Post-Katrina Trauma and Journalists

“A lot of our old people are dying from broken hearts. One of my mama’s best friends off the West Bank, Ms. Frances, never lived outside New Orleans. She went to California and she died. It ain’t about no money. It’s about how you killing our people by separating them from their surroundings, everything they know and love, from the people who took care of them. Those people never even crossed the Mississippi River Bridge before. How you going to send somebody from New Orleans to Boston, Utah, or Alaska? We are a community of people, and we took care of each other.” – Eleanor Thornton

FIRST IN A SERIES: Reflections from an Oral Historian

The mood at Jerusalem Baptist Church’s temporary meeting place in Central City was subdued this morning, August 29, 2010. It wasn’t until the final benedictory prayer that Hurricane Katrina was even acknowledged. In an understated voice, the usually ebullient Pastor Aldon Cotton began his supplication, “God, I still don’t understand. [long pause] I’m just letting you know.” His reference point was so obvious to all of us in attendance that the words “Hurricane Katrina” remained unspoken. Cotton went on to plead for God’s special presence to be felt by the mother, not a church member, of the boy who was murdered on the Danziger Bridge on September 4, 2005, for our members still stranded “abroad”–his euphemism for points of exile beyond New Orleans–and for all of us who lost people as a result of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath and the government’s transporting of our people to random, distant corners of the United States, from which 100,000 have still not returned.

“… in all of Baby [Sugg’s] life … men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.” – Toni Morrison

Those of us who lost people, not only through death, because of government negligence and human greed, dread this day of the year more than any other. It is the one day the media can be counted upon to remember our existence. Month after month of silent neglect is interrupted by an eruption of disturbing images and more misrepresentations about what happened — and is happening, still — to our communities, our people.

How journalists have covered “Katrina” stories, which stories they have chosen to tell, and whose side they have taken has mattered from the beginning. For example, the journalists who focused on the “looting” story helped to shape the government’s decision to focus on “crowd control” rather than on humanitarian, post-disaster relief, thereby slowing down the delivery of food, water and medical supplies to people whose own provisions had been submerged in flood waters caused by the failure of the negligently maintained levees to function properly after the hurricane.

The way disaster stories are framed, initially, lingers with people no matter how overwhelming the evidence against them or the disclaimers quietly buried in fine print weeks after the fact. Telling Katrina stories in an omniscient voice from the vantage point of Uptown or the French Quarter has had long-term consequences for African-Americans. Not only were black survivors herded into the convention center, Superdome, and other similarly under-equipped, over-crowded transfer arenas, but their journey to cities of refuge were made more traumatic by the extraordinarily hostile reactions they encountered along the way. One young Xavier student recalled how her bus of convention center survivors was met by white men with nooses at a rest stop in Arkansas. Her voice was still trembling three weeks later as she recounted their threats and derogatory language. Reverend Charles Duplessis and his extended family were prevented from buying gasoline to complete their trip to Tuskegee, Ala., by not one but three gas station owners in Mississippi. Second-hand trauma was experienced by the people I interviewed as a result of watching the ordeal on television and seeing how the people they knew and love were being slandered as violent, lazy looters. Toussaint Webster, a junior at Morehouse College in 2005, remembers trying to avoid a television set during the week after Katrina as he tried to care for his displaced parents, handle his duties as a residence hall counselor, and stay on top of his studies because all of his friends stopped him or texted him to ask if he knew how negatively the people of New Orleans were being portrayed on television. Talented individuals with impressive resumes and good people skills have reported being turned down for jobs years after the storm because, they believe, of their association with black New Orleans and what it now stands for in the popular mind.

There are several factors that have congealed to make coverage of Katrina, from a non-hegemonic position, difficult for outsiders. First, the long-standing history of racism in the Deep South has led to a reflexive distrust of outsiders, both scholars and journalists. One of the Lower 9^th Warders I interviewed started his interview with the story of his father, a veteran, who raised his boys never to talk to strangers. Channeling his father, he said: “If he were here today, he’d say: ‘I’m not going to talk to her, and I advise you boys not to talk to her either.’” In the wake of Katrina, many of the people I interviewed have developed a particular distrust for what they label as culture or disaster “vultures,” academics and journalists who swooped down on the city’s most vulnerable people for a career-making article, de-contextualized and de-socialized the quotes gleaned from rapid-paced interviews, and then disappeared, wordlessly. A third factor is the Southern Baptist tradition of stoicism that dictates one must never complain in public, but rather divert the questioner to unanticipated positive outcomes. If one reads Leatrice Roberts’s chapter in Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), one might miss entirely her deep and abiding homesickness for New Orleans. Only the last year of follow-up visits preceded by phone calls and letters from the road over three years has won me the privilege of listening to her talk about the things she misses most about New Orleans, the things she finds most oppressive about Dallas, and the way she would trade her much larger, modern house in a suburb of Dallas in a heartbeat to have back her tiny, memory-laden home in Pontchartrain Park.

I am an oral historian. In my profession, we have the luxury of time and the freedom of space to seek context and build relationships with the people who become co-authors of our collective work. Over the past five years, I have listened to over 290 black survivors, some of whom I followed up with formally as many as seven additional times. In September 2009, when I returned to New Orleans for good, I joined Jerusalem, a small community church. The service is intimate, the relationships between brothers and sisters in Christ forged over decades of faithfulness through tribulations and celebrations. Jerusalem is beyond both academia and journalism’s purview. In our makeshift sanctuary, we are at home among people who know and love us. Here we can drop our guard, articulate a portion of the inconsolable loss we feel, and shed our tears without fear or shame.

In this blog series, I will share from my work and experiences some of the things that remain profoundly traumatizing for some African-American communities and are less readily apparent to even the best-intentioned journalist. Then, I will offer some suggestions that could make (coverage of) Katrina’s aftermath less traumatizing.

My comments are drawn from the testimonios of people who were raised in the 9^th Ward or Back of Town (Central City). At the time of the storm, they were also living in the East and Pontchartrain Park. The men and women of Pontchartrain Park and the Lower Ninth Ward were most often homeowners, even though some of the latter may have only had seven to 11 years of inadequate education. The Back-of-Towners were much more likely to be renters. I choose to focus on these narrators because their stories have been least accurately re-told by outsiders and because their communities are still bearing disproportionately heavy traumatic burdens, whether they are home or, more likely, living in isolation abroad.

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.