Notes on the Emptying of a City

by Ashley Hunt

Public Speaker 1, “Right to Return” Rally, Congo Square

[Drumming]Big Chief!
When will he come back?
Ba ya ya!
[Response] Ba ya ya!
[Drumming]
No wind, no rain, no hurricane, can stop me from coming back home!
[Scream]
[Drumming]
I’m the Big Chief!
And it won’t be long
before the people
come back home!
[Response] That’s what I’m talkin’ about…
[Response] Ba ya ya!
[Scream]
Who they talkin’ ’bout?
It won’t be long.
It won’t be long…

I.

The first position I will describe is the position of the storyteller. That’s me. It’s important to remember that I am someone writing this story, real or not, and whether I admit it along the way, I see things in a peculiar manner, which will bleed into, color, and frame all the facts and events I offer here as true.

Dear reader: it is important you trust me enough to follow my thoughts, but mistrust me enough to question them. So who am I to talk about New Orleans? Suffice to say that I have been witness to some things. I witnessed what we all witnessed through satellite transmissions as dirty water filled a drowning city, when a friend wrote me in an email: “Where are the fucking helicopters?!!!”

I also witnessed things that few others, or no one but me, saw, in and around the city as its streets began to dry and crack with heat. I pointed a camera down boulevards, into abandoned houses, emptied jail cells, shattered store fronts, and up to a cynical, quiet blue sky. I felt a whispering rumble of ghosts. I pointed a microphone down at brittle brown grass that had been suffocated and poisoned and ran my shoe through it to produce a crackling in my headphones that I’d never heard from grass.

I saw a lack of things, that deceptive nothingness which, if you look and listen too long, reveals things performing everywhere, the way a colony of ants comes into focus on what you’d thought was a motionless ground. I witnessed things as did others, and witnesses need to speak, witnesses need audience. And like anyone else, my testimony is as much for my own sake in speaking it as it is for you to hear it. So forgive my mistakes, stumbles, and indulgences, but like snapshots confirm a life, prove that you were there, affecting things and alive in time, our stories prove we matter. To recall is to bear witness to our selves, and to suggest a shape to the world as it uniquely touches a “me” or an “I.” It is how, between those of us who share language and space, a record is built, and how we make demands so that we won’t be abandoned. It is how we come to agreement about what hurts in the world, what pleases, what is just, and what is worth taking risks for. Losing our language for justice permits justice to mutate into a violence that calls itself justice.

This is what brings you to this page now. I was asked to go to New Orleans and witness things with a camera. These are parts of what I remember or bits I have in images or soundtrack—people telling stories, what others saw, stories of speech permitted and speech proscribed and speech fallen among debris in the streets, speech that carries force and speech that has none. These are glimpses of things that shape, misshape, permit, forbid, and yet demand speech as if one’s life depended upon it.

Public Speaker 2, “Right to Return” Rally, Congo Square

I’m so glad we’re all here today, for truly, it is a historic day, and Assalaamu Alaikum. And what I want to say is this: I come from the ranks for the homeless before the hurricane was here. There was seven thousand of us on the streets, homeless, and couldn’t get no consideration whatsoever from this city government, the mayor, or nobody. Now, it’s seventy thousand, and this is what I want to tell! There’s no use in us running to the mayor, there’s no use in us running to Washington, these people already know and saw everything that happened better than what we saw it! I said it all through the hurricane, and let me tell you—you see this FEMA thing, and all these things, all these changes they taking us through, they’re not gonna look out for us, they’re not gonna do the right thing, we got children out there! People got mothers and daughters and brothers and sisters and they got to come home. Unless we, as a race of people, first of all as a race of black people come together and do it for ourselves, we got to take this city by any means necessary! These people are wrong, the system is wrong! They did us an injust, and the whole world sees that! Ain’t no use in to keep on beggin’ ’em—we got to do this for ourselves. And the time is now! The day is now! You hear me? We got to go down in history today, no longer we gonna be beggin’ ’em—every day you got to run up to them and tell them what kind of situation you done went through, when they got all this international TV seeing everyday what we been through. We been misused here. And we gonna continually be misused if we gonna have to run to them and beg to them, and every day it’s a different plan. Bring these children back here! Bring these people back here! You understand? We’ll make it work! We’ll make it work! Thank you.

II.

I am being flown to New Orleans with my video equipment in order to collect stories of what happened at the Orleans Parish Prison during Hurricane Katrina, where it has been reported (and officially denied) that prisoners were left to drown in their cells. My trip is paid for by an activist organization, but I don’t work for them or even have a contract to produce something per se, so they won’t circumscribe what I’ll have to say. Meaning, their organizational point of view doesn’t creep into my own. Or, what I mean to say is that I’m trustworthy. That is, I’ll still be independent. I guess I feel the need to justify what I might be beholden to. Honestly, I’m not a journalist and have no desire to be. You can call me a journalist, though, a documentarian or an activist—I’ll use whatever title gets me in. Between you and me, I’ll say I’m an artist, because, however imperfect, it is the most open position I know to speak from, the only one allowed access to the irrational and impractical, and the one that can dig into the subjectivity of the author rather than having to erase it. I don’t know who is free of institutional liabilities or the hidden frames through which we speak, and I think there’s something interesting in polluting one’s voice with the urgencies and polyvocality of organizations accountable to communities of people who have more knowledge than I alone can have. I mean, it’s one thing to fight for my own sovereign free speech, but it’s another to be too arrogant to hear other voices or to let other voices grow even louder than my own. Who am I anyways? This hurricane didn’t happen to me. This work won’t be for me or for any other people it didn’t happen to. I may have lost New Orleans, but I haven’t lost my home. My audience won’t be permitted to just consume this greedily like cable news between commercials, they will be asked to leave something of value behind, some innocence and action. I don’t know where I’m staying when I land; I have a contact to call and will drive a rental car from the reopened airport to meet her.

Fragment

“Do you need me to bring anything to the house?”
“I guess if you want to get some water, we’ll need water.”

Press Conference 1, Orleans Parish Prison: A Declaration of Charges

We recently filed two declarations in Federal Court, from two former inmates there, Raphael Schwartz and Guantonio Williams. Mr. Schwartz was sprayed with mace and abandoned by officers in a locked cell with seven other prisoners. They remained in this cell without food, without water, without light, without ventilation for three days…. They were rescued by a deputy, who told them that she found three dead bodies in the jail as she was searching for survivors. We believe there’re scores more bodies that were left in this jail, but we can’t get access.

Architecture 1

With no inhabitants to be seen as you enter the city, you try to learn about the storm by reading the architecture. It’s not so conscious at first, but you notice patterns. Take, for example, the soft grey stain drawn at eye level across all buildings. You realize this was the height at which flood water had stood, and with this the architecture begins to speak. It tells you that for close to a week, the perspective of this city had been organized by these lines, watery trajectories sent down each street toward a vanishing point set high above ground, making houses and buildings look as if they’ve been smashed ten feet into the ground. Some lines run higher and others run lower, and in a few neighborhoods there are no lines at all, and since you know the city you figure out that the vulnerability of high ground and low ground correspond to the race and class composition of neighborhoods—in other words, to history.

Collective Speech 1, “Right to Return” Rally, Congo Square: A Demonstration of Political Presence

[Drumming]
What are we gonna do today? Take it back! Now you!
[Points]
[Call] What are we gonna do today?
[Response] Take it back!
[Call] What are we gonna do today?
[Response] Take it back!
[Call] What are we gonna do today?
[Response] Take it back! Take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back, take it back…
[Cut]

Architecture 2

Next you are struck by a signature repeated, scrawled onto every house, apartment, garage, and shack. A red “X” with varying combinations of letters in each elbow of the X—the top, bottom, right, and left. Each door is marked, encrypted with this spray-paint stigma. They are diagrams to be read by someone who is not you, but the letters soon come to form acronyms (NOPD, LANG, USMC), and the numbers transform into exiled inhabitants and body counts. They are traces, the territorial cataloguing of an unmanageable space—an evacuation, a manhunt, a quarantine. It was not like the quarantine procedures of the plague stricken European city described by one philosopher as the beginnings of modern discipline, it was this same crossing of a private doorway and its according inventory mark, the same practice of ordering, counting, and knowing that allows a space to be read from a surveilling point of view. It is somehow the same moment in time, that moment when everything stops and the divisions of historical difference fall away to reveal a continuum. A circular space, tagged by the same marks, drips and scratches of power onto all things it has the vision to see.

Press Conference 2, Orleans Parish Prison: Demands of Accountability

Today, several organizations, Critical Resistance, Friends and Family of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, Southern Center for Human Rights, The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Committee, The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, The ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and survivors of Hurricane Katrina, have come together to bring attention to the neglect and abuse of prisoners that occurred during Hurricane Katrina and in its aftermath. Among the thousands of people left to rising flood waters with no water or food were hundreds of Orleans Parish prisoners locked in jail cells with no way out. Prison guards and officials simply walked away from flooding jail cells that housed six thousand people. Despite knowing a levee break would put everyone in the jails in danger, there was no evacuation plan. Prisoners were trapped for as long as four days in sewage tainted water up to their chests, without food and water. Prisoners were forced to break windows to leap out, or tie sheets together to use as a ladder to escape. Some set fires to pieces of clothing to signal the need for help to helicopters above, and there are now reports of prisoners being abused at one of the prisons they were transferred to, Jena. As such, we demand an independent investigation of the evacuation of Orleans Parish Prison. We also demand amnesty for those who were arrested for finding food and trying to help themselves in the aftermath of Katrina, and also for those whose cases are in legal limbo.

Camera Frames

A press conference doesn’t like to point to its origins. But its construction is written throughout any image of one you see. It requires only a small tweak of a camera’s frame or a twist of how the event is explained in order to render that construction legible. The field reporter never explains to the anchor in the studio the email they’d received, announcing that someone worthy of news attention would make a statement worthy of news attention. Nor would they explain how they decide what is and isn’t worthy of news attention. It’s just “news.” Just like that. Or it’s “not news,” and then it doesn’t exist. They will never mention the public relations people who organized the press conference, the negotiation of its staging and location, how they’d calculated its attendance, or decided which press to target and which to avoid. Most of all, none of them will ever reveal the processes through which a multiplicity of thoughts, memories, traumas, and emotions are wrestled into speech, then collected and parsed into statements, evaluated for their political weight, then edited finally into formal claims, demands and declarations.

From an Interview with a Community Organizer outside the Balcony Bar, Uptown

The first thing [at the shelters], I ran into a grandmother who said, “I’m hoping you can help me to find my grandson.” And I was like, “Okay, where was he?” And she said, “Well, we finally made it out of where we lived, it was like Tuesday morning or whatever, and we sat on the highway on that freeway waiting for folks to come with like, six porta-potties for the growing number, hundreds and then thousands of people who were waiting there. The buses kept coming, and no one knew why or why not people were getting on them or not, there was no order to it at all, there was no food, there was no water. After three days of sitting there, the bus finally pulls up and they tell us in our group we can get on. Me and my fourteen-year-old grandson start getting on the bus and my grandson pushes somebody to get closer to me. And the police officers pull him off the bus and handcuff him, and that was the last time I saw him, I was driving away on the bus while the cops had him, outside.

Public Speaker 3, “Right to Return” Rally, Congo Square

Good morning.

[Response] Good morning.

I come today with an, uh, heavy heart. Like the gentleman said, we really have been used and abused. It hasn’t really hit us ’til Katrina happened, but we have always been abused here, as Americans. You know, when they look at us as refugees, you know? Nobody want a really bring that to the forefront, ’cause that’s how we were looked at…. It was a manmade thing. It’s a manmade thing! And we, as a people, has to learn how to identify what is happening here now. You know the mayor know. He was going to the table with the big officials. They know what was being planned. When you look at ’em they first thought about a body bag. You remember? They threw a body bag out there to us. Well, [the officials are saying] “we got ’em now, we got New Orleans for ourself, ’cause we have plans to make New Orleans a dirty-girty town.” But what they forgot, our old ancestors died for this, died for us to be here. You know I work, I’m a single parent, I work, I raised six kids, I work hard I work two jobs, and I do believe 3300 belong to me. By all rights. I don’t intend to give it up. You know and I see the mayor and everybody, and they got their crony here already takin’ housing…. And people that is still out of town, have no say in the matter, and our officials is lettin’ this happen, because they part of the problem. They part of the problem and we need to make sure, election time, excuse me elderly people I’m an elderly lady too, I’m sixty-five years old, but we get them asses outta here! We get ’em outta here! We cannot, we cannot continue to be abused in such a manner, in writing us off as naïve dumb stupid people. You know, if we don’t speak up for ourselves—today!—you see all these people out here today? Please don’t let this just happen today. We gotta make it a continuing thing. You know I didn’t want to get up here because my heart is heavy, I’m a mother, I’m the victim of multiple homicides in this city that the officials refuse to address. I just lost my baby son August the sixth, who had been overseas and put eighteen years in the military and he came here and he was murdered. I haven’t had the chance to really address that. And when I feel the abuse of the officials, you know, it makes me…. I’m not easy to cry, people, but I’m so damn angry. I’m so damn angry. How much you want us to do? How much you gonna take from us? If we supposed to sit back idly?

III.

At night the city is dead but for the red and blue lights swirling from the tops of countless police cars sweeping block to block, enforcing but mostly witnessing their curfew in rectangular patterns, smearing white flood light across houses. Police lights were the only source of color. Martial law has a particular smell you know, and the emptying of a city isn’t at all as freeing as one might think. It stunk throughout with the heaviness of a power that had no witnesses and no contracts to regard—all rules and protections forged over centuries of bloody struggle are suspended. I have a roommate, a young activist with guts enough to guard this house of an elderly activist on a deserted street. She said poor communities the world over feel the same as this place every day: rules suspended, no laws that protect you, no witnesses to step forward unless you want to become a suspect too. You can shout, but never in a way that will force power to listen. You are the exception, placed outside of law, and you didn’t need a disaster like this to create it. When the cop cars finally thin out late into the night, you step out onto the stoop and survey this desert, staring up at the stars so used to hiding from this city.

From an Interview with a Community Organizer on His Front Porch, Algiers Neighborhood

I would say from the time the levee broke, black men was demonized, black people was demonized, in particular black men. They was all classified as looters. Some of them was doing rescue, but they still were classified as looters. If you walked up into Jefferson Parish you was liable to be shot if you was from Orleans Parish. That’s how distinctive it was. There was a curfew that only applied to blacks. If you was white you was able to break the curfew, and maybe get a warning. But if you was black you were either shot or beaten down. I couldn’t walk up on the police here. If I got as close as I am to you, the weapons was drawn on me, that’s the closest I was able to get to a person.

Story without Footage, Ursuline Street, Mid-City

The cops didn’t see us pull up across the street or they might have acted differently. The presumption was that there was no one, no one on the street to see and no one in the houses to watch out their windows. Once you got outside of the French Quarter where the contractors and bureaucrats were hosted in tourist accommodations, the city was deserted. The streets were lined with a thin layer of mineral and dirt and the sky this day had a haze that colored everything green. Where residents could afford to return to their homes, duck-taped refrigerators and chunks of moldy drywall already lined the sidewalks. Nothing but corroded flood debris lined our block, so the cops presumed it to be empty. Or maybe it didn’t matter to them. Two portly white cops, one tall and one not so tall, had parked their car at a hurried angle half up the sidewalk, cutting off the pathway of a thin, middle-aged black man, a man I will refer to here as the “suspect.” Actually, I will call him the “citizen.” The citizen looked confused and cautious, as if trying to figure out how to not be what these cops suspected. We were too far away to hear what was being said, perhaps he was afraid of making one of those fatal movements you hear about, ones which later get written up as “deadly.” There was no audience but these cops standing in his way, staring. As if he was in charge. They were waiting for him to do the wrong thing. I’d seen this before: their silence is aggressive: a prompt, an invitation, so even if you’re not what they think, they frustrate you slowly into doing something—anything—arrestable. The citizen pointed to the ground and turned out his palms as if to account for his being out on a street in the middle of the day. The curfew didn’t say you couldn’t be on the street during the day, but the cops and military were to be out catching looters. Maybe something in the cops’ eyes—or maybe in their orders—made the citizen into one such looter. I heard a scream. I guess I’d gotten distracted and looking back, could not tell why the citizen had screamed, and all three were still, the same as before but for the stress growing on the citizen’s face and the stiffness in his body. Again the scream, and this time I matched it not to the citizen but to the shorter cop, who was waving his arms and leaping like a tap dancer and screeching like a crow. His partner seemed not to notice, staring clinically at the citizen as if it was just the two of them, and as suddenly as the screaming had begun it stopped. One cop cocked his head with curiosity and the other with impatience. Whatever could this suspect be reacting to, be so paralyzed by? Had he seen a ghost? Had he gone mad during the flood? Is that why he couldn’t speak? Or was he hiding something, acting suspicious? The tall cop seemed to ask, “Are you gonna answer my question or not?,” and the citizen’s mouth jittered, stuttering as did his gestures, pointing over his shoulder and counting steps as if to account for this moment in his life. Still, no reaction from the cops, composed, rational, just good civil servants waiting for his response. Finally, the citizen seemed about to say something when again the scream—a shrill “cah” and a leap, as the taller cop joined in with the hooting of an owl, arms in the air and hopping madly, performing a chaos of their own, letting something out of themselves to a captive audience who might crack under pressure. No witnesses, his incrimination their treatment: the vindication of the madness they themselves had been driven to. A criminal was the evidence they needed to verify that they were in fact the law, the rational, the orderly, the civilized. They stopped, nothing had happened: clearly it was the citizen who was crazy.

Architecture 3

In the worst-hit areas, houses were broken open like lobster shells. Their emptiness was not that of the back lot of a movie set, where a street of buildings is revealed to be only façades without interiors, without even the gesture of use or memory. This was a wholly other emptiness, the emptiness that is itself a presence—residues of memories you cannot know because they died with their owners. It is a haunting, not by the character of the memories left, but by you, in your realization of their erasure and the tragic indifference of the architecture left behind.

Collective Speech 2, Call and Response, Rampart Street, Tremé Community

[Up-tempo second-line music, a handheld image of feet marching rhythmically on grey-blue asphalt; horns scream upwards and drop into silence, leaving only percussion: a snare drum with cymbals, hands clapping with feet stepping, punctuated by syncopated burps of tuba as a man’s voice begins to shout]

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home

[Call] NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Response] No place like home