new orleans 2010

BY TERRY GLOVER PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER CHIN

NEW ORLEANS NATIVE MARTHA DANIELSand her seven adult children have never been ones tomake a habit of fighting the power. Most are educators.All have lived unassuming lives, raising their familiesand quietly working within the system.

But there’s something about coming face-to-face withthe worst of nature—and human nature—that will stokea fire, even in the most docile types.

The entire family lost virtually everything in 2005when the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history flood-ed 80 percent of the city that they call home. Daniels andfive of her children have since returned to New Orleans(one is in Houston, the other is in Los Angeles). Startingfrom scratch, looking to rebuild their lives, hoping toheal deep wounds.

Their story is one of pain, perseverance and purpose,borne out of the wrath of Hurricane Katrina, and onethat, probability predicts, bears witness about onceevery century.

Odds are better that it could take that long beforeDaniels and her children who returned—Cynthia Phipps,Gwen Payne, Geri Davis, Marcus Green and HarriettaReed (and Reed’s daughter Rhonda)—are able give acomplete testimony of their experience. At least withoutinviting back a flood of emotions as deep as the stormsurge that submerged their homes in and around theNinth Ward in eight feet of water.

As they sit around a nondescript kitchen table, eachrecounts, in fits and starts, how Katrina affected themmost. Woven together, their stories run life’s continuumand counter to the coverage that mainstream media hasgiven to the plight of Black storm victims.

Contrary to popular belief, most Blacks in NewOrleans—including the Daniels family—were neverlooking for a handout. But after what they have gone through, you’d best believe that they’re nowdetermined to get a fair shake.

Each journeys back with the realization that they arethe fortunate ones. Some they knew never made it out ofthe Crescent City. Others never returned. But on theroad to recovery, destination can turn one person’s bless-ing into another’s calling.

BY KEVIN CHAPPELL PHOTOGRAPHY BY VALERIE GOODLOE

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70 EBONY l MARCH 2010 MARCH 2010 l EBONY 71

Although it has been nearly five years since Hurricane Katrina, communities have not totally returned and homes are still being rebuilt.


‘I WASN’T A CHARITY CASE’The date: August 28, 2005. Katrina was gathering strength in the Gulf of

Mexico. Daniels and her family were along various points on the evacuationroute with enough clothes to last a few days. They had planned to meetup in Houston, about 350 miles west along I-10.

What they hadn’t planned on was being there for the better part of a year. Not being able to return to New Orleans after the storm, the family

bounced around from hotel to hotel, finally moving into an apartmentcomplex when it was confirmed that all of their homes were submerged ineight feet of water.

Rhonda Reed calls their time in Houston a “living hell.” What hurts hermost, even to this day, was the way her family was treated, especially byBlacks in Houston. Reed compares it to “the vast exodus to the Northafter slavery, and the terrible treatment that slaves endured by other Blackswho were already there,” she says. “We were told by some Blacks inHouston that we didn’t know our place, that they didn’t want us there.We were treated worse by our own people than any other race in Houston.It was horrific.”

As hard as it was for her, the 37-year-old schoolteacher believes that itwas worse for her three children, who were taunted almost on a daily basis.“Children were throwing bottles at our children when they got off thebus. They would tell my children that New Orleans was under water, andthen they would laugh. They called my children ‘refugees.’”

Reed said that it was an emotional roller coaster. “I cried every day,” shesays. “I was upset every day. I was praying every day. I don’t think I prayedso much in all my life.”

The looks. The insinuations. The whispers. At times, it was too muchto take. “I wasn’t a charity case. I lost my home because of somethingthat I had nothing to do with. It was not my fault that Katrina happened,but no one cared,” Rhonda Reed says. “It had gotten so bad in Houstonthat one day a Hispanic person told me that I needed to go back to whereI came from. That’s when I knew that had to do my level best to get out of Houston.”

left | Martha Daniels, mother of seven children, holds a picture of her late husband,William Daniels, who died before the family returned home to Louisiana.

right | Daniels’ daughter Cynthia Phipps shows some pictures of the water damagethat resulted after the floods caused by Hurricane Katrina.

““I wasn’t aCHARITY CASE.I lost my home because of somethingthat I had nothing to do with.

NOONECARED.

It was not my fault that Katrina happened,but


left. It was like I was thinking that if I go into denial––and I don’t talkabout it and I don’t do anything––it would be OK, eventually it was goingto be all right. I was hoping that somebody was going to say, ‘No, it wasn’tas bad as I thought it was.’ But that never happened.”

“Your survival skills kick in,” says Gwen Payne, moving her sister’s storyforward from one of shock to one of endurance. “When the Red Crosstruck came by and we would hear that bell, we’d get happy, just like kidsrunning behind an ice cream truck. Sometimes, by the time they got to you, they only had rice and sausage left. I would say, ‘OK, give me therice and sausage.’”

It was during that tough time that someone gave Payne, also a school-teacher, the book Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. “It had aprofound impact on me. It was a book that talked about how sometimeswe get so comfortable with our living status that we take things for grantedand think things are going to always be there,” says Payne, who recalls thattwo days before Katrina hit, she had the time of her life with her son at a taping of the TV game show x at the New Orleans Convention Center.“You never think that something of that magnitude could happen andwould happen and change your whole life the way Katrina affected ourlives.”

‘THIS IS NOT AN EXPERIMENT’In many ways, what frustrated the family the most in the initial days

after they returned to New Orleans was their inability to really do for self. The first thing Payne’s sister Geri Davis did when she returned to NewOrleans was attempt to get back her job as an assistant principal. “But theywouldn’t hire any of us,” she says. “My school went from [being a] publicschool to [being a] charter school. They were turning all of the schools intocharter schools and hiring people (mostly White) from outside of NewOrleans as teachers and administrators.”

Davis eventually moved to Chicago to accept an assistant principal job.She lived there for a year, using her salary to rebuild her home in NewOrleans. She calls it “shameful” that city officials seem to be using recoveryfunds to pay outsiders to show them the “right way” to rebuild. It was anotion even put forth by President Barack Obama during his visit to theMartin Luther King Jr. charter school in New Orleans late last year. “I loveBarack Obama, but it really hurt me when he said that New Orleans schoolswere bad before Katrina,” Davis says. “He’s pushing charter schools . . . butthe people running these charter schools don’t care about our kids.”

Davis says that the large number of Mexican immigrants working construction jobs during the recovery has also had an impact on the schoolsystem. “They came in and brought their entire families,” Davis says.“While the dads were out doing the rebuilding, we were forced to educatetheir children. As a result, the city brought in teachers [who] weren’t certified but could speak Spanish.”

Test scores in New Orleans reportedly are up since the city began its move toward charter schools, but Davis wonders what will happen tostudents once the recovery money dries up. “They are not worried aboutteaching our children,” she says. “They are in it for the money. They needto stop the madness. These are our kids. This is not an experiment.”

According to Marcus Green, Davis’ brother, “The pre-Katrina days inNew Orleans weren’t that great.” But being a testing ground for everyurban renewal project imaginable is not so great, either. “Since Katrina, so

‘WHO MOVED MY CHEESE?’But making it back home after the floodwaters had receded turned out

to be the easiest part of the family’s ordeal, recalls Cynthia Phipps, Reed’saunt, as she continued where her niece left off. Awaiting them back in NewOrleans was a witch’s brew of decay and rot that continues to haunt Phipps so much that, “I haven’t really talked about it. What I found whenI returned home was so devastating to me.”

First, it was the smell. “God, I can’t even describe it,” says Phipps, whohad lived in her house for 26 years. “It just penetrated you. It went in yournose, went in your throat. It was spoiled food, rotting wood. It was just awhole mixture of stuff. It’s a smell that I will never forget.”

Then, it was the sound. “I had never witnessed silence like that before,”Phipps says. “You didn’t hear a bird. You didn’t hear a dog. You didn’t heara cat. You didn’t hear anything.”

Nothing looked the same. “The mildew had gone up the wall,” she says.“It was black and thick. I had never seen anything like it before. This was toxic mildew.”

Nothing felt the same. “Everything you touched. Everywhere you walked.The lawn was gray. It was like something out of a science-fiction movie,”Phipps says. “Everything that you had saved was full of stinky water. Thatwater was just like acid. It had eaten through everything. It was the weirdestthing. I opened my photo album. The pictures were there. They were fuzzy,but they were there. But when I lifted the plastic off, they just dissolved in frontof my eyes. Every picture, even the baby pictures. It just broke my heart.”

What Phipps experienced in the year that it took her to move out of herFEMA trailer and rebuild her home not only broke her heart, but alsothreatened to break her spirit. “I was just in shock. It was like my brain just

above | Harrietta Reed surveys one of her properties that was dam-aged by Hurricane Katrina. The property has not been repaired, butthere is a family living there rent free.

opposite, top | Teacher Rhonda Reed consoles a student. A majorityof the schoolchildren suffer stress directly related to HurricaneKatrina. (bottom) Arianne Randall and Jeremiah Reed, MarthaDaniels’ great-grandchildren, recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

“

”

Everything you

touchedEverywhere you

WALKEDThelawnwasgray.It was like something out of a

SCIENCEFICTIONMOVIE.


many more things are exposed,” says Green, a 25-year school-teacher who has rebuilt his home completely. “It’s like peoplesee a chance to conduct social experiments on Blacks to keepus in our place.”

Many who made up the once-large middle-class progressiveBlack community have not returned. But some, like Green,who have returned are committed to picking up the slack.“It’s a struggle, and we’re trying to overcome,” Green says.“You have to stay enlightened and drag as many people alongas possible. Now, if we can get our economics straight, we willbe a lot better.”

‘WE HAVE A VOICE’That has proven to be the toughest part of the recovery,

according to Green’s sister Harrietta Reed, as she brings thefamily’s story full circle. “We don’t have economics on ourside,” she says. “We are still the majority in the city, so we havethe numbers. But even though we are the majority in NewOrleans, we’re not the majority in the state. We’re a Black cityin a Southern state, one of the reddest states around. We don’thold any real seats of power at this point.”

Reed, who is in the process of rebuilding her home, tells stories of laws being arbitrarily changed, substandard cityservices, no street lights, skyrocketing food and gas prices, andunresponsive government officials and insurance companies.“Every pressure point that can be applied is being applied, and no one is hearing about it,” Reed says. “We’re like an island down here all by ourselves. We don’t have a bullypulpit to yell from. We don’t have the microphones. We don’trun the media.”

Reed and her siblings have turned to Black radio as a way tochannel their discontent into activism. She compares one localAM station, WBOK, to Radio Free Europe. “Without it, wewouldn’t be able to survive,” she says. “It has galvanized us.We have a voice. We talk about the issues. Most of the politi-cians realize that they have to come to the radio station toaddress the people. We hit them with a bunch of questions,and we get to see what their agenda really is.

Reed has helped organize marches, shuttled people to thepolls to vote and spoke at numerous city council meetings. Withthe help of the radio station, there has been a real push topatronize Black businesses, hire Black contractors and helpBlacks find jobs. “Either you turn to activism and try to find a way out of no way, or you perish,” Reed says. “I am willingto step out front because I have no other choice. The racial tension here is at an all-time high. It has to be resolved for usto move forward. We’re going to fight back. Either we moveforward together, or we don’t move forward at all. We’re notgoing to give up.”

Organizing has put an end to the political games that were being played shortly after Katrina. “We are becomingpolitically savvy, so that we will know how to vote the nexttime,” Reed says.

For Harrietta Reed (shown here at her home), the years of rebuilding have taken a toll.


‘YOUR LATTER WILL BE BETTER THAN YOUR PAST’As the matriarch of the family, Martha Daniels can appreciate her children’s

post-Katrina push to make things right in New Orleans. But at 75, she saysthat she understands the bigger message of Katrina.

“Katrina taught me how important it is to always have a personal relationship with God,” she says. “I didn’t have any doubt before and Idefinitely have no doubt now. I’ve always understood that you have to gothrough to get to. I don’t know why God allowed this. But I do know onething: He was going to see through those who allowed Him to.”

Daniels not only lost her home to Katrina. She also lost her husband, whodied while in Houston during the evacuation. But because of her faith, shesays that things are better now than ever. “Before Katrina, I would some-times I hear this voice. It would whisper to me, ‘Your latter will be betterthan your past.’ So far, it is beginning to be better now than in the past,” saysDaniels, who has rebuilt her home. “Not from a materialistic perspective, butfrom a spiritual point of view. I understand so much more now. I thought Iwas close to God before. But I’m so much closer to Him now.”

It’s a message, and an understanding, that she is trying to impart on her children: Be active, but also be thankful. “I’m thankful for what Katrinataught me,” she adds. “I’m thankful for how I saw the hand of God working through this. I can’t say that I’m thankful for Katrina, but I’mthankful for everything that God has shown me. I’m thankful that I wasable to see how powerful He is.”

WHEN IT COMES TO REBUILDINGHIS CITY in the aftermath of HurricaneKatrina, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Naginhas not let anyone or anything stand in hisway. In the four-plus years since the storm, he has taken on bureaucrats on every level,including President George W. Bush. Naginhas been praised by some for his dedication,and criticized by others for the recovery’sslow progress and misguided funds. EBONYSenior Editor Kevin Chappell sat down withNagin, who will leave office in May, to discussthe city’s historic rebuilding efforts.

EBONY: How much rebuilding moneyhas flowed into the city since PresidentObama took office?

NAGIN: I can’t put a dollar figure on it. I was just looking at some numbers, andjust on the FEMA side, [it] had authorized30 percent of what outside engineers saidwas needed to repair our public facilities.According to the Stafford Act, the federalgovernment, after a disaster, is required torepair public facilities. Since Obama has takenoffice, we have seen a 65-percent increase inthat fund. That’s just one example. All of thepublic housing developments that have beentorn down are being revitalized. We did theribbon cutting on the last one. That was agoal of the Obama administration.

EBONY: How would you assess therebuilding efforts so far?

NAGIN: It’s coming along. It’s such a

unique challenge. No other American city hashad 80 percent of it damaged at one time,with every citizen being evacuated. We’vestudied other disasters. We looked at theearthquake in Kobe, Japan. We looked at theL.A. riots way back when. We even looked at the 9/11 site in New York. The averagerecovery takes anywhere from 10 to 15 years.We’re in year four. We have about 80 percentof [our] citizens back. We know that we havea long way to go, but we’re moving along.

EBONY: What’s the racial breakdown inNew Orleans now?

NAGIN: It was 68 percent African-American pre-Katrina. The last numbers I’veseen, we were at 62 percent.

EBONY: There’s quite a bit of talk thatthe city is moving toward not being a major-ity Black city. Is that true?

NAGIN: There’s a lot of misinformationout there. African-Americans are comingback. Whites are coming back. We have amuch larger Hispanic population now. Wehave a good Asian population here also. Butit’s definitely a majority Black city. I don’tsee that changing. I don’t know how itcould. If Katrina didn’t change it, I don’tthink anything else is going to change it.

EBONY: What are your plans to rebuildthe Lower Ninth Ward?

NAGIN: It’s our plan to rebuild everyarea of the city, especially the Lower Ninth

Ward. There’s a dividing line within theLower Ninth Ward, which is ClaiborneAvenue. As you go closer to the river, it’s thehighest side of the Lower Ninth Ward. Theother side of Claiborne that goes toward thelake is the lowest side. And we haven’t reallypushed that, but we haven’t had a moratori-um on it. People are very smart. The oneswho have rebuilt have built higher andstronger than pre-Katrina. That’s where theBrad Pitt homes are. The Army Corps ofEngineers will finish their work, and thenthe Lower Ninth Ward will be fully protect-ed. Then we can really start to focus on thatlower side of the ward.

EBONY: How do you plan to provideaffordable housing for people returning tothe city?

NAGIN: We have a good flow of afford-able housing. We looked at the affordablehousing that we had available pre-Katrina,and by 2011, we’re going to get to 94 percent of the affordable housing we hadpre-Katrina. Right now, it’s still a little tightwith the rental market, but we’re going toget there. As far as the Ninth Ward, therewere a lot of homeowner successions, peoplewho had passed their homes down overtime. Unfortunately, many people sold theirhomes after Katrina to get that Road Homecheck. So what we have done is to encouragemore homeownership by partnering with thestate and an organization called the FinanceAuthority of New Orleans [to provide loansto purchase a home].

EBONY: Do you think New Orleans willever be the same?

NAGIN: I don’t think the city will be thesame. It has the potential to be better. I thinkthe infrastructure will definitely be better.The school system looks like it’s going to be better. The streets are going to be betterat some point. We have a lot of activity goingon. We are approaching $700 to $800 mil-lion of street work that’s in progress. Crimeis still a challenge. Young people involved inthe drug game, for the most part. It’s like alot of urban cities. We also have had anincrease in domestic violence, and mentalhealth issues are definitely a challenge in thiscommunity with post-traumatic stress disor-der. We’re in the process of building a newmedical complex. We’ve identified 70 acresof land right off downtown where we aregoing to build two teaching hospitals thatover the next four or five years will providebetter services than we’ve ever had in thiscommunity. But that’s down the road.

QA&

four generations of the Daniels family (top) returned to NewOrleans and are reclaiming their lives. (Bottom) Harrietta Reed turnsactivist to bring health care back to the Black communities.

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new orleans 2010

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