In watching the now repeated drowning of New Orleans, the horror and anger my wife and I felt at the loss of life and completely unnecessary suffering that apparently resulted from the utter neglect of NOLA’s poor (and mostly black) population was also tinged with a deep sense of regret. We meant to take our honeymoon in NOLA last Spring for the Jazz and Heritage Festival, it would have been a first visit for both of us (Dianna’s business trip years ago doesn’t really count), but due to circumstances and indecision didn’t go. Now we can’t help but wonder whether the “Nawlins” that was will ever be again? Will the diaspora of musicians, people of color, “colorful” whites, and the other residents of the Big Easy following Katrina (and now Rita) ever reassemble into that unique gumbo that made NOLA a place with such a draw on those of us who love music, especially jazz, and wish to embrace the joie de vive that we associate it?
Of course, it is important now to focus on helping people renew their lives after being left with nothing. Rebuilding NOLA involves more than getting the French Quarter back in action, it must include addressing the stark inequalities and neglect that allowed so many people to be left behind to live through many horrors, making choices that will haunt them, or to die. The scenes in the streets of NOLA we all witnessed from afar, the death on the overpasses and bridges, in the hospitals, and on those streets, were not acts of God, they were the result of neglect, pure and simple. If the neglect and its effects are admitted and form at least part of the foundation in rebuilding then the loss of that unique character will not be in vain. If instead NOLA is rebuilt into a Disneyesque “Nawlinsland,” with little or no attention to the deep and ingrained poverty, and the inequality intentionally built between those who in reality formed its true soul and those who partied and profited from it, it will be another clear message that America has lost its way. As Mary Ann Towler put it in last week’s City Paper:
As it was tearing off the roofs of houses and destroying neighborhoods, Katrina was also exposing the enormous divide between New Orleans’ poor and not-poor. And if you don’t see the parallel between Rochester and New Orleans, you haven’t been paying attention.
We need look no further than our own Crescent before passing judgment. Let’s not wait for a natural disaster to tear away our blinders.
And still, Dianna and I regret not experiencing NOLA before the flood. Something is bound to be lost; something that is vital to what drew us to that place at this time. It is one of the few places that seemed to be a place where the circumstances of history had thrown together peoples, black and white, resulting in a unique music and outlook. As a bi-racial couple, this was one of the qualities that drew us to NOLA. Katrina has torn away the veneer, exposing the deeply scarred timbers below both in that city and elsewhere. I don’t know if NOLA or the rest of the country will ever be the same.
If you’re interested in what’s happening with the unique musical scene in New Orleans and its surroundings, and to find out how the many musicians who have joined the diaspora are doing, one wonderful resource is NOLA’s “Jazz and Heritage Station” WWOZ 90.7 FM, currently in exile in Baton Rouge.
