Moving on from Hurricane

IF THIS THING HAD NEVER HAPPENED: MOVING ON FROM HURRICANE KATRINA by DAINA CHEYENNE HARVEY A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School New-Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Sociology Written under the direction of Karen Ann Cerulo And approved by _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION If This Thing Never Happened: Moving on From Hurricane Katrina By DAINA CHEYENNE HARVEY Dissertation Director: Karen Ann Cerulo It has been suggested that understanding Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures requires a paradigm shift within sociology. Disaster and risk, race, class and inequality, urban sociology, and the sociology of trust, to name but a few areas within the discipline have all been recast since Katrina. The people who experienced Katrina also experienced a paradigm shift of sorts. The trauma and suffering Katrina inflicted upon residents of New Orleans has resulted for many in a change in expectations about the future, a change in the ways they interact with others, a change in their cultural practices, a change in the way they think about the world. My dissertation focuses on evacuees who decided to return to the Lower Ninth Ward in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In the five years since Katrina evacuees have been forced to make life altering decisions, strategize about the future, negotiate the past, and deal with confusion and uncertainty. The major question this study addresses is how do people move on from major collective events. In particular I am interested in the cultural and cognitive tools people use to form long term strategies of action after major acts of social disruption. In examining how people have moved on from Hurricane Katrina, I provide a detailed analysis of how culture both ii enables and constrains. I also focus on the lived experience of suffering, including what people do with suffering and what suffering does to people. iii Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the help of the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward who graciously let me into their homes and lives for the time I lived in New Orleans. In particular I would like to thank Warrenetta Banks, David Eber, Kathy Muse, and Bill Waiters for making me feel at home whenever I was at Little Zion. I would also like to thank Ward “Mack” McClendon for the many inspirational talks and late night commiserating at the Village. My research would not have been possible without the crew at lowernine.org, including Laura Paul, Rick Prose, and Matt Grigsby. Thanks to Tim for not laughing at me when I brought 1x8’s when he asked for 2x4’s and to Darren for teaching me many things I should have already known. And thanks to Lou for always telling it like it is. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support from Rutgers University Initiative on Climate and Society, The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and The Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Public Entity Risk Institute with support from the National Science Foundation and Swiss Re. This dissertation would not have been possible with the help of my colleagues in the Sociology Department at Rutgers University. Many of my colleagues and advisors read early work on Hurricane Katrina that helped me think through this process. So thanks to Jennifer Hemler, Janet Lorezen, Audrey Devine-Eller, Dena Smith, Jeff Dowd, and David Peterson. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee, Patrick Carr, Ann Mische, Arlene Stein, and Javier Auyero for their support and for comments on previous drafts. iv Finally, I owe an immeasurable debt to Karen Cerulo. I not only would have never finished this project without her help, I never would have begun it. Without her assistance I would not have finished graduate school and I would certainly not be a professor at the College of Holy Cross. Her guidance and mentoring will take me the rest of my career to pay forward. And most importantly thanks to Lesley Ray Harvey and Finch Harvey for enduring cold weather in New Jersey and hot weather in Houston and for allowing me to live in New Orleans, so far from my true home for so long. The royalties from any products associated with this research will go to the lowernine.org and the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association. v Table of Contents Title Page i Abstract ii-iii Acknowledgements iv-v Chapter One: “What Do They Think Happened Here?” 1-30 Chapter Two: A Brief History of Trouble 31-49 Chapter Three: The Presentation of Community 50-114 Chapter Four: Dealing with Disaster 115-207 Chapter Five: Katrina as the Future 208- 230 Appendix 231-242 References 243-257 vi 1 Chapter One: “What Do They Think Happened Here?” Getting Dirty Darren was pointing at a couple of places on Greg’s roof that worried him. The roof on the old blue double shotgun was bending and sinking in various spots. If you looked at it from the side, it resembled a giant, broken accordion. The remnants of the blue tarp, like those that once dotted the rest of New Orleans in 2005, still peeked out here and there. Darren was saying something about the back wall not supporting the roof. Anyone could see that a good portion of the wall was simply gone, washed away in a torrent of water nearly six years ago. Tongue and groove boards, probably over a hundred years old jutted this way and that way, splintering into an opening the size of a refrigerator. Next to the tongue and groove should have been the rest of three or four fourteen foot barge boards-- wood taken from barges that sailed down the Mississippi that were used to build homes in the late nineteenth century--but they too were gone. But smiling and shaking my head in affirmation, I had no idea what this had to do with the roof. I knew, in what was part a mental exercise for him and part learning experience for me, Darren would tell me several more times how and in what steps we were going to fix the roof. Throwing his hands up, frustrated because neither the homeowner nor the non-profit wants us to fix the wall, he turned to me and said it’s got to be done. Smiling, trying to egg him on, I said, yeah, we can’t have anyone fall off of the roof, that’d be bad for business. “We gonna have five or six people up there. If something happens, I can only save three or four, maybe”, Darren quickly replied. If anyone else had said it, I would have laughed. The thing is Darren really meant it. 2 Darren “Dirty” McKinney grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward. He was pretty much raised on the streets until he was taken in by a family in the neighborhood. Everyone acknowledged that Darren had a rough childhood, rougher than most. Sitting next to him, handing him tools or learning how to “fix” a wall or floor or roof, I often found myself wondering how bad it must of have been to stand out among all the others in this neighborhood, a neighborhood that the esteemed African-American historian Kent Germany has called the most marginalized place in the country. Dirty learned to work on cars, build porches, fix lawnmowers, and fiddle with about anything by the time he was twelve. One morning over bacon and donuts he told me rather matter-of-factly that he learned how to fix things by watching other people. He looked at me as if to say, I don’t know who you were hanging out with when you were young, but that’s what I did and you should have too. Everyone in the Lower Ninth Ward knew Darren. Whenever I was with him people would laugh and tell me to be careful and not let him work me too hard. Before Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures Darren was more or less the unofficial handy man of the Lower Ninth Ward. Despite losing his home and most of his friends, “some dead, some left, don’t much matter--they ain’t here no more and we is”, he hadn’t missed a beat. Driving to work sites in the morning people would wave us over and ask him if he could cut their grass, fix the brakes on their mom’s car, help frame a wall, work on their roof, put in the kitchen sink; “Hey”, they would say, “when you coming over?” One day, after taking rotten studs off of a roof, I stepped over to the other side of the house to ask him for a different hammer and found him laying in the middle of the road, underneath a car, trying to fix a flat. If you worked with Darren long enough you soon found yourself 3 trimming someone’s hedges with a hand saw, or crawling under a stranger’s house to see why their sewage was leaking, or sprawled out under a house on your stomach with a jackhammer trying to remove part of the home’s foundation. Somehow it seemed right. One night, on my way home after a terribly long and hot day working on wiring in an attic of a house that should have been torn down years earlier, an elderly man stopped me on my bike and asked if I could help carry a few bags of concrete mix from his truck to his living room.

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