[From the diaries by susanhu.]
I write this diary on the People’s Hurrican Relief Fund march yesterday, at blksista’s and Janet Strange’s request. I write this because the image of a small altar on a white piece of cloth, on a patch of grass on Congo Square, is too beautiful to keep to myself. Candles, fruit, and people leaving dollar bills, to ask the ancestors permission to return to the city, on a patch of grass where the black, slave ancestors were allowed to celebrate their culture once a week in New Orleans.
I saw a young, beautiful African American woman crying at this scene. I waited a while and introduced myself. Her name was Ebony, and she’s from Mississippi. She is working for Public TV on black programming, and is here with a friend filming. I told her we are fighting to reopen public housing here.
There were those small, intimate encounters all day for me. Like the sometimes homeless man, Dr. Bob, wearing a traditional, colorful African hat, who asked me to hold his notebook for him while he ate. He gave me some writings, journal style, on being homeless. I told him that I see our small movement to open public housing, as eventually merging with the homeless movement in this country, and certainly we are traveling parallel ideological lines.
There was Cara, a beautiful African American woman who sang “Indian Red”, a Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indian song at the opening rally, slowly and sadly like a dirge, and a call to arms, so to speak:
“Mah day Kuh-tee-fiya “ee-aye-ee”
We are Indians, We are Indians
We’re the Indians of this nation
this whole wide creation
We won’t kneel down, not on the ground,
Oh how I love to hear them call my Indian Red.
And oh goddess, I hope I don’t offend Indian rights activists by quoting that song, because the Mardi Gras Indians, I believe, were created out of admiration for the American Indians, and a need to create a new tribal community of their own to replace the one lost.
There was the woman from Boston, Soleil, who participated in an event at the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge the other day. She and a small group of activists presented a dereliction of duty notice to Governor Kathleen Blanco, and set up an alternative housing structure on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion, complete with toilet and living room furniture. They were detained for a couple of hours, and questioned by plains clothes state police. They handled the questioning by repeatedly stating, “We have the right to remain silent.”
I told Soleil of my idea to present a similar document to the Army Corps of Engineer, who is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people in this area. They constructed the levees in violation of their own design plans, and, when the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board proposed a dredging action in the 17th Street Canal in the late 80’s, the Army Corps okayed the project against their documented better judgement. They knew this dredging would undermine the clay foundation of the canal, and this is documented.
Soleil and I discussed presenting the Keystone Cops I mean Army Corps of Engineers with citizen murder charges.
I saw my new Creole friend Veda, a fiercely intelligent and outspoken woman who clued me into grant monies that are available through the SBA, for renters and homeowners to replace their belongings that were lost in the storm. The SBA, the financial arm of FEMA, is being very quiet about these funds, and their availability will expire January 7th.
What will also expire January 7th is FEMA funds for evacuees staying in hotels across the country, so I expect that some kind of aberrant phenomena will occur on that day, as it seems to be a magic number for FEMA to deny help to people. Perhaps that will be the day the spaceships come, as Neil Young predicted, to take us all away to a better life in another galaxy.
I heard Mama D speak after the march and she told her young black people that they were watching too much TV, but she said it in a way to urge them into wakefullness for the sake of survival. She blew off her 3 minute limit for her speech and said the 3 minute limit was killing activism. I love Mama D, and I fear her as well. I wonder if I would measure up…
I walked over a mile back to my car with very sore feet and legs from second lining it during the march with the Soul Rebels Brass Band, and feeling my feet lift off the ground like they do when you abandon yourself to the joy. And it was a joy mixed with the sadness of not knowing if your community will ever be whole again.
Malik, who runs the Commonground project in Algiers, and was one of the Black Panther’s arrested in the Desire Housing Project incident in the 70’s, draped his arm over his elderly white friend and said, “Only in New Orleans do you dance at protests.” A young fellow from out of town agreed he had never seen anything like it. And this is why we must bring it back.
