Barge Watch:

HOW SWEET IT IS...

Since the walls gave out, the Lower Nine is reputed as representative of unequal race relations, of a lower class that faces a cold shoulder and mandatory relocation. The people there have been cheated, very much like in a relationship gone awry.

Over three months after Mr. Go (the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) spit out the shallow, flimsily steel-reinforced levee wall and all but destroyed the Lower Ninth Ward – a once healthily populated part of Orleans Parish, not much has changed with the exception of a long-awaited “look and leave” visit.  Finally, residents of the neighborhood directly in the eye of the breach returned. What hope and faith they brought, I don’t know.

But what remains: homes on tops of cars; messages spray-painted on weatherboard and refrigerators, “We Be Back Soon Mom” chalked in the off-white film left on a flooded Ford Taurus; sticks and foundations and a decapitated Jesus ornamenting a lawn; chairs caught in magnolias; the enormous red barge that tore through the levee wall, squashed a yellow school bus, and set down near or in the middle of Jourdan Avenue (it’s difficult to discern) – marks the end of the world. 

At 5422 Flood Street, a heart tagged next to the name Kaylen indicates either a message of life still standing or a memorial.   Across the street from the Chicken Box on N. Claiborne Avenue, where for a time soldiers were posted in line to the canal’s edge to prevent media and civilians from getting near the structural wound, a newer home bows at the middle, pieces of itself scattered in the shredded lot adjacent. 

And yet, in a neighborhood between St. Claude Avenue and the river, a handful of people have started over, not by leveling their homes(or having their homes leveled), but by removing debris, gutting, repairing, and from what I’m told, by helping one another. Out here, as in many parts of the city, despite the mess there is no question about whether or not to keep going.  ACORN, the grassroots fair housing group headquartered on Elysian Fields has come around and posted signs:  “No Bulldozing.”

Before the breach, there was the occasional shooting in the Lower Nine.  It was one of the up and coming parts of the city, slowly ascending into gentrification.  It was home to Fats Domino and numerous other musicians, and ornate captain’s houses on Egania Street, built by a steamboat chief in 1905. It had a rural feel, the levee green and a fisheye view of downtown.

 On Caffin Avenue, the Baptist Church is busted.  The exterior is still in place, but the chapel’s innards are in disarray. A lone chandelier hangs above a tossed organ, some upturned pews and a bent cross mark the three months since services were held. 

The oxidized red barge, anchored in the cracked toxic earth of the Lower Nine, is a totem of mistake and “malfeasance,” a reminder that relationships are complex, entanglements; It forces the imagination to problem solve:  How the hell are we gonna move this thing, and when?  Does it matter?

It seems to me that everyone is waiting for the next flood to wash the rusty vessel away. Maybe it will just come, and the waters will lift it past MLK Elementary, the branch public library and the captain’s houses.  The waters will cover the military memorial on the parish line at Arabi, and down St. Bernard Highway through the wasteland that was Murphy’s petroleum facility. The barge will pass along the fallen at the Chalmette Battlefield, through Violet’s oak grove, and hang a right into Plaquemines. It will drift with the ruined satsuma orchards and drowned country churches at its sides, and towards the end, through the stricken shrimpers’ wake, out of sight.