I was starting my first year after finishing at LSU-Baton Rouge, teaching four courses in writing and literature at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana, a town about 36 miles north of the western suburbs of New Orleans and 45 straight-line miles from New Orleans proper. It was a good job to get and I had moved from Baton Rouge to a cinder-block apartment building a few blocks west of campus that I thought was also a good get, because I could keep my two cats, The General and Leonard. The first week of classes had gone well, but a persistent heat wave made me glad they were all in one building.
During the last days before the calamity, I talked to each of my classes about the need to keep up with the news, not just about approaching hurricanes, but in general. Responses to what was going on nationally, whether emotional, moral or logical, were good sources of ideas for essays. Most students asked to raise their hands if they kept up with the news on TV, in print on online would keep them down. This was always something I hoped to remedy with my students, even coining the phrase “a wider form of literacy” which I was then defining in the teaching philosophy statements I used to apply for jobs.
With Katrina’s approach I had the chance to make this stick for another reason than gathering essay-writing ideas. The Thursday and Friday before her arrival, I didn’t have to work to convince my mostly young students that knowing where, when and how mattered to their and their loved ones’ lives. In first-year writing, we talked about the best primary sources, the National Weather Service, and the secondary sources that paid the NWS the closest attention. We broke information down by the most useful categories. What to be doing now. What to be doing when Katrina arrives. What to do after.
I did a lot of those things myself. Bought food, flashlights, candles, cat food, ice chests, several bags of ice. I didn’t forget the several kinds of batteries. By then you could get the little batteries that would charge your phones. Bought those. I thought about cashing a $1,000 check my parents had provided to help with moving and settling in, but in the end opted to just keep it with me.
By the time the Katina winds arrived in Hammond, I was just impatient to get it over with. There was a little excitement admittedly, since I had never experienced a hurricane of her intensity. But when the first winds arrived a little after midnight and the power went off, the air in my two-bedroom one-bath first-floor walk-in began to oppress. But I dared not open my windows, what with the wind coming through their bottoms making a strange embouchure between the bottom rail and the sill and playing a steady mezzo forte high A. My apartment was Katrina’s vuvuzela.
I realized by four a.m. I’d never get to sleep without help. In those days I was not as wary as I am now of using a sleeping pill (and possibly waking up with bread and cookies bags all around me) and the choice was generic Ambien. Took two and then awakened about ten hours later in a quiet, greyish bright muggy room.
I looked out my bedroom window and the fencerow behind my apartment building was still up. The clothesline I remember being back there was still there, swinging a bit as the north to south winds of Katrina’s western side, what I thought of as the hair going down the back of her head continued to blow in the light rain.
I opened the front door and could see thankfully that my maroon Ford Escort wasn’t damaged. There were limbs down from the oaks and pines around the complex, which also included a one-story row of walk-ins along Pat Drive. The rain being light and the wind being gusty but no longer dangerous, I walked across the gravel parking lot to Pat Drive and looked north at an open, green field. The tall grass was blown down in every direction and a curiously wadded up ball of silvery tin lay in front of the large storage facility. It had been blown off and then worked by the winds into the perfect sculpture of a torn out scrap of loose-leaf halfway to the stage of becoming the kind of paper-wad ball I’d throw around the apartment for The General to chase and then bring back to me.
I tried to tune in radio stations but rolling through the AM and FM dials on the little Grundig I’d bought just got blathering static. I probably spent that first day listening to the radio, going through what I could of my phone’s rudimentary way of using the internet—just lettering on a screen—read books, listened to music or audiobooks on a Sony CD player that could play mp3 files and ate cold-cut sandwiches from the rapidly warming refrigerator.
When the radio stations in Baton Rouge and New Orleans returned to the air maybe a day or two after the storm had passed, the story unfolded. At first, New Orleans had seemed to come through it okay. But as the days went on and levees failed, allowing the storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain into low-lying neighborhoods, the full dimensions of the disaster became more clear. I began to realize towns on the rim of the flooding would be feeling the impact from incoming evacuees and would need volunteers to assist.
At some point a few days in, I took a walk down Western Avenue toward campus, hearing the drone of working electric generators as I walked through the more prosperous neighborhood around SELU. When I got there, I could see crewman sawing limbs and fallen trees apart and getting them loaded into trucks. By this point the downed power line danger had passed. I think I gathered some things from my office and went home. At least I could use the time the campus was closed to get ahead on class preparation.
Hammond got its electricity back on Wednesday, but not cable television or internet. On Saturday the 6th, I drove to Hammond Square Mall, Tangipahoa’s Premier Shopping Destination, and sat down at the bar in Garfield’s. I ate a meal while watching grainy antenna-pulled Fox News. Now I saw the footage being run over and over again of a couple African-Americans emerging from stores on Canal Street with long televisions. First Bill O’Reilly and then Sean Hannity was saying New Orleans was bedlam, with looters ruling the streets and NOPD powerless. Even rescue helicopters were being fired on, they said, by obvious street gang members. George W. Bush needed to send in as many armed troops as could be spared to bring order and civilians with property needed their guns immediately handy.
I shook my head, told the bartender the hysteria seemed suspicious to me. The more honest sources I could read on the internet when I got into the public library, reporters from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Baton Rouge Advocate, The Nation, CNN, said the looting had been sporadic and restricted to Canal Street and areas around it. There weren’t people in the hundreds breaking violently into shopping centers all over the New Orleans area and they sure weren’t travelling up interstate highways to steal blind every SuperWalmart from Opelousas to Covington. Yes, there were a couple that were looted in New Orleans, but nothing beyond that, I’d learn later.
The university began classes again on Wednesday. I accepted two more first-semester writing courses comprised of students who transferred from colleges to our south too damaged to hold them, University of New Orleans, Loyola University in New Orleans, Dillard, Southern University New Orleans. There was no payment, but I was happy to volunteer and made up my syllabus so that writing projects could be done based on the students’ experiences with the storm and their quests to find information and resources to help themselves and their families.
By that day I needed groceries in a severe way. So did my cats The General, Leonard and Cowcat. So I drove to the Walmart, seeing the parking lot crowded to an extreme and leaving my car much closer to the entrance than to the front doors. I saw that at last you didn’t have to wait in a long line in front so your group of ten shoppers at a time could be allowed in. I gathered my TP, my Lean Cuisines, the kitties’ Purina One and Fancy Feast, paper plates, smoked turkey, swiss cheese, 1 percent milk and Nature’s Own whole wheat bread and went over to the check out lines. They were all very long but few shoppers had buggies full. Most only came in for a few items.
But the line I was in was long and slow slow moving. When I got in proximity I learned why. Many shoppers were paying with little white cards with the Red Cross logo on them. I found this touching and yet very convenient, certainly a terrific idea to get donations directly into the hands of those needing them. There was one hitch, though.
For every transaction in which the cards were used, this Walmart was requiring the approval of what I knew was called a Customer Service Manager. One of my first jobs in Hope was at Walmart 1025 on Hervey Street, the Clark Kent Walmart as I now call it which would be replaced later by the SuperWalmart a bit further north. Customer Service Agents were called when the cashier, which I was, mistakenly scanned an item twice that needed to be paid for only once. The CSM had to approve any subtraction from the charge recorded on the register. CSMs also had to be consulted if the customer’s charges were over something like $150 or they paid with hundred-dollar bills, which needed to be labelled with a small post-it note and placed in the safe. Cashiers called them over by pulling the lamp wire twice, making the bulb that lit up your lane number blink. Usually only a couple red= or beige-vested CSMs were on duty on the busiest of days.
So each time shoppers who had obviously sustained Katrina-imposed difficulties which could range from homelessness to loss of family members needed to use their Red Cross cards, they would have to wait while a CSM was called over to—I don’t know—inspect the card? Ask for driver’s licenses that might possibly lost. This seemed an imposition to me on people who did not deserve one more inconvenience. The former reporter side of me wanted to know more, anticipating eventually writing about the time. I’d already asked the editor at the Hammond Daily Starif I could occasionally contribute, as I would do in the other towns where I found positions as teacher.
Realizing my own purchases would not likely have to be okayed by a CSM, I considered interrupting a transaction involving the cards ahead of me in line, but I dropped the idea of being so rude. Fortunately, when my own purchases were being run through, the CSM was still there so I asked my question. He was a tall man with slicked back thin hair and glasses. “Sir, I’m just curious. Why do Red Cross cards have to be approved before they’re used. It’s slowing up the lines and these people have probably suf-“ But I didn’t get the last sentence out. The CSM spoke into a walkie-talkie on his shoulder, “Security to register 9. Security to register 9.” I naively thought he was calling someone to help answer my question.
When a shaven-haired, blue-eyed medium tall fellow in his early-20s in a black uniform came up, the CSM pointed. “Him,” he said. The officer grabbed me by the right arm and began pulling me toward the front door. Another officer, thinner, also with a shaved head, soon joined us. “You’re gone and your banned,” he told me.
So there went all my merchandice. I remember thinking as I was hauled out of the SuperWalmart like a drunk from a yuppie bar that the CSM would now have to delay people in line even more voiding all the items that had been scanned for me, a thing cashiers already dreaded because it meant listing subtracted items one by one on a paper work sheet. Maybe they weren’t doing that anymore.
So I’m pushed out the doors, into the parking lot and the blinding heat. I’m discombobulated but I realize what has happened to me was not right. But I’ll be derned if I can find my car. I was peering around, focusing more closely when I’d see maroon sedans, but no, they never turned out to be mine. The security boys, who I thought might be city police, kept following behind me. After a bit I turned to look behind me and I heard a clipped conversation from them.
“Hey, he’s not-- What’s he doing? I think we can get him for failure to leave. Yeah, failure to leave.” I saw women leaving their cars with kids stop their walking, grab their kids and crouch down. Then I felt another grabbing touch and now screams.
“Get down! Get down! Get your ____ down!”
I thought it prudent to put my knees down on the pavement, feeling the dig of embedded gravel into my joints.
“Get that face down! Put that face in the dirt, ______!”
Someone grabbed my arms and I felt metal around my wrists, then heard that unmistakable scritch you hear so often now on The Rookie.
“We told you to get the ______ out! We told you!”
I felt a pull on my upper arms and an effort to turn me toward the front doors. “Now you’re taking a trip. Ain’t you proud of yourself?”
“But I was looking for my car,” I said.
“I don’t give a ________.”
One of the officers called in on a walking talkie about needing a pickup. For a time I was sat down at the bench in the vestibule of the store so that every shopper could gawk at the bearded hipster handcuffed for display. A plain-clothes Walmart shrinkage control (shoplifter preventer) with a handlebars mustache and greasy hair met us after a minute or two. “You’ll have to get him to the back,” he said. So we all walked through action-alley, the central aisle. A couple male shoppers smiled and laughed like I had just arrived for a party.
I saw that the back of a SuperWalmart, near the accounting offices and the time clock had not changed much from the Clark Kent incarnation I knew as a cashier in Hope. It was where employees congregated before the time was clear to clock in. I was fortunate to have timed my arrest during a shift-change, so it was my privilege to meet about half a dozen blue-vested Associates girding themselves for the post-Katrina rush.
A statuesque assistant manager with expensive hair asked me who I was and where I worked. Stupidly, I told her, possibly hoping the officers and shrinkage guy would realize they had made a mistake and discover they’d gone too far. “A teacher? At SELU? Really?” she said. “Do you know Dean _______. I’m his daughter-in-law.”
I didn’t know Dean ________.
“I’m sure he’ll love to know about you. What about Vice President _____________.”
No I didn’t know them.
“Well, that’s my mother’s stepdad. He’s going to hear all about this.”
I was asked by a couple associates what had happened. The shrinkage guy said, “Oh, he was drifting around the store, taking too long and then he mouthed off at the check-out stand trying to hassle the CSM.”
“Nope,” I said. And I left it at that.
Pretty soon an officer from Hammond’s finest arrived. He was a bit older and more relaxed seeming. “Okay, I got him,” he said. He took the cuffs off, prompting blue-eyed officer to say, “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He had me follow him to the police car which was parked just outside the front doors. The lights and siren weren’t on.
I didn’t speak until I was shown the back seat. I thought he was someone I could talk to.
“This whole thing was silly,” I said. “I just asked a CSM why they had to approve it every time a Red Cross card was used. I just wanted to know. And they threw me out.” I explained that it was my not being to find my car, not the tossing out, that caused me to be arrested.
“Well, whatever you say. We’re going downtown anyway. You’ll get your one phone call. I recommend a bail bondsman.”
At the Hammond City Jail holding cell I met with many males younger than me. Many of them said they had been taken from weekend college parties but were still in jail several days later for lack of money to pay a bail bondsman. I remembered the check in my wallet.
When given my phone call, I asked for a phone book. I called a bail bondsman, gave my credit card information. The fee was going to be $100. In about fifteen minutes I was picked up and then taken home to my apartment. I didn’t dare return to Walmart for my car. I trusted a neighbor with whom I’d made friends to drive me there the next day, having bicycled to teach my classes that morning. The Ford Escort stuck out like a sore thumb to me as we turned into the parking lot entrance.
I was worried about the Walmart Assistant manager’s implicit threats to get me fired, but my chair, Jeannie Dubino heard me out in her office. I told her the story and to my surprise she said she heard nothing that would endanger my employment. She even asked if I needed an attorney but by then I had already given the $1,000 as a retainer to an attorney with the same last name as a classmate of my then-girlfriend.
A few days later, my attorney called to report the charges had been dropped. He recommended I consider a lawsuit but I was too glad for the whole thing to be over and so busy with teaching that I didn’t want to bother about such a thing. I did report the incident to internal affairs with both the Hammond Police Department and the Tangapahoa Sheriff’s Office. Neither could find the identities of the two very young officers who arrested me. Walmart management had said they considered my ban from the store to be lifted. I would go sometimes, but only when the Rouses Market or Piggly Wiggly or the hardware stores couldn’t suffice.
In the years afterward, I’ve told the story as my one interesting Katrina story. And in all these years of reading about the event and its terrible aftermath that continues, I’ve concluded I fell afoul of the paranoia caused by the exaggerations and false reports of widespread violence and looting. Watching the recent NatGeo documentary series, Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, has been a revelation to me these 20 years later about the role that both mistaken and, in some cases willfully spread information that confirmed racist stereotypes resulted in fewer rescues, more deaths, failures to respond and help and an ongoing belief still common about the events of that era. That I was inconvenienced, made anxious and lost money was just a pittance when measured against the damage this paranoia caused.
I thoroughly recommend the NatGeo documentary, available on Hulu and Disney Plus, as well as Douglas Brinkley’s great panoramic work of large-scale journali, The Great Deluge and Chris Rose’s collected columns in 1 Dead in Attic for those wanting to immerse themselves further into one of the most devastating and mostly man-made disasters in American history.
If you or anyone you know with connections to Hempstead and Nevada County has a story of Hurricane Katrina that has not yet been told, please contact Jeff Smithpeters at jeff@swark.today.
Above photo courtesy of the National Environmental, Satellite Data and Information Service. It was taken August 29, 2005 just before the hurricane made landfall.