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.
(Page 4 of 4)
The trombonist didn’t go into all that. He just said, “Lady, I don’t think I can explain that. You’re going to have to see it for yourself.” It was as if he had just cued the band. The sousaphone player started bouncing low notes out of his horn. Then came ringing booms on a bass drum and rapid-fire pops on a snare, the unmistakable rolling rhythm of New Orleans music. Boom, boom, boom-ba-doom-ba-doom. After a couple bars, there were blasts from the rest of the horns—a trumpet, a French horn, and a trombone. They started out playing a melody in unison but quickly diverged, calling and responding to one another’s lines like a game of follow the leader, weaving in and out of the bass line.
And then the band started to move, walking slowly through the parking lot while they played. The music flew through Reliant Park, and people who’d been hanging out in Town Square and lounging under shade trees outside the Dome came running to fall into the parade.
It was a perfectly joyous, instantaneous release. Every twenty feet or so the parade would slow down, and the musicians would form a circle around Chippy and Big Poppa, who danced with anyone who would enter the ring. There were enough takers that soon the circle was gone, dissolved into a solid block of three or four hundred dancing, shouting, smiling New Orleanians.
Chippy, the grand marshal, led the parade to the east entrance of the Dome, where a large Houston cop crossed his arms and said no way was this bunch going inside. No matter. The parade kept snaking through the parking lot. Men took off their shirts and waved them up and down to fan other dancers. Women clapped their flip-flops together to the rhythm. Little kids skipped along, bouncing basketballs and darting in and out of the dancers. Open bottles of water were twirled overhead so that water sprayed the parade, as if it was marching through sprinklers. Soon there were about fifty uniformed police officers following curiously behind, most on foot but some riding golf carts, three cops to a cart. It looked like the closing scenes of The Blues Brothers.
The crowd was now chanting along with the music, which blurred into one half-hour-long song. “Jesus on the main line! Jesus on the main line!” And then “New Orleans! New Orleans!” And finally, “Go, Blanco! Go, Blanco!” as the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Blanco, appeared out of nowhere and started dancing in the middle of the mob.
I smelled a little pot in the air and talked to one reveler, who said he wanted a beer. He told me, “You people get to drink wherever you want when you come to New Orleans. Why can’t I drink where I want in Houston?” But he wasn’t too concerned. This was too good. I quit trying to interview people but started running up to dancers with my notebook and pen out, asking as many as I could, “Excuse me, can you tell me where you’re from?” None of them took the question seriously. They got the joke. And every one of them screamed the same answer: “Man, I’m from New Orleans!”
BY MONDAY, September 12, barely 1,400 people were still in the Dome and fewer than 5,000 total at Reliant Park. Shelter officials announced that they’d move these remaining people into Reliant Arena by the week’s end, a decision that would simplify managing the site and, though no one admitted it, provide incentive for those still on hand to think harder about moving on.
The Dome was the first facility emptied, beginning with careful transport of the elderly and special-needs cases after supper Wednesday night. Teams of volunteers spread out over the floor to help families get in line near the east ramp, where city buses would take them and their belongings on the short drive to the Arena. It was important that this not resemble the evacuation from New Orleans, so nothing was left behind. Trash bags and hand-me-down luggage stuffed with donated items represented everything these people owned, and all of it went. The work was done quietly and efficiently. One team of volunteers included actors Don Cheadle and Joaquin Phoenix, who was just four days away from an appearance on the cover of the New York Times Style Magazine. They worked the late shift Wednesday night and were back first thing Thursday morning, operating without entourages, publicists, or much notice at all.
A line of the relatively able-bodied had formed at the east ramp by seven o’clock Thursday morning. I played gatekeeper, making sure that families boarded the buses intact and that their belongings were kept with them and separate from the others on their bus. To get that last one thousand people out took the entire day, and while moms and dads waited in line, groups of kids threw footballs and did tricks on wheelchairs that had been left in the Dome. Most people kept their cool, save the occasional squeaky wheel, like a big woman in a red muumuu who stormed through at lunchtime, riding in a wheelchair and constantly barking orders. She yelled at her kids and grandkids (of which there appeared to be about twenty), at the volunteer wheeling her around, at the people lugging her bags, and at the guy helping her get on the bus. The only people she didn’t yell at were the hundred or so in line whom her family had cut in front of. A couple of those people pointedly asked what the hell was going on. It was quickly agreed that everyone would be more comfortable once that woman was gone.
The last two people in line were Darrell Jones and his fiancée, Joanne Hampton. When the final bus pulled up at seven, they were both sleeping, Joanne in a wheelchair with a stuffed basset hound in her lap and Darrell in a chair next to her, with his head on her shoulder. Unlike a lot of people who got antsy waiting and left the line to walk around the emptying Dome, Darrell never left Joanne. And as they moved to the bus, he insisted that he push her wheelchair himself.
I rode with them out of the Dome. There were twenty other people on board, all talking loudly, about half of whom were kids under ten and the rest the kids’ parents. There were four women sitting together wearing “I survived Katrina” T-shirts.
Joanne tried to keep sleeping; Darrell had parked her wheelchair at the front of the bus, away from the crowd. Pulling out of the Dome, we saw volunteers breaking down the Town Square tents and the kids’ moonwalks lying deflated in three big piles. Darrell was sitting behind Joanne, and even though he had locked the wheels on her chair, he never let go of its handles. He was a small guy, about five-seven, with his two front teeth broken off at the gums. She looked up once, showing herself to be a gap-toothed beauty queen, with a blue do-rag on her head and a red bandanna over that. As she put her head back down, Darrell started to tell their story.
“I live in the St. Bernard projects, and when the water rose, this cat came by in a pickup truck, so I was gonna get out. But the water got too high and the truck died, but it just so happened to be right in front of a boat shop. Well, he had some bolt cutters, so we freed one of the boats and then started rescuing people. The last person we saw was her”—he pointed down at Joanne—“but I didn’t even know it was her. She was on a hill off a ways away, and I couldn’t tell. But it was her. She and I pretty much grew up together, and in fact she was holding onto a bicycle that I had built for her a long time ago.”
I asked him where her wheelchair had been.
“Oh, she can get around if she needs to. She’s not really sick; she’s just sickly. Though I guess if you think about it, she was kinda born sick.”
At that, Joanne reached behind herself and hit his hand. “Watch it, little man,” she said.
“But wait,” I said. “Why weren’t you together if you are engaged?”
“We weren’t engaged yet,” said Joanne. “But when he pulled up in that boat, he said, ‘Well, I guess you have to marry me now.’ He’s been asking me for years.”
Darrell smiled. “Well, I don’t know about that ‘asking for years,’ but yeah, we’re going to get married.”
We stopped at the Arena, where volunteers grabbed Darrell and Joanne’s bags. We walked into a room filled with cots, far fewer than in the Astrodome but in a much smaller space. Darrell paused near the front door, in an area where the Red Cross had told the new arrivals to leave their belongings. This “storage center” was just a roped-off section of floor. The only thing keeping any of their things safe was trust.
There were hundreds of piles, and Darrell’s was about the same size as the rest, twenty or so bags stacked three feet high and ten feet across. To make his things easier to find, he wrapped the pile with a band of bright-blue masking tape. Then he wheeled Joanne to a couple cots in the back of the room, where he would try to keep her comfortable until they had to move again.
My Library
