Leonce Gaiter: Last Mardi Gras in the City of New Orleans

Last Mardi Gras in the City of New Orleans

02/09/05 10:08

My mother was born and raised in New Orleans. My father was raised in Plaquemine, not far away. All of their relatives lived there, and my Frenchified name attests to the city's centrality to my history.

I lived there only for a couple of years, and never learned to like it. I didn't see the New Orleans of the spring break frat boys on Bourbon Street or the quaint old buildings that reeked of southern gentility. I saw black New Orleans, a remnant of a slave past, a ghost of hatreds so rank and rampant that to this day they make you want to vomit.

Black New Orleans was segregated from the white. It was poor. And it too often wore a plantation-style mentality like a shroud. I was an army brat, raised in D.C., Germany, Maryland, Missouri. My parents were unapologetic 60s bourgeois strivers and pert-near psychotic in their insistence on three things: excellence to thwart the race hatred they saw all around them, controlled rage to keep the memories fresh, and arrogance in the knowledge that while the majority with all its power had done its best to dehumanize and belittle us--they had failed.

In New Orleans, I saw something completely different from the attitudes with which I was raised. Too often, blacks seemed to harbor hopelessness--belief that a shotgun in the ghetto was the best they could ever do until rescued from this vale of tears by Jesus. Where was the fight, I asked my young self? Where was the rage? They seemed downright frightened of white people.

But my parents had spared me the south's pre-civil rights viciousness, and offered me tools to counter it when it reared its head. So many of these folks -- exposed to nothing but that city's and that region's unrelenting brutality for generations -- had not been so blessed.

The Washington Post today reported a black woman in New Orleans saying, "To me, it just seems like black people are marked. We have so many troubles and problems."

Such words enrage me almost as much as a government that dares to dream of empire, yet is so incompetent it can't get water from point A to point B. They anger me almost as much as people who gleefully suffers a smirking, so-called leader with the arrogance and gall to lie bald-facedly before a TV camera that no one had anticipated what everyone in America knew--that Katrina could breach levees and flood the city.

Today, Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post quoted Donald Rumsfeld saying about Iraq, "while no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression."

I don't hear a lot of that understanding for the black people of New Orleans. They have no food, no water, but the National Guard has been given orders to shoot to kill if they see someone walking out of a store with a case of sustenance. Well, they're just nigger looters. Not people deserving of compassion. Not people with no food or water; not people with nothing but generations of nothing to lose behind them.

The novel Bourbon Street was my hate letter to that city and all it represents to me about the worst in this country and its past. Instead of a black character desperate for acceptance, or one who destroys himself due to the vagueries of trying to live in the majority's world, I wrote one who dared to learn the majority's lessons, and gain what he wanted even if he had to destroy their world to get it.

Watching thousands of poor, black people march aimlessly around that devastated city while its government all but ignores them, I say "All hail Alex Moreau."