Schwarz
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SITTING safely in Washington, I am watching harrowing footage shot from helicopters above the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, submerged under 14 feet of water when the Mississippi thundered through the breached levee at the Industrial Canal and destroyed everything in its swirling waters.
The author's home before the levee breach blocks away. Katrina damaged thousands of vernacular houses that embody the city's ethos.
My home is there, a West Indian-style plantation house built in 1826, standing as an ancient relic amid a maze of wooden houses a century younger. Some are classic bungalows, but most are distinctly New Orleans building types, with fanciful names like shotguns and camelbacks. I watch as a neighbor is rescued from his rooftop. Dazed, he has emerged from his attic, wriggling through a hole he hacked in the roof, swooped up by a Guardsman on a swinging rope. He is safe. Scores of others aren't. Bodies float through the streets of the Ninth Ward. Presumably they are from the diverse group that inhabits this deepest-dyed old New Orleans neighborhood: poorer blacks and whites, Creoles of color and a sprinkling of artists.