Going home to the Big Easy

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You Got Conserved

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

December 9, 2005

There is a writer in New Orleans whom I respect a lot. Chris Rose is a columnist for the Times-Picayune, and he has what has always been a pretty sweet job: He writes about New Orleans. He's not the food guy, or the movie guy, or the Living section guy; he's the guy who gets to put it all together and talk about the feeling, the emotion, the experience that is living in New Orleans. His job has sucked for the past several months, but he has been one of the few New Orleanians, it seems, who can still put it all together and remind us where we're from.

Chris has written a lot since the storm and has provided many New Orleanian college students with many Facebook quotes as a means of explaining what they're feeling, but one stands out. One of the many nice things about living in New Orleans was the moment when you told someone you're from New Orleans?the reaction was fun, happy, excited. Now it's awkward, sad, pitiful. Chris explained this better, and since he's a real columnist and I'm not, it's okay, but his conclusion works: It kills me every time someone says, "I'm sorry" after I tell them I'm from New Orleans. I hate the emotions behind every kind gesture I get from deans and friends alike that remind me that my city isn't what it was.

I went home for Thanksgiving, for the first time since the storm, looking for a lot of things. Closure. Normalcy. A fried shrimp po-boy from Domilise's. I went back looking for every brush with Katrina's havoc that I could find, not closing my eyes for a week and a half hoping that seeing all this hurt and change would make it okay that I watched the whole thing unfold on CNN, that I wasn't there, that I didn't hurt like my city did. I went home nervous as hell.

The New Orleans I experienced was a city of stark contrasts and inconsistencies; entirely normal in one neighborhood and entirely gone in another. Parts of New Orleans are the way they were before Katrina, if only in function and not in spirit, whereas the media coverage of the devastation in the Ninth Ward and Lakefront areas pales in comparison to being there. Prior to Thanksgiving, I had never seen a river barge sitting on top of a school bus, or the intact roof of a house sitting peacefully on a lot with no house underneath it.

Going home was not what I thought or had hoped it would be. I didn't feel better after seeing the devastation, and I don't feel closure. During my time home, it felt so odd to be with friends and family, and have it feel the way you think it should until you notice the little changes. The way the first question in any reunion conversation isn't, "How's school?," but instead, "How'd y'all do?" The way Fat Harry's has last call at 1:30 a.m. so everyone is gone by the 2:00 a.m. citywide curfew. The way you walk outside and talk to the military police in their Humvee.

Things have changed in New Orleans, to be sure. But I am comforted by everything that hasn't changed. New Orleans is still the cosmopolitan city it has been for over 300 years (the first truly cosmopolitan city in the United States by many years), and its citizens still revel in the rich and sometimes eccentric culture that history provides. I'm comforted that the Mardi Gras parades will roll, and that Jazz Fest will run from the last weekend in April to the first weekend in May. I'm happy to explain this to those who sadly exclaim, "I would have liked to visit New Orleans."

I know New Orleans will be back because the spirit remains. It's in the Mississippi River. It's in the muck that still coats a lot of the houses in the low spots. It's in the Christmas lights hung across FEMA trailers sitting in front of shacks and mansions alike. There are a bunch of Bowdoin students for whom this Christmas is gonna be a hell of a lot different than the last. But from one of you who has spent one holiday home in a disaster area, it was great to be home, nonetheless. Merry Christmas, y'all.

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