Sterlneshia tells her guest – the wide-smiled man she remembers from the movie Shaft – that the guards stop her from playing, but she’s glad they’re there: “Katrina took away the peace: now young kids are cutting each other up like crazy and there were many killings in the trailers before the guards came. It’s scary around here. The guards won’t let us make any noise, but they make me feel less frightened.”
Sterlneshia is amazed a big movie star wants to hear her story – it’s been a long time since she felt that the US Government much cared about her family’s fate, after all. Her story is one of many thousands of similar stories: of families and friends, homes, possessions and much-loved pets lost to the steel-grey floodwaters that engulfed New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane of August 29, 2005. Sterlneshia still has nightmares about Katrina, waking up breathless, thinking she’s about to be pulled under by a fierce swelling tide… especially when it rains.
Samuel L. Jackson is hearing Sterlneshia’s story as part of a documentary film for the charity campaign LISTEN. LISTEN is a global campaign that asks people to listen to the world’s disadvantaged children – children affected by poverty, disease, war, exploitation, AIDS and natural disasters. It’s a simple proposition, but a powerfully novel one in a world that typically fetishizes the story of the hungry child through the medium of the emotive charity plea, or the journalist’s pen.
Jackson says he was drawn to the project from the outset: "I had to come here for this… to listen to remarkable stories such as Sterlneshia’s,” he explains. “I don’t know how they get through it. These kids shouldn’t be hungry and homeless, going to sleep hearing gunshots, without good schooling, getting ill from the formaldehyde leaching out of the trailer walls. That these kids are still suffering, two years after Katrina, is a national scandal. Their voices should be a call to action.”
Shyly, Sterlneshia asks her guest if he wants to hear the poem she wrote about Katrina. Jackson nods an affirmative, his signature Kangol cap bobbing up and down, redoubling the encouragement. Sterlneshia begins. “Water’s getting higher/Children are crying/Levees are breaking/Barges are shaking/ Standing in the storm, the roof caved in/Some got out, the others stayed in/Mommies are worried because their babies are hungry/ They think they’re going to die/Cus there’s no one on their side.”
Across town, six-year-old Scotty might also wonder whether anyone is on his side. When the hurricane came, Scotty and mother Koren were living on Burgundy Street in the Lower Ninth Ward, a proud afro-American community and the long-time home of jazz great Fats Domino. Scotty remembers Burgundy Street as B Block, a community of neighbours that would gather for hours chatting and sharing vast pots of rice and beans, where old Miss Cynthia would call from her porch with his favourite snack of pickled pigs’ lips, where every door was open and every face wore a smile.
However, in a matter of hours, Scotty’s community disappeared. Decades of corporate malfeasance had carved industrial canals through the wetlands to the north and south of Lower Ninth Ward, with fatally precarious ecological consequences. Without the buffer of the 27,000 acres of wetlands subsequently lost to salinisation, levees on the monstrous MR-GO canal were, inevitably, breached by the storm. Scotty’s modest life – his Shrek DVDs and action toys, his home and community – were sunk in a soup of floodwater, gasoline-laced mud and sewage.
Crouching on the step of the simple shotgun home Scotty and Koren once called home, now a deserted neighbourhood being stealthily reclaimed by creeping vegetation, Samuel L Jackson asks Scotty what he misses about his old life. “I miss Cynthia and Miss Betty, and brandy the white dog,” says Scotty, his eyes wide, taking in every contour of Jedi Master Mace Windu’s face, “I wish we could come back to Burgundy Street and there be no floods.”
Scotty now lives with his mother in a FEMA trailer out front of his grandparent’s house, in the similarly deserted, and equally hurricane-struck, New Orleans East. With no streetlights, the district is ink-black at night, few neighbours are hardy enough to have returned, and the small family are under constant threat of break-ins and hijackings. As their home was rented, they aren’t eligible for federal compensation, and cannot afford the cost of a new rental home (which have spiralled to treble the pre-Katrina rates). Scotty, therefore, has no choice but to stay in the trailer, his asthma worsening due to blooming mold, lonely with no neighbourhood playmates.
What little has been accomplished in rebuilding the lives and communities of the forgotten families of Louisiana is largely the result of people helping themselves and one another, relying on donated materials and volunteer labour. Aware of the widening gulf between federal promises and families’ needs, Oxfam America has been working on the ground with partner organisations; to offer tools and financial support for hurricane victims to piece their lives back together themselves. “Bureaucracy is killing people, and ruining kids’ lives,” says Peggy Case, of Oxfam partner organisation Trac, a Louisiana charity that offers advice and aid to families in hurricane-afflicted areas. “At best, if their families are homeowners, they’re waiting and waiting on a federal cheque, but many, of course, will get nothing. We need to stop and listen to what these children need. Money is important, but it’s about much more than money. It’s about community.”
Scotty is pleased that Samuel has heard his story, although remembering his lost toys and neighbourhood friends has made him a little sad. He wonders whether the Jedi Master can’t use his powers to make everything alright again in New Orleans? Samuel smiles. When it comes to a force for change, Scotty’s story is much more powerful than a purple lightsaber could ever be.
Words by Sally Howard |
