Some of the Dispossessed Say They Won’t Return

Displaced residents of this city -- especially the poorest blacks, who were hardest hit by the storm -- are pondering whether they will try to return to a town the tour guides often missed, one that has suffered decades of crime, corruption and grinding poverty.

“Katrina had a tremendous impact on the black people who lived here,” said Lance Hill, director of a diversity training program at Tulane University. “This city was tough on a lot of them even before the hurricane. A lot of them were already unemployed or had minimum-wage jobs. Many of them were renters. They don’t have anything to come back to. A lot of them are just not going to come back.”

Before the storm, most Americans knew New Orleans as a blend of old Southern elegance and Bourbon Street decadence. The aftermath, however, has highlighted a primarily black city in which one-third of the African American population -- more than 100,000 people -- lives below the poverty line. Many of those hardest hit by the storm are not sure whether they want to go back.

“I didn’t have no money for gas,” said Thomas Lallande, a 60-year-old black man, as he rubbed his raw feet after finally evacuating.

Lallande said he wanted to leave before the storm but couldn’t afford to. As the flood rose chest high last week, he waded from his submerged apartment in the 9th Ward to the Superdome, where he and thousands of people -- nearly all of them black -- waited for days without food, water or security.

Lallande escaped New Orleans -- he was recuperating at a Baton Rouge shelter Monday -- and, for now, he has no plans of going back: “What for? I don’t have nothing back there.”

And where some saw grim images and shattered futures, the city’s most destitute saw rare opportunity.

“Actually, some people were a little better off after the storm,” said a 26-year-old man who spoke on condition of anonymity as he took groceries out of a store last week. “I had gotten to the end of my rope. Now, I got a little something.”

But even middle-class African Americans are reconsidering their futures in New Orleans. Herman and Christy Taitt, devotees of the city’s music and culture, said they already had calls out to several different cities.

Herman, 44, is the head maintenance manager at Dillard University, and Christy, 37, is an accounting supervisor at a pharmaceutical firm. They had a house and three cars -- including a Corvette -- but they always thought they might have done better outside New Orleans.

Last week, at a Kinko’s computer in Baton Rouge, they found aerial photos of their New Orleans home on the Internet. Water had inundated their neighborhood.

“Family kept us here,” Herman Taitt said. “And I love the history of this place. The culture. It’s the birthplace of jazz. The food. The parties. You can have a good time here. So we stayed. We allowed ourselves to have a second-class status to Southern white folks.”

But now, Herman Taitt said, his elderly father is missing -- and a crucial bond to the city has been broken.

“We’re looking at Houston,” he said. “We’re looking at L.A.”

New Orleans teacher Karen Francois, 53, said her apartment in the 9th Ward was destroyed. Though she would like to return to her job in January, she’s thinking about Arizona after that.

“I’ll be sad because I don’t think there are people like us anywhere else outside of New Orleans,” she said. “But you can’t get any money there. There’s no real opportunities in New Orleans -- not for us.”

New Orleans has always been a city of ironies. The first European settlers were Frenchmen lured in the 1700s by a Scottish pyramid schemer who paid land speculators with profits he reaped from newer real estate investors.

By the 19th century, New Orleans was a major cotton producer and market for slaves, many of whom built the beautiful antebellum buildings that drew so many tourists over the last century.

It was also home to one of the nation’s largest free black communities. Many of the free were “Creoles” of mixed ancestry, sometimes the offspring of privileged plantation owners and black concubines. Some free blacks even owned property -- including slaves.

Now, New Orleans’ small but influential black middle-class community is one of the oldest in the nation. Many of them were educated at one of New Orleans’ predominately black colleges, including Dillard University and Xavier College, the nation’s only historically African American Catholic college and a leading producer of black medical and dentistry graduates.

New Orleans’ three-tiered racial structure -- white, black and Creole -- plays a subtle but decreasing role in the city, residents say. New Orleans natives, especially people of color, say they can tell who’s black, and who’s Creole, by differentiating between kinky or smooth hair. Most of the city’s black leaders have Creole ancestry.

“I can distinguish because I’m from there. My older sister used to go to ‘Brown Bag parties’ ” in the 1950s, said Eric Spurlock, who fled his home in the 9th Ward. “They would hold up a brown paper bag, and if you were darker than that you would have to pay 25 cents to get in.”

Francois said she considered herself Creole and acknowledged that her status afforded her access in New Orleans that was not extended to many of her African American friends.

“I went to a white university, I can speak as they do, act as they do,” said Francois, the schoolteacher. “Whites are comfortable around me, but it’s not that easy for other people I know.”

The problems of urban America linger here. Last year, New Orleans’ per capita homicide rate was among the nation’s highest, as was its illiteracy rate.

In the last decade, the city has been rocked by a series of bribery scandals and police brutality scandals that led to investigations of a former mayor, a parish judge and a variety of other city administrators.

“They was killing each other in broad daylight,” complained Tynia Williams, 42, explaining the city’s problems with street crime.

Williams had to evacuate her apartment in Jefferson Parish, right on the New Orleans municipal line. She worked and had family members in New Orleans proper, on the other side of the 17th Street Canal.

Williams said her home was destroyed, but she is not sentimental about it. She is looking for work in Baton Rouge.

“The politicians were crooked, the judges were dirty,” she said. “A judge convicted my son for murder and sentenced him to a life sentence, and two months later the judge got convicted.”

In 2002, Mayor C. Ray Nagin came to office with a mandate to clean up city corruption and to lift residents out of poverty. The latest in a succession of black leaders who have broken into New Orleans’ political system since 1978, Nagin ordered the arrests of dozens of city employees on bribery and related charges in the early months of his administration. Several federal corruption investigations were in process when Katrina hit.

In an effort to lower crime, city leaders had set about a controversial plan to replace many public housing projects with single-family homes and businesses. The notorious St. Thomas housing projects, for example, were replaced a few years ago by a Wal-Mart.

Supporters of the program say it is one reason crime had, in fact, been somewhat reduced in New Orleans. Detractors said it would displace black project residents, many of whom went to live in the eastern part of the city, one of the areas hit hardest by the flood.

They needn’t have bothered with the debate -- Katrina displaced more poor people than gentrification ever could.

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Times staff writer Richard Fausset contributed to this report.