That Little Dash

by Pete Hamill

It was just after 6:30 p.m. when the blue Chrysler sedan we had rented turned onto eastbound I-10, headed back toward downtown New Orleans and out of one of the worst neighborhoods in New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward. As I sat in the passenger’s seat looking out the window towards the city skyline and silently reflecting on the things I had just seen, I knew that this was a story I would tell my grandchildren one day.

I have no friends or family in New Orleans. I have never been here before, mostly because I never had a reason to come. When a group of my fellow Idaho Law students decided to join the Student Hurricane Network and come here for spring break to help provide relief from the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina on this beautiful city, I found that reason.

We came here to help. Having heard the stories of neighborhoods still in such a state of disrepair that they are nearly uninhabitable, we wanted to do more than just talk. We wanted to help clean up. We went to a block party in the Ninth Ward that had been organized to get residents of the neighborhood to interact with and help one another. That’s where we met Mary.

Mary and her husband, Lionel, are an elderly couple that used to live at 2298 Rayboune Street in the Lower Ninth Ward. Now they live in a FEMA trailer No. 49229621, which is parked next to the shell of what used to be their home. The inside of the house has been completely gutted and only the concrete foundation and wooden frame remain.

Mary showed us the entrance to the attic and told us that when the levies broke and the water came rushing in, her husband and her son climbed up into it to escape the advancing flood and wait for help. They waited for three days before it arrived — a story that became even more unbelievable a few hours later when we get our first glimpse of Lionel as he emerged from his FEMA trailer in a wheelchair that he has been confined to since before the storm.

The high water mark is plainly visible on the outside of the house. It is a dark brown line, four inches wide and at least five feet high. It runs through the middle of Mary and Lionel’s front door. They did not have flood insurance. Consequently, they are insured only for the damage that occurred above the water mark. Their yard is nearly entirely covered with what looks at first glance to be tiny white pieces of gravel. A closer look reveals that they are not rocks at all, but seashells washed in by the water in Katrina’s aftermath.

Our job here was to move a giant trash heap out of the yard and to the street where it can be hauled away by garbage crews the next day. The pile stood eight feet high and is a mixture of scrap metal, concrete, garbage and dirt. It was completely overgrown with weeds. As we started to dig into the pile, pieces of Mary and Lionel’s life as it was before the storm started to emerge. Ashley found a picture that had been buried for at least a year. It was heavily damaged by water, but you could still make out a young man and woman, their arms around one another. When Michelle walked over to give the picture to Lionel, he told her that it was of his son and his son’s girlfriend.

Later we found a souvenir from the Mardi Gras parade — a coconut painted red with “ZULU 2002” written on it. I took it over to Lionel, who had rolled his chair to the front of the driveway and was surveying Ray Street like a hawk. I knelt down next to the chair, and asked him if it was something he would like to keep. He was silent for a moment and then his eyes started to well up as he told me that yes, he would like to keep it. He said that the coconut had been a gift from a friend a few years earlier. Lionel’s friend had not survived the storm.

We worked for nearly three hours to move as much of the trash pile as we could. There was more work to be done in a different part of the neighborhood, and so just before 5 pm it was time to say our goodbyes. Mary informed the group that we would not be going anywhere until she got a hug from each of us. I walked over to Lionel, shook his hand, and told him to take care of himself. The look on his face as the group said farewell and started to get into the cars made it clear to me that this day was about so much more than helping fix a house and clean up a yard. The people of the Ninth Ward have been neglected. They have been forgotten about by nearly everyone. For this family to finally feel like someone cares about what happens to them means more than any amount of yard work ever could.

After about another hour and a half spent knocking the tile out of a bathroom in a different house a few blocks away it was time for the group to return to our hotel in downtown New Orleans, the reconstructed part of the city where the rest of the tourists are enjoying the spectacle known as Bourbon Street.

It had started to get dark and the Ninth Ward is not somewhere one would want to be at night. I sat on a curb next to my friend Erick while we looked up and down the street, surveying the incomprehensible damage to the homes. As we sat in silence, Erick reached into his pocket and took out his MP3 player. We listened to a Garth Brooks song called “Pushing up Daisies.” The chorus goes like this:

"There's two dates in time
That they'll carve on your stone
And everyone knows what they mean
What's more important
Is the time that is known
In that little dash there in between
That little dash there in between..."

Those words had never meant more.