Walter and Sam had as some of their hustles cutting grass, landscape design, and washing the trailers in Oak Haven, many of which, unlike the houses, had air-conditioning so that “when you opened the door that cold air would run out of there.” Walter knew because he’d gotten familiar; his employers would offer him Coca-Cola in six-ounce glass bottles. In time, he’d also clean the trailers’ insides, which is how he worked a vacuum for the first time. One tenant offered him corned beef with chowchow relish. He was thinking he had it going on and that life couldn’t get better.
Sam Davis was on the way to Spee-D Super Market on Chef Menteur one day when a Gypsy family who were living across the highway on Chef next to a greenhouse stopped him. “They asked me to get something from the store for them. That was gonna be a nickel or a dime. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll get it.’ They said, ‘You wanna make some more?’ They had me cut the grass. Said, ‘You wanna make some more money?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’ They had a chicken out there in the yard, they had a goose out there in the yard, they had a lamb out there in the yard. Look, everything that was in the yard died that day. They wanted me to kill it. Said, ‘Grab the chicken, kill the chicken.’ I tried. I was running around after that chicken. I did want to catch the chicken. I could not catch that chicken. Old lady ran over there, I don’t know how she got that chicken, grabbed that bad boy, swung it up, broke its neck, came down with it, took a hatchet, chop. This is all one move, martial arts stuff. I said, ‘I want my money.’ Well here’s how they paid me. All that stuff was walkin’ round out there in the yard, they gave me a big ole plate of all that stuff. That’s how they paid a brother. I went home. I was mad. I gave that plate to my mom. She didn’t have no problem with all that stuff dyin’. She was from the country. Mama tore that up.”
This story sounds outrageous but around the same time an advertisement appeared in the Times-Picayune’s Lost section: “ANYONE knowing the whereabouts of either Gypsy or Spanish people with a large tan-and-white collie, please call WH 5-3775.”
The first year they lived in the not-yet-yellow house, Simon and Ivory Mae threw parties in the backyard for every holiday or birthday, or any other excuse. The liquor was stocked and stored in the shed at the back of the property. Simon would spend the entire morning cutting the grass, setting up tables and chairs. His friends from NASA would come and so would members of the various social and pleasure clubs to which he and Ivory belonged. All of the neighbors knew to appear.
Ivory Mae loved entertaining. She prepared the food herself: stuffed eggs, potato salad, and fried catfish. Sometimes, she pulled vegetables from her small garden. They had begun growing tomatoes and okra on the land.
Friday was a recurring holiday, too: Mom would either take the bus to meet Simon at Schwegmann’s Super Market across the Danziger Bridge on Gentilly Road, or he’d come to the house to retrieve her. They dressed nice to go to the store because chances are you’d run into people you knew. Inside, they’d start off holding hands, Simon’s entire salary balled up in his pocket. One full basket led easily to two. Simon knew everyone—if he didn’t know them he would soon—and was always stopped in the aisle having conversations. The ice cream and thing be melting in the cart he so busy talking.
Simon Broom built a wooden bridge wide enough for the car tires to roll over the ditch into the land close to the side door of the house where the children would run out and unload the bags.
From time to time, Simon set up a projector in the backyard, turning Fridays into movie night for anyone who wanted to come watch Hollywood fantasies—horrors like The Last Man on Earth, which the children loved, and Mary Poppins—the side of the house becoming, for a night, the greatest movie screen.
“Look,” says Eddie. “It was like a movie, OK?” He was six then.
“It was pitch-black, nighttime,” says Deborah, who was eleven.
Nineteen sixty-five. Tail end of a notably mild hurricane season. It rained so hard the yards between the houses flooded—standing water for three days—but that was normal. This mid-September storm was erratic, busybodied; it seemed not to be able to make up its mind on where to go. “Wandering Hurricane Betsy, large and tempestuous,” the newspapers said.
The house was full of babies. Karen was not yet one; that birthday was two weeks away. Carl had just turned two. Michael was five. Darryl, four. Valeria, eight.
Simon had been called by NASA to join the emergency crew piling sandbags, but that was just in case. He expected to get right back. And anyway, Uncle Joe was staying at the house then. He was in between loves. No one knew the details, but some woman had put him out, or he had left some woman. Neither scenario was unusual for him.
“We all went to bed,” says Deborah.
Last she knew, the hurricane had turned, was headed to coastal Florida.
“All of a sudden I hear: ‘Get out the bed. Now, now, now.’”
It was midnight.
“We put our feet down on the floor.” Water.
The house turned frantic.
Miss Ivory said, “Get the baby bag.” Karen was the baby.
Later, it was said that the water rose twenty feet in fifteen minutes.
There was no attic to climb up into, no way to sit above it all to wait it out. When Uncle Joe opened the front door, water bum-rushed him. Deborah panicked: “We gon die, we gon die.”
“She started screaming at the top of her lungs like a person going crazy,” says Uncle Joe.
“She went into hysterics,” says Eddie. “And look, they couldn’t stop her.”
“Yeah, cause it was black. It was …” says Deborah.
“She wouldn’t move,” says Eddie. “She was stuck.”
“So I slapped the piss out of her,” says Uncle Joe now. “Shut up,” he remembers saying. “This ain’t no damn movie.”
The water was waist-deep on the two adults. They waded through snakes and downed wires toward the high ground of Chef Menteur Highway, which was, for once, carless, to shelter in Mr. LaNasa’s high-sitting trailer park business at the corner.
Carl rode Uncle Joe’s back, Deborah his side, holding tight to the baby bag. Mom had Karen and Valeria, one on either hip.
Eddie, Michael, and Darryl swam like fish.
“I was a tiny boy,” says Michael. “Water was so high. I’m swimming, I’m swimming. The dogs, too. The water was moving through here like we was in a river.”
He’s right. The water was sweeping us down the street.
The water had in fact swept in like a river, its course and fury made possible by many things, most of them man-made. Poorly constructed levees, for one.
And two: navigation canals touted as great economic engines that would raise the profile of a weakened Port of New Orleans by creating more efficient water routes that would, it was hoped, draw more commercial traffic. The Industrial Canal, dredged in 1923, physically separating New Orleans East from the rest of the city in order to link the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, was the first. Then in 1942, the Intracoastal Waterway was expanded through eastern New Orleans to connect with the Industrial Canal. But in 1958, construction began on one, more damaging than the rest: seventy federally funded miles of watery channel linking the Gulf of Mexico to the heart of New Orleans, shortening ocean vessels’ travel distance by sixty-three miles. It would officially be named the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, but everyone would call it MR-GO.
As with much of New Orleans East’s development, in the early days of MR-GO