Losses That Can’t Be Overcome

SECOND IN A SERIES: (Click here to read Part I)

“Yet the history of my family, like that of all black Southerners, is a history of dispossession. We loved the land and worked the land, but we never owned it; and even if we bought land, as my great-grandfather did after the Civil War, it was always in danger of being taken away, as his was, during the period following Reconstruction.” – Alice Walker

Two weeks ago I sat with Reverend Mildred Alcorn on her red couch in a small rental unit on Royal Street in the Lower 9th Ward, only blocks from her former home. Before the storm, the now 58-year-old woman combined ministry with her work as the director of a program of last resort for homeless women they helped transition to employment and safe housing.

“We were their last hope. Failure was not an option,” she recalled.

As Alcorn reflected on the fates of the significant people in her pre-storm social network — the sisters, nephews, god-children, friends, and church members who all lived within a six-block radius before Katrina — she paused to admit that she still tears up every two to three days as she worries about how they are coping in distant cities. She misses their companionship achingly. “Some losses can’t be overcome,” she gently chides me, the co-editor of Overcoming Katrina.

Repeatedly over five years, I have witnessed the pain of separation. It is palpable in the intense hugs and unbidden tears of embrace when someone loved by an entire congregation makes it home for a rare visit. It was there again this morning, Aug. 29, 2010, when Pastor Cotton announced from the pulpit that the entire church was going to Greensboro, N.C. the fourth Sunday in September to visit Ms. Pearl. She has been in a nursing home in North Carolina since Katrina. Our informant, Ms. Pearl’s niece, reported that her aunt smiled for the first time in three months when Cotton visited her a few weeks ago. Our hearts are heavy at the injustice of not being able to bring her comfort in her old age as she did for us as we were coming of age, raising our own children, and finding our way in a world filled with obstacles, naysayers, and distractions. She always had a bowl of steaming hot gumbo or red beans and rice for us when we passed by. Ms. Pearl listened to our hopes and dreams. She believed in us when we didn’t believe in ourselves. To the outsider, our elderly people may not seem that special, with their love for fried food, occasional missing tooth, pressed but worn clothes, and dated hair styles. But to us, they are national treasures.

Before our eyes, our rigorously independent elders are dying prematurely or being transformed into renters or occupants of a distant relative’s spare bedroom. Our people are losing their land, land that miraculously for southern African-Americans had been in the family for three and four generations. Without their community of young people, pastors, and public-interest lawyers, countless elderly homeowners from the Lower 9th Ward gave up their struggles with the insurance companies for reimbursement because of a handful of missing papers and/or capitulated to Road Home without a fight, trading their homesteads for $5,000. From the vantage point of the Civil District Court, Parish of Orleans, on an almost daily basis, I see the titles to property that had been in the family for generations transferred to strangers with as little as $500 to quiet the tax lien and money enough to pay court filing costs and an attorney’s fees. Meanwhile, the original homeowner may well be depressed and stranded in Houston or Birmingham with no notice that his family plot is in danger of slipping away. Our mayor, Mitch Landrieu, has taken advantage of this five-year marker to let us know that he considers dealing with “blighted” properties one of the most important items on his agenda.

Lost is also a sense of easy optimism about the future, an intuitive expectation that a linear relationship exists between hard work and justice. Sometimes we falter in our hope that justice-loving, fair-minded people from around the world will stand with us as long as it takes to right the wrongs of an unnatural disaster.

D’Ann Penner, Ph.D., is the co-editor, with Keith C. Ferdinand, M.D., of “Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond,” which in 2009 won the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust Leadership in Journalism Award. She is at work updating the counter-narratives of Overcoming Katrina to release them more directly into a public sphere visited primarily by journalists who cover trauma and racism on a daily basis. Currently the Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, Penner is a second-year law student at Loyola University New Orleans and works at the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans.

Her article, “Assault Rifles, Separated Families, and Murder in Their Eyes: Unasked Questions after Hurricane Katrina,” was recently published by Cambridge University’s Journal of American Studies.