CITY OF GHOSTS
by Malik Isasis


I was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana until about the age of 17 years old, but often found myself in New Orleans as a child when my mother would frantically wake my little brother and me in the middle of the night. Her eyes were swollen, her lips busted. My stepfather had beaten the shit out of her again in a violent rage. Like many times before, she planned her escape when he fell asleep. We hopped the Greyhound to New Orleans, where my aunt lived. Willa-Mae was her name.

New Orleans is partitioned into 17 Wards, or voting districts. Willa-Mae lived in the most infamous one: the 9th Ward, in a dilapidated shotgun house with her husband and their three children. A shotgun house is an extremely narrow house without hallways. One can see the backdoor from the front. My aunt took my mother in, every time, regardless of the emotional and financial strain on her own family. Before Aunt Willa-Mae, a man named Buddy lived in the house. I remember Buddy; he had snow-white curly hair and deep chocolate skin, a beautiful man. Buddy had an incredible addiction to heroin and was killed when a couple of men used an empty syringe and shot air into his vein when he didn’t pay a debt owed.

One of my first nights at the house, my cousins told me that Buddy haunted the house. At 8 years old, it didn’t take much to excite my imagination. That night, sho’nuff, I heard footsteps, all night, pacing back and forth on the wooden floors.

Along with a real or imagined ghost, were roaches. Aunt Willa-Mae’s house was plagued with roaches. If you opened the cabinets, a roach would fall into your glass or food. We use to sleep with cotton balls in our ears for fear that they would crawl in and nest in our brains. Truth be told, I hated staying with Aunt Willa-Mae and I hated New Orleans. Notorious for its oppressive poverty, and cruel violence, the 9th Ward during the 80s, was likened to the 80s war-torn Beirut. As a matter of fact, we did call it Little Beirut after the crack-cocaine epidemic in the mid-to-late 80s, possessed it like the devil and suffocated its residents with unimaginable misery and suffering. The 9th Ward had long ago stopped meaning its original definition as an administrative district of the City, but had fully come to represent another definition: a section of a prison.

Young adults and boys had a distorted view of manhood, a hyper vigilance and a self-hatred that was explosive. If any aspect of their emasculated manhood was called into questioned, there was a real possibility of finding death. Admittedly, I was a coward and stayed inside with the roaches; my little brother on the other hand, was not. He often got into fights—losing most of them (bless his heart). He would come home weeping. Our mother would yell at me for not defending him. Why would I volunteer for a beat down? That didn’t make much sense.
I pleaded, still she threatened to “whoop my ass” if I didn’t protect my brother.

I was relieved when we moved back to Baton Rouge. Some months later, the abuse cycle would repeat, and we would find ourselves in New Orleans, again.

After a while my mother had evolved out of the abusive cycle, abandoning the gypsy way of life and giving us time to settle and become rooted.

In 1990 I was 17 years old. By then, Baton Rouge had caught up with New Orleans in its violence. I had witnessed a great deal of violence and had lost three friends who’d succumb to gun shot violence; there were cousins, uncles, and aunts who’d traded in their dreams for the temporary refuge that heroin and crack-cocaine provided. I managed to graduate high school and join the military.

My mother was killed in a car accident in 1992, and several months later, my stepfather died of a heart attack. My stepfather and I had a complicated relationship; as a young adult he tried hard to build a relationship with me, often rewriting history as I remembered it. I wasn’t interested in a relationship with him. The memories of his hostility toward us were too strong to forget and too painful to forgive. However, I was deeply heart broken when hearing of his sudden death of a major thrombosis. It meant that we could never be friends; all those opportunities were buried with him. If my mother was able to forgive him, I should too.

It would be ten years before I would return to New Orleans, a city I both loved and loathed, equally. In 2002 I spent a month in New Orleans and with much distance between us, I was able to love it much more than I hated it. I had loved it still, in spite of it being stuck in a perpetual loop of oppression, poverty and unbelievable violence.

As Katrina visited the shores of the Gulf Coast, I sat in my Seattle apartment and watched Katrina impregnate Lake Ponchitrain, resulting in a birth of destruction never seen in American history. After seeing the destruction, it was time for me to return home, and I did.

The faces.

They were all like mine, thousands of them, all destitute by an American caste system. They were my brothers. My sisters. My family. Like a bed-ridden, infirmed old man who hasn’t been turned in months, America was about to see the bed soars of its legacy. Hurricane Katrina pulled back the sheets and rolled America onto its side for the world to see its open wounds, and the world stood aghast. The media contorted itself in all directions to avoid the most obvious fact: race. The media referred to them as refugees, devaluing the victims of the disaster, their citizenship. Not only was racial and economic stratification revealed, but also the frightening incompetence of the President and his Administration, an incompetence that was a bitter pill for Americans to swallow.

A year and some months have pasts, since President Bush stated during a photo op:

"We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch.” – President Bush

Bush did not ask the corporations that will rebuild New Orleans to pay livable wages; instead he suspended a 74 year-old law The Davis-Bacon Act that requires companies using Federal funds to pay livable wages in the area; Affirmative Action, Environmental laws were also suspended in the Gulf region so that private corporations can come in and rape the citizenry.

A great American city has died and Bush and his Administration and the Congress has pissed on the grave of New Orleans by allocating billions, only to be laundered and squandered by corporations like Halliburton. The same team that brought you the Iraq War and Iraq Occupation, now is responsible for saving an American city—both if you haven’t notice, has gone to hell in a hand basket.

The President’s shallow and insincere production exposed his method for those willing to pay attention: it’s not what you do; it’s what you say. When he left, so did the supplies and convoy…so did the corporate media.



Source:
CorpWatch, “US: Katrina Work Goes to Officials who led Iraq Effort” Entous, Adam. October 2005.
Edsall B., Thomas. “Bush Suspends Pay Act in Areas Hit by Storm” Washington Post, September 2005.
More on The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931.
Janofsky, Micahel. “Bill Would Let E.P.A Relax Rules for Cleanup” New York Times. September 2005.
National Organization for Women. “The Origins of Affirmative Action” Sykes, Marquita. August 1998.

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