Has NOLA Lost Her Soul?
One Reporter’s Journey Back to the Crescent City
2009-10-16
By Kevin Chappell

In my 15 years at Ebony and Jet magazines, I have written about a myriad of people, places and events. And I have penned articles about the famous and the not-so-famous, the rich and the poor, interviewed U.S. presidents and average Joes.

But not much compares to my life-changing experience Labor Day weekend 2005. That’s when I got the call from my editor to head down to New Orleans. The city was underwater.

Less than 24 hours later, I was there, walking the streets of New Orleans, talking to as many Blacks as I could. Each story seemed more horrific than the previous. One person told me of hearing the levee break. Said it sounded like an atomic bomb. Another described the fierceness of the wall of water that swept her and the virtually the entire Lower Ninth Ward down stream.

There was one lady that I’ll never forget. Even now, I can still see her eyes, filled with a pain that few people know, and that no one should experience. I witnessed a city drown, and the images are still seared in my mind.

This is part of what I wrote at the time: “Right there, in the eyes of these hurricane victims, I could see their souls.

Crying souls. Pleading souls. Angry souls. Lost souls. Too many wounded souls to separate yourself from. Too many hurt souls to be simply a reporter. You see, on the streets of New Orleans, amid the women who had lost their children, the men who had lost their wives, the families who had lost their homes, there I was—a journalist who had lost his words—another soul stripped bare by Katrina’s wrath.”

I later flew over most of the devastated Gulf Coast aboard a Blackhawk helicopter with the legendary Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré. Destruction as far as the eye could see. And I returned on the one-year-anniversary. The water was gone. Most of the debris picked up. Pockets of rebuilding can be seen throughout the city. But not many Blacks had returned.

Now, more than four years later, I return to New Orleans to cover a town hall meeting being held by President Barack Obama—a new American president, one who promised not to ignore the plight of the Crescent City like his predecessor.

It’s the first time Barack Obama has visited New Orleans since becoming president. He promised throughout the campaign to do whatever it took to bring the city back.

Since taking office, the Obama Administration, through its $787 billion stimulus package, cut through bureaucratic red tape to release more than $1 billion in public assistance projects for New Orleans. That’s been welcome news for Mayor Ray Nagin and the people of New Orleans, who cried out for help in 2005, but instead was sent 80,000 FEMA trailers and $500 debit cards.

But can the new attention, new money, new programs and new promises ever really bring New Orleans back? Has New Orleans lost her soul forever?

Hurricane Katrina was the greatest natural disaster in the history on the United States. Some 80 percent of the city flooded, an area equal in size to seven Manhattan Islands, and severely damaged more than 200,000 homes. More than 1,500 people died; 134 were still missing two years after the storm. The Coast Guard rescued more than 33,000 people, and some 800,000 residents were forced to live outside of their homes, the greatest mass upheaval since the Dust Bowl of the ’30s.

So while The French Quarter is bustling with activity, Jackson Square is a beautiful as ever, and artists, painters, fortunetellers, mimes, musicians, and dancers still dot the sidewalks throughout downtown, the roots that kept generation after generation of Blacks in the city, have been cut forever. Many Blacks have moved for good, setting up new lives in cities like Houston, Atlanta, Memphis and Mobile.

The St. Charles Streetcar is up and running, and the city has regained three-quarters of its pre-storm population.

But the Ninth Ward didn’t get rebuilt, and many of the new residents are Hispanic day laborers looking to find construction work. The shops on Magazine Street bustle with activity. But four of the public housing projects that housed thousands of Blacks have stayed closed since Katrina, leaving many former residents no way to return home.

As a result, the city that brought the world Louis Armstrong and gumbo is now mostly White. We won’t know the exact racial breakdown of the city until next year’s census. But by any measure, Blacks haven’t come back in the numbers that were hoped. And I’m not sure a town hall meeting by a president with soul can do much to bring the old soul back to the city.

Kevin Chappell is senior editor for Ebony and Jet magazines.