The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, A Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken - Softcover

ONE

A SONG OF RESURRECTION

I drove east across the Claiborne Avenue bridge on the first Friday night in November 2007, two years after the storm that devastated this city. My hometown. My New Orleans. As I came upon the Lower Ninth Ward, there was an extraordinary amount of traffic headed in the same direction as me. They’re coming to see the play, I thought.

The play was Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s immortal absurdist drama about two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, living in a wasteland and waiting for a savior who may or may not come. The play, which Beckett wrote inspired by the agonies of Nazi-controlled Paris, deals with abandonment and the struggle inside all of us between hope and despair.

Paris had the Nazi occupation; New Orleans had Hurricane Katrina. We New Orleanians knew abandonment. We knew what it was like to struggle for a lifeline of hope in the midst of a maelstrom of despair. God knows that we who had to deal with FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) knew absurdity.

Nobody in the city knew it more intensely than the people of the Lower Ninth Ward.

For a long time after the storm, if you drove over the Claiborne Avenue bridge into the neighborhood, you plunged into a void, both physical and existential. There was nothing but a sea of night where once a thriving neighborhood had been. It was the abyss, a black hole of death and desolation, and a darkness so intense that many in New Orleans feared no light could ever overcome it.

On the morning of August 29, 2005, Katrina gashed the levee in two places north of the bridge, which traverses the Industrial Canal, the economically vital artery for shipping from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain and, via two other man-made canals, out into the Gulf of Mexico. Millions of gallons of water washed through the Lower Ninth Ward, scores of houses were toppled from their concrete pillars. A barge barreled over or through the levee, nobody can say for sure, crushing houses and cars. Hundreds of people drowned as the twenty-foot wall of water flattened everything in its path. It was biblical.

In a single morning, a historic African American neighborhood of fourteen thousand souls, among them the city’s poorest, ceased to exist. Gone were the places where people lived, worked, shopped, prayed, visited, loved. Days later, after the water receded, there was nothing left but ruins, and corpses. In the heat and moisture of south Louisiana, weeds, vines, and trees rapidly consumed the desolate lots and sidewalks. Rattlesnakes and cottonmouths moved in, chasing the rats that overran backyards where children once played and stoops where families used to barbecue. Sometimes, packs of wild dogs owned the streets. The few residents able to return not only had to fight nature just to hold their ground, but also lived in fear of predatory rapists and other savages lurking in the rotting ruins and dark thickets that used to be a neighborhood.

This happened in one of the great American cities, or what was left of it. I knew intimately the agony of the people of the Lower Ninth Ward. Six miles north of the neighborhood, where the Industrial Canal meets the lake, the district of the city where I grew up—Pontchartrain Park, the first African American middle-class subdivision in New Orleans—had been virtually annihilated when a breach in a different canal to the west caused the neighborhood to fill with water up to the rooftops.

Built in the mid-1950s as the wall of segregation was beginning to crack, Pontchartrain Park symbolized the opening of the American dream to black folks in New Orleans—people like Althea and Amos Pierce, my schoolteacher mother and my photographer father, who in 1955 bought a modest ranch home there and started a family. Like their neighbors, Daddy and Tee, as we called our mother, lost everything in the flood. Like so many New Orleanians, from the upscale white enclave of Lakeview to the hardscrabble black Lower Ninth Ward, Daddy and Tee washed up on solid ground far from home, mourning and weeping in their Baton Rouge refuge, wondering if they would ever make it back.

The world post-Katrina was a hard time for my city. The hardest time. For people who didn’t live through it, no words can fully express the pain, the rage, the grief, and the futility we New Orleanians felt. For the people who did, words seemed like a feeble protest against a relentless night without end.

How do you go on when you are bone-tired and broken down by a world where nothing makes sense, and there’s no direction forward that leads to anywhere but the ditch or the grave? How do you embrace a life in which everything and everyone you knew and loved has been taken away, and may never return—and nobody else cares? How do you live through today when you fear there’s no tomorrow?

These are the questions Waiting for Godot explores. In 2006, New York visual artist and publisher Paul Chan visited New Orleans, and when he saw the catastrophic ruin of the Lower Ninth Ward, he thought of Godot and conceived of staging the play for free in one of the neighborhoods most damaged by the ravages of Katrina. A year later, I played Vladimir in the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s New York production of the Beckett play, one that Chan eventually brought to the Crescent City. We did two performances on an intersection near vacant Lower Ninth Ward street corners covered by grass and weeds as high as a man’s chest. We did two more in the Gentilly neighborhood, which, like 80 percent of the city, had also taken cruel licks from the flood.

That night—November 2, 2007—was the first performance. More than six hundred people came and, before the show, ate free gumbo ladled out at the door. When showtime arrived, the Rebirth Brass Band burst into song and led the audience into the bleachers under the floodlights in a classic New Orleans second-line parade. From two blocks away, J. Kyle Manzay, who played Estragon, and I stood in our thrift-store suits and shabby bowler hats, preparing for our entrance. From where we stood, the butt-shaking fanfare of the brass band and the rustle of the crowd taking its seats were the only signs of life in the great and oppressive silence that surrounded us. As close as the people were, it felt like they were a hallucination.

Robert Green, a Lower Ninth Ward resident who lost his mother and granddaughter in the flood, stood in the performance space near the very spot of their death and gave a solemn benediction. On this night, he said, Let’s remember them. Let’s remember all of them.

I did. We all did.

(When we repeated the Godot performance in the Gentilly neighborhood later that month, my mother gave the first night’s benediction as I stood inside an abandoned house, waiting to enter. She ended with “Now, enjoy my son.”)

By then, I could see the audience under the lights. There were people from all walks of life—longshoremen and lawyers, teachers and shopkeepers. People from the neighborhood and people who had never set foot there before that night. All of these people—my people, New Orleanians—gathered in the ruins, expecting . . . what? Comfort? Remembrance? Catharsis? Revelation?

I stood there in the shadows, watching, trying to penetrate the thick canopy of night. There were no houses around us; they’d all been washed away. There were only grassy knolls, weed-choked lots, concrete stumps like teeth in a half-buried jawbone, and matching concrete staircases leading to nowhere.

And there we were, two actors in the center of the darkness, not much more than a stone’s throw from where the levee broke, about to walk forward, poor as we were in the face of so great a need, and give everything we had.

Lord, I prayed silently, we are on sacred ground. I’ve come here to make sure that You are honored, so bless me, that I may honor You. And God, I ask You to bless me that I may honor those who lost their lives in this place.

The lights went down and I got my cue to go. My microphone was on, allowing the audience to hear me breathing and running and mumbling, even before they saw me.

“Here we go,” I whispered, huffing. “This is happening . . . we’re going to change things . . . I’m coming . . . for you . . . for you . . . for all of them. . . .”

Those were not Beckett’s words, but I wanted them to lodge in people’s heads, to know that we were there for them, that we were coming for them, that we were going to do something very special for them.

What I didn’t know was that I was running toward the most transcendent experience of my life, one that combined all I am as an actor, a child of Amos and Tee, and a son of New Orleans. On that night, in that field of death and despair, I saw the rebirth of life and hope. I witnessed the power of art to renew the vision of people in danger of perishing. And not just to renew vision, but to impart a spirit of resurrection that proclaims in the face of the hurricane, Yes, these bones can live!

The Godot experience breathed life into my bones, bleached dry by the relentless grief and humiliation of Katrina’s aftermath. It gave me the power and resolve to help my neighborhood and my city. Decades from now, little kids will ask, “Mr. Pierce, what did you do in New Orleans’s darkest hour?” and I will tell them about that play, written by an expatriated Irishman who had experienced Paris in the depths of Nazi occupation. I will tell them about that night in the Lower Ninth Ward, and how, like some kind of miracle, the play said everything that could be said about what it was like to live through the endless nightmare of our post-Katrina city. I will tell them how it taught me about the power of art within an individual and a community to galvanize us, to renew, redeem, and rebuild our lives together.

And maybe I’ll tell them the story about a kid like them who grew up in New Orleans, in a little house with a hardworking mother and father and two brothers. That kid spent his young life working hard in school, eating dinner with his family, going to mass on Sunday, playing in the park with neighborhood kids, and reveling in all the ordinary joys and sorrows of an American life. One day, when he was a little older, that kid discovered he had a talent for acting. Though that boy’s parents were of modest means, New Orleans made it possible for him to attend one of the best performing arts high schools in the country. When he graduated, the kid launched himself into the great big world, leaving for the Juilliard School in New York City to become an actor. Later, the kid from the little house in Pontchartrain Park would go on to a stage, film, and TV career, with a starring role in The Wire, widely acclaimed as one of the greatest television dramas ever made.

When the boy became a man, he began to understand that all those gifts he had been given by his mother and father had not come easily to them. They had been earned with sweat, study, and endless perseverance in the hope that, one day, their children would have more. What the boy’s parents gave him, they in turn had received. His mother had been raised on the bayou by wise, intelligent, but barely educated farmers who believed in the power of hard work, self-discipline, and education to lift Negroes out of the poverty and misery of the Jim Crow South. Both his folks benefited from their civil rights struggle, an early fruit of which was a decent neighborhood for people like them to raise their families, just like everybody else.

The boy had been given a life unimaginably richer and freer than his forebears had known, all because of their own patient sacrifices, and the conviction they held in their hearts that, one day, the dark night of racism and violence would give way to a new dawn of justice and opportunity. He had been given a life by the people of Pontchartrain Park—by the civil rights activists whose early victories led to its founding, to the men and women who staked their claim on the American dream there, and who built a village in which to raise their children together. He had been given a life by the city of New Orleans, that singular urban gumbo of cultures—Native American, African, French, Spanish, American—that has been simmering in the Louisiana heat in that pot between the river and the lake for three hundred years, and whose distinct flavors have melted into each other to make a tradition all its own.

It was a grace, and it was a gift. All of it. It was a gift that came from faith—in God, in America, in family, in the future, and in the ability of each of us, and all of us together—to overcome any hardship, and not only survive, but triumph. It was a gift that came from home, and a gift that came from hope—hope that as hard as life is right now, our suffering means something, and it will lead to better days for those who come after us. It was a gift that came from love—a love of life so bright and true that it refused to let slavery, it refused to let segregation, it refused to let poverty and ignorance and injustice and terror and hatred knock it down, wash it away, and bury it in a sea of darkness forever.

If my ancestors and all those who struggled alongside them had endured and conquered all those challenges to give me and my generation the life we have today, how dare we give up in the face of this hurricane? As Vladimir, my character in Godot, says, “What’s the point of losing heart now?” Given the impossible odds against them, those generations had all but walked on water to get where we are today. For me—for us—to lose heart, to let that precious patrimony of faith, hope, and love slip through our fingers, would be to sink beneath Katrina’s floodwaters and drown.

No. These lines of Vladimir’s from act 2 sounded in my heart like a prophet’s incantation and a call to arms:

Let us do something, while we have the chance! . . . At this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!

Yes. I must keep faith with my fathers and mothers, the ones of my blood and the ones of my spirit. I must keep faith with those ripped by slave traders from the arms of their mothers and fathers, with those who withstood the blows from white supremacists and earned the education that uplifted the race. I must keep faith with the Moses Generation, those who demanded their rights as Americans, who refused to accept that they were second-class citizens in a nation their ancestors helped to build, and who led our people to the Promised Land. I must keep faith with the mothers and fathers of Pontchartrain Park, also members of the Moses Generation, who carried on the everyday struggle to prepare the Joshua Generation to live and prosper in the land of milk and honey (or in our case, cold beer and Creole gumbo).

“Mr. Pierce, what did you do in New Orleans’s darkest hour?” that kid in the future will ask. I will tell him that the catastrophe of Katrina revealed to me who and what I love. It revealed to me the boy I was, the man I am, and the man I want...