Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City

one

A Camille on Betsy's Track

The big old camelback house on Lamanche Street was home to Patrina Peters, and had been for most of her forty-three years. Her parents lived in one of the paired front-to-back apartments that made up the ground floor. "shotgun" apartments in local parlance, because of their long, narrow layout. Zip, her brother's widow, had stayed on in the other downstairs apartment after Kevin's sudden death from a heart attack a year earlier. Peters and her two kids lived upstairs on the partial second floor that humped up on the backyard end of a camelback and gave this kind of house its name.

But if it was a cozy home for an extended New Orleans family, it was also a monument: to the self-reliance of Patrina Peters's forebears and to their standing in the city's Lower Ninth Ward, the rough-and-tumble working-class community some twenty blocks long and twenty-five blocks wide just downriver from the Industrial Canal. The waterway cut New Orleans more or less in half-a corridor of ship repair yards, steel fabricators, cold-storage warehousing, and the like that ran on a south-to-north axis from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain. West of the canal, on the apron of land along the bank of the Mississippi River, lay the older and generally whiter parts of the city: Bywater, Marigny, the French Quarter, the downtown area with its business corridor and gentrified warehouse district, the Garden District, and then, farther up St. Charles Avenue, the sprawling heterogeneous swath of housing and universities known as Uptown.

There was more to New Orleans than these original settlements along the river's edge. As New Orleans was drained and landfilled early in the twentieth century, the city pushed out into the swamps, eventually reaching all the way to the lake, a shallow and brackish inland sea fifty miles long and twenty-five miles across. More recently, settlement had spread beyond the Lower Ninth into another, considerably larger welter of swampland and postwar subdivisions known as New Orleans East. People still spoke of wards in New Orleans, none so frequently as the Lower Ninth, mainly because it was geographically so succinct. But these political subdivisions-there were seventeen wards-for practical purposes had been supplanted in modern times by councilmanic districts, of which there were only five.

Peters knew what people said about the Lower Ninth, and she would hear a lot more of it on television in the weeks ahead. It would sicken and disgust her, the way the TV reporters figured everyone in the Lower Ninth was poor and on crack and couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane if their lives depended on it, which maybe they did.

Peters's great-grandfather on her mother's side, the Reverend Allen Thomas, had been pastor of the Battleground Baptist Church when it was in Fazendeville, a storied African American hamlet on a corner of the Chalmette National Historical Park a few miles downriver in St. Bernard Parish. The bulldozing of Fazendeville in 1964 was the final hurrah in a campaign by preservationists to bring the field to a closer semblance of its condition during the Battle of New Orleans one hundred fifty years earlier. Anticipating the end, the pastor moved his flock and his eleven children and their many children onto land he had acquired in the Lower Ninth. His sons were builders and cabinetmakers-the reverend himself sidelined as a roofer and in due course, a swath of several blocks was dominated by his family and his followers. Two generations later, Peters's cousin the Reverend Eric Lewis, was assistant pastor at Battleground Baptist.