A Paradise Built in Hell (44 page)

I stopped by Camp Casey the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf and found a big camp and an extraordinary community akin in many ways to disaster communities. The rolling green landscape studded with small groves of oak trees was beautiful. The sky was strange, huge white clouds swelling overhead, the air stifling. A field of crosses, one for each American soldier dead in the war, stood in front of the huge shade tent with open sides and in which all the meetings, meals, and conversations were held. Someone had come the day before and decorated the crosses with roses of all colors that were wilting in the steamy air. Retired colonel Ann Wright—the career diplomat who resigned on March 19, 2003, the day the U.S. war against Iraq began—strode around making sure everything was going well at the camp. Tough, sweet, and enormously competent, she had directed the evacuation of the U.S. presence in Sierra Leone when that nation erupted in conflict and helped establish the embassy in Afghanistan in 2001. She radiated the same joy many others there did: that this was exactly the meaningful work they had always wanted, and the heat and disarray and discomfort mattered not at all compared to this great sense of arrival. Everywhere people were having the public conversation about politics and values a lot of us dream about the rest of the time, average-looking people of all ages from all over the country, particularly the heartland.

I met a woman who lost her teaching job in Indiana for saying something against the war to elementary-school kids and who was terribly worried about her navy son; a twenty-five-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, on his honeymoon with a wife who pushed his wheelchair everywhere, because an explosion in Iraq had paralyzed him; an old man from Slater, Missouri, who had been in the marines from 1957 to 1963 and had been sleeping in his Ford pickup with 300,000 miles on the odometer during the encampment; four elders from the American Indian Movement, who said what everyone said, “I heard about it and I had to come.” The dozen or so clean-cut, serious young veterans of the unfinished war were restless that day, worried that much of the Louisiana National Guard and its equipment was stationed in Iraq when their state needed them desperately. Immediately afterward, the camp broke up, and the group Veterans for Peace drove busloads of supplies to the Gulf, becoming one of the earliest relief efforts to arrive, responding directly from outside the gates of the president’s vacation home while inside everything was stalled and confused.

Sheehan herself moved through the camp giving interviews, hugging veterans, receiving gifts, seemingly inexhaustible, as though grief had hollowed out all usual needs and left her nothing but a purity of purpose. She said to me at the end of that day, August 29, “This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me and probably that ever will. I don’t even think I would even want anything more amazing to happen to me.”

Early in his work with the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. began to talk about the “beloved community.” The movement was against discrimination, segregation, and other manifestations of racism. In King’s eyes, it was not only against but also for—for a larger vision, a utopian ideal of fellowship, justice, and peace. Every activist movement begins by uniting its participants in important ways, giving them a sense of purpose drawn from the wrongs they seek to right and the shared vision of a better world. In 1957, King wrote that the ultimate aim of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a key player in the movement, was “to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. . . . Our ultimate goal is genuine inter-group and interpersonal living—integration.” Integration was no longer merely a practical matter of buses, schools, lunch counters, and workplaces. It was a metaphysic of solidarity and affinity, a condition of hearts rather than laws and facilities. The same year he declared that the nonviolent activist in this movement “realizes that noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves. . . . The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community.” Of course that was a movement that came out of the black churches of the South, and so it was religious from its roots on up. Other groups took up the term, notably the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that organized Freedom Summer and introduced ideas about participatory democracy rather than charismatic leadership to the activists of the 1960s.

What begins as opposition coalesces again and again into social invention, a revolution of everyday life rather than a revolt against the system. Sometimes it leads to the kind of utopian community that withdraws from the larger society; sometimes, particularly in recent decades, it has generated small alternatives—cooperatives, organic farms, health-care projects, festivals—that became integral parts of this society. One of the fundamental questions of revolution is whether a change at the level of institutions and systemic power is enough or whether the goal is to change hearts, minds, and acts of everyday life. Someone like King wanted both: the end of the official apartheid and discrimination in the United States and the transformation of spirit and imagination in each and every citizen.

When we talk of social change, we talk of movements, a word that suggests vast groups of people walking together, leaving behind one way and traveling toward another. But what exists between these people is not movement but a settling in together that is the beginnings of community (though in other cases, notably that of the civil rights movement, a community quite literally got up and began moving, through streets, across states, into diners and voting places). This is one of the major rewards of activism—a new community offering a new sense of shared purpose and belonging, honoring the principles for which it fights, the conditions so palpable among the people at Camp Casey that August. Again and again, antiwar, environmental, social justice, human rights, and other movements generate new communities, often transcending old divides, and in the process bringing something of that urgency, purposefulness, suspension of everyday concerns, fellowship, and social joy also found in disaster. This, of course, is not always what happens: dysfunctional organizations with bad internal dynamics are legion, but much of the activism of the 1980s in particular focused on cleaning up the process—working toward egalitarianism, nondiscrimination, and accountability from the inside out. The affinities with disaster communities are obvious: activist communities come into being in response to what is perceived as a disaster—discrimination, destruction, deprivation—and sometimes generate a moment or fragment of a better world. As Temma Kaplan, a New Yorker who had been part of that movement in the American South, said, “For a short time, during the first few days after 9/11 I felt that Beloved Community that we talked about in the Civil Rights Movement.”

After Katrina, existing communities had been devastated, both by the physical damage that scattered residents to the corners of the country and by the traumas of the social and political catastrophes. The volunteers who came from outside the area did something to restore those existing communities and in the course of doing so generated an ephemeral series of communities all their own. Religious groups played a huge role in the resurrection of New Orleans. In terms of sheer might, Catholic Charities and the Methodist Church did the most. (A Mennonite call to retired RV owners to congregate in the Gulf listed among the benefits of volunteering, “Becoming the ‘hands and feet’ of Jesus offers a very rewarding retirement activity; fellowship with other persons of a like mind as you become part of a team; bring back hope to those who have lost it; enjoy social times, potlucks, eating out together, accepting local invitations for meals.” Though the Mennonites I saw were mostly in their prime and fiercely good as construction crews.) The tight-knit community around Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in New Orleans East organized the congregation whose early return and effective mutual aid made it possible for others in the Vietnamese American community to return as well.

And then there were the groups descended from the countercultures, the not-always-beloved communities of resistance of the 1960s, the Black Panthers and the Rainbow Family, as well as a lot of young anarchists connected to more recent movements around economic and environmental justice and human rights. Often while the big groups were still sorting out their business or entangled in bureaucracy, the small groups these radicals begat were able to move faster, to stay longer, to sink deeper, to improvise more fitting responses to the needs of the hour. The volunteers became their own culture. And much of the positive experience of disaster seemed to belong to them, not to the residents.

Six months after the hurricane, I stopped in at the Made with Love Café, in St. Bernard Parish, just across the line from the Lower Ninth. The dining room was a big tent where volunteers served three hot meals a day to hundreds of returnees. New Orleanians called it “the hippie kitchen.” Behind a young woman in a bandanna and undershirt serving up food, a sign painted on cardboard in bright colors read, “To Emergency Communities Made with Love Café & all the amazing residents: WE WILL NOT FORGET YOU!” A black woman and white man were singing and playing music as people sat at long tables talking and eating. Around the main pavilion was a collection of tents, trailers, temporary buildings and other tarp-covered structures, a packaged food giveaway, a yoga site, and various other amenities. I struck up a conversation with one of the volunteers, Roger, who was walking his two elderly greyhound rescue dogs around the back of the complex. A white-haired white retiree with a thick Boston accent, Roger seemed almost transfigured by joy when he spoke of his work in this little community. He and his wife worked in the supplies site, handing out free stuff. They had found the volunteer opportunity on the Web, driven down to participate, and were, when I met them, six weeks into an eight-week stay.

Half an hour later, I met an African American man who’d been in New Orleans all his life. We were standing at the site where the infamous barge bashed through the levee to flood the Ninth Ward. Looking downcast, this substantial middle-aged man told me he had grown up at the levee breach in a house that had become a pile of splinters and rubble, though after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, his family had moved uptown. This day six months later was the first time he felt ready to come and look at the devastation. He had been evacuated from New Orleans, spent three months in Houston, come back, but he said it didn’t feel like home anymore, and it never would. He was grieved and embittered by the way people like him had been treated in the eventual evacuation and upon their return. If he could win the lottery, he told me, he would leave New Orleans for good. This spectrum, from Roger’s joy to the local’s despair, was New Orleans early on.

The out-of-town volunteers were often very different from the locals, emotionally and culturally. But they weren’t necessarily at odds. I asked Linda Jackson, a former laundromat owner who became a key staff person at NENA, the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network, how the community felt about the assistance pouring in from around the world. She replied in her whispery voice, “They’re stunned. They never thought the world would reach out the way they did. I’m not going to say that it makes up for [the initial, official Katrina response], but the help that we’ve been given from throughout the United States and the world, it makes us work that much harder. We say: you know what, if these people can come down here and take off of work, drop out of school for a couple weeks, there’s no way, there’s just no way we can have a negative attitude.”

Over and over again I met volunteers who told me they initially came for a week or two but who three months, six months, a year later were still at work in New Orleans. One morning in June of 2007, I stopped at the Musicians’ Village that Habitat for Humanity was building in the Upper Ninth Ward—a whole neighborhood of small, tidy row houses raised well off the ground and painted in bright colors. I struck up a conversation with a small, dark man of unclear ethnicity and a very distinct Harley-Davidson motorcycle, Brian from Monterey, California. He told me that ten months earlier, in August of 2006, he had taken a detour to New Orleans from his journey to watch the leaves change in Vermont. “And I was going to stay for a month, but after a couple weeks they realized that I was the only trim carpenter they had. So they asked me to stay.” Habitat for Humanity was founded by a wealthy couple who realized that their money wasn’t giving them purpose or joy; it is a Christian group and one that has a strategy for integrating volunteers and locals. They call it “sweat equity”: the future homeowners must work on the houses—though in New Orleans the houses were going up in such numbers that the homeowners would sometimes be chosen only later. Brian said that for him, it wasn’t about saving New Orleans or social justice: “At first I thought it was, or I just wanted to help because it was such a mess. In New Orleans East, this elderly couple had been in this house thirty-five or forty years, very elderly, they couldn’t get anybody to tear it down, they had no insurance, they had to get the lot leveled, so every day they would burn. They would tear off part of their house and burn it in the front yard. You see stuff like that and you just get angry. The money’s there. The money is there, and like I said, at first I thought I was doing it for an idealistic reason, but I get more out of it than I put into it, a lot more. I get letters and postcards from people that have been here, and a lot of them just can’t wait to get back. I’m doing it for the people here, the people I’m working with, and the volunteers. That’s where I get my love from.”

It started out with shotguns on a front porch, transformed into young medics bicycling through the streets offering assistance to anyone and everyone who wanted it, and it ended up as dozens of relief and reconstruction projects around the city and thousands of volunteers. Malik Rahim, the former Black Panther who reported to anyone who listened that vigilantes were murdering African American men in Algiers, recalls, “Right after the hurricane I got into a confrontation with some white vigilantes in Algiers, and when I got into them I seen that I was over-matched. I had access to a couple of weapons, and maybe enough ammunition that I could withstand maybe two, three firefights with them, and that’s about it. I made a call for some help. Scott Crow and Brandon Darby came to assist us.” Crow and Darby were white activists from Texas who had worked with Rahim on the case of the Angola 3—former Black Panthers who had endured decades of solitary confinement on questionable charges. One of them, Robert King Wilkerson, had been exonerated and released, and the young Texans came to check in on him. Their adventures in eluding the authorities, launching a boat, exploring the city by water, and eventually being united with King were considerable, and at the end the two young white activists, the two older ex-Panthers, and Rahim’s partner, Sharon Johnson, sat together in Algiers and talked.