In her story, Norris interviewed several people from New Orleans who found safe haven in a Baton Rouge shelter in the wake of the hurricane. One interview with Belinda Bruce, a nursing assistant who fled her Elysian Fields neighborhood with her boyfriend and six daughters before Katrina hit, is worth noting. [Since the report is a recorded conversation, I have done my best to transcribe the exact wording of the interview shown below.]
As a lead into her interview with Bruce, Norris says that Bruce "is trying to figure out how to explain the disaster" to her daughters:
Bruce: I really can't explain to them than just to say that maybe it was for the best.
Reporter: For the best?
Bruce: Yes. Because I am more happier, what I can say, homeless.
Reporter: Help me understand that. You, you're sitting here at a shelter, your house is most likely underwater, and you're–you're happier here than you were back home?
Bruce: Because there was so much going on in my neighborhood. Even though I was comfortable in my house, in my house, the blocks up where the kids went to school it was horrible, they always had shootouts, they just didn't respect the kids, they was selling drugs. The good thing is that I am away from that with my kids. So, and maybe they'll get into a better school, a better neighborhood. So ...
Reporter: So when you, you think about this, how, how do you make sense of it now as you're sitting here and as you realize that even after the disaster, after you had to leave everyone, every thing you loved and, and a lot of people you loved behind, that you're somehow happier sitting here outside of a shelter?
Bruce: Hmm. I felt that [pause] God sent that there because of all the nonsense that was going on in that neighborhood, and just, in that, in New Orleans period, there was too much violence going on and just, just a cleansing, just to clean up that city.
Reporter: So will you go back to New Orleans?
Bruce: I am not going back, it's my intention, I am not going back to New Orleans, not where I was living at.
Reporter: It's just that easy, you'll leave everything behind, your family, your house?
Bruce: It was hard at first, but I'm just looking at it as a new beginning for myself and my kids, so.
But what in heaven's name could have been so abhorrent, so abominable in New Orleans if a now homeless woman is happier in a Baton Rouge shelter? What poverty, what destitution of life and heart could find solace on a cot, preferring the possession of nothing to the possession of a home, a neighborhood, a city? (One or two commentators have suggested that much of New Orleans was less like America and more like Haiti, which has been a nasty, grief-stricken place for decades.) To where do we turn to understand how losing everything is "for the best"?
And how is it that America could have in its midst a place so dreadful that people who lived there are relieved to see that dread washed away in a cataclysm? How is it that a mother of six daughters greets a "new beginning" with joy when that new beginning means the destruction of everything her children have ever known?
Sobering, sobering stuff, to say the least.
Peace to you, Miss Bruce.
Contratimes
©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
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