New Orleans

2 years later and still the neighbourhoods of New Orleans are ravaged, prey to the same government paralysis, infrastructure breakdown and inertia that characterized the post-tsunami aftermath. And yet there is an extraordinary resilience and spirit to the people here who lost everything, from the Fats Domino, to Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu who had to get on a boat and rescue people from stranded rooftops when his state system broke down. The great debates of Katrina revolve around racial inequality and extreme poverty, that the storm (as it is referred to around here) flashlighted. (There are t-shirts here with the following headline: FEMA’s Evacuation Warning: Run Bitch, Run).

The rest of the US may have forgotten two years later, exactly how and why the levees broke, and why there is an extraordinary amount of buck-passing aroundabouts here, but the people of New Orleans themselves haven’t forgotten. The jazz is still here, whether at Preservation Hall, or elsewhere and this is of course the home of Buddy Bolden, subject of a novella by Ondaatje called Coming through Slaughter.

We went to a jazz club, owned by the legendary Antoinette Doe (an ex-Ikette with Tina and Ike Turner). Her husband, K-Doe was a one hit wonder way back in the 60s I think, and then turned to drink and died shortly afterwards. She had a life-size wax replica made of K-Doe her husband, clothed him in his trademark red velvet jacket and white crisp cravat, and put him in a wheelchair and takes him everywhere she goes, in a black hearse. They dine together at respectable places and the waiters serve him as though he was real and all of New Orleans knows about it. Can I tell you that this is who I want to be in my old age (and have every likelihood of becoming?!) We also went to Dooky Chase, an old establishment of around 50 years, home to the plotting of the early civil rights movement and the early jazz musicians. Ray Charles was served there!.

I also met John Thompson at a dinner. John spent 18 years on death row, with one capital punishment sentence and 49 years of another life sentence, for two murder counts. After 18 years, DNA found him to be wrongfully convicted on both counts and he was released. He has now founded Resurrection After Exoneration, a transitional home for ex cons and exonerees, to overcome the pull of recidivism and start a new life. A sweet black man, he had spent most of his life to date in jail. 40 days after he got out, he got married to a) over come deprivation!!! (in his own words) and b) lock himself into a life so he wouldn't feel the urge of "institutionalization". He went through seven execution dates, and always got a stay of execution at the last minute. He was led to the chair seven times, and thought he was going to die seven times. How does one come out of that alive? with hope and strength and conviction? How does one overcome the fact that 18 years of one's life are spent in a prison cell? I don't know but John is testament to hope not in institutions, but in human beings. He was convicted at the age of 22, when he was involved in drug dealing and had sold the murder victim coke right before someone killed her. As he said: that judge could have slapped ten life sentences on me and I wasn't going to open my mouth. i was a black man with an all white jury in Louisiana in the 80s. They could have blamed Kennedy's assassination on me. What a travesty of injustice.

Such is New Orleans, this crazy beautiful city of brokenness and abandonment, energy, resilience and spirit. Katrina was a storm that exposed race, poverty, corruption and inequality to America, and the City will never be the same again. As one person put it, this was one of the last strongholds for black power in America and now its gone, to be replaced by Martin Luther King's white power structure.