We made small talk as we rode along. She told me that Chalmette had been flooded because “they” dynamited the levee to save the Garden district. I said that the theory was sound, if few decades late, except for the MRGO, which had left a big hole in Chalmette’s defenses and was a perfect conduit for the storm surge that filled the town.

The stores on Canal were closed, so we swung on past and started looking for a bar. It is a sad day indeed when it’s hard to find a bar open at 12:45a.m. in New Orleans.

Next she told me that the cause of the storm was abortion, and that all the abortions in New Orleans had led to the storm, which even looked like a fetus in the radar pictures she had seen.
I wondered why God had sent such an indiscriminate maul to hammer sinners, since it seemed to me that the doctors and lawyers had mostly left town or ended up above the water line uptown, while the dead were the poor that rumor (and scripture) had it were particularly blessed in God’s eyes.

She didn’t have much of an answer and anyway it was time for her to hop out and run in for her smokes. Turns out she was underage and wanted me to go in the bar for her, but I kept the truck idling at the curb and told her where to find the cigarette machine inside a bar I frequent but wouldn’t want to rat out for selling smokes to innocents.

On the way back to the 9th Ward, when I would have been making a proposition had she been a guy, she dropped her final theory when she said, “I hear people our color aren’t coming back, but people, you know, the other color, are.”

I looked over at her and saw that she was referring to me and herself as the same color, and I realized for the first time that she was white. I mean, I’d noticed the color before, but her affect and inflection were so similar to the Black Folks I know from the neighborhood that I had assumed she was Black. I’d learned soon after moving here not to assume anything about race based strictly on complexion.

“Seems to me this town is getting paler and paler,” I said.
“What?”
“I see fewer Black people than white in New Orleans. This used to be a mostly Black town.”
“That’s not what they’re saying.”

I spent the rest of the drive talking about the next turn I was going to make and about stop signs and garbage spilling out into the street. When we stopped in front of her apartment I got out and lifted her bike from the truck bed and wished her a good night.

Now certainly there are family folks, fine folks, backbone types from Chalmette. There are unprejudiced, sweet cherubic tots and delightfully urbane drag queens, clear-eyed high-school football stars with clear complexions and virginal zones. There are honest cops, selfless teachers, and one theater owner to whom the town owes a special debt. Chalmette has produced saints and virtuous citizenry.

But in my social circles I meet a different type of Chalmation, and careful though I am to entertain strangers, the angels are in short supply.