Welcome

"Welcome to the edge of America," a man says to me as we sit in the hotel bar. "Welcome to storyville." He was in the convention center a year ago after his home was flooded. The only possession he managed to save was his address book. An old boy scout, he kept a plastic bag in his pocket for just such an occasion. He is a photographer, but he didn't save his camera or his cell phone. He saved this old address book, or part of it. Part of the book showed signs of water damage and some pages had been stripped away, but a good portion of it was intact. He says he felt like someone who had just left a concentration camp. He had nothing in the world but this one book, and with those contacts he has traveled over 5000 miles.

"Welcome to Pompey," the same man said to a woman walking down St. Charles Ave last year. She turned to him, chest out, with a certain sexual liveliness and said, clearly and crisply, "This is not Pompey." Nothing in New Orleans is back to normal, almost everyone I have spoken to has emphasized that, and they want people to be aware of it. But New Orleans is not a dead city, and they want to make sure that people know that too.

"It wasn't America," someone told me the day I got here, referring to the days after Katrina hit. Many people here felt that way, it seems. One woman I spoke to, Jane, rode the storm out in Bay St. Louis. She still remembers the smell of the rotting bodies, and lifts her hand up to cover her nose as she speaks of it. By the time a mandatory evacuation had been called in Bay St. Louis, there was no gas left in the town. So she stayed. After several days, she managed to make it to Jackson, Mississippi with her 11 year old daughter. She got a hotel room, and asked her daughter if she wanted to go with her to a nearby Popeyes to pick up some food. Her daughter chose to stay in the hotel room and shave her legs.

Jane walked through a gas station in order to get to the Popeyes. The line was several miles long - not blocks, Jane emphasizes, miles. As she was passing through, one car tried to cut into the line - the driver got two bullets to the head for his trouble.

As I leave the bar, Jane turns to me and gives me a hug and makes the symbol of a cross on my forehead. A blessing, she says. She still has faith, somehow. Faith and hospitality, those are two things in abundant supply here in New Orleans. No matter the horrors that people here have faced, one thing they all say is "welcome."