City of Refuge Read Online Free PDF Page A

Georges, and they had come through allright. Maybe they had to replace a window, or some roof shingles, or they sat with no electricity for a couple days, cooked with sterno and ate by candlelight and had block parties on the street with the beers they had stockpiled in their coolers. New Orleanians knew how to turn deprivation into an asset; they had the best gallows humor going, they danced at funerals, they insisted on prevailing. They had heard it all before, and most of the time it turned out to be a false alarm. The regular challenge made them defiant. Especially in the working-class neighborhoods. The poorer the neighborhood and the harder people had to fight to stand their ground through the years, the less likely they were to jump ship and head for higher ground, even if they had the means to do so.
    Evacuating was expensive. It cost money for gas, money for hotel rooms. Those who had family had a leg up, but if you didn’t have the cousin in Baton Rouge or Brookhaven or McComb or Holly Springs, it was a hotel, and it was expensive, not just the hotel but eating out every meal. And lucky to find a room, because everybody else was trying to squeeze into the same hotels. The traffic was horrible. If you had children, or aged parents, preparing them for the several-days’ trip under unpleasant circumstances was no fun, especially when it was a false alarm time and again. What if you run out of Pampers? What if you run out of Depends? What if Mama Stel goes to the bathroom in the backseat again while you’re stuck in traffic on I-10 for eight hours? And what about the pets? You just going to leave them leashed in the backyard to fend for themselves? You have to bring the pets. Never had a carrier for them, and the hotels don’t want a bunch of dogs barking and cats peeing in their rooms. Then you get wherever you’re going, and after a day or two when the storm passesyou have to pack everybody up again and make the drive back, sitting in traffic. Maybe you had to miss a couple days’ work, besides, and your boss doesn’t like that and hires someone who doesn’t leave town every time the wind blows. Wasn’t a mandatory evacuation.
    That’s if you have a car in the first place. If you depend on the bus, which is most of working-class New Orleans, then it isn’t even a question, unless maybe your nephew comes by, or your daughter, and insists on taking you out of town in his or her car. A way of dealing with it, an attitude, begins to set after a while. You don’t really want to be the only family in your neighborhood evacuating all the time; that smells funny. Especially if it’s a neighborhood where people watch and notice things and wait for a house to be vacant for a couple of days, a house with a nice TV or sound system, since generally the people who have the money to leave have the money for things that might be valuable at resale. So you stay and stick it out, and then you tell stories about it, and that becomes part of the texture of life, too. Someone with no stories to share is suspect. You prepare as well as you can, and you ride it out.
    In neighborhoods where people expect to be comfortable all the time, where they are used to having services and attention, the prospect of being without those services and that comfort and attention, without electricity and a steady flow of electronic information, without refrigeration and air-conditioning, is not a badge of honor. The badge of honor is being able to ride above the discomfort, arranging things so that you and your family are not sweating it out in the grease pit with everyone else. Who can blame them? If you could get out of 100-degree heat and spoiled food and no lights for a few days, why not? The boss usually understands; hell, the boss has left town himself, and shut the business down prudently. The question is not usually whether to evacuate, but where.
    Storms are a regular feature of late summer and fall, but they have to compete for