I don't know. That was a big question whether I was going to come back
to live here after Katrina. Now I'm not talking about immediately after
Katrina. I'm talking about like from December
through March. I'd been back in the city. I'd seen, you
know—and I knew it was rough. I mean, right now it's
relatively—. Compared to back in December, it's easy. It's
still very, very hard, but compared to December, it's easy. I mean, I
can remember, man, shit, you'd turn a corner. Say like at night, be on a
major street, turn a corner, and all of a sudden there's nothing.
There's no lights; there's nothing, absolute—. It's just like
you fall off the edge of the earth. I can understand how people used to
think the earth was flat. Nothing. You know, I mean, I don't know if
people understand that if you grew up in an urban environment, you could
always see a light somewhere. But there were times back in December,
once you turned a corner, there was nothing. As far as you could see,
there was nothing. You didn't see no lights, no nothing. You didn't hear
nothing, wasn't nobody outside. This is New Orleans, and people always
outside. There wasn't no cars, just nothing. Man, that was shit
was—that was rough. It was December. I mean, even now there
are certain parts of the city you can't really deal with them at night.
Streets signs are gone, street lights are not working, stop lights are
not working. For the most part, nobody's living there.
I mean, New Year's Eve I went down in the lower nine and we were having a
program at one of our members whose house was in the lower Ninth Ward.
They were gutting the house and trying to get it back up, and it was
kind of foggy. I crossed the bridge, man, in the fog, and I had my high
beams on. You could barely see, you know, like twenty feet. Once I got
off the bridge and turned to go to her house—. She lived
close to the river. I lived close to the swamps. She lives like in the
seven or eight hundred block, and I was in the twenty-five hundred
block. On the side of Saint Claude that she lives on, I didn't go over
there that much. So although I knew the streets in general, I didn't
know them like I knew the other side. So I turned, and without lights
and no street signs and all this other kind of stuff, you get lost. And
that darkness was not—. You couldn't
see. You could feel it. It just wrapped itself around you. I've been in
all kinds of situations. I've been in war situations. I've been, you
know—. I don't have much fear, either in terms of
apprehension about my personal self or afraid that somebody is going to
hurt me. But I was making some turns with the car, trying to get to her
place, and realized I'd turned the wrong street. I must have missed a
street or something because I just couldn't see it, and had to back up
and I'm saying, "Damn, if I'm having this much trouble, I know
people who never dealt with this before, I know they can't make
it." You know. I know they can't make it. It was rough.
So no, I don't know that—. That's a long answer to your
question about if another one hits. If another one hits, I don't know
that there will be much left. You know, the ecosystem and the social and
physical infrastructure of New Orleans is fragile right now. Another
hurricane hits, I think a lot of stuff is going to get completely wiped
out. Nobody's even going to think about trying to resuscitate it, as it
was. We have a lot of people who are putting up a good struggle and who
really believe that they can bring the city back, but I don't think so.
Not like it was. It's not coming back, not the way it was.