As I walked the streets of Bay St. Louis and Waveland nine days after Hurricane Katrina dumped her wrath on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and changed our state forever, I kept thinking one thing: “It looks like it’s been carpet bombed.”
It was such a glut of horrifying details everywhere I looked that I had a hard time focusing, at first, on the beaten-down and exhausted local people still there, or back from where they’d fled, with blank looks on their faces. They sat in front of destroyed homes or poked through the rubble for something, anything that could help put the scattered and destroyed puzzles of their lives back together.
“There was junk, and death, and rank odor, and sadness, and despair everywhere,” I wrote for the Jackson Free Press then. “Slabs and high-water marks, family photos floating in the ocean, cars in swimming pools, everything imaginable left tangled together in battered trees. As I drove and walked down street after street devoured by the wrath of Katrina, I looked for something, anything that said what needed to be said.”
Then I realized a recurring symbol, my touchstone to follow to tell the stories of people suddenly thrust into hell and soon having to try to convince an insurance company that it was wind, not water that left you homeless. “It was the wheelchairs,” I wrote. “Everywhere I went, I saw a wheelchair. Some of the tools of assistance were in pristine shape, others mangled, some overturned, floating, hanging from a tree limb. They were in rich white neighborhoods, poor Black ones. One was sitting on the second floor of St. Stanislaus College with a flattened SUV of some sort lodged into the floor just below it, the wall missing, recalling the image of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, ripped open to reveal its innards.”
What didn’t have to be said then was the overwhelm of the long rows of homes the Katrina bomb had taken out—134,000 homes and 10,000 rental units in Mississippi, leaving 100,000 Mississippians in FEMA trailers, some for years. Unlike the piles of rubble in ground-zero Waveland, many of the homes I saw in Bay St. Louis were waterlogged and crumbling shells of their former life as cozy nests in a charming beachfront town. I walked down the middle of Ballentine Street, starting at Beach Boulevard for several blocks, looking left and right at the bombed-out domiciles, the wooden ones often in piles on the ground.
Some residents of the Black neighborhood, like Isaac “Guitar Bo” Darensbourg, were sitting outside in the heat because where else would they be as they waited for FEMA, or the checks, to show up?
The locally famous guitarist, and occasional lawn man, talked to me in front of his daughter’s stucco house—it had suffered, but it was standing—because his four-room shotgun home, around the block on Caron Lane, was flattened just like the big houses white people lived in two blocks away on Beach Boulevard. Two of his cousins had drowned on Caron, too. Everybody I talked to had lost not just homes, but people. Sixty-five died there in Hancock County alone.
“We were lucky,” Guitar Bo told me about surviving. The water had risen so fast in their daughter’s stucco house that they chiseled a hole into the roof, climbed up and prayed for the best. By nine days later, they were waiting for help and a new roof over their heads. “Someone said the government might come through and bulldoze the houses. My wife said they might give us a place, but I’d prefer assistance,” he said.
Guitar Bo wasn’t asking for a bigger house, though; greed wasn’t in his heart. “We don’t want nothing no more than we had,” he said.
‘Try to Stop Us’ Hubris
Two things were clear to me that day on the Gulf Coast, walking through neighborhoods seeing lives upended, drowned photo albums, dirty dolls in the street and roofs blown off. This tragedy was as human as it gets—and housing was every damn thing. Nothing else mattered more. People needed walls, a roof, dry beds, kitchen tables, a place to heal. Many of them, like Guitar Bo born right there on Easy Street between Ballentine and Caron, had been there since birth; they needed a chance to rebuild their lives, security and families.
But it wasn’t long before the very idea of federal funding to rebuild low-income housing—say a four-room shotgun like Guitar Bo and Miss D (Delores) had on Caron—became a commodity. Yes, the money would eventually come from Washington to rebuild homes and lives, and then most of it was stolen, divvied up, passed around among the wealthy, leaving so many families sold out. Many people were forced to leave their neighborhoods or left the Mississippi Coast—was this the powerful’s motive?—opening up valuable real estate within walking distance of the beach.
Most of the nearly $600 million Congress approved for affordable housing was just pilfered for pet development projects of white men and men in power there. In plain view. Bald-faced with “try to stop us” hubris. “Jobs” over housing, yada yada.
The crazy part is that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ultimately allowed the theft. A former HUD assistant director told me recently that the regional office rejected the then-Mississippi governor’s request to approve his “redirection” plan—but then a well-placed high-level political appointee of George W. Bush flashed the green light in Washington.
This systemic attack on the poor is such a horrible reality to try to grok—just like those piles and piles and piles of rubble that day—that a lot of people haven’t understood the scam to this day. They don’t know, or maybe care, that our governor then, the international lobbyist and political southern-strategist OG Haley Barbour, decided to openly redirect over half a billion dollars from low-income Katrina housing to build a port that would end up honoring him.
Of course, most media then and through last week’s Hurricane Katrina’s 20th anniversary just … ignored it … focusing instead on Barbour’s brilliance in convincing the feds to send down so much money, proportionately more than the Democratic leaders in Louisiana managed to get despite having even more damage. That is, the Mississippi press corps repolished Barbour’s brand yet again and gave him an open mic to continue molding his version of Mississippi history with him as the perpetual white knight of our state.
When News Editor Ashton Pittman, who drove to Gulfport expecting a very different kind of commemoration last week than the lovefest to Barbour that ensued (with Tulsi Gabbard there for no apparent reason) told me that organizers had chosen the Port of Gulfport complex to further polish his image in, I nearly choked. Have they no shame?
Apparently not. Bear in mind, too, that Barbour set out to redirect nearly four times as much federal money to his port project than Nancy New, John Davis and friends stole from federal TANF welfare funds over a decade later. Thanks to a boatful of legal work, especially by the stellar Mississippi Center for Justice, which lives up to its name regularly, the State agreed in 2010 to allow $132 million of the half-billion low-income housing costs to go to its original purpose—but the rest of the federal housing booty still went to port projects including the Small Craft Harbor and the Barksdale Pavilion.
This means that a big part of Barbour’s ongoing legacy was giving future Mississippi bureaucrats and celebrities permission, and a roadmap, to grab up federal funds allocated to needy people for pet projects. That might mean big ports, college volleyball stadiums or even start-up businesses for their own enrichment or to have their name on it. In this money grab, you don’t need to ask for permission—or even apologize if you get caught.
You’re just a damn savvy businessman. And a hero with your name on stuff.
We’re Not That Into Power
Due in no small part to thousands of Jackson Free Press stories I either wrote or edited in the last 23 years about Haley Barbour’s ways and schemes, I’ve been told that I’m obsessed with him. Mind you, those stories included being the only newsroom leader in the state who dared to kick open the reporting door on his propensity to pardon violent women-killers, his nursing-home lobbying, the actual truth around his “tort reform” crusade or, of course, his role in using race strategy to help ensure white southerners didn’t turn the corner on our racist past and upbringing, electorally and otherwise. Or, hell, on his actual work as Republican National Committee chairman to “build” the modern Republican Party, as he puts it including, you know, calls to do away with the Department of Education as he had called for in his 1996 party-building book, among other extremist ideas. Then there was his family’s Katrina fraud saga involving housing money.
In a way, I guess it is obsession—but on behalf of the people of my home state. Journalists and editors should fearlessly fixate on the power influencers in our midst who keep us mired in muck and division or that we can prove use our tax money for their own expensive projects and glorification, especially those who believe they’re out of reach. That right there is the epitome of privilege and power—not just the chicanery, but the knowing that nobody, including your media friends and colleagues, will type a word against you. In his case, most Mississippi journalists and editors won’t even bring it up, yet they’ll shower him with love and devotion 20 years after he gutted housing money and pitted Mississippi against Louisiana.
It’s astonishing, except it’s not. It’s reality here.
But damn it, people, Katrina was about people. Real people. People who mow lawns for a living and cut holes in roofs to save their families. It was about people who lost everything because the damn insurance companies—one can also call them lobbying clients—screwed Katrina victims over and over again.
Unchecked power barrels through the crowds of real people, elbows them out and centers itself like the fat cat that it insists on being. And often power has a trail of reporters running behind it, recorders thrust forward to capture every word it has to say, while leaving the people’s words unsaid and their needs on the cutting-room floor.
Let’s just say I’m obsessed with the people affected and left behind and don’t give a damn about power—except how it treats the rest of us. I’ve designed two Mississippi publications now that never salivate over power and that daily favor the voices of the people they try to drown out and ignore. I’m always amazed when people ask me how we’re different from other media in Mississippi. “Have you read us?” I’ll sometimes ask. If I’m feeling magnanimous, I’ll hint: “Who do we center?”
Bottom line: The coverage of Haley Barbour in Mississippi media for the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina just proved my rather obsessive point about how power is routinely centered in our state. Call it déjà vu all over again.
Bank on this: We will always choose the people first. As for power? We’re just not that into it. But we will continue to hold it accountable, and tell its stories, so the people understand what we’re all up against.
Correction: In the original column above, Donna Ladd inadvertently transposed wind and water in one instance, which is now corrected.
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