New Orleans – A Little Credit Where It Is Due

Note: many of you have asked when I’m coming home. I’ve been home for weeks. Each of these entries was started while I was down south and I’m finishing them up and sending them along as I have time. It’s just been easier to keep them in their current tense. -mf

I came down here with the hope of being useful, and not necessarily comfortable. I’ve been lucky to find the latter; I’m still wondering about the former. It turns out that several of my friends and colleagues from New York are down here now in a variety of useful capacities. I beg your patience for a few paragraphs and hope you’ll read along while I crow about them a little bit.

Alain was a transplant about eight years ago. We knew each other at the Parks Department before he left to hone a craft that is also his passion: cooking. He’s been conjuring up dishes with Emeril for years now, and introducing neophytes to superb, off-the-beaten track meals in and around New Orleans for as long. I can’t recommend highly enough, thanks to him, The Longbranch in Abita Springs, just north of Lake Pontchartrain. And, if I lived in New Orleans, the Dellachaise would be my steady haunt and I’d be proud to have the stool next to his.

Philip, who would still be a mensch and a hochem even if he didn’t look like he was plucked from Central Casting for the role, arrived a week before Katrina hit in order to help run the Jewish studies program at Tulane. Both Philip and Alain found themselves driven from their adopted city for several weeks after the storms. Both have returned.

Juliet, who along with Philip has been the reason for most of my comfort as my hosts, shifted from raising money for important civic causes in New York to doing the same in a place that’s not half the city it used to be, at least by the numbers.

Olivia is a former classmate who helped get the High Line off the ground, as it were, in New York. Now she’s putting her knowledge and chutzpah to work on exploring the thicket of urban planning challenges confronting a city that is contemplating how or whether to rebuild entire square miles of communities.

I’ve known Paul since high school. And, as long as I’ve known him he has focused on environmental issues in one form or another. He left work as an attorney for the Federal government in order to lobby and advocate for the replenishment of the freshwater wetlands at Louisiana’s threshold on the Gulf. These critical ecosystems may be more instrumental in buffering southern Louisiana from hurricane storm surges than any levee ever could be. A whole other entry could be written about how fragile these wetlands are, how quickly they’re disappearing, and how relatively easily they could be restored for manifold benefits.

Michael is a friend and former colleague who was working on small business assistance issues in New York. He’s now doing it for the whole of the state of Louisiana. With a skeleton staff and a network of community-based organizations, he’s endeavoring to deliver aid to thousands of small businesses in the southern parishes of the state.

And I had the great good fortune of being introduced to Robin briefly a year ago back in New York. She has since made a home in New Orleans running a community-based organization focused on workforce and small business development. Our mutual acquaintance reminded me of the connection before I left for New Orleans—and it made for a singularly rewarding experience as a result.

I spent a week with her team reviewing small businesspeople’s applications for state aid to help them get their livelihoods back in order, and to help to return New Orleans and the southern parishes’ neighborhoods and towns to some semblance of order. It was not sexy work. Robin and her team had spent the previous several weeks directly visiting business owners in their communities to sign them up for the assistance. With every intention to be fair and accountable, the grant process requires a good deal of documentation of the affected businesses’ status and their financial affairs in order to be considered. Many applicants had their files and papers swept away in a torrent or disintegrated by mold and mildew after weeks of sitting in flood waters and the sticky, torrid weeks the followed.

Many applications were taken with incomplete documentation while business folks looked for alternative ways to corroborate their plights. A lot of what I spent my time doing was slowly, iteratively reaching out to those folks, checking on how they were doing collecting information from other sources, strategizing on creative but appropriate ways to otherwise document claims, and sometimes just listening to what they were going through. As I’ve mentioned before here, I was so often floored and inspired by the tenacity and resilience of a goodly number of these hardy folks who were already back on their feet. But almost as frequently, I heard from folks who lost everything, still had nothing, and were looking for some way to get a toehold to begin building a business again. A few hundred dollars for a new stove in a juke joint in Plaquemines. A thousand dollars to buy a few new steam cleaning vacuums for a business with no shortage of potential customers now in Metarie. Grant funding to pay off a loan to repair a fishing boat in Venice and substitute the shame of a handout for the shame of debt.

Robin was the glue that held a small but diligent team together. Two people in particular were really something to see.

From the desk where I sat for a week, I listened to a young woman named Linda who followed up with every applicant whose file was incomplete and who mainly spoke Vietnamese. These were business owners from the Vietnamese enclave of Village de l’Est in eastern New Orleans, or Vietnamese fishermen and –women from the southern parishes of Plaquemines and St. Bernard. Hour after hour, she dialed numbers, tried to find the right person to speak to about the application, and then patiently asked for the same information in their native tongue in a variety of permutations: tax forms, receipts from fish sold at the docks, proof of paid employees. Sometimes teen-aged children were the conduits Linda worked through to get their parents to understand what was needed and how quickly it must be submitted. Hours of plaintive requests in Vietnamese were peppered with English-only terms like “ten-forty” or “ten-ninety-nine” or “trip tickets”. I’ve heard that the organization I was working with wound up submitting over 700 completed applications for aid to the State of Louisiana on behalf of small businesses. The Vietnamese business community owes no small debt of gratitude to Linda for helping to make sense out of the forms and hurdles they had to contend with to get help.

Even more remarkable is Jeremy.

Jeremy is perhaps the most unassuming, go-along get-along guy I’ve ever met. He’s a fellow Wagner graduate whom I had not met before arriving in New Orleans. Nothing seems to bother him and, when it does, it doesn’t seem to for long. In the span of just a few months, this lanky Texan who made his way to New Orleans via New York (Sunnyside!), became perhaps the least likely but most authoritative representative of the Vietnamese fishing boat crews in the southern parishes. So well did he know many of the fishermen’s cases that he would often overhear Linda speaking to a particular applicant over the phone, remember the sticking point from when he was down in their far-flung fishing community weeks before taking the application originally, ask Linda for the phone and, in a loud and enunciated voice say things like “Hi, it’s Jeremy. Jer-e-meee. You know, the tall guy. The tall white guy. Jer-e-mee…” And, sure enough more times than not, there was eventual recognition on their part. Suddenly they remembered all the things that Jeremy had spoken to them about while he was down in Venice or Buras or Pointe a la Hache and then Linda was able to quickly follow up with them. Robin says that no one knows the Vietnamese fishing community better than Jeremy at this point. She told me stories of how he’s been invited out on week-long fishing trips by many of them (which he’s graciously offered to let me join in on in August). In one remarkable conversation which I will not soon forget, Jeremy heard Linda struggling with one applicant on the phone as they strategized about how to get 20 or 30 pages of documentation to our office in a day or so from 70 miles away in the trafficlight-watertower whistlestop of a town that is Boothville, LA. He took the phone from her, cheerfully reminded the applicant who he was and, after recognition, said “Mr. Lee’s Market has a fax machine… Mr. Lee’s Market… You know where it is?... Mr. Lee’s… You know: go to the end of the long road, make a left, then another… Mr. Lee’s… He has a fax machine there he’ll let you use. OK, great! Good luck!” And that was just one of several like that.

* * * * *

When I first arrived in New Orleans, I went straight to a friend’s office in government. There was a conference room that was wired with a few rows of phones that had clearly been installed hastily post-Katrina and were still in use. Wires came up over the edges of desks in a way that bespoke the system being slapped together quickly. The phones themselves were older-fashioned push-button tone phones of the type you might have had in your house 20 years ago, before cordlesses and solid-state electronic systems. I was waiting for Barney Miller to stick his head into the room. It was eerily reminiscent of many New York City offices in the weeks after 9/11. I sat down in New Orleans at one of these phones and just the sound of the touchtone buttons reminded me of the old phones that we had to make do with for a few months before our systems were replaced in 2001 after the World Trade Center fell. My heart raced a little bit to remember what it was like to be set back a few decades technologically, how humbling it was more than 5 years ago, and how real all this actually is in New Orleans 18 months on.

Even the hallways in the building I finally wound up working in had that institutional ammonia-marble-glazed cinderblock smell of an old school or government building. It reminded me of NYC’s Public Health Laboratories building that my agency retreated to when we were displaced from Lower Manhattan. And the acrid smell of toner burned onto paper from copying machines. I don’t know why, but we used so many damn copiers after 9/11—more than I felt like we ever did before—and damned if this place didn’t smell exactly like that. Smells are powerful memory joggers. My throat tightened a little and my peripheral vision blurred. It smelled like an emergency to me in New Orleans.