Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 - (Page 92)

Tropical woes New novels swirl out of the unpredictablity of living in a hurricane zone Those of us who have read quite a few Katrina-related books over the last few years might not have expected finding works of fiction to add to the “Katrina canon.” However, recent novels by Tom Piazza and Amanda Boyden prove that there is indeed new emotional territory worth exploring. City of Refuge is the story of two New Orleans families, one from Uptown’s Riverbend neighborhood, one from the Lower Ninth Ward. Tom Piazza has captured the ethos of the city in their overlapping narratives, reflecting distinct but intertwined worlds of African Americans as they endure Hurricane Katrina. It is also the story of those who chose to evacuate before the storm with those who were evacuated in the week after the flooding began. S.J. is an established carpenter in the Lower Ninth. He lives with his sister Lucy and her teenage son Wesley in a camelback (two-story) house on Reynes Street. In the days before the storm, he boards up his windows, puts up supplies, and settles in for the long night of Sunday, August 28. All Monday, S.J. and Lucy ride out Katrina in their home, stranded on the second floor by rising water from a breach in the Industrial Canal. Piazza’s beautiful but harrowing description of the encroaching water: “And then, late that day, or the next, the surprise at the water making its way up the street like the tide coming in on the shallows, the leading edge filling the holes in the streets with eddying water, advancing perhaps a foot every twenty seconds, and fifteen minutes later the whole block flooded to the tops of the curbs, then the bottom step up to your house, and then farther and higher, depending upon how far you were from the break that was sending all that water, and how high the land in your neighborhood was.” S.J. looks out over the transformed landscape Tuesday morning, houses moved or destroyed by the murky water and “automobiles that undulated softly in the water for as far as he could see.” He spots a small rowboat floating in the “islands of smashed wood,” and climbs down into the oily water on a rope made from bedsheets. After helping Lucy make it to high ground, City of Refuge by Tom Piazza Harper Collins: New York, 2008 Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden Pantheon: New York, 2008 92 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2008-09 he stays in the neighborhood for days, one of the many heroes who shuttled people to safety from rowboats and pirogues. Wesley rode out the storm with friends in Gentilly, far north of home, and tries to find his way back to the Lower Ninth. He confronts the lake that now blocks his way: “He kept going, running when he could, toward Claiborne. A block and a half past Galvez Street there was water again, stretching off as far as he could see.” Lucy, Wesley, and S.J. each end up at the Superdome for a time, separated from each other, trying to come to terms with this “refuge of last resort” where “the mind cannot process all the disjunction, the endless din echoing in the Superdome halls and the sour itch in your clothes, the booming echoes overhead in the Dome, with its patch of sky visible, the intolerable hallways clogged with people sitting on the floor, waiting for the bathrooms, through the endless stretch of ruptured time, on lines that wind off into the gloomlight as if following the curve of the rings of hell, but a perverted inferno, set up by the guilty for the innocent.” Upriver and a world away live Craig and Alice with their two children. They are originally from Michigan and Craig is editor of the weekly newspaper Gumbo. His wife has done her best to make a life for their family in what she considers to be a captivating but dangerous place. For Craig, New Orleans holds far more allure, noting that “His self was invested in the city, in its rituals; he read meaning into it and it returned the favor by endowing him with a set of coordinates, a loose confederation of attitudes, and a community of others who operated under the same constellation.” Later, even post-Katrina’s slime will not mar his love of the city. Craig’s evacuation route from Uptown to the Causeway over Lake Pontchartrain is a detail that New Orleanians can appreciate — Craig skirts the jam on Interstate 10 with a clever detour that readers will likely keep in mind for future reference. They evacuate to Chicago and stay with an elderly aunt and uncle. Craig begins writing dispatches for the local weekly, Chi Eye, and makes an exploratory trip back to New Orleans postKatrina — all the while pondering whether or not to move back, weighing their children’s welfare with the call of the city that has become their home. S.J.’s family is scattered for a time to well-meaning volunteers. Lucy is evacuated to a church camp in Missouri, and eventually makes her way to Houston and its growing community of displaced New Orleans residents. Wesley is flown to Albany, New York and watched over by an older couple from the Lutheran Church, which leads to some unexpected blessings for all of them. As the elderly gentleman tells Wesley: “When people are in trouble you are supposed to help out. That’s really all there is to it We’re all very lucky to be alive and we should treat each other better than we do.” It’s Wesley’s first glimpse at life outside of his New Orleans orbit, and unimaginably foreign to him. However, his

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 Contents Friends Editor's Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Prospect.1 New Orleans The Historic New Orleans Collection The Enduring Performance of Michael P. Smith Jazz Notes Louisiana Foodways Birds of a Feather: Windfowl Carvings in Southeast Louisiana Louisiana Association of Museums Louisiana Architecture O. Winston Link in Louisiana The Ogden Museum of Southern Art The Colfax Massacre Louisiana State Museum Unlocking the History of Greek Key Architecture Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

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