By Stuart Mitchner

You guys have a way of making a way out of no way. You know the sun comes after every storm. —President Obama to New Orleans

Ten years after Katrina, the president comes to New Orleans, looks the city in the eye and says,” You inspire me.” At the same time he’s shining a light on his administration’s high points, he’s making sure the audience in a community center in the lower 9th Ward knows there’s a grease stain on his pants from some fried chicken he ate at Willie May’s Scotch House on St. Ann Street in Tremé; he’s just glad it didn’t get on his tie; he’s got his mojo working; after all, he’s in “the gateway to America’s soul, where the jazz makes you cry, the funerals make you dance, and the bayous make you believe all kinds of things.”

It’s the human touch, mix the politics with some sloppy downhome reality you can rub between your fingers, and make your exit while Bruce Springsteen’s singing “Land of Hope and Dreams.” 

Going for the Upbeat

After watching Spike Lee’s Emmy-winning Katrina requiem, When the Levees Broke (2006), I should be writing something in the way of a lament. But having taken that four-hour-long, emotionally exhausting journey through death and despair, misery, heroism, and human error, I’d much rather write something upbeat, something more in the spirit of the city that inspires Obama.

Still, it’s not easy to shake the impact of Lee’s epic and the richly evocative score composed by Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter and New Orleans native son Terence Blanchard, who also takes part in the documentary. Blanchard’s stately theme has been playing in my head for days. I want to write a scherzo and here’s this majestic music bringing me back to Katrina, back to moments like the one where a man describes his slow recognition of the death of his mother in her wheelchair, left that way for days, a piece of cloth draped over her bent head in the chaos of the Convention Center where there was no power, no water, no food, no medical supplies, and no sanitation. Another moment, one of the film’s most wrenching sequences, comes when Blanchard shows his own heartbroken mother through the devastated remains of her home, from room to ruined room, her world turned upside down.

A Spirited Woman

I could write about the tears wept and the outrage voiced with such raw eloquence by the film’s chorus of victims and witnesses, white and black alike, but I’d rather focus on one spirited woman, Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc, who brings a special quality to her time before the camera; this undaunted flood victim expresses herself with a bright free-swinging energy that caught the eye of David Simon when he was casting his post-Katrina series Tremé, where she plays Desiree, and that convinced Spike Lee to begin his fifth anniversary Katrina update If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise (2010) with her passionate in-your-face recitation of the poem she wrote around the title refrain. The staged performance, however, is no match for the full-force full-bodied spontaneity of what happens in Levees when she relives her desperate attempt to get through to an unresponsive switchboard operator — “I’m here talkin to you, so if you can hear my voice talkin to you you must know there’s a heart beatin inside my body, there’s a life here!”

After the heavy going of Lee’s requiem, I want that kind of passion. I want Springsteen rocking out and Louis Armstrong climbing the Everest of cadenzas in “West End Blues.” I want brass bands and hoopla and some melodious New Orleans spontaneity of the sort described by a resident of Tremé in a recent New York Times article (“10 Years After Katrina”), where somebody “crossing the street on Dumaine” says “something funny,” and the whole block starts laughing, then someone else starts “playing it on his horn,” putting “what the man said into music,” and the horn man’s brother comes out the door playing a drum to “put a beat to it.” So they “start calling people on the phone until there’s a band on the street and someone’s got the lyrics down and “next thing you know” you’re “hearing it on the radio.” Except according to the story in the Times and related accounts, the street spontaneity that was happening is no longer possible because after Katrina forced a mass exodus, the neighborhood was rebuilt, renewed, and repopulated by people who can afford higher rents. As one musician told the Times, the players “generally get together elsewhere” now, it’s no longer “musical around here.”

But if you believe in New Orleans mojo you know it will always be musical in neighborhoods like Tremé and the lower 9th Ward where Obama appeared last week. What a contrast between the late arrival ten years ago of the nation’s woefully out of his depth, deer-caught-in-the-headlights 43rd president and the African American commander in chief ten years later, who understands that New Orleans before, during, and after Katrina is an absolute, a fact of national life, whose contributions to the spirit and culture of America and the world transcend all the negatives that could be asterisked next to any celebration of the city’s “rebirth” that fails to acknowledge the rampant gentrification, continuing racial divide, and the unredeemable damage done by Katrina.

Who Dat?

Let’s stay upbeat and enjoy how it was when the down and out despair of Katrina was followed by a storybook Super Bowl victory for the chronically benighted New Orleans Saints. “There was no way in hell the Colts were gonna win,” Spike Lee says in the DVD commentary accompanying If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise. “When a team has a cause, they’re unbeatable. This win was to me complete clear documentation of how sports can mean so much to a community. And for New Orleans to win the Super Bowl during Mardi Gras! It was going to be the end of the piece. A most upbeat ending. But BP had another thing in mind.” The sequel’s subtitle says it: Five Years Later, Facing Another Man-Made Disaster and Still Marching On.

True enough, the Saints and the city go marching in and on. Some of the same people we saw lamenting their lot in When the Levees Broke are shown dancing and shouting in Sweet Lorraine’s bar as they watch the Saints come from behind, and in Miami “it was like a home game,” says Lee, the crowd “ten to one” Saints fans chanting the Who Dat? riff that harks back to the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the streets and stages of early New Orleans, and the back-and-forth between performers in minstrel shows and even into politically incorrect Marx Brothers routines like Harpo as Gabriel piping at the head of his African American flock in A Day at the Races. The aura of oldtime showbiz racism in the “Who dat man?” routine adds a special dimension to the sight of biracial Saints fans shouting it like a mantra of celebration.

Princeton and Katrina

Nine months after the nightmare siege of August-September 2005, the Convention Center reopened for The American Library Association. In Katrina: After the Flood (Simon & Schuster $27), Gary Rivlin reports that “the city’s hotel and restaurant owners were happy to see seventeen thousand librarians descend on New Orleans at a time of year when the temperature typically topped ninety degrees.”

Princeton Public Library Director Leslie Burger, who became president of the ALA at that convention, remembers what she saw on the ground during a post-Katrina tour in the fall of 2005 (“Some say librarians are crazy,” she told Town Topics at the time, “but by November we had made a commitment to go”): “The city was devastated, both physically and emotionally — you could see it in their faces, hear it during conversations, and see it with your eyes in neighborhoods that were like little ghost towns where all that was left were children’s toys tumbled out on the street, upended cars, or foundations that no longer supported homes.” While they were there, the librarians (including 20 PPL staffers and volunteers) “reopened branch libraries in two neighborhoods, joined the clean up in the 9th Ward, and helped with building repairs throughout the city.”

Hope and Dreams

Now back we go to the lower 9th Ward where the volume’s all the way up and Springsteen’s singing of “saints and sinners” and “losers and winners” as the president goes hugging and handshaking his way through the community center crowd, a touch of New Jersey mojo energizing the scene, “the steel wheels singing and the bells of freedom ringing,” and here comes the late great Clarence Clemons playing his heart out, saying it all, saying there’s room for everyone, “the lost souls, the broken hearted, whores and gamblers, fools and kings” here where “the jazz makes you cry, the funerals make you dance, and the bayous make you believe all kinds of things.”