On Friday we stopped by the Candlelight Lounge after Kermit’s, but no live music at either place that night. But outside the Candlelight, there was a lively scene—JJ serving food straight from the streetside fryer, people from the neighborhood loosely gathered around, shooting the shit and getting dinner.
We fell into talking to Wayne and his lovely wife Cheri (?). Unbidden, the subject of Katrina came up, and everyone present had some small part of their experience to share—whether they were living in Tremé, the Seventh Ward, Mid-City, or further out from downtown. For everybody there on that afternoon in Tremé, it was like it was yesterday, and the stories just tumbled out:
“I had just taken down my attic ladder and if the water had come in we would’ve had no place to go.”
“There were people right up there and they had 2 inches of water in the house. Not the bottom floor, mind you—the top floor. The bottom floor is just gone.”
“Firefighters were hotwiring any boat they could find and siphoning gas out of people’s cars to run the boats and rescue people.”
“There was a guy hanging out of that tree and when they came to rescue him he said, ‘Leave me be, go get that guy in that house, I can hear him screaming.’”
“I saw that reporter on the TV standing there in the Quarter on Bourbon, that patch of high ground, and just lying, saying, ‘There’s no water here. New Orleans is fine.’”
It’s been 19 years since Katrina and Rita, and the entire city seems to have a case of untreated PTSD—particularly in the low-lying, largely Black parts of town.
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