a non-native (white) person boarding a bus and taking photos of disaster as if it were Graceland or Niagara Falls (yes, there really are such tours, although I don't know much about their theories of operation). Such an approach turns history into spectacle, an easily consumable experience of the "real" that can be seen, smelled, and photographed from a safe distance before the bus hightails it out of there and the tourist is on his or her way back to the luxury hotel. I know, for example, that I would not be in a car on its way to the Ninth Ward if it had not been destroyed. If it was even spoken about (which most likely it would not have been), it would have been described as an area for white tourists to avoid at all costs, and there would not have been an explanation for how such extreme impoverishment came to exist in an all-black urban neighborhood in a former slave-selling city. But our host asked us if he could show us the Ninth Ward, and since the ride was already haunted by the missing, it seemed fair to say "Go ahead," and so we drove over the bridge.

One of the first buildings I saw was one that housed the Common Ground collective, a community based volunteer organization that is helping New Orleans to heal (www.commongroundrelief.org). This is an organization I first read about on Houston's Indymedia website, and one I recommended to people who were looking for organizations to which they could donate money. When I saw the house, I wished we had more time to stop, more time to work, more time to listen; more time, and more time, and more, more, more time.

Rather than supply you with details of what I saw in the Ninth Ward, I'll make a note, instead, of the silence in the car and the terrible emptiness -- how it kept going and going and going. Endless.