Wolf D. Fuhrig

Home

The City Of Saints And Sinners

“The river rose all day.
The river rose all night.
Some people got lost in the flood.
Some people got away alright.
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines.
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline.
Louisiana , Louisiana .
The’re trying to wash us away.”

This is how songwriter and singer Randy Newman told the story of the great Mississippi flood of 1927 that rolled through the streets of New Orleans. Hundreds perished. Hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes in six states.

The New York Times reported how the disaster “ripped the veil off the genteel, feudal relations between whites and blacks, how blacks were rounded up by armed guards and prevented from leaving as the waters rose.” Race riots erupted, and Randy Newman wrote:

“President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand.
The President say, ‘Little fat man isn’t it a shame
What the river has done to this poor crackers’ land.’”

Little did Coolidge suspect that the “poor crackers” would express their anger at the ballot box by shifting their historical allegiance away from the Republican Party to the Democrats and to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Since its foundation almost 300 years ago, New Orleans, the city that loves to be called “The Big Easy,” has lived nonchalantly in the subtropical flood plane of the Mississippi delta, trusting in the levees that are to protect it. It has lived through major hurricanes, floods, and fires. Hurricanes first destroyed the city shortly after the French settlers began building it up.

Most of the 1.3 million residents in the metropolitan area--67 percent black, 28 percent white—fled when Katrina, the killer hurricane, approached. An estimated 100,000 residents without private or public transportation, however, remained in their homes. Reporters described them as the poor, the less educated, the elderly, and the disabled people. They may have hoped that Katrina would pass them by, as many previous hurricanes had done.

According to census figures, 9 percent of all Americans live below the poverty line and 19 percent are disabled. In New Orleans, however, 28 percent are poor and 24 percent disabled. An estimated 50,000 households do not own an automobile.

Yet, the same troubled city is best known for its joyous celebrations, such as Mardi Gras, the Jazz Fest, and Southern Decadence, and for its vivacious nightlife, most notably in the French Quarter. "Laissez les bons temps rouler" ("Let the good times roll") is the city's unofficial motto. That’s how many residents traditionally wanted to live life. Because the living was easy, Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson loved the city and enriched it with their music.

Never before has an estimated 89 percent of New Orleans been flooded. The horrific devastation showed the city’s true saints, the selfless rescue crews, and its worst sinners, the looting losers.

For the time being, the Big Easy as the world knew it, is no more, but considering its history and the spirit of its people, it is unthinkable that New Orleans and its unique culture will not rise again.