By Rosalyn Story, KERA 90.1 Commentator
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-527174.mp3
Dallas, TX – A year after Katrina, we hear mostly about what's not happening in New Orleans: the delays in government assistance, the shystering insurance companies, the political banter over which neighborhoods are viable to rebuild. In the past few months, anger, anguish, and frustration have boiled into a bitter roux already soured with grief and pain. The city of great American music has trumpeted too few sounds of joy, but here and there, amid the droning dirges, are the revelries.
Weeks ago I learned two New Orleans natives, Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr, had lent their support to Habitat for Humanity to build a Musicians' Village, a neighborhood of 81 houses in the Upper Ninth Ward for Katrina's displaced artists. A musician myself, I was intrigued, I signed up online, and with my impressive construction resume (I'd recaulked my bathtub), I was accepted.
In Camp Hope, an elementary school-cum-dormitory in mostly devastated St Bernard Parish, we Habitat volunteers of all ages and races, from every corner of the continent, had little in common save our desire to do something of meaning in a city where you didn't have to look far to find something needing to be done. The gutters at camp donned hard hats, masks and boots to brave the brown voids that once were homes, and make rubbish piles of the flotsam and jetsam of human lives. The builders among us had the more uplifting task of raising two by fours to frame the lives that waited to begin.
The rewards were not long in coming. A fellow volunteer with the stage name Big Fine Ellen Smith, an earthy, spunky single mom and jazz singer at Ray's Boom Boom Room, returned to a ruined house from exile in Carollton, Texas but smiled when she showed her daughter what her new bedroom would look like. "My house is gonna be purple," Ellen said, "And the inside will be in Mardi Gras colors."
However slowly, however fraught with argument, dissent and painstaking red tape, the rebuilding of the Big Easy has begun.
In the once devastated city, there is a reinvented routine flavored with irony; kids ride their bikes through ruined neighborhoods, and don't seem to notice that towers of debris block their path. At "The Spot" diner at Desire and Claiborne in the Upper Ninth Ward, a few blocks from where we labored like pioneers in an urban wilderness, young men on lunch break sat on barstools arguing with passion about how the Saints should never have lost that game. Down the street, a few families rebuild, lives stretched between a darkened house and a FEMA trailer. And on what used to pass for a main street in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, a lone light of neon blares a single word: Daquiris; a lighthouse beacon of celebration in a fog of uncertainty. Where there were only signs of life, now there are signs of gumption, audacity, spirit.
Those who forecast the end of New Orleans and its neighbors never took into account the gale force of hope and the storm surge power of human will. It has always been a city of the odd marriage of celebration and grief, the party on the way back from the grave, the lament before that great getting-up morning. In the city of haints and spirits where life and death duel like irascible lovers, one has always served to affirm the other. Despite government failure and shameful neglect, New Orleans will revive in its own sweet time, through the will of its own people and other caring souls. It will rise and shake off the ashes of death and grief - the dance has already begun.
Rosalyn Story is a Dallas-based freelance writer and a violinist in the Fort Worth Symphony.
If you have opinions or rebuttals about this commentary, call (214) 740-9338 or email us. p>More on-air and online hurricane anniversary coverage from KERA
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How KERA helped North Texas weather the storms
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