Natalie Godwin
It’s hard to believe it has been three years since Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst disasters in our nation, hit New Orleans. I recently visited the Big Easy for this year’s Essence Music Festival during a media trip sponsored by General Motors. Like thousands of others, I enjoyed the music, the food and the ambiance of New Orleans, a city that is making a huge comeback – everywhere, that is, except the Lower Ninth Ward.

I wrote my graduate thesis on FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina and wanted to see the area for myself. Like so many, my conscience told me to go to New Orleans and help, but I never did. Somehow graduate school, work and the endless hours spent in Los Angeles traffic got in the way.

When I learned I was going to New Orleans, a trip to the Ninth Ward was a top priority. It was higher than a walk along Bourbon Street — too many drunken people fighting over beads. Or a tasty beignet from Café Du Monde — it is so not on my diet.

I needed to take a group of journalists for a ride in the 2009 Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid, so we headed to see the Lower Ninth Ward. The journalists, a group of women writing for magazines, non-profit organizations and auto publications, loved the vehicle, but were shocked at an area forgotten.

The Lower Nine received national notoriety after the storm as one of the areas hardest hit by the levee failure. Movie director Spike Lee spent a year in New Orleans filming the four-hour HBO documentary, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.” Most of the storm’s victims are African American, but Lee did not make a racial polemic.

Before the levees, separating Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, were breached and the city filled like a bathtub, the Lower Ninth Ward was a working class community, a group of neighborhoods that families called home for generations. Now it’s full of empty lots and abandoned houses torn apart and turned upside down. About a football field away from those levees, I stood on a slab of concrete; from the tile we could tell it was once a family’s kitchen. Less than 10 percent of the population from the area has returned.

However, one family will always call the Lower Nine home. During our tour we met Robert Green. A tax accountant, he and his family are still living in two FEMA trailers. In the hours before Katrina came ashore, a barge crashed through a cement floodwall and sent 20 feet of water pouring into his neighborhood. The floodwaters swept the Green’s one-story blue home off its foundation. It floated several blocks while family members huddled together on the roof. Green’s 3-year-old granddaughter slipped into the water and drowned; his 73-year-old mother suffering with Parkinson’s disease, died on the roof. Green still chokes up as he talks about leaving her there. Neighbors with a small boat carried the rest of the family to safety. It took him almost a year to find their bodies for a proper burial.

Many stories have been written about Robert Green. But it’s different when you meet someone and hear their story. A memorial outside of those famous toxic FEMA trailers pulls you into his life. He told us he’s waiting to move into his new home built by actor Brad Pitt and his Make It Right Foundation. The project is building affordable and environmentally friendly homes in the Lower Nine. Green and his family will live about ten blocks from the Musician’s Village, a row of colorful houses being rebuilt by jazz artists Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr.

I left New Orleans changed by his story.

Earlier, the journalists and I planned to visit one of my favorite boutiques located in the heart of the French Quarter. We envisioned walking down the street like we were the ladies from “Sex and the City” with fabulous new outfits. But after talking with Robert, shopping just didn’t feel right.

In New Orleans, where one-third of the Black residents lived in poverty before Katrina, odds are high that most will not return, resulting in a significant shift in the city’s demographics. This major shift has political, social and economic implications. Therefore, the issue of race and class cannot go unexplored. We can’t forget seeing rapper Kanye West declare that President George W. Bush doesn’t care about Black people. West’s claim about Bush was a critical judgment about the failure of all levels of government, which he represents. It should also be clear that although the president may not have had racial intent, his actions had racial consequences. It cannot go unnoticed that the majority of the victims of the hurricane are Black and poor.

Natives of New Orleans have a special way of dancing, talking and eating. But I fear the rich jazz culture, which allures many to the Big Easy has hit a sour note. After Katrina, one of the main questions becomes, will many of the people that form the heartbeat of New Orleans’ unique culture return?

Whenever a large segment of aa population is displaced, the loss of contextual culture can be profound. The reconstruction process must include the input and the voice of the African American community to include the city’s rich cultural gumbo of ethnic identities. In order to sustain the city’s rich cultural heritage, silence is not an option.

Natalie Godwin manages broadcast communications for General Motors at the global headquarters in Detroit.