28.
How can I explain it, now some twenty years later, the real difference between me and Lindy? The way her voice on the phone that night still haunts me, at times, and the way it has shaped who I am? The way I’ve had to find peace with my role in this?
Perhaps I could start by telling you:
Baton Rouge is not New Orleans.
They get all the press, yet we are the capital city of Louisiana. Our downtown is flanked by gray government buildings, a courthouse, and two governor’s mansions—one retired and turned into a museum. Our state capitol building, once the tallest structure in the South, still bears the bullet holes from Huey Long’s assassination in 1935. This makes it unique, and so a few people visit this place.
Downtown New Orleans is called the French Quarter.
Maybe you’ve heard of it.
It is a mash-up of whites, blacks, immigrants, Cajuns, and Creoles: New Orleans. It is a city of great poverty and also of great wealth, often located on the same street, and so all the best minds have studied it. Baton Rouge is a city whose problems, on a statistical level, are largely predictable. We have traffic at peak hours. We have violence in the roughest parts of town. Our public schools, when filled with poor children and ill funded, are likely to crumble and die. Our officials, if elected by wide margins, usually fall short of their goals. When compared to the national averages, Baton Rouge normally ranks around thirty-seventh in the top one hundred metropolitan areas of America, no matter what you are measuring.
However, we always score well in odd polls. When demographers and social scientists get past the numbers, when they ask more qualitative questions, Baton Rouge inevitably ranks high. We’re off the charts in mysterious categories like “enjoys their neighbors,” “had a good weekend,” and “hopes their children will stay close.” There are several reasons for this. Flowering plants do well here. Things grow like crazy. When it’s hot it’s really hot and when it rains it really rains. Our weather is not enigmatic. The food in Baton Rouge is also good and cheap, which is important. There is no place to get a bad sandwich. Open a mediocre restaurant and go under. Open up a new place where there used to be a bad one and pray that we forgive you. We don’t draw enough tourists to float a halfhearted kitchen. Thank God.
Baton Rouge is also, in large part, a college town, and this makes people feel young. On fall Saturdays, the LSU football team draws crowds of ninety-two thousand people to watch them play. On these days, Tiger Stadium itself becomes the sixth-largest city in Louisiana and you will struggle to find a person in town, interested or not, who doesn’t know the score. During the game, the LSU campus—dotted with oak trees, Spanish tile rooftops, and two Indian burial mounds—holds another one hundred thousand people who couldn’t get a ticket but decided to come anyway. They sit around in fold-out chairs and talk to one another. They share cold beer and hot food. They all have the same thing to root for. This helps.
It is also helpful that Baton Rouge is built on a bluff to the east side of the Mississippi River, which often protects us from major hurricanes. This is not to say we haven’t had our asses kicked. In 1992, when Hurricane Andrew barreled through South Louisiana, my mother and I watched the winds of it rip a forty-foot oak tree out of our yard. In the seconds before it fell, the thick roots snapping beneath the slab of our house sounded like popcorn popping. By the time the eye of Andrew hovered above us and we could step outside on the leaves and limbs and thrown shingles, the crater the oak tree left was already full of debris and rainwater, never to be even again. This type of damage was common in our neighborhood. At Lindy’s house, for instance, the water oak I’d spent so many nights in toppled and crashed through her bedroom wall. It smashed the roof, shattered her window, and also broke a support beam in the second-story floor that allowed rainwater to pour through the entire house. At this point in time, however, in the fall of 1992, nobody lived there anymore.
Still, we have often been spared major disasters.
In 1973, for example, Baton Rouge was able to avoid historic flooding along the Mississippi River by opening man-made spillways and floodgates. Although it seemed like a simple decision to save our city, the cradle of the state’s government, this action flooded dozens of less populous towns and bayous along a waterway called the Atchafalaya Basin. River silt clogged people’s tailpipes. Homes floated away as if children were steering them. Wildlife disappeared. New species invaded. Entire ecosystems changed. Baton Rouge stayed dry.
Even worse, though, is that we were spared the floods of Katrina.
You have to understand. When people think of Louisiana, they think exclusively of New Orleans. We are okay with that. New Orleans has the culture, the allure. They are The Big Easy. The Crescent City. The Birthplace of Jazz. The people of Baton Rouge don’t even have accents. Our parades, when compared to New Orleans, are amateur hour. Even our most raucous bars close at two o’clock in the morning. Theirs don’t close down at all. So, whenever people in Baton Rouge feel wild, we drive the sixty miles to New Orleans. We stay in upscale hotels and spend gobs of money. We drink beer on the street and make bad decisions. We take wrong turns at intersections and feel perpetually lost, and when we wake up in the morning, regretful and satisfied, we go back home saying, “It’s a fun place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
In other words, we make a lot of sense.
New Orleans doesn’t.
For instance, New Orleans is the only American city below sea level that is actually located by the sea. Sunny settlements in the valleys of California mountain ranges don’t count. The Gulf of Mexico, Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River, they surround this storied city and push on it, they press on it, they ingest it. New Orleans is so low, in fact, so waterlogged, that they must often bury their dead above ground.
The city of New Orleans is also ironic. On a national scale, it consistently ranks first in both violent crime and in the number of city permits granted for public celebrations. It is a place that has known both slavery and brutal prejudice, and yet is vibrant with gays and transsexuals. It has been decimated, repeatedly, by plagues and battles and record-breaking storms and, rather than leave this place, the people of New Orleans instead take pride in the fact that the circumstances beset upon them are extraordinary and tragic. So, for anyone to act as if New Orleans is not the most interesting place in the world is, to a New Orleanian, uninteresting. For people to act as if New Orleans is anything other than its own planet, its own universe, is na?ve. As such, the people of New Orleans have been known to wonder what a generic place like Baton Rouge, at its core, has to offer.
For a long time, we had a hard time coming up with an answer.
But now I can tell you.
We have guilt.
When Hurricane Katrina entered the Gulf and turned north in 2005, the wealthy made their way from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. They heard on their digital televisions and satellite radios the order of mandatory evacuation and had crammed our hotels and empty parking lots by dusk. Traffic was heavy with cars and RVs as the state employed what is called contra-flow to reverse all westbound and northbound lanes on Interstates 10, 55, and 59. Baton Rouge was happy to help. We were neighbors, after all. We’d always been polite.
So, when we went to stock up on our own supplies that day—batteries, bottles of water, propane for grilling—we were fine with the fact that New Orleanians were strangely there, too, buying toiletries and bags of chips for their hotel rooms. Lines were long and things were inefficient, and they did their comedic best to make this known to us. They were loud and gregarious and immediately skeptical of things like our bread selection. It was funny, how strange they found our city, as if they’d been set down on Mars. They didn’t know where the juice aisle was. They couldn’t find Jax beer. They weren’t sure exactly which lane of the road was the turning lane and they honked their horns a lot quicker than we did, even when they were in the wrong. This was not a big deal. After you, we said. We hope you enjoy your brief stay. And then, on that last night before the storm, we packed our local restaurants and drank heartily, the people from Baton Rouge and New Orleans together. We joked about how crazy it was, living down here.
This was August 28. On the next day, it began to rain.
Then the wind came and the power went out.
After this, the inconceivable news trickled in.
By August 31, nearly fifty sections of the New Orleans levee system had failed.
Most areas of the city, eighty percent in some estimates, were underneath ten feet of water. Cell phone service became spotty for everyone, and there was suddenly an issue of missing people. Nobody knew where their neighbors were, their cousins, a grandma. I got word that two friends of mine who lived in uptown New Orleans, an old college pal and his wife, had spent the last two nights in their Subaru Outback, parked at a strip mall in a nearby town called Denham Springs. They didn’t know what else to do. The woman, whose name was Jennifer, was enormously pregnant, and my buddy wondered if I knew of any hotel rooms, anyplace she could get a shower. Like every Baton Rougean worth their salt, I opened up my home to them. I held Jennifer’s hand as she walked up the few stairs to my front door and apologized for the heat, which, without power and air-conditioning, was inescapable. She put on a two-piece bathing suit and stood outside, washing herself in the garden hose, and she was a sight. When the power came back on that next day, we stood around like imbeciles and watched the television.
The devastation to New Orleans was total. It was obvious. It was tragic.
And although I feel close to that disaster, although I was forever affected by it, and although I truly do love and care about that great city, her story is ultimately not mine to tell. I understand that.
Baton Rouge’s, however, is.
We had some trouble of our own.
After the levees broke and their streets filled with water, the stranded poor of New Orleans, of which there were many thousand, began to make their way west on Interstate 10. Some were transported in school buses, commandeered by Governor Kathleen Blanco’s executive order, and sent to generous places like Houston, Jackson, and Shreveport. Others simply walked. It was ninety-six degrees and their shoes were still wet. Men went shirtless and the women wore dripping tank tops and bandanas on their heads. Minor injuries had gone unattended: a deep red gash from a fallen tree branch, a strawberried bruise from a slip on slick asphalt, swollen sets of fingers on swollen pairs of hands that were all perhaps broken. Those in wheelchairs got help from strangers and kin and either slept or read Bibles, and the lot of them looked like Third World migrants moving up the American causeway, toting heirlooms in plastic Walmart bags.
Helicopters sent footage of this to network affiliates, and army trucks rattled by, tossing out cases of bottled water. On a national level, people were outraged. Locally, many of the stranded poor, when they reached the first small town they came upon, were turned away at gunpoint. Baton Rouge, however, opened its doors.
And the people kept coming.