Come Hell Or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster

There's less original reporting here than analysis; 'Come Hell or High Water' draws heavily on press accounts of the Katrina debacle. But the annotation is thorough, and Dyson — the University of Pennsylvania professor who wrote 'Is Bill Cosby Right?' — weaves it all together with prose that is resonant and rightly angry. The book's account of FEMA's stunning ineptitude is especially well detailed. And a more original chapter that parses popular culture for insights into America's current racial and cultural climate is an agreeable digression, flawed only by Dyson's inclination to treat rap jingles — some transcribed at length — as oracular.

Dyson's lapses are mostly minor ones. His long diatribe against the syndicated columnist Cynthia Tucker seems like filler, a settling of accounts run up over his Cosby book, in which Dyson chided the comedian for seeming to blame blacks for not standing up to social problems associated with poverty and disempowerment. Dyson repeats the now discredited notion that a loose barge caused the Industrial Canal's flood walls to fail. And had New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin not recently declared that Katrina was partially the product of God's wrath against President Bush for occupying Iraq 'under false pretenses,' Dyson might be accused of going on a bit about religion. But his conclusion is a sound one: that it would be great to see the 'prophetic anger' of the black church recommitted to the struggle against poverty.

A more serious gripe is that, to make his portrayal of racist oppression all the more compelling, Dyson himself warms to some false and unintentionally demeaning stereotypes about the hurricane's victims. For one thing, the equation between poverty and immobility in the face of the approaching storm isn't nearly as neat as he implies. A lot of the people who stayed behind to ride out Katrina — rich and poor, black and white — turned down rides out of town or had cars of their own, making the city's low rate of vehicles per capita a less reliable tool for analyzing the debacle than Dyson suggests.

Dyson elsewhere speaks glibly of 'the sheer social misery of much of postindustrial urban Southern life.' That won't play well in many New Orleans neighborhoods, least of all the storied Lower Ninth Ward, a proud, mostly low-income enclave that witnessed some of the worst flooding. It may be true in a physical sense that the Lower Ninth 'crouches behind a pile of dirt' (to quote a Washington Post article that Dyson stitches into his text), but that dirt is the levee that the residents of the Lower Ninth wish had been piled higher. Rich whites in Lakeview, another flooded area, lived behind similar earthworks. And the ugly overtones of this image are off the mark. The Lower Ninth was not a crouching dog in a junkyard part of town, though some parts of New Orleans might have fit that description. Dyson is on firmer ground when he remembers the Lower Ninth's rich cultural and racial pedigree, its '"second-line" parades, characterized by churning rhythms and kinetic, high-stepping funk grooves.' The reality of the pre-Katrina Lower Ninth lies somewhere between a dirt-pile dirge and high-stepping funk. The community is, or was, a complex weave of homeowners and destitution, of social pathologies — also to be found in rich parts of town — and proud churches, Mardi Gras Indian tribes and other less formal but deeply embracing kinds of camaraderie.

Neighborhoods such as that answer a question that must baffle people who have watched New Orleans's ordeal from a distance: Why would anyone be fighting, as many are, to return and rebuild such a place? In fact, the traditions and culture of the Lower Ninth Ward are a reason why the agents of Disneyfication will have a harder time gentrifying New Orleans than post-Katrina developers might hope. Those traditions and culture are also a reason why New Orleans is worth saving.

Jed Horne is a metro editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. His book about Hurricane Katrina will be published in August."

Reviewed by Jed Horne, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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