Katrina: After the Flood (12 page)

5

THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT

Mayor Nagin woke up early on Saturday morning. It was barely sunrise on his sixth day of presiding over a waterlogged city, and finally he had gotten four or five hours of sleep. Clots of people were still at the Superdome, but he was pleased to learn the buses had been running all night. Convoys of buses were finally starting to clear out the Convention Center, which would be empty of people by Sunday night.

Sunday was the day Nagin started talking to the media. First up was Oprah Winfrey, who was due in the city at noon.

The early part of the Winfrey interview proved disastrous. At first the problem was Eddie Compass, the police chief, who, Nagin said, “verbally exploded in front of the cameras.” Compass himself had told the
Guardian
newspaper that his people had yet to substantiate any rapes at either the Superdome or the Convention Center. The article appeared the night before the Winfrey interview. There was also no evidence of the violent crimes that had supposedly been committed in either refuge. Yet Compass, who kept butting into Nagin’s conversation with Winfrey, blurted out, “We’ve got babies being raped.” The mayor asked for a small break and pulled his chief aside. “Pull yourself together!” he hissed. Yet
Nagin proved no less reckless a spokesman for his city. “People in that frickin’ Superdome for five days,” Nagin told Winfrey, “watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.” For days there had been apocryphal talk of slit throats and even the rape of a seven-year-old girl inside the Superdome. Now New Orleans’s mayor and its police chief were repeating unsubstantiated accounts of unspeakable crimes to the afternoon audience watching
The Oprah Winfrey Show
.

Winfrey was dressed in jeans, a lime-green blouse, and rain boots. Nagin asked if she’d like to go inside the Superdome but immediately regretted the invitation. Too late to say no, he made Winfrey look at the camera and repeat after him, “I, Oprah Winfrey, promise not to hold the city liable financially or otherwise as a result of me going into this doggone stinky-ass Superdome.” All week Nagin had avoided talking to people inside the dome out of fear for his own safety, but now with Winfrey, walking into the empty facility, he was assaulted by a smell so malodorous, he said, “I could taste funk.” Tears filled Winfrey’s eyes as she scanned the dank building lit up by shafts of light from the big holes that Katrina had punched in the dome’s roof. “How could the richest country in the world let Americans suffer the way they did over the past week?” Nagin asked. The two hugged when they said their good-byes.

Nagin sat down with John Donvan of
Nightline
after Winfrey. Immediately, Sally Forman knew she had made a mistake pushing the mayor into the spotlight when he was describing himself as “mentally and physically drained.” Donvan opened with a soft-ball question about Nagin’s house. The mayor’s home had not flooded and only suffered minor roof damage, yet she watched as the mayor told Donvan, “I know it’s gone. I don’t want to see it.” The mayor seemed surprised when Donvan asked if race was the reason it took so many days to come to the city’s rescue. Call it race or call it class, the mayor said, but “I don’t think this type of response would have happened if this was Orange County, California.” The mayor ended his Sunday with Scott Pelley of
60 Minutes
, where his exhaustion expressed itself as pessimism: “When you see a city that you love so much and you see it devastated and almost dead, you wonder what the future looks like.”

Nagin was up early the next morning talking with Matt Lauer, who spoke with him via satellite from the
Today
show studio in New York.
The mayor gave Stone Phillips of
Dateline
a flyover tour of the city, then opened up to CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “What the state was doing, I don’t friggin’ know,” Nagin told O’Brien. “But I tell you, I’m pissed. It wasn’t adequate.” Off camera, Forman was frantically slashing her finger across her throat, but the mayor ignored her. “She said she needed twenty-four hours,” the mayor continued, referring to the governor’s confrontation with the president on Air Force One. “And more people died.” When Diane Sawyer asked Nagin about Bush, the mayor gave the commander in chief the benefit of the doubt: “I don’t think the right information got to the president.”

Sally Forman was with Nagin when she received the expected phone call from the governor, early Tuesday morning. The mayor and his communications director were on Canal Street. Post-storm, the media had parked satellite trucks, RVs, generators, and tents where normally streetcars would be running. Nagin and Forman were sitting under the big top NBC had set up, waiting for the mayor to talk live with Katie Couric. Nagin nodded an emphatic no when Forman mouthed that the governor was on the line. So Forman absorbed Blanco’s fury at being accused of making a decision that cost lives. “If the mayor wants to go toe to toe, I’ll go toe to toe with him,” Blanco warned. The governor’s voice was cracking, Forman said, and she thought Blanco might be crying (Blanco said she wasn’t). Forman mimed tears and gave her boss a pleading look. He wouldn’t take the phone.

The conversation ended when the connection was lost, causing Forman to utter an audible “Thank you, Jesus.”

“MAN, I GOTTA GET
out of Dodge.” Ray Nagin made it no secret how badly he needed a break that second week after Katrina. Thousands of Guardsmen were now patrolling New Orleans, along with another twenty-two hundred soldiers from the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. The city was safe and he wanted to see his wife and kids, who had flown to Dallas the day before the storm. In the command center that the city and Entergy were still operating on the fourth floor of the Hyatt, he asked Dan Packer, Entergy’s CEO, for a ride to Dallas on Entergy’s corporate jet. On Thursday, September 8, ten days after the city flooded,
Nagin flew to Dallas, forcing Packer to make the trip as well given a company policy that an Entergy officer be aboard. “I was very much in need of rest and recuperation,” Nagin wrote of his decision to leave New Orleans for five days after Katrina.

The mayor’s time in Dallas was uneventful. His two boys, Jeremy, twenty-one, and Jarin, eighteen, were there, as was his daughter, Tianna, who was six. The mayor caught up on sleep, but otherwise they spent their days like other well-off New Orleanians needing to relocate, at least temporarily. The Nagins went to the mall to buy the mayor some new clothes. They visited potential schools for Tianna and found a town house that would serve as their temporary home base. Nagin told his wife that the family should figure on staying there for “at least the next six months.”

The mayor did have city business in Dallas. Just before leaving New Orleans, Jimmy Reiss had phoned. Reiss was an important ally and Nagin’s RTA chief, but he was also the one who told the
Wall Street Journal
that New Orleans would become “demographically” different after the storm or he and the other old-line families wouldn’t be moving back. Now Reiss was insisting that Nagin make time to meet with him and other members of the Business Council. The mayor’s being out of town made everything simpler. Dallas had an operating airport and hotels with working toilets. That Saturday, the mayor drove himself to the giant Loews Anatole Hotel just north of downtown Dallas for what he later described as “my meeting with the shadow government” of New Orleans.

RAY NAGIN WAS NINE
years old in 1965 when Hurricane Betsy battered New Orleans. His family stayed in New Orleans through Betsy, he wrote, because “we just couldn’t afford to leave the city for an unplanned ‘vacation.’ ” Levee failures after Betsy caused mass flooding in the Lower Ninth and other parts of the city, but not in the Seventh Ward, where the Nagins lived.

Nagin’s father worked as a bricklayer and a truck mechanic. Eventually, he’d secured a job as a garment cutter and earned extra money moonlighting as a City Hall janitor. The mayor described his mother as
a homemaker who did seamstress work to supplement the family’s income. The future mayor would be born at the city’s Charity Hospital in 1956. His parents named their only son Clarence, but only Nagin’s wife, Seletha, seemed to call him that. Officially, he was C. Ray Nagin, but to most everyone he was Ray.

The Seventh Ward was a community of cottages and shotgun houses filled with the city’s barbers, waiters, and factory workers. The Nagins were a religious family, Catholic, and Nagin was an altar boy at the church a block from their house. That’s also where Nagin attended elementary school. He earned good grades without having to work too hard. Mainly he focused on athletics. His curveball won him a baseball scholarship at Tuskegee University, where Nagin earned a degree in accounting. After graduation, he bounced around in various jobs that sent him first to Los Angeles and then to Dallas. In 1985, at age twenty-nine, he landed a good-paying job that brought him back to New Orleans as a controller for Cox Communications, the cable company.

Nagin flourished at Cox. Its books were in horrible shape when he arrived, Nagin said. Somehow the franchise was losing money despite having a monopoly and ninety thousand customers. Nagin was steadily promoted and was soon a Cox vice president, overseeing its New Orleans operation. While at Cox, Nagin launched a live call-in show on the community-access channel and served as cohost of this once-a-month program that gave unhappy Cox customers a forum to complain. There he learned the skill of talking to the general public via a television screen—or, as he put it, “honed my skills on ‘romancing the camera.’ ”

Bill Hines, a prominent attorney in town, recalled the night that Nagin announced he was running for mayor. A year earlier, Hines, who is white, helped to inaugurate what participants tended to call the “black-white dinner”: ten black business leaders and ten white had a standing invitation to a monthly dinner that was ostensibly about improving race relations in New Orleans. At one of their regular dinners in the fall of 2001, Hines said, “Ray Nagin clinks his glass and says, ‘I have something to tell everybody.’ We ask what’s that, and he says, ‘I’m going to run for mayor.’ We all started laughing.” If Nagin harbored any political ambition, he had done a good job of concealing it. Even his wife confessed bafflement over her forty-five-year-old husband’s sudden
interest in local politics. “My initial reaction,” Seletha Nagin wrote in an e-mail exchange with Sally Forman, “was that of shock.”

Nagin made it official in December 2001, on the final day of candidate registration. Two months before election day, he was joining an already crowded field of fourteen, nearly all of them black. Polls showed him drawing less than 3 percent of the vote. He fashioned himself as a crusading outsider vowing to take the “for sale” sign off City Hall, but others were also claiming the reformer’s mantle. “Had Ray Nagin started this eight months ago, it would have been very interesting,” said Stan “Pampy” Barre, a local businessman and political fixer. “I gave him money. . . . [But] I just don’t see this happening.”

FOUNDED IN 1718, NEW ORLEANS
is one of the older US metropolises. In the early nineteenth century, it was the country’s third-most-populous city. Its port opened the city to a cosmopolitan assortment of characters, but it also made New Orleans the center of the slave trade. The city was home to the largest slave market in North America at the same time more free black people walked its streets than anywhere else in the Deep South. The country’s largest slave revolt took place just north of New Orleans, in 1811.

A former French colony, New Orleans lived by the infamous “code noir,” which spelled out the rules for slave ownership. If a slave struck his or her owner or anyone else in his master’s family, the law dictated that the slave be executed. An escapee should have his or her ears cut off (and their hamstrings severed if gone for two months). But slaves in New Orleans also had the right to earn money and, during Spanish rule, they secured the right to buy their freedom. Both French and Spanish law recognized that freed slaves—“free people of color,” they were called—and those who had never been enslaved had the same rights as any other colonial subject. In time, many free people of color settled the Faubourg Tremé, or simply Tremé (pronounced “truh-may”), just across Rampart Street from the French Quarter. Tremé has been described as the “oldest black neighborhood in America.” Its cultural center was Congo Square, which some music historians point to as the birthplace of jazz.

The country’s first black-owned daily newspaper was founded near
the end of the Civil War—the
New Orleans Tribune.
This paper, begun as a bilingual broadsheet, had a mixed-race staff that sought to help shape the new, post–Civil War South. The
Tribune
called on government to divide the southern plantations and grant plots to former slaves and advocated equality under the law. Closer to home, the paper also demanded the integration of the city’s streetcars, which occurred in 1867. That was during Reconstruction, when the federal government exerted its might to guarantee that newly enfranchised blacks could vote. One-fifth of the city’s schools were integrated; Louisiana could even boast of the country’s first black governor (the country’s next would not be elected until 1990).

The federal government withdrew its troops from the South in 1877—twelve years after the Civil War ended. The schools in New Orleans resegregated. Congo Square was renamed Beauregard Square in honor of a Confederate general who had lived in New Orleans.
^I
A statue of Confederate hero Robert E. Lee was erected near the bottom of St. Charles Avenue, and in 1884 Tivoli Circle was renamed Lee Circle. Taking direct aim at New Orleans, the state legislature, in 1890, passed the Separate Car Act, which reinstated segregation on public transportation.

The black population fought back. In 1892, a half century before the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks helped to spark the modern civil rights movement, a black man from New Orleans named Homer Plessy took a seat in a train carriage reserved for whites. The resulting legal case made it to the US Supreme Court, which, in 1896, used
Plessy v. Ferguson
to establish the doctrine of separate but equal.
Plessy
remained the law for six decades, until it was overturned in 1954 by
Brown v. Board of Education.
Plessy
was a cruel blow to all African Americans, but the loss was more deeply felt in New Orleans, where the dream of equality had seemed closer at hand. Following
Plessy
, Louisiana purged 95 percent of the state’s blacks from its voter rolls, and the city stopped offering schooling past the fifth grade to black children. The Klan took hold in the area and lynchings in the city became more commonplace.