NEW ORLEANS ON THE MEND:                                    EYEWITNESS REPORT FROM THE GULF COAST

By Chris Heneghan (heneghanc@yahoo.com)

[Photographs by Chris Heneghan]

[On August 29, 2005, storm surges from Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the levees separating low-lying New Orleans from neighboring Lake Pontchartrain and flooded 80% of the city. Hardest hit were heavily African-American sections of the city, such as the Ninth Ward, where thousands of homes were submerged. Government plans for these devastated areas have amounted to little more than demolition and gentrification by real estate developers eager to take advantage of the misery of a populace which has abandoned the city in large numbers. However, there are those who are fighting to save the heritage and homes of New Orleans residents. Activist journalist Chris Heneghan visited the Gulf Coast and filed the following report with the SHADOW--Ed.]

As my flight hooked inland off the Gulf of Mexico, and we began our descent on the Crescent city, from my window seat, I could see landmarks left by a disaster I had watched news coverage of just four months earlier. The winds had stopped, the flood waters subsided, but New Orleans was still suffering. A sea of blue tarps covering storm damaged roofs and a patch of freshly spread mortar atop the Superdome guided us into touchdown at Louis Armstrong International,. I swallowed, trying to get my ears to pop, but my saliva was stopped by a lump in my throat as thought to myself, "This is real, where all that horrific stuff went down." Images from the air would not prepare me for what I would encounter on the ground.

I came to spend my semester break working with a grass roots relief organization called the Common Ground Collective. I was drawn to Common Ground by their slogan "solidarity not charity," and the idea of providing mutual aid and support to returning residents in this region.

"Not sure how safe this area is," the cab driver said as he dropped me at the volunteer check-in at Common Ground, a house at 1415 Franklin Avenue in the Ninth Ward. I wasn't sure whether he had fallen victim to the looter paranoia syndrome that infected the minds of so many in the days following the storm, or if he was referring to the bleak veil of desolation Hurricane Katrina had draped over this area of the city. The taxi was the only vehicle on a street that should have been bustling with traffic at this time of day.

I stood on the sidewalk for a moment to process my surroundings before heading into the house. The crimson glow of the sunset reflected off puddles of black flood water. The city could only pump so much out. On every block, it seemed that there was a broken water main. Running out of hydrants into the road, water was spewing from cracks in the concrete. There were roofing tiles scattered in the road, mounds of garbage strewn everywhere, cars with smashed windshields, abandoned boats from search and rescue attempts, downed wires, telephone poles, traffic lights and street signs blown from the posts that anchored them to the ground. Then there were the houses and the businesses, all abandoned, with their windows boarded up or broken out, as far as I could see. Various things were spray-painted on doors by rescue crews: no bodies inside, number of bodies found inside, no animals inside, number of dead animals found inside. Painted next to the numbers on most buildings were the letters TFW, which I learned stood for "Toxic Flood Waters." Aside from the volunteer house behind me running on generator power, this section of the city appeared to be a ghost town.

I left the desolation on the sidewalk and stepped inside where a woman name Sam met me with a smile and introduced herself as the volunteer coordinator. I dropped my backpack, gave her my emergency contact information, told her how long I was planning to say and signed a few waivers. It had been a long day of traveling for me and I could have laid out my bed roll and slept on the floor of that office. Rest would come, but not yet. "You have room in your car for one more," Sam told a grey-haired woman and man with a long brown pony tail. The two were bleary eyed, sitting on the floor finishing cups of coffee. "Yeah, we can take him," the woman said as she stood up. "Where we going?" the man asked, rising from his resting place on the floor. "Here's directions to the community center," Sam said. "Dinner is served around seven." She gave us one last welcome, and said "see you in the morning," as the three of us headed out the door.

I loaded my gear into a tightly packed station wagon. Closing the hatch, I noticed the New York license plate. As I climbed into the back seat, I mentioned that I was from Connecticut. The two introduced themselves as a mother and son who ran a horse farm in upstate New York. They planned to stay for a week and lend a hand. We talked about how nice it was to get away from winter as we headed for the community center.

The Greater Mount Carmel Baptist Church on the corner of Pauline and Claiborne was home to the Common Ground Community Center. Badly damaged by flood waters and a prayer away from FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency–Ed.] assistance or an insurance check, the Collective had worked out an agreement with members of the congregation. They would use the space for the time being in exchange for providing renovations to the building. Gutted and abated of black mold by volunteers who came before me, the church now served as a hub for grass roots relief, a place where Common Ground volunteers ate, slept, and congregated before and after their workdays.                                                               

The community center was like an oasis amid the storm battered streets of the Upper Ninth Ward. The aroma of spices in the balmy evening air invited me into the church courtyard. It was my first look at the logistics that made Common Ground's operation possible. Under three EZ-UP tents and a tarp was an outdoor kitchen where four propane burners and a volunteer cooking crew worked from 5am-8pm to provide three meals a day for up to three hundred people. Across from the kitchen, a group of volunteers were repairing bicycles they had salvaged from debris piles on the streets. Nicknamed, "flood bikes," these scrapped together peddle-powered creations were a popular means of transportation for folks at the Common Ground.  

There were anarchists mingling with soccer moms, who were shooting the breeze with transgenders mixing it up with Baptist preachers, along with college kids earning class credits, dropouts searching for somewhere to drop in, doctors, lawyers, and even a couple of young republicans.

The morning meetings were conducted in a non-authoritarian fashion, with no hierarchy, no time clocks and with collective participation. It was a perfect way to start a workday. The meetings gave me a glimpse into the enormity of the tasks performed by the Collective. In addition to house gutting, mold abatement and roof taping; the group also provided free legal support, medical care, documentary work, distribution of clothing, clean water, food, and other necessities, as well as organic gardening and other sustainable development projects. Along with child care, after school tutoring and day to day political struggles, everyone's skills had a place within the collective. If a volunteer had an idea for a new project, they could bring it to the attention of the collective and they would usually find a few volunteers interested in working alongside them.

After about a half hour of addressing individual concerns, the facilitator would step back as a volunteer with a clipboard entered the circle. Time for work assignments--one by one, jobs were read from a list, along with the number of volunteers needed for each job. A crew leader was picked for each project, and interested people reported to that person. Then it was off to work for the day. But first, a group called Sun Salutation offered yoga sessions to level body, mind and spirit. Good for everyone, but particularly beneficial to the house gutting crews, who would spend days inside abandoned houses, sweating in TyVec suits and breathing through respirators.

In time, I'd get my share of that, but this morning, I was on my way to install a kitchen sink in a women's center scheduled to open by the end of the week. I estimated that the job would take me two days. The first day would be spent taking measurements and finding a truck to drive me to a store for supplies. Without knowing, I had made my first mistake. Assuming I would operate here in the same way that I would outside of a disaster zone was wrong. Materials would come for this job, but not in the same manner I had been accustomed to.

The Common Ground Women's Center was located on the corner of Robertson and Louisa in the Ninth Ward. I walked into the gutted building with my tools, where I met a kid named Josh who was working on some plumbing in the bathroom. He showed me where the kitchen was. Two stumpy pipes protruding from the sub flooring was all I'd have to work with. "You should be able to find everything you need to plumb in a good sink in a pile of debris somewhere," he said. "Be sure to scrub everything down with bleach before bringing it inside the house. That will kill any black mold, prevent it from spreading inside and becoming a health hazard." Josh also explained that the collective had decided to buy building sup-plies only in emergency situations when what was needed could not be salvaged. Made sense to me. 

The abundance of supplies in the area was due to the city's inability to keep up with the amount of garbage to be disposed of. As homes were gutted, workers would pile debris curbside, covering the sidewalk and sometimes most of the road. Eventually, the city would load it into dump trucks and haul it away, but for the time being, it sat and continued to rot, unless a resourceful relief worker came along to salvage it. By the end of the day, I found a two bay stainless steal sink, a counter top to go with it, and enough scrap lumber and piping to frame it out and plumb it up.

After doing some carpentry work at Common Ground's Free Health Clinic in Algiers, I met a guy from northern California named Jerry who spoke about the ingenuity of the collective's volunteers: "We're living like ground hogs," he said, "Common Ground hogs." I agreed with him. Common Ground Hogs we were, working ourselves to exhaustion each day. The longer we stayed, the more the days and nights fused into to one continuous cycle of sunrise and sunset. After a few days on the grass roots relief work scene I couldn't tell you what day it was. Nobody could. What we could tell you was that our eyes were bleary, our clothes were dirty and we smelled funky.

The first day I started working with the collective, as I searched through piles of debris for salvageable material, the Red Cross was doing mobile food distribution out of a truck which made its rounds through the Ninth Ward, but they had no workers on the ground. Every now and then, a stream of FEMA trailers would enter the rail yard on a line of flatbed freight cars. They would sit on the tracks for about a week, just long enough to lift the spirits of residents awaiting their arrival before being hitched to a locomotive again and moving north to another location. Even more elusive were the FEMA workers themselves--I don't recall seeing one of them in the Ninth Ward at all during my time there.

At one point, I met up with Malek Rahim, one of the founders of the Common Ground Collective, at his house in Algiers. A long time community organizer and Green Party mayoral candidate for the city of New Orleans, Rahim explained that there is more than just a thick line of red tape keeping federal aid from some of the hardest hit neighborhoods in New Orleans East. He told me: "The plantation syndicates that run the state of Louisiana have their feet on the necks of black population." Citing the potential "land grab" of residential properties by some of the biggest developers in the nation through buy-out and eminent domain as reason for the stalling of federal relief work in these areas, Rahim said that developer's plans have influenced decisions by city officials to keep residents away from their homes. "How can a mother bring her children home and feel safe here when the city won't even turn on the streetlights? How can you go to work and come home when there is still a 4pm curfew in the Lower Ninth Ward that is enforced by federal agents?" he asked.

I took a morning off one day to take some photos. A thick coat of mud still covered the streets. It sucked at the souls of my boots, slowing my stride, making me stop to mourn the missing, those who were unable to evacuate and who perished when the levee on the east bank of the industrial canal burst, sending a massive wave of water through their neighborhood. Flooding was so severe in this area that some houses were completely submerged underwater. Others were washed off their foundations, floating for blocks before becoming caught in trees or anchoring themselves atop other houses.

Kim Price, a Lower Ninth Ward resident, objects to the proposal put forward by the urban planning commission to demolish homes affected by the flooding. "A lot of families want to come back," she told me. "This is their home and they have no other place to go. We are going to rebuild until someone else tells us otherwise. If they can fix [this neighborhood] for the developers, there is no reason why they can't fix it for the people."

If the Common Ground Collective has their way with the city, Price will be able to begin repairs to her property, but activists have made no promises. Residents have experienced one empty promise after an-other, from the city, from the state, from FEMA, and from insurance companies. The success of the grassroots relief movement depends on the support of the people in the community. Trust is vital to maintaining that support. Common Ground has made it clear to the community that they are committed to standing in solidarity with the people of these areas, that they are committed to pro-viding mutual aid and assistance, while fighting to defend residents' rights. At all times, members of the Collective have been aware of possible trouble at any moment.

On the afternoon of January 5, cell phones began ringing. The enemy had attacked in a neutral zone. Bulldozing of homes had begun. Volunteers left whatever they were doing and searched for any means of transportation to get over to the 2000 Block of Reynes Street in the Lower Ninth Ward. Fast response was critical in this situation. Twenty minutes after my phone rang, I arrived. A number of activists were already there, and a caravan of cars was on its way, trailed by two choppers playing cat and mouse with one another in the air. One was a piloted by federal agents, the other by a television news crew. A police barricade kept us from moving further up Reynes Street to confront the demolition crews. A block away, we were within eyesight and it was clear our presence was making the hard hats uneasy. Tracie Washington, an organizer for the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, was on site with a cell phone, informing the city attorney's office that the demolition at-tempts were "in clear violation of an agreement that the city made on December 28 to hold off on demolitions until a hearing in civil district court." The call was followed by a hail of activist cheers as the demolition crews shut down their operation and retreat-ed from the scene, taking their machinery with them. After a hearing the following day before U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, it was ruled that the demolition of homes in the Lower Ninth Ward be put on hold until the city's redevelopment plan is finalized.

"One for the underdogs," I thought to myself as I returned to the community center at the end of the day. Usually, by dinner time, volunteers were exhausted, but that evening, everyone was in high spirits. There was a celebration with a sing along around the trash barrel fire in the courtyard. As there were several musicians in camp, a pickup band was quickly formed, with a couple of guitar players, a fiddler, a few pot and pan drummers, a harmonica player and a kid clicking out rhythm on spoons. Everyone had a silly song to contribute. We danced, drank and sang all night. As activists, we were all a bit surprised–for the moment, we had the upper hand on the city. We had shut them down.

The next morning, the Times Picayune headline read, "Lower Ninth Ward Activists Chase Away Bulldozing Crew." I was glad to see something printed in the mainstream media. Though the article made no mention of the Common Ground Collective, it didn't matter to me. None of us did the work we were doing for celebrity status. What mattered was that somebody other than the people involved could read those front page head-lines and know what was going on. As I read the article, I thought back on my meeting with Rahim a few days earlier. He had told me: "We are challenging some of the largest corporations in the world that are looking at this as a cash cow, another way to bleed the American public out of its tax dollars. Not only that, together, we are delivering a blow against racism."

Rahim, a man of modest expression, who humbly went about his work each day beneath a mane of wise grey dreadlocks, would not take credit for inspiring the direct action on January 5. He credits the work being done by the Collective to the "spirit of [the] volunteers." This spirit, he believes, helped Common Ground grow into the massive relief organization it is today. "Young people who are making a stand for peace and justice. They come in. They look around. Common Ground is just one of the venues they want to use in that cause for peace and justice," he said.    

It was this cause that inspired Rahim, his partner Sharon, and activist Scot Crow to organize the moment they learned that Hurricane Katrina was going to impact New Orleans. Sitting around Rahim's kitchen table on August 27, the three had a total of fifty bucks between them. They decided to put that money toward organizing efforts for when the storm passed. The choice not to evacuate had been made.

Before the hurricane, the three transformed Rahim's kitchen into a makeshift bunker. Rahim ran 2x4s across a corner of his kitchen between the freezer chest and the stove. He then placed a car hood over the 2x4s and put a mattress underneath them so that they would be in a safe place if the roof caved in. Stowed away in the kitchen, the three waited anxiously as the storm thrashed its way through the gulf coast, leaving in its wake battered towns and broken cities.

When the rains stopped, the three immediately secured a space at a local mosque in Rahim's Algiers neighborhood. Located on the east bank of the Mississippi, Algiers did not flood, but many of the homes in the area suffered severe storm damage. In the days that followed, a group of anarchists showed up to assist them. Organizing out of the mosque, the group set up a makeshift clinic, where they provided free health care to survivors in the area. Robert King Wilkerson, the only freed member of the Angola Three, named the space the "Common Ground Clinic." [The Angola Three (Wilkerson, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, all members of the Black Panther Party), were inmates framed by prison officials for two jailhouse murders in 1972 and 1973, as retaliation for their political activism behind bars. Woodfox and Wallace are still incarcerated, having been in solitary confinement for more than 30 years each–Ed.]

Most would agree that such an accomplishment deserved a pat on the back. However, city officials had a different opinion of the grassroots relief movement. Rahim remembered the early days of Common Ground: "When the city first found out about us, we were the laughing joke of the city. They didn't believe this could happen. They thought Malek, that old militant, done hooked up with some young dirty hippies, and all they will be doing is having orgies. They were calling our health clinic the hippie clinic,"

Rahim laughed, explaining how that joke quickly turned in on itself, when those who first doubted the Collective watched in disbelief as Common Ground's operations grew into what they are today. The Collective currently operates five distribution centers in four parishes, two free health clinics, an after school tutorial program and an adult education center. They also offer a number of other free services to returning residents, including house gutting, tree removal, roof tarping, and legal support, In five months, Common Ground has provided services to over 50,000 residents.

Not one elected official has visited any of their facilities during this time, but their impact upon the city and surrounding parishes cannot be ignored. Currently, Common Ground is focusing a great deal of their energy on preserving residents' properties in the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood whose fate is yet be determined by the Urban Planning Commission's redevelopment proposal. Blueprints laid out in closed door meetings don't slow progress on the grassroots level. In fact, knowledge of such planning meetings fans the already burning ambitions of the volunteer community. "Their plans are their plans," Rahim said. "We are not going to react to their plans because if we do, we are going to end up losing. We have to go ahead and carry out ours. I don't care what their plans are. I don't care what those developers are trying to do. What we are doing is moving to set up an alternative."

That was exactly what the collective intended to do when they moved into the Greater Mount Carmel Baptist Church on the corner of Pauline and Claiborne Avenue in the Upper Ninth Ward in late October. After establishing a base camp, a distribution center was opened. A Women's shelter and health clinic followed. Common Ground's community activism has forced the city to re-evaluate their plans for the area. Where the city once sought to send bulldozers to demolish homes under eminent domain, they were now clearing debris from roads so that residents could return home. Where downed wires once hung hazardously on lawns and sidewalks, the utility company Entergy was now coming around to re-store electricity. Block by block, house by house, the lights were coming back on.

To think that a collective founded by an ex Black Panther and a group of anarchists was responsible for saving a neighborhood was almost more than I could fathom. But direct action did bring about the eight hour work day, the right for Women to vote, and desegregated schools. Perhaps history will soon add the rebuilding of New Orleans for its people to that list.

Art by Seth Tobocman