Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [60]
“When you said that,” I ask, “did you believe it?”
“I believed it somewhere in my heart. I just didn’t know when it was going to happen,” he says, looking around at the empty hall. “I knew they weren’t going to leave us forever.”
Dr. Henderson picks up a child’s shoe, and a few tears run down his cheek.
“You had all these voices,” Dr. Henderson recalls, “saying, ‘Is there any help coming?’ ‘Doctor, I need you. Doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor, we’re over here, over here.’ What arose over the five days of anarchy, if you will, was just sort of a general lawlessness. I heard some pretty harrowing stories, and I think a lot of those stories got a lot of press and maybe contributed to this area not getting help. I think there was a collective attitude of everyone was just murdering everyone down there. ‘Just stay away from that area or you’re going to die.’”
I am silent while wandering through the deserted Convention Center with Dr. Henderson, stunned that this could have been allowed to happen, and that it took so long for relief to arrive.
Local, state, and federal officials had all seen models of what a storm of this magnitude would do to New Orleans. Hurricane Ivan, the year before, had come close. No one seemed to have adequately prepared for Katrina. Despite extensive television coverage, Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, didn’t even know that people were stuck at the Convention Center until he was asked about it by reporters on Thursday.
“We look at each other with maybe too much hubris and say, ‘This is America, this doesn’t happen here,’” Dr. Henderson says, sitting with me amid a pile of rubbish on the curb outside the Convention Center. “This is disgraceful. This is a national disgrace. Nowhere in this country should that ever have to happen again. But unless we learn from this, it’s going to be very ugly ’cause it’s going to happen again.”
MY GRANDFATHER DIED in New Orleans. The year was 1944. My father was seventeen and had just graduated high school. He was working at Maison Blanche, a department store on Canal Street, selling young men’s clothing. The store is gone, but the building remains. It’s now the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where Dr. Henderson was staying when Katrina hit.
My grandfather came to New Orleans for a visit. One Friday evening he lay down on the sofa in the living room and fell asleep. He never woke up. My grandmother and my father’s younger siblings went back immediately to Mississippi, but my father stayed to make funeral arrangements.
He’d never been close to his father. He feared his quick temper, his unpredictable moods. When he wrote about him in his book, he described him as a “creature of charm, magnetism, tyranny, and madness.”
My grandfather was not a religious man. He never went to church. “The Almighty knows about the people up at the church,” he once told my father. “He doesn’t know anything about me. When I die, I’ll be no different from an old rotten limb falling off a tree and lying on the ground.”
My father didn’t know what to do with his father’s body. He called the Lamana-Panno-Fallo Funeral Home. It was the only one he knew; he used to pass by it every day riding the streetcar.
When he went to collect his father’s body from the funeral home, to take it to Mississippi for burial, he was surprised to discover that the morticians had laid him out beneath the outstretched arms of a large statue of the Virgin Mary.
“I don’t know how they’d done it,” my father later wrote, “but they’d turned him into an Italian. He looked exactly like an Italian banker. There was something excessively combed and waxy in his appearance, almost as