Clinton and Pitt save 9th Ward in 40 minutes or less

Clinton and Pitt save 9th Ward in 40 minutes or less

The rumors had been building for weeks. Some speculated there would be two hundred individuals, then the number grew to three, then four. By the time that March 17th, 2008 rolled around there were estimates of six hundred College aged students who would be delivered to the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans to perform cleanup and mowing in a disaster area which still had upwards of four square miles with only a dozen inhabited houses. The area in the path of the levee breach on August 30th 2005 was leveled by a 23 foot storm surge of water risen from the Gulf of Mexico. After homes were washed off their foundation, the area sat underneath 13 feet of toxic water for two weeks. Of those homes that had not floated like boats to be dropped blocks away from where they had witnessed sometimes 100 years worth of birthdays and breakfasts, nothing was salvageable. All possessions, all pets and around 1200 people had been swallowed by the water.

Fast forward two and a half years and the houses which had come to rest in the middle of Tennessee and Deslonde Streets were gone, leaving the area a landscape of toothy foundations and tombstone slabs. At night and in the rain the ghosts are never far from this place. Even though much work had been done to date, there were still large chunks of concrete, refrigerators to move. A local ordinance had resulted in resident's property being repossessed for lawns with a height in excess of 18 inches and the resultant fines of $300 a day. Enter into this some scene six hundred college age students, arrived as part of the Clinton Global Initiative partnering with Brad Pitt's Make it Right Project. We in the volunteer sector had heard the kids would be working for around eight hours that day, and with such an amount of work to do still in the Lower 9th Ward, we were genuinely excited about. The area had become overgrown with the swamp that was here before the people and with the summer not far off their presence was welcome help that our group of less than 30 unpaid volunteers could scarecely manage alone.

At 7:30 the work crew coordinators began to drop off equipment. CNN and other news outlets were assembling their cameras and stationing their people on Tenessee Street. The excitement building, around 9 o'clock the groups of students started arriving, all wearing matching blue shirts. They got off the buses and by 9:15 had begun moving concrete debris out of the yards and closer to the street for disposal as well as mowing lawns. I and a fellow volunteer named Sarah walked around with a camera to capture some of the work for the relief organization, snatching a shot of four people lifting an especially heavy piece of concrete or using shovels to clear ground so that an open gush of water was diverted to the street drain rather than pooling on the ground. The City of New Orleans had taken two years to replace the street signs in the Lower 9th Ward, so the neglect of seeing unrepaired water lines spewing was not an uncommon sight.

Walking a little further, there was a quiet spot where Sarah & I rested underneath one of the oak trees which flank Tenessee street. After a minute a man with a weed wacker and an orange vest gestured to us that this tree was next in line for his tool. We moved six feet away and he yanked the cord to start the gasoline motor. He cleared about a quarter of the grass which was at the bottom of the tree, then switched the tool off, held his right hand to his right ear, and listened. I looked to Sarah and said, "Secret Service." and she, "I didn't know they were given orange to wear."

At 10:00 Brad Pitt and Bill Clinton began walking south on Tenessee street. Any remaining whir of weed wackers stopped. The hands lifting wood or chunks of debris ceased. All feet walked to Tenessee to watch Bill Clinton's ashen head and Brad Pitt's signature golf hat greet students working. I started taking photos and noticed quickly that I was able to either correctly expose Bill Clinton's face or his hair, but if I correctly exposed his face his hair would flare and over expose his head like a halo. If I correctly exposed for his hair, his face would appear sunken in shadows. I kept shooting. I saw that despite the fact that students were on both the east and west side of the street, Clinton & Pitt were only greeting those on the east side. The obvious answer was of course lighting. The kids on the East side were able to shake hands or joke with Clinton and Pitt because they provided the better exposure for the photographers. Those on the West side got to watch with mere reverence rather than engagement.

As I snapped photos of the back of Bill Clinton's head, a woman ran up to me and said, "Hello. Yes. Hi. I need you to stand over there. Yes. Over there. I'll get a shot for you later if you want. But today its all about the kids. Yes. Thank you. Please move." My face was exasperated by such a strange demand. Though I had lived in New Orleans only 5 months, I considered it, and the Lower 9th Ward my home, and felt as though a stranger was asking me to leave an area I not only lived in, but worked in, loved in and was striving to make habitable. Because of my bewilderment, I was unable to find the words to say, "The kids? Its been two years since the storm. What about the residents?"

A teenage boy with Indian features wore one of the blue Clinton Global Initiative t-shirt looked across the street longingly.
"I wish I could be over there." He said.
"You should head over there. Have a good time."
"I don't know." He responded.
"Look, in life, some days you have the shirt and some days you don't. Today you have the shirt. Go enjoy it."
He smiled and left. A woman from CNN said,
"Somedays you have the shirt." to which another said,
"Story of my life."

To be frank, I was getting tired of this mockery. For a full hour and a half Clinton and Pitt had been walking down the street and no one thought it was important to be clearing lots or mowing lawns. If this was for the kids, then the kids weren't doing squat to help the people trying to move back to the Lower 9th Ward, an area with 65% home ownership before the storm. If this was for the kids, what about the kids of the homeowners who were almost exclusively black who were now at risk of having their land repossessed because the city was fining people $300 a day for having grass over 18 inches. If this was for the kids, whose kids was it for? The Lower 9th Ward is an area that many former residents want to move back to, despite the violence that occurred before the storm, where gunshots sometimes would break the humid nightime air. Those who would like to move back though have been unable to do so by the megalithic bureaucracy that surrounds their being reimbursed for Federal Disaster Assistance funds appropriated by the US Congress. FEMA, HUD, all had funds that had been promised to people to help them move home, and the stark reality was that there were no houses built. None. Or rather, maybe 1 house for every 40 lots per city block. So the Lower 9th Ward still lay almost entirely empty two and a half years after the storm. There is a distance between the nuanced complexity demanded by large Federal agencies, and the reality that people had wished to return and had been conintuously thwarted by nothing more corporeal than paperwork. Residents of Florida are routinely reimbursed millions of dollars for beachfront property from the same Federal Disaster Assistance.

No one claimed that the financially poor residents of the Lower 9th Ward held the same sway politically, but the disparity between Florida, or even other sections of New Orleans where residents of the Garden District had been reimbursed a month after the storm, to the tune of $1,000 per window, was startling and appalling. There were rumors that 2 billion dollars was stuck in Baton Rouge and yet couldn't be publicly distributed for some stated or unstated reason. Still the morning was picking up heat. Still the cameras were feeding the illusion that work was happening with lots of multi-racial kids assisting the beleagured people of the Lower 9th Ward. I stood in a line of reporters busily documenting the regal procession. A little exasperated and not without a little bile, I looked to one who was filming anxiously and said, "You should come back tomorrow." She smiled and asked "What's happening tomorrow?" I paused and looked up and said, "Not this." She looked sad and said, "We were here yesterday."

By this point the two hour mark of their walk was nearing and the thousand or so people who flanked Tennessee street were now watching as Bill Clinton walked toward a CNN Tent to do an interview. As I walked back to where I slept a block away and saw Clinton wrestling himself into an interview chair, then begin to clean his teeth. I wondered if there was something around to eat. I grabbed a paper bag from the Make It Right folks who were serving Po-boy lunches with Zapps chips. At least we were being fed. The kids began to grab lunches and make their way to the buses they had borne them here. One by one the buses pulled out and headed back over Claiborne Bridge. So the sum-total of work was forty five minutes. They got a good amount done in that time, but as I looked north from the house where I and my fellow volunteers slept towards the desolate and empty space left vacant by so many homes I wondered if they could get that much done in forty five minutes, what might have been done with eight hours? Sarah asked me to go pick up cigarettes. I hopped on one of the repaired bicycles and started off.

The store was about a mile away and within the first two minutes of my journey the sounds of the remaining crowds and cameras lessened, after five I was biking by shattered shotgun houses with the Xs still painted on them to mark how many bodies were found inside after the floodwaters receeded. My left pedal started to come loose and then fell off in the street. I knew I couldn't reattatch it without a wrench, and pedaling with one foot didn't work, so I then pushed myself forward with my left foot as my right foot kept balance. I was about half way to the store and this method was still faster than walking. Nobody was around to steal the pedal, and no cars passed by that might run it over. I picked up the cigs from the store and turned around. The pedal was where I had left it and I held onto it with my left hand as I pushed my way back toward "The Block", the housing where I and my fellow volunteers were housed. By nightfall, all the journalists and students and former Presidents and movie stars would all be gone. A few would return, in a month, a year's time. Maybe some would even linger more than a day to help.

The irony was hitting me like the heat. I thought, "If anyone saw CNN today, they would think that Bill Clinton and Brad Pitt are rebuilding New Orleans and that there is plenty of help for them to do it. If they actually came down here they would see one of the lead coordinators of a volunteer relief organization, those who actually are doing the work on the ground day in and day out, gutting houses, helping repair homes with unpaid volunteers, pushing himself around on a one pedaled bicycle."

Somewhere between these two realities, the people for whom this story should really be about are waiting in Houston, in Dallas, in Seattle for God's sake. Waiting in rooms in Baltimore, in Atlanta, in Phoenix. Waiting for someone to set some of the usual political considerations aside. Waiting for someone to say its ok to come home. Waiting for someone to stop treating their lives as nothing more than a media backdrop.

--afterword
out of the wreckage of the Lower 9th Ward, Brad Pitt has made himself into nothing short of a miracle for many residents there. To date, The Make It Right Project has built 14 homes, with another 19 in progress. They are making a genuine difference in the lives of many families who have been collectively abandoned by the Local, State and Federal Government. The preceding is meant to illustrate the very tenuous connection in our modern world that images have with reality, and the very real difference between show business and the actual needs of people, between the image of someone helping, and the idea that images ingender, as well as the very real and very hard work that is necessary for our current moment.
--october 2010