The coffin lay open. The mourners approached one by one.
Some spat their contempt and turned away swiftly. Others reached inside the grand, silver casket and kept a hand there for a moment as if trying to purge the years of terrible memories and suffering. Each left a handwritten note.
“Since this is a church, I’m going to be nice,” one said. “You made me lose my home. You may have taken away my life as I know it, but you’ll never take away my spirit.”
Another said: “Thank God you are gone, but unfortunately you will never be forgotten.”
The congregation had gathered to bury Hurricane Katrina five years after it smashed through New Orleans’ inadequate levees, flooded most of the city and erased entire communities. About 1,800 died and more than 1 million fled, many never to return. Tens of thousands are still living in trailers scattered across neighboring Texas and beyond. Many of those who did come back faced desolation, the destruction of their homes, the loss of their jobs.
The Roman Catholic archbishop of New Orleans, Gregory Aymond, said the symbolic funeral would lay to rest “the hurt, the pain, the woundedness, the hopelessness.”
He then looked on slightly astonished at the vigor of an evangelical preacher, Jesse Boyd, who put it another way: “We’re here to say arrivederci, adios, goodbye to Katrina. Rest well.”
Five years on, the government has spent US$143 billion on the reconstruction of public buildings and private homes, roads and bridges, in one of the largest programs of its kind in US history.
However, the anger of the notes dropped into the coffin echoes across large areas of a city that has recovered so completely in parts that the only evidence of Katrina is how often it still comes up in conversation.
The money-spinning French Quarter is again busy with tourists, and white southern gentlemen in panama hats and bow ties populate the restaurants of the smarter ends of town as if nothing ever happened.
Then there is Ventura Drive, a few blocks from Katrina’s funeral in St Bernard parish. House No. 3112 stands almost alone. There is a compulsory demolition notice taped to the window. There is no 3110 or 3114.
The blocks to the left and right, in front and behind have been wiped of all sign of the homes that once stood there. Today, grass stretches right across the space where the houses stood close to an oil refinery at the water’s edge, which poured fuel into the flood five years ago.
More than one-third of the population of St Bernard has still not returned.
Across the administrative line in the neighboring Lower Ninth, the predominantly working-class black American district that bore the worst of the disaster, just one in four residents has moved back. One is Henry Irvin, whose house sits virtually alone on St Louis Avenue.
“The house next door had almost blown on top of mine, but it didn’t. But my house did fill with water, covered with water. Everything inside was destroyed. All my personal stuff,” he said. “Volunteers gutted my house out. We had to air it out and then we had to rebuild. New insulation, new electrics, new everything.”
Irvin, 74, fled the day before the storm. For the next three years he moved around, living with relatives and in a trailer provided by the authorities. Finally, he moved back home in 2008.
“I was just trying to hurry up and get home, because there was nothing like living in that damn trailer. Most of my neighbors are gone. In my square, I’m the only house. All around are empty lots. Turn the corner and there’s nothing there but grass and trees,” he said. “There was a time when everybody around here knew everybody. It changed. There’s not the people, not the community. Perhaps they can change it for the better, but they’ve got to give us a fair share of the pie. There’s a lot of people all the way to Texas that want to come back home, but they can’t because they can’t afford to rebuild or bring their kids back here because we don’t have the schools. They give the grants to the people with the big houses.”
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