Excellent WP reporting from NO's "eerily still" Lower Ninth Ward

[DeepModem Mom]

Once More, a Neighborhood Sees the Worst
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 8, 2005; Page A18

NEW ORLEANS -- The Lower Ninth Ward crouches behind a pile of dirt, separated by a big bend in America's biggest river and a thick canal and eons of tradition from the "high-class people" up on the high ground over in the French Quarter. They keep piling the dirt higher, pushing the levee up and up over the years, but the water keeps coming into the Lower 9.

This place -- an archetype of New Orleans African American culture dotted by tiny corner groceries called "superettes" and laundromats called "washaterias" -- is still now, eerily still. This poorest of neighborhoods, which gave the world Fats Domino and hosts during Carnival season the "second-line" parades, with their high-stepping funk groove, is almost completely under the water that Hurricane Katrina pushed into the city.

What isn't underwater is coated with a mud so thick and gloppy and black that it could have been produced only on the banks of the Mississippi. New Orleans is a counterintuitive place, and so is the Ninth Ward: The streets closest to the river stay driest and drain fastest because the ground is higher there, and the ruined houses have the small consolation of being glazed now by caked dry mud instead of the wet stuff.

The dead, and many of the living, are elusive. The dead because they are underwater, or tucked silently into flooded homes; the living because they are willing to hide in order to stay.

They sit in mildewing living rooms, curtains drawn, breathing the foulest of air and distrusting the people sent to help them. Theirs is a place of persistent poverty -- 36 percent of Lower Ninth Ward residents live below the poverty line, nearly twice the statewide poverty rate -- even though parts of the neighborhood have been upgraded....The young Navy boys are trying to talk the most stubborn out of the area, offering hot meals and showers on the ship that pulled up to the levee. But it's a tough sell. The storm that wrecked the Lower Ninth Ward only worsened the class divide, the mistrust that was here before. The people who live here do not need a demographer to tell them that much of the deepest flooding wrought by Katrina rose in places where black people live, or that almost all the faces in the evacuee lines are black....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090702127.html