Dome Away From Home
For two weeks in September, the Eighth Wonder of the World was miraculously transformed into the largest emergency shelter in the universe, where 17,500 Katrina survivors found comfort, hundreds of families were reunited, and New Orleans showed its first signs of rebirth.
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The interloping didn’t end there. Jim Forrest, a longtime SBC employee now working for Technology for All, a Houston nonprofit that provides recycled computers and wireless Internet to low-income neighborhoods, called Aanstoos on Wednesday afternoon and told her that he had forty spare desktop computers. She told him to bring them over, and together they set up a computer center where evacuees could search Web sites on which Katrina survivors were registering and looking for others. By Thursday night it was done. But there were more than a dozen sites with lists of survivors—FEMA, the Red Cross, the Gulf Coast News, MSNBC, craigslist—and the searches were taking too long. As luck would have it, Yahoo, one of SBC’s corporate partners, happened to call and ask what it could do. By the end of Friday, fifteen of what Aanstoos and Forrest both called “Yahoo’s best and brightest” had shown up and created a webcrawler that ran through all searchable sites. A dozen or so registration sites, one search engine, and every half-hour the computer center breaking out in applause at another virtual reunion.
I WAS BACK AT THE Dome at seven Sunday morning and, seeing the room come alive a second time, felt the need to be of some help. I went to the fourth level to grab a tray of breakfast food to pass out on the floor. On the concourse, people were trying to conjure up regular life. Some barbers from the crowd had bought electric clippers at a nearby beauty supply store and set up chairs to cut men’s hair against the wall on the walkway. And behind the tables where the meals were being served, in small recessed areas that housed the Dome’s old concession stands, families had found places where they could almost be alone. They ignored the bustling cafeteria-like lines just ten feet away and looked as comfortable as they were going to get.
After handing out what I could on the floor of the Dome—items coated with glaze and powdered sugar went fast; fresh fruit went untouched—I returned to the concourse to get more supplies. Behind a food table, some police officers were in a tight circle around a screaming woman. There were six children standing there with her, aged from tykes to teenagers and looking confused, and she sounded like a woman I’d seen overdosing outside the afternoon before. I loaded up my tray and headed back down to the floor.
When I returned for more food half an hour later, there was a Red Cross blanket stretched over a body on a cot in the center of the recessed area. The food and the cops were gone, and the kids and the woman were sitting in silence. Two women in yellow cleaning-crew uniforms were standing nearby, and they told me that this family had wanted to let their father sleep late, but when it looked as if he might miss breakfast, they tried to wake him up. He’d died in his sleep.
A couple hours later I ran into Jeffrey and Pecola. They were taking the bags from under their cots and piling them into one of the hundreds of shopping carts that had found their way into the Dome. Some neighbors had offered a ride to Baton Rouge, and though Jeffrey would clearly rather make it to Dallas, he was ready to get back to real life. This was the surest, quickest way.
The Peterses had far more stuff than they could easily carry. A van was picking them up just outside the Dome, so they grabbed everything they could and headed out past the triage station and up the east ramp to the parking lot. Jeffrey refused my help with the cart, which was stacked about eight feet high. He kept one hand on top of the pile and pushed with the other, and about halfway up the fifty-yard ramp, exposed now to the oppressive Houston heat, he started to run out of gas. A New Orleanian coming down the ramp jogged over, grabbed the front of the cart, and without saying a word, helped pull it to the top of the hill. Jeffrey never saw him, and when we reached the parking lot, the man quietly walked off.
A white Ford Econoline van was waiting, as were some ten other people with just as much stuff. Nobody acknowledged that there might not be enough room. Instead, they hustled to get their own things and themselves into the van. As Jeffrey forced bags under the seats, Pecola said she had to go back inside to get her mother, who was waiting at triage for a flu shot. We’d seen her there as we exited, standing at the wrong end of a very long line. Jeffrey’s eyes flashed. “Why the hell didn’t she do that yesterday?” Pecola said simply, “I’ll be right back,” and headed down the ramp.
It was too late; while they were talking, the van had filled up. The driver looked at Jeffrey and shrugged his shoulders. Quietly, Jeffrey put their belongings back in the cart, then took them back to his cot.
THE DOME LOOKED different the second weekend after Katrina. There was more structure to the security, with the introduction of a curfew and metal detectors at foot traffic checkpoints. But it did not feel locked down. “Reliant City Town Square” had been erected in the parking lot just outside the Dome’s east ramp, with twenty basketball hoops, large air-conditioned tents housing arcade games and a day-care center, and three inflated moonwalk-style amusements, $70,000 worth of recreation organized and paid for by Houston furniture king Jim “Mattress Mac” McIngvale and his wife, Linda.
Life had changed inside the Dome too, where people were adjusting to what one volunteer called “the new normal.” It helped that there was more room. The Houston Chronicle reported that just three thousand people were living in the Dome. A great many had left to move in with family in Texas and elsewhere or relocated to Houston apartments provided by the relief effort. But just as important for the remaining residents, financial assistance had started to arrive in the form of debit cards handed out by the Red Cross and FEMA. According to news accounts, the initial day’s distribution of the cards had been a disaster, with people standing in line on the hot parking lot asphalt for hours on end. The Chronicle reported numerous faintings and fights. But the people I talked to Saturday were just grateful for the money. While some of them said they weren’t touching it until the Astrodome generosity ran dry, others were using it to reclaim a little of everyday life. Many people now walked through the Dome carrying boom boxes—played at respectfully low volumes—and many more had Discman-type devices and headphones. It was refreshing; the thought of that many New Orleanians in one place with no music had been almost as hard to fathom as the sightings the previous weekend of young black men in Toby Keith T-shirts. That wrong was remedied with Red Cross—funded shopping sprees at an urban-apparel shop across the street.
On Sunday afternoon I saw two men outside the Dome dressed as if they were looking for Mardi Gras. One was wearing a black suit and hat, with a silver sash across his chest that read “Katrina.” He was carrying a tall pole with a banner at the top that sprouted royal-blue peacock feathers. The banner read “This is how we do it where we come from.” The other man, short and round, had on a white dress with purple, gold, and green clown faces on it and a long blond wig done up in Swiss Miss braids. His shoes were lace-up wingtips made of dark-purple and lavender ostrich skin. There were clowns tattooed on his right arm and Indian chiefs on the left, and his name, I learned later, was John “Big Poppa” Porré. He and the other man, Alfred “Chippy” Weston, were here representing a New Orleans social aid and pleasure club called the Tremè Sidewalk Steppers.
Their presence wasn’t necessarily going to create a stir. The previous weekend I’d seen Al Sharpton, Joel Osteen, and Dr. Phil walk through the Dome without creating a quarter of the ruckus caused by a guy who came in dressed as Laa-Laa the Teletubby. But the Steppers had four horn players and two drummers in tow. I heard a man with a trombone and his ball cap turned sideways tell a radio reporter that these musicians were part of the New Birth Brass Band, recently relocated to Houston from New Orleans. He said that like everybody else, they’d lost most of what they owned and that a couple of his bandmates were carrying donated horns.
The reporter asked, “Could you please explain the famous New Orleans tradition of the second line?” She was referring to a funeral parade, in which the front end, or “main line,” contained the deceased, his family, and the preacher, and the “second line”—everything that came after—contained a brass band and mourners. On the way to the burial, the band played slow hymns, but on the way back home, the music turned into a raucous celebration of the dead.
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