Cover Story
When Eddie Sears rolled off the couch and put his legs into thigh-deep water a day after the hurricane blew through, he knew the time had come to seriously consider leaving his apartment in the St. Bernard projects. By then, the electricity was out, the toilets had backed up, food was running short and a tidal surge of nasty, brackish water was slamming garbage cans into the side of his apartment, disrupting the nap he was trying to take.
The boatmen arriving at Sears’ front stoop called for women and children first, but the 58-year-old hopped aboard anyway. “It wasn’t the time for that hero shit,” he recalls.
The boat, which had no motor, had to be towed to an I-10 overpass, where Sears was transferred to a helicopter taking him to buses that eventually delivered him to the Houston Astrodome, where, Sears says, he was treated like royalty for six weeks. “If you wanted a donut, they gave you a whole box,” he says. “I wanted to walk around the outside of the Astrodome with a huge ‘thank you’ sign.”
Sears is tall and thin, with perpetually red eyes and an admitted substance abuse problem. During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, he doesn’t seem capable of holding himself to the four-beer limit he professes to keep. His voice is deep, like a preacher’s, but he enunciates at the front of his mouth. It often seems as if he’s yelling, though he says he doesn’t mean to.
Before the storm, he called himself a “freelancer,” meaning he cut grass and finished odd jobs for neighbors who lived in the quaint houses around the projects. In 1952, when he was 5, his family moved from public housing uptown into the St. Bernard Housing Development, built under a Roosevelt-era initiative. Sears has lived here, off and on, ever since. (The Saint Bernard projects, three miles northwest of downtown, shouldn’t be confused with St. Bernard Parish, a suburb three miles southeast of downtown virtually annihilated after Katrina.)
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
He was offered a new start in Houston. But he turned down a rent-free apartment because he didn’t want to live in a Hispanic neighborhood. “I didn’t like Houston,” he says. “It was too big. It was too far from the store. I didn’t want to go on no one else’s turf clowning around.”
He eventually made his way to his son’s home in Baton Rouge for two days but left because his son is a minister who doesn’t like smoking or beer drinking. He moved to his daughter’s house in Vacherie for two weeks, but he didn’t appreciate the large number of guests coming and going or his daughter’s welfare mentality. “She’s always begging,” Sears says. “I hate the begging.”
He convinced his daughter to drive him to the corner of St. Bernard and Sere streets in New Orleans, which is where the southwest edge of the St. Bernard projects begins, expanding to become 45 acres of low-income apartment buildings that collectively have the look and feel of a concentration camp.
St. Bernard Projects
Sears arrived with $17 in his pocket and no way to get out, as his daughter told him she wouldn’t be back. “I have experienced hardship before,” Sears says. “I glory in suffering. I’ve always had hardship since I come from a family of nine children. That’s a lot of people in one motherfucking house.”
Sears found the projects, like most of New Orleans, was uninhabitable. Debris was strewn as far as the eye could see, turning the region into one giant garbage dump. St. Bernard, once home to 75,000 people, was a ghost town. The only noise was the constant beep of fire alarms in need of batteries.
Sears estimates he’s the first resident back to St. Bernard, though he has met several people who have returned without permission to live in the massive complex. He found the door of his Senate Street apartment still open from rescuers looking for bodies and began squatting inside even though an 8 p.m. curfew was in effect in that part of the city. Candles provide nightlight. Charcoal keeps him warm. He reads the Bible and says the Lord’s Prayer each night before turning in.
Sears immediately found jobs gutting houses for early-returners to the Gentilly neighborhood. He made $50 working five hours for a carpenter repairing a mom-’n’-pop market whose roof was damaged during the storm. That’s where I first meet Eddie Sears, outside the store sitting on a plastic bucket smoking a cigarette the day after Christmas. He is wearing a donated yellow windbreaker and brown camouflage pants. He hasn’t bathed in five days.
His main concern is whether the New Orleans public housing authority, which is still exiled in Houston, will reopen the projects to residents. He’s certain the jails and hospitals will have to be fully serviceable first since there’s such a close connection between the projects and the legal and medical communities. Houston’s crime rate, dailies in several major cities have reported, has spiked since New Orleans residents arrived after Katrina.
There have been murmurs, especially among the white middle-class residents in Jefferson Parish, where I grew up, of rebuilding a new New Orleans, one where poor blacks aren’t as visible. They have not-so-secret hopes that many people like Eddie Sears will stay in Houston, Atlanta and other places where they won’t interfere with the rest of the Crescent City’s social fabric.
Sears is worried the housing authority will allow the projects to sit empty while rainwater creeps through leaks in the roof, causing further damage that will take months, if not years, to repair, delaying his neighbors from returning.
He’s not as sure what his private role will be in cleaning up his neighborhood. He contemplates whether to escape New Orleans and the depressing prospects of reconstruction. Maybe he’ll find a ride to Shreveport to find work on the racetrack, where he’d once been a hotwalker and groom. He struggles with himself over how often he wants to work inside fungus-filled houses when homeowners avoid going inside. He complains he can feel mold “eating” on his neck. His nose and chest, he says, are itchy. “Why should I go into the mold if they don’t want to,” Sears asks while on the way to buy beer at one of the few open stores in the area. “I love me too.”
He also likes the idea of finding a female companion to make recovery more bearable. After we pass a full-bodied woman pushing a baby carriage outside a FEMA office on Loyola Avenue, Sears says, “That’s a woman there. I’d like to make a play on that. That’s survival. That’s recovery—laying up in a bed and having a woman care about you.”
But it is apparent, after a week with Eddie Sears, that he isn’t going anywhere. He is at home in the projects, where he knows everybody and everybody knows him. He can find his way around without a car and knows where to go to satisfy his “little vices.”
Randy Robinson
The day after I meet him, he asks me to drop him off at the corner of St. Bernard and Claiborne Avenue, where he will troll some side streets until he finds someone to sell him a rock of crack. He tells me not to follow him and he doesn’t want me to print that he was looking for drugs.
“Leave that part out,” he says more than once. “You’re fucking with the underworld. Addiction is its own punishment. There’s nothing you can do about it. Your story is about the recovery. Your story is about public officials and the government doing its portion. Your story is about the humanity.”
Eddie Sears
The carpenter Sears works with the day after Christmas is Randy Robinson, a lumberjack of a man who seems to be the only person enjoying himself in the no-man’s-land New Orleans has become after the storm. “I feel like getting up every morning and yelling, ‘Good Morning, Vietnam,’ ” he says with a bit of glee in his voice. “Look at this place. It’s like a bomb went off.”
Robinson is tall and barrel-chested and looks Dutch or German but claims he is almost full-blooded Chickasaw. He chain-smokes hand-rolled cigarettes and rides around on a white Suzuki motorcycle badly in need of new tires. (Four-wheel vehicles are for “unbalanced people,” Robinson says.) At 51, he is fit enough to whip a younger man—challenging me to a wrestling match if I didn’t agree.
Robinson rode his bike from Chico, Calif., to New Orleans in late October, following four carpenters driving a GMC Suburban that broke down in New Mexico. The five were originally supposed to work in Mississippi. But a police chief who said he’d hire them wasn’t available when they arrived, so they found work in New Orleans with a man who let them live in a small apartment.
By the time I meet him, Robinson has abandoned the other carpenters because, he says, the leader of the group, a guy named Jimmy, owes everybody money. Robinson moved out of the apartment and built a room on the side of a garage out of two-by-fours and $50 worth of tarp. One end of the room is open, but four suspicious dogs patrol the large yard, ready to bite the first intruder. Robinson owns an electric hotplate, refrigerator and television, all of which he obtained by rummaging through the detritus piled along New Orleans thoroughfares. He calls his collection of valuables “groundscores”; they include videotapes (but no VCR), luggage and a black Stetson made of beaver, not felt.
Robinson is a kind of blue-collar mercenary. He traveled to Florida after Hurricane Andrew blew through the peninsula and to Sacramento in 1997 when an area flooded north of that city. He is ready to bid on construction jobs in New Orleans, but Louisiana officials require contractors to live in the state three months before granting a license.
Instead, he agreed to gut and rebuild the corner store, a cinder-block building with a second-story apartment with a roof first repaired by a group of Mexicans who abandoned the job, leaving the ceiling at different heights. “It’ll challenge my ingenuity,” Robinson says, looking at the crossbeams overhead. “It’s a carpenter’s nightmare. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.”
One of the problems Robinson faces is the shortage of unskilled laborers hired for mindless tasks like tearing out drywall, leaving reconstruction to skilled workers like Robinson. There has been an influx of Latino labor, but they come at a price in what has become a laborer’s market. Instead of $75-per-day wages, illegals want $100 with a raise to $150 after two weeks, which the owner of the store refuses to pay. “If I had the right crew I could put this motherfucker back in business in six weeks,” Robinson says. He guesses that, without more help, it will probably take three months.
Robinson’s social life is another matter. The rumor going around is that men outnumber women 17-to-1 in the city’s large construction zone. Robinson says he got lucky in the French Quarter with a 23-year-old bartender who considers him “real people.” He wonders what she sees in an “old scooter-bum” like him. After a couple of encounters, she tells him she is four months pregnant, which is a major drawback to a libertine like Robinson, who has been married three times. “I done my time in hell, and I ain’t going back,” he says, sipping a Natural Ice beer inside his makeshift room. “The American dream is the American nightmare. I had the three-bedroom house, the wife, kids, two cars and pickup in the driveway. I don’t want to go through all that shit again. Talk about the stress and bullshit. I don’t have any stress or responsibility here. If I lay here tonight and freeze to death, nobody will care and neither will I.”
Lorie Seruntine
Sitting outside the store midweek between Christmas and New Year’s, waiting to talk to Robinson, I see a young white guy easing down Senate Street in a red SUV. He’s wearing a ball cap and is in need of a shave. Like many people who travel by the projects, he stares at the ugly, charcoal-and-red buildings, even though the rest of New Orleans looks like hell too.
He stops his car in the middle of the street and asks, through an open window, which projects they are.
“St. Bernard.”
“Any idea if they’re going to tear them down?”
“I don’t think anybody knows.”
Taking his foot off the brake, he says. “They ought to clear the whole thing. Let them stay in Houston.” He grins and waves and drives off.
On Hamburg Street, on the east side of the projects, there’s a flurry of activity. A legion of quirky volunteers—from Oregon, New York, Arizona, California—have descended on a Baptist church run by Bruce Davenport, a portly, good-natured pastor who stayed behind for three weeks after the flood, wading through the murky water to hand out canned goods to residents who refused to leave.
When I complain that my sinuses are gunked up from walking through moldy homes, he waves his hand in front of his face and says he can’t tell allergies from colds anymore. They’re blended together into a continual sickness.
Davenport is part minister, part activist, part clinician. Besides St. John’s, the small shotgun church where he preaches, he also runs two homes that service HIV patients and other victims of the sex trade. (“He’s had to bury quite a few patients,” one of his neighbors tells me.) He shows me photos of girls forced into prostitution by their mothers, some as young as 11. He knows women who give free sex as revenge for contracting HIV and teenagers who use him as a last resort when VD symptoms begin to appear. “When they can’t get rid of the burn, they come see us,” he says.
Taking a break from his workday, Davenport walks along Gibson Street, the only north-south artery through the projects. The street is known as Marijuana Lane—not to be confused with Heroin Alley, where Davenport’s church and hospices are located, or Crack Boulevard, officially known as Milton Street, which is the east-west artery through the development.
Davenport walks down Gibson, sticking an index finger in bullet holes in the mature oaks lining the street. He grew up in these projects when fistfights, not gunfire, were the way to prove you were tough. Times changed in the mid-1980s, as New Orleans, like the rest of the country, was immersed in the crack trade and the accompanying violence over turf wars and revenge. Only those who double-crossed a hustler were supposed to get whacked, the ghetto version of the Mafia’s wise guy code. But thugs aren’t known for practicing gun safety or eliminating the correct target. Mistakes have been made. Innocent people often have been gunned down.
Still robed in a blue contamination suit, Davenport points out the St. Bernard residents murdered after being entangled in drug disputes. A young man ambushed in a stairwell. Another shot and dumped in a bed of fire ants. Three young girls shot as their parents ran out a back door. Body parts pulled from a compartment underneath the projects. A woman gunned down while begging for her life. Another young man shot point blank six times while Davenport’s small congregation worshipped inside St. John’s. Vendettas against family members unaware their kin had been beefing with somebody.
At the crime scenes, murderers hid themselves in the crowd of spectators, checking to ensure nobody ratted them out.
The one thing you didn’t want to do in the projects was get caught slipping, Davenport says. Slipping meant you weren’t watching your back for signs somebody was stalking you or someone you were hanging with.
There were so many murders in and around the St. Bernard projects that police installed video cameras on telephone poles to capture the action. Police wanted to videotape from one of Davenport’s buildings, but he said no way. “Do you know how many ministers have been murdered for being a witness?” he asks.
As we stroll down Marijuana Lane, a stocky man with dreadlocks pulls up in a white Pontiac. He’s a former crack dealer who now paints houses for a living. He gives Davenport a quick hug, looks down Gibson Street as far as he can see, and recalls the day he evacuated. “I’d never been in a boat in my life,” he says. “It fucked me up.”
The man doesn’t want his name printed and insists I scratch out comments after I write them in a notebook, especially when he says he was paying $25 rent while earning $500 each week painting houses. “I love my ’hood,” he says. “I miss my ’hood. There weren’t too many people who could walk all the way through it, but I could.”
He says he saw a young man shot down by an Uzi not far from where we stood. Another guy was clipped by an AK-47.
Stolen goods were dispensed in the projects as if it were a giant flea market. “You could buy any kind of weapon,” the man says. “As much as you wanted of whatever you wanted. Uzis. AK-47s. Car rims. Sound systems. Put your order in. If you didn’t like it, you could return it. Money ran through the projects all day. People thought we were a bunch of poor black folks. But we had money.”
Groups of young men calling themselves Hard Headz and Young Gunnerz terrorized the neighborhood. But they were gangs in name only, he says. “There ain’t no gangs in here. Just killers.”
The man says his goodbyes and turns to leave. Talk of the projects, the drugs and violence, has made him nostalgic. “I don’t care how deadly they say it was,” he announces. “This is home.” Faced with the prospect of losing the projects, he says a $2,300 check from FEMA is meaningless. “If I could,” he says, “I’d give it all up to come back.”
On the return trip to his church, Rev. Davenport says he’d also like to see the St. Bernard projects return exactly as they were before. It is surprising to hear him say this; he explained in an earlier conversation that he chose to return to his old neighborhood after seminary because he was tired of burying young black men. He wanted to help. He wanted to affect change. Why, then, would he want the projects to come back exactly like they were, complete with violence, prostitution and drug addiction?
Davenport’s explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy me. He says living in the projects is mostly a last resort for those who refuse to fend for themselves in mainstream society. The projects aren’t just what they know. It’s what they prefer. “It’s very easy to get out of the projects, but they don’t want the responsibility,” Davenport says. “They have no light bill, no gas bill, $25-a-month rent. They’ll survive murders and killings, but they can’t survive the rent running out, the phone and lights cut off.”
Page 2 >>>