NEW ORLEANS: April, 2009 (Part 13)

At the end of my afternoon in Algiers Point, I blithely took the ferry back to Canal Street, innocent of the story I would later learn. I settled in for a final dinner of oysters on the half shell and a glass of Chardonnay. This was my last night in the city.

The next day, I flew home haunted by the week I'd spent in New Orleans, a magical conundrum of history, decadence, music, food, culture, ethnicity and politics. A metropolis of writers, artists and culinary geniuses offering more sensory indulgence per square foot than almost anywhere I'd ever traveled. And yet....

Will the destroyed neighborhoods be rebuilt? Will its citizens come home?

Some believe New Orleans' time is up. They wish the city would entirely rot in its current location and relocate inland to what they think is safer, higher and newer land.

But ask a chef or a trumpeter, a poet or an architect, and they'll likely shout a resounding "nay" to the notion of abandoning the Crescent City. I unabashedly side with those voices. For me, New Orleans is a city where all things are possible — including rebirth.

***

Once back home in Los Angeles, I drove to my in-laws' in order to retrieve our pets, to deliver thank-you gifts and to have a necessary conversation.

When William told his parents how his latest job had ended, there was a pause and his father voiced an idea.

Maybe it's time to find another career, he said.

It was a short conversation. William was already devastated by the course of events and this was the last suggestion he needed.

I need to tell you both something, I started, as I sat with my father- and mother-in-law and our cups of tea at the kitchen table. Your son is gifted. It's a rare thing to make a living doing what he does.There will be no career changing. He needs our support.

They listened. I give them lots of credit for that.

I know you're concerned about security but let's face it, we're all watching the news and seeing employees pour out of Manhattan skyscrapers carrying cardboard boxes with their personal belongings. I'm not certain, in these troubled times, if security exists anywhere.

Well, people will always want to see movies, his mother offered.

That's true, I agreed.

His dad nodded and sipped his tea.

William and I are in the arts, I continued. The upside of that choice is that we're always prepared for unemployment. It's not pleasant but neither is it a terrible shock when it happens.

I didn't get into my angst at being into year two of my book not selling. I figured they could only stomach so much truth at one time and I was feeling like a pretty big loser when it came to what I could only loosely call my writing career.

It's a terrible business, show business, his mom said and shook her head.

She was getting the picture. The whole picture.

I stuffed Stinky and Scrabble into the car, gave a final thank you and drove off to start a new chapter with William. A period we would call unemployment or, as it was now whimsically called in the press, funemployment.

NEW ORLEANS: April, 2009 (Part 12)

It was on the airport shuttle the next day that I overheard a tourist conversing about his visit to Algiers Point and something about "gun-toting locals shooting people up."

Good grief, I thought. My Algiers Point?

Not Historic Algiers, a neighborhood of porch swings and fish frys, with its quaint small-town charm and orange-and-blue Gulf station right out of an old movie...a place where you can step back in time. Back home, I did some research and did a little more than shiver at what I found.

Algiers Point missed the destructive flooding that eighty percent of New Orleans endured after Katrina. Algiers Point suffered some wind and rain damage but for the most part survived unscathed. However, as the storm took hold and the levees gave way, the citizens of Algiers Point became aware of the mayhem across the Mississippi and battened down their hatches. What if mobs came here? What if those people raced down Canal Street, hopped on a ferry and came to our high, dry land and wanted our stuff? What if?

Algiers Point is a predominately white enclave. A predominately black population lives in the further reaches of Algiers. On September 1, 2005, three days after Katrina made landfall, a group of white townspeople formed a militia. They gathered shotguns, assault rifles, ammunition and formed a vigilante gang. It is so easy to step back in time in Historic Algiers.

In an article for The Nation titled "Katrina's Hidden Race War," journalist A.C. Thompson interviewed victims, witnesses and perpetrators of events that took place in Algiers Point.

According to Thompson, the renegades closed off streets using downed trees and pieces of lumber. They created makeshift motion detectors using aluminum cans and glass bottles to alert them to the thieves and marauders that would surely descend.

As one local put it, "On one side of Opelousas [Avenue] it's 'hood, on the other side it's suburbs. The two sides are totally opposite, like muddy and clean."

Another said, "I'm telling you, it was forty, fifty people at a time getting off these boats...hoodlums from the Lower Ninth Ward and that part of the city. I'm not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good. You can see it in their eyes."

On this evening, three young African-American men left their battered home in Algiers and walked toward the ferry terminal in hopes of getting to the other side and onto a bus. The National Guard had designated the Algiers Point ferry landing an official evacuation site.

Donnell Herrington didn't make the boat with his two friends because his body was filled with metallic buckshot. At least seven pellets were lodged in his neck and others in his legs, arms and back.

In an interview about that night, Vinnie Pervel, President of the Algiers Point Association, said, "We would yell, 'We're going to count to three and if you don't identify yourself, we're going to start shooting.'"

In a separate interview, Pervel said, "I'm not a racist. I'm a classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me."

Who shot Donnell Harrington? We don't know. To date, police have investigated neither this event nor the shootings of ten other people in Algiers Point during that time period. Mr. Harrington did not die, but others did. Three and a half years after the event, no charges and no arrests had been made.

I found an online video about the shootings. A Danish team of filmmakers also interviewed the hunters. One fellow faces the camera and jubilantly declares, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it."

NEW ORLEANS: April, 2009 (Part 11)

I had read of a ferry leaving every fifteen minutes from the base of Canal Street. Its destination: Algiers Point, a New Orleans neighborhood on the other side of the Mississippi.

Because it was described as yet another zone devoid of tourists, Algiers Point interested me. And since the ride was free, and since I like ferries almost as much as trains, this venture had my name written all over it.

I boarded the boat and took in panoramic views of the city. The engines gunned and we were off for the six-minute ride. To my right I noticed the steeple of the St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. Church-builders believed a steeple must mark the highest point of a town because man should never rise above God. To my left I saw the skyscrapers of the Central Business District and noted: They forgot.

Upon landing, I climbed the elevated grassy levee surrounding Algiers Point and studied a harbor busy with industry. On the dirt pathway along the top of the levee, a girl jogged by and a man walked two dogs. They both expressed greetings. In fact, almost everyone I passed in New Orleans would nod and say "Hello" or "How ya doin'?" or "Nice to see ya" as if we were long-time acquaintances.

Very friendly bunch, I thought. Very friendly, indeed. I could live here.

Guideposts in Algiers Point informed me that I was in Historic Algiers and as I walked around the village I sensed that I was stepping back in time. On a corner, a 1930s-era gas station with a bright orange Gulf sign and blue trim, one pump and two picnic tables. Quaint and adorable, it looked like a movie set.

The streets were quiet but for a slight breeze riffling through branches and the chirping of birds. Porch swings. Baby toys scattered inside fenced yards. Sweet.

A large white banner advertised a Knights of Columbus Fish Fry and Crawfish Boil. Fun and so neighborly.

Two huge billboards heralded tours of Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World, where "Every Day is Mardi Gras!" Poking around warehouses of parade floats sounded super-fun, but when I got there I found the entrance bolted shut. A piece of paper with a handwritten scrawl curled in the wind. I flattened the notice with my hand and read that Mardi Gras World had moved to the Convention Center.

Wow, a whole world moved across the river to the Convention Center. Hope they have more food and water than the Katrina evacuees received, which is to say: none.

Disappointed, I moved on from Mardi Gras World and found myself face-to-face with a bronze plaque. "Algiers, established in 1719....Originally called the 'King's Plantation,' it was first used as the location for...a holding area for the newly arrived African slaves." A bucolic countryside where chained men and women were cleaned up before being sold at auction in the French Quarter.

Though the sun shone, I shivered, and read on.

Algiers Point became a hub of shipbuilding, dry docks and rail yards. Kevin Herridge, President of the Algiers Historical Society, and Vinnie Pervel, President of the Algiers Point Association, have their names engraved on the sign along with this claim: The charm and architecture of old Algiers is New Orleans' "hidden jewel."

Mmmm-hmmm.

NEW ORLEANS: April, 2009 (Part 10)

I stood on the scruffy edge of railway tracks and let the cars of the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad send a rumble through my body. I like the greasy smell of trains. I like that the engineer waved to me from the red cabin of his car and I waved back. I would like to rock asleep in a berth closed in by pleated curtains, and in the morning watch golden flatlands speed by outside the window. To eat a meal in a dining car at a table set with crisp linens, and to see the water swaying in my goblet.

I would like all of that, but today I could only pretend, because today I'd step over these tracks and make my way toward the Warehouse District, up Magazine Street, into the Garden District, back through the quiet end of the Quarter, across Esplanade Ridge and into Faubourg Marigny (Faw-berg Mari-knee). And then I'd board a ferry and cross the muddy Mississippi to Algiers Point (Pernt).

The stroll would take me five hours, send me through eons of history and rumble me deeper than those train cars, but I didn't know any of that as I ventured forth only to be sideswiped by the grumble of my stomach.

On Magazine Street, an area known for antiques, art, quirky restaurants and boutiques, I found Surrey's Cafe and Juice Bar: small, hippy-dippy and crowded with locals. Great, I'd managed to duck the tourist crowd. I neither wished to wait 15 minutes for a table nor did I need one. I was happy to sit at the three-seat bar, where I ordered a cup of chicory coffee, a fluffy baked biscuit, grits with a hint of garlic, two poached eggs and sliced tomatoes. The healthiest meal I'd eaten in days.

In the Garden District I wandered through an above-ground cemetery. The gray and white stones are a familiar landscape in this city. On the disaster tour we heard ghoulish stories of the powerful flood dislodging some 1,200 tombs and sending them far from their peaceful settings. Some bodies remained encased in their concrete vaults and then traveled up to 33 miles, landing in trees or swamps. Some caskets cranked open and the remains, no longer at rest, were sent on a long swim. Officials then had the task of gathering and identifying the newly dead, the newly-buried dead and the historic dead. Nice job.

The Garden District was first settled by Americans arriving in New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The grand mansions of the Garden District have a distinctly different architecture from the green, pink and yellow Creole cottages of the Quarter. The homes of the Garden District rise over wide verandas, where dogs slumber in the shade of camellia and magnolia trees.

In contrast, French Quarter balconies framed in wrought iron sit high above the narrow streets, providing an outdoor space perfect for watching Mardi Gras parades.

I ambled up and down the quiet streets of the Garden District. The homes, a mix of gingerbread Victorians, Greek revivals, Italianate and pretty shotgun cottages, are predominately painted white. They were constructed when white paint was invented. The metaphor is not lost on me.

This is New Orleans, where all things are possible and those things vary ward to ward, parish to parish, and people to people.

NEW ORLEANS: April, 2009 (Part 9)

Halfway through the Katrina disaster tour the bus pulled into Audubon Park for a rest stop. I joined my fellow tourists wandering into a concession area for hot dogs and ice cream. I pondered the menu and decided I wasn't all that hungry after witnessing some gruesome sights. Seeing wrecked homes and hearing the stories of wrecked lives was more than a little unsettling. I stepped outside into spring air and my cell phone rang.

I've been fired.

What? What do you mean?

They got an Oscar-winner to replace me.

What? How can they do this?

The producer said it wasn't personal because I hadn't done any work yet. He just couldn't turn down a big name when the opportunity presented itself.

The unspoken inkling had revealed itself. The breeze we felt was windy.

How will this affect us?

We were in April of 2009, in Year Two of a worldwide recession that showed no signs of abating. In this climate, showbiz also floundered. We had read regular accounts of film and TV crews sitting on their couches worrying how to pay mortgage or rent and health insurance. California was especially hard hit by thousands of home foreclosures, runaway production and a failed banking system.

Standing in a New Orleans park that afternoon and hearing my husband's depressed voice dispersed my logical thinking. I only wanted to be with him, hug him and reassure him. My other half was hurting and I was far away.

I lumbered back up the steps of the bus and knew that, as tragedies go, ours was small compared to the homes and lives lost outside my grimy bus window...but lost is lost.

I had one more day in New Orleans before I'd be on a plane and back home with my husband.