The Long Road Back
New Orleans--If, as it has been said, jazz is a performer's art, not a composer's, so, too, is the rebuilding of New Orleans. True, failure, or at least the distinct possibility of it, is very much a presence in this city's fetid streets and flood-damaged homes. For all the billions of dollars being pumped into the city, in fact, given the many stumbles in the government efforts to help New Orleans get back on its feet, the prospect is ever present. But spend some time talking with those to whom the real challenge of rebuilding will fall--talk to the men and women who lived, worked, and raised families on Freret Street, for instance--and defeat seems a chimera, far from a given.
At Dennis Sigur's barbershop, the regulars flow in and out, some looking for advice, some just in for a shave and a haircut. Others drop by to shoot the breeze, see who's back in town. One customer strolls in, spots a familiar face. "I heard you was backstroking, man," he says to the friend, who didn't evacuate and whose home, like Sigur's, was destroyed. Knowing nods, across the room. Around here, "How's your house?" and "How's your Daddy?" tend to be the greetings of choice. "Not too good, baby," tends to be the answer.
A few doors down from Sigur's barbershop is Bloomin' Deals Junior League thrift store, nirvana for New Orleans ladies who can't pass up a bargain. Linda Cantero, a regular, has found a hobbyhorse for a cousin, whose home, she says, was "flattened" by Katrina. So was the wooden rocker she was going to give her year-old grandbaby. The toy, like a grown child's boxed-up baby blanket, was one of a thousand accumulations of a life suddenly washed away--small losses in the bigger scheme of things but losses that, when they're added up, can leave a great emptiness. That emptiness has swallowed up some here, but many, like Cantero, refuse to let that happen. She digs a cellphone out of her purse and dials. "Hey, you little heifer," she says. "You'll never frickin' guess what I just bought." Like the revelers who follow in the wake of Creole funeral processions, laughter here often follows close on the heels of grief. This is a city that knows how to mourn.
End to end, Freret Street runs just 3.8 miles, from the Pontchartrain Expressway to the east, up to the Mississippi River bend in the west. In that short stretch, however, it embraces virtually the full panoply of the strange, the ennobling, and the desperate that made New Orleans America's most unique and outlandish city. "Everything here," says Sigur, attending to a customer, "is stories." Over the coming year, U.S. News will recount the stories of the men, women, and children who called Freret Street home, the stories of some who no longer wish to do so, and those of still others, possessed of that uncommon grit that is second nature to so many in this city, who are determined to do so once again.
advertisement
