Thank you, Ms. D

The eight-hour drive to N.O.L.A. was a learning experience in itself. I discovered that my “new” car (its actually 12 years old) has some quirks to it. For instance, the air conditioning sometimes chooses to stop. It must get tired or overheated, but in any event, it sometimes just stops working. This started happening around hour 3 of the drive. By hour 4 I had discovered that by banging my fist above the stereo, I could get the A.C. working again. This remedy proved to be quite embarrassing when 4 fellow Duke Engagers piled into my car to go to Tujaques restaurant for our first introduction to each other and to the Program Directors, Joy Mischley and Dr. Dave Schaad. It was swelteringly hot and everyone was dripping sweat and I just kept banging and banging in front of these new people and they were very nice about it, but I could tell they were a little freaked out. Thanks for hanging in there, guys. I have since discovered that I can achieve the same result if I just turn it on and off, with a switch and not a fist.
The drive itself was extremely interesting. Watching the Texas landscape curve and bend from loud pines into lazy Louisiana marshes, dotted with quiet wildlife, echoed in me a strange sense of natural progression – from school to summer, from Durham to Dallas, and from all this push and rush, to this landscape of loud ease. I have been to New Orleans before and when I was there I tried to soak in the cultural climate seeping from every bar, from every twangy voice, from every fleur de lis, but I knew I hadn’t; I knew that whatever I thought I had taken with me after that two day visit was about to taken back, adjusted, and given back to me twenty fold. I had no idea what to expect. I had a read about the problems in N.O.L.A. – the racial tensions stiff since 1927 when a levee was purposefully broken above the predominantly black neighborhood to save the richer parts of the city – that were now even more unresolved after Katrina. I had read about Nagin and Blanco’s lack of leadership and resolve in the days and hours before the storm made landfall, about how hundreds of lives could have been saved if evacuation had been ordered sooner. I drove into New Orleans staring out my window trying to see the source of all of this weight and fear. I tried to peer into the windows of houses that I passed, but most were boarded up, marked with X’s, and waiting to be demolished because front lawns were too high, or residents weren’t returning.
I didn’t see what I had read about – I didn’t see how New Orleans was struggling because I was looking for something specific, for a sign, or landmark. What I wasn’t realizing was that I was surrounded by it. I was driving down an interstate banging my air-conditioning, listening to Fergie, not noticing the two walls that guarded the road on either side that were marked by an 8 foot high water line, a scar of Katrina. I was oblivious. I hadn’t yet heard a woman’s voice quiver from pain as she showed us pictures of her kids next to her flooded house. I hadn’t yet driven down Claiborne Avenue for eight straight blocks without seeing one house lived in. I hadn’t yet been to the Lower Ninth Ward and I hadn’t yet realized that it didn’t used to be a massive field full of tall grass, but was once one of the most densely populated areas in the whole City.
A waitress started talking to Joe and I last week because she heard us asking each other “Where is the money going? How is all of this going to happen?”
- “We don’t know. I lost everything, and we still struggling to get our lives back…” she said, pausing for a second to lean on her broom. Her brown eyes leveled on us like she was our mother.
- “But we just happy to have y’all here to try to help us, to try to answer some of these questions.” I nodded, overwhelmed by her resilience, put my eyes down, as she refilled my ice tea.
- “Hey, ya hear now. If you ever over by 9th ward, stop over see Ms. D. I be happy to have you.”
- "Thank you" we said, quietly.

Thank you, Ms. D, for your unbelievable strength.
Thank you, Ms. D, for making this city alive with so much heart and passion and resolve.
Thank you.