'They' Destroyed New Orleans

My little cousin, Kenneth, sits across from me smoking a cigarette in the driver's seat of his car. Like everyone else in my family, he lost everything when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Now he sits in my driveway on a Saturday night in LaPlace trying to understand why.

"Them people blew them levees," he says, looking at me, puffing on his cigarette. "They wanted to save the white people Uptown, but they ain't know it was gonna be this bad."

I just look at him when he says this. He's sincere, not a trace of doubt in his voice. Some people might call him crazy for believing a theory like that. But truth is, he's not alone, far from it. Last month I went to Arlington and visited some of my in-laws, who evacuated there. When the subject of Katrina and the levees came up, all of them went to talking the exact same way.

"That's how they do us."

"They ain't want us there in the first place."

"So you know they don't want us back."

"And they wonder why people down there runnin' up in stores."

I sat on the couch that night and listened to them go at it for about an hour. None of them seemed unreasonable. None of them seemed crazy. Everybody just seemed pissed off. Their homes were gone, their jobs too. Somebody had to be responsible. But when it got down to figuring out who, the only one any of them could agree on was "they."

"They" have existed in New Orleans for years, generations really, all the way back to 1965 when Hurricane Betsy hit the city and those same levees along the Industrial Canal collapsed. Back then, the lower Ninth Ward flooded just like it did during Katrina. Eight feet of water poured into the neighborhood and covered the eaves of most one-story houses. The people, most of them poor and black, climbed onto their rooftops and waited for help. And even though Betsy's storm surge wasn't as strong as Katrina's, and even though the water didn't sit as long, the horror stories afterwards were still about the same.

"I remember seeing dead bodies tied to telephone poles, floating in the water," a co-worker of mine named Horace once told me. Horace was 16 when Betsy hit. He waited out the storm and the water in the lower Ninth Ward on the second floor of his uncle's house. He remembered having to beg his uncle not to try to swim across the street to save one of their neighbors who was trapped in her attic. His uncle didn't. The neighbor eventually drowned in that attic.

When it was all over, Betsy killed at least 60 people in Louisiana, a small number compared to Katrina, but when the people of the lower Ninth Ward found out their neighborhood took the brunt of the hit because a levee collapsed, the controversy started. For them the levee failing wasn't an accident. It was a sacrifice, another example of white people looking out for themselves. It was in this environment that "they" first appeared and became a part of New Orleans folklore.

"We could hear 'em that night," Horace said, "blowing the levees. They knew if they didn't, the water was gonna get to the French Quarter or to the white people uptown. And they didn't want that."

Hearing my cousin echo those same words tonight, I can see that after Katrina, the folklore shows no signs of dying. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson would seem to agree.

"I was stunned in New Orleans," he told NBC's Meet The Press, "at how many black New Orleanians would tell me with real conviction that somehow the levee breaks had been engineered. These are not wild-eyed people," he said. "These are reasonable, sober people who really believe that."

Louis Farrakhan even claims he has proof. According to Newsmax.com, Farrakhan said that Mayor Ray Nagin told him about a 25-foot crater that exists under the Industrial Canal levee. Proof enough for Farrakhan that the levees were blown up to get black people out of New Orleans.