2 March 2009 | Vol. 9, No. 1
Richard's Story
1
My sister left a week before the hurricane.
Me being hard-headed… I didn't leave.
I went to the French Quarter with friends
for a hurricane party
and got trapped.
Couldn't nobody get in,
couldn't nobody get out.
At first, it was fun.
We barbecued and partied,
four blocks from the heart of the Quarter.
We didn't have no water,
no electricity. No gas, no
nothing. The moon wasn't out.
By 6 o'clock it was pitch dark.
Hold your hand up,
you couldn't see it.
We all ate together. We
lived together. We
found us a store. We
broke in there, got us
meat, charcoal. We
sat together and prayed. I was happy.
You know the 12-step program?
We say a prayer, then drink [laughs].
It dawns on me sometimes, we
have to believe with our minds.
Yeah, He give us strength. We
utilize the strength real good.
Monday we heard an explosion.
It was like dynamite on the levee.
A loud explosion. Then the water came.
Anybody in their right mind left.
I'm not saying I'm not in my right mind.
Even if I'd had a car,
I would have stayed
anyway. Louisiana used to get a little wind
and a little rain. Why leave?
But most of the people there
didn't have cars or nothing
so they couldn't leave.
The Governor got buses
to transport prisoners.
How come she can't give some to the people?
It amazed me. Louisiana had no plan!
Everybody put in the Superdome,
which don't have facilities.
Why send people there? That part
didn't make no sense.
I got mad behind that.
I could hear the Superdome
from where I was. All kinds of people
locked in. You see that big fence
all the way around the car?
It's twenty feet high. It was like that.
Couldn't nobody crawl up
and get over. And somebody
have the key that opens it up
to let people out, but took off instead.
Somebody else come with bolt cutters
to open the gate. You're not going
to read that nowhere,
cause nobody talks
about it. Blame the…
I'm going to leave it at that.
I take insulin three times a day.
I don't care where I'm at or what I'm doing,
but I wasn't going there.
The army's helicopters flew over us
dropping packs. A loud speaker
blared that it was food
that was falling on buildings.
People ran up top
and tried to hog it all.
Then wanted to sell it to you.
We had police who broke
into cars, stole new ones.
A policeman is paid $20,000
in New Orleans to put his life
on the line, so quite naturally
our police saw an opportunity
and took it. We're crooked
but it's a colorful town.
2
In July of last year my Hepatitis C
started up again. Maybe it come
from Vietnam, cause I was wounded
and had a blood transfusion in the army.
I don't know. One year I had a cold
and took aspirin and kept on working.
The next thing I know,
I can't breathe.
I'm having a heart attack.
Doctor told me to quit smoking
but I didn't quit. He said,
I'm going to tell you all the chemicals
in cigarettes. You embalming yourself,
cause they use embalming fluid.
I've quit now. Long time ago,
I was on drugs. During the war.
I turned seventeen in Vietnam.
You see your brothers fall
or get blown up, you got to have
something to keep going.
We were living in the war zone.
If they keep sending guys over to Iraq
without armor, they don't stand
a fighting chance. We did…
I think Katrina was the best thing
could've happened for us.
So many people was just hustling
in the street. That storm tried
to bring us together.
I feel sorry for the people like
my sister who worked so hard
to buy her house. People like me
move with the wind.
I did lose all my pictures
from Vietnam. All that's gone.
Brings tears to my eyes.
My mother told me all these things
are going to happen. She said,
"It's going to be hard
sometimes, but you can't
stop and say, I ain't gonna do this,
and I ain't gonna do that."
I been on my own a long time.
Nobody but me to help me.
Everything I've seen to do, I've done.
The party was good. So what's left?
Nothing. See a volcano and
a tsunami. Die a happy man.
Notes on this piece:
The photographer and artist Rebecca Ross and I are working on a large, multimedia project entitled Voice-Prints: A Katrina Elegy, from which the interview-poems, "Richard's Story" and "Sally's Story," are excerpted. We portray the impact of a natural disaster, in this case Hurricane Katrina, by focusing on the local and the individual—interviewing and photographing a cross section of Katrina evacuees who evacuated to Arizona, and retracing the steps of their journey—to relate a compelling sense of what happened to people caught in disaster. The Katrina transplants who have let us into their lives represent a migratory microcosm that opens a window on a broader phenomenon of migration. Through interview poems and black-and-white photographs of people and their possessions, we follow twelve people's journeys from Louisiana to Phoenix in the kind of precise and intimate detail that emerges in a personal interview, making the particular story vivid. As artist-witnesses, we listen and observe, hear and see. As analytic artists, we investigate how someone survives the shock of catastrophe—of dislocation, loss of intimacy, loss of community and the ways one had of making a living. There is a striking depth of analysis that emerges as Richard Lyons, a Vietnam veteran, speaks about what happened to him, for example, or the sense that Sally Cole Mooney, a professor of English, makes of what she has been through, that reveals the courage they have shown under duress. The stories they tell of travail and resilience are not what any reporter, historian, or sociologist would recount, because they are from inside the event. As poet, I stand aside. These are interview-poems, and as such, are in the words of the interviewees and used with their permission. I have shaped and edited the original texts just as Rebecca has edited what is in front of her lens, focusing on details, distilling essence. Our larger conceptualization is to weave poems and photographs together to create portraits of lives from across the social spectrum profoundly touched by trauma and tragedy. We track evacuees as they struggle to reinvent themselves in order to make new lives. Photographs reflect present moments, and also gesture toward what evacuees have lost. The physical markings that are left of those lives lead back to contextual roots that have withered, ghosts of memory. The specifics speak to our times, and thus tell a larger story. We bear witness to one tragedy that impacts the local, but offers insight far beyond local borders, into how the human spirit falters, learns resilience, and then rallies to transcend suffering in an age characterized by forced migrations.
About the author:
Cynthia Hogue has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Incognito Body (2006). She is the co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (2006), and of the first edition of H.D.'s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton (2007). In 2005, she was awarded H.D. Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and in 2007, a MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship. In 2008, she was awarded an Arizona Commission on the Arts Artists Project Grant for a multigenre project of interviews with Hurricane Katrina evacuees. In 2003, she joined the Department of English at Arizona State University as the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry.
For further reading:
See the complete list of work by Cynthia Hogue at 42opus. Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 9, No. 1, where "Richard's Story" ran on March 2, 2009. List other work with these same labels: poetry.
