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Common Ground As I trundled the wheelbarrow through the length of the little brick Baptist church I thought about her. Emmanuel’s grandmother, president of the Board of Ushers for 50 years. Fifty years of commitment to this church that now was filled to the eaves with mold and mud. We were in the lower 9 th ward of New Orleans , the part of the city that bore the brunt of the rushing floodwaters when the levees broke. The 9 th ward is one of the oldest black neighborhoods in America , where generations of family members lived in houses with paid-off mortgages. In the lower 9 th, the homes nearest the water were crushed to splinters, except for one that washed away completely and came to rest two blocks from its original corner. Emmanuel, who is now a grandparent himself, drove us from the upper 9 th ward to our work site in the lower 9 th. We stayed in the upper ward, where a slight elevation gave the residents a great advantage. Although the floodwaters remained in place for nearly six weeks, the flood line on each house was only about chest high. People had been able to get in and out, and nearly 200 residents had found refuge at St. Mary’s Catholic School . The school is a good solid place, made of cement and cinderblock, and people lived for two weeks in the upper floors. No beds, no water, no electricity, no plumbing—toilets don’t flush when the pipes are filled with mud—but somehow they survived. They’re scattered now, most in Houston or Mobile or one of the other places far from home. It is home, the 9 th ward, in ways that few people these days can understand. The upper 9 th, where Emmanuel lives—at the moment he’s in a trailer parked in his driveway—is a charming neighborhood of little 1920’s craftsman houses, with brick-a-brack and painted trim, eaves with decorative cut-outs, the occasional house with Victorian frills. Small, close together, but attractive—like a beach town, I thought, with sturdy little cottages. No one can live in them right now. The molds are toxic, and the mud has sewage and bacteria and industrial pollutants. They can’t just be cleaned; they have to be gutted, stripped of all except masonry and timber framing, every last bit of wallboard and fiberglass insulation and insulation board ripped away, every nail pulled, and surfaces washed with bleach, before it’s safe to go in without a respirator and Tyvek suit. So that’s what I wore as I rolled the wheelbarrow out to dump debris onto a pile in the street. Thinking about Emmanuel’s grandmother and how she never wore a Tyvek suit in her life. Thinking that I looked a lot like the Pillsbury doughboy in mine. I had a love-hate relationship with the respirator. It hurt, and as the filter worked it got harder to breathe, but none of the mold got through. I’m allergic to mold and didn’t have a moment’s discomfort. Great things, those respirators. But it would be impossible to live in one, to bring children back into a house where it was unsafe to breathe the air or touch the walls. If the 9 th ward families are evicted March 15 from their emergency housing, which will happen if the Federal Emergency Management Agency stops paying their rent, they have no place to go except their old homes, their now-toxic homes. Trailers would help. There are 30,000 applications for FEMA trailers, which like Emmanuel’s can be placed in each homeowner’s driveway, but only six percent have been delivered. Emmanuel was one of the lucky ones. There’s no electricity on his block yet, but he has a safe place to stay while he and the Common Ground volunteers work on his house. His truck still runs, and he’s able to get supplies from the Common Ground Distribution Center. He can cook with propane, and use flashlights or lanterns at night. His plumbing is almost working—just one major clogged pipe to clear. Mary Moorefield, a volunteer from Ashville , North Carolina , takes over my wheelbarrow and I start pulling down fiberglass insulation and stuffing it into a bag. My 13-year-old son Kevin is prying wallboard off. Liz Carter, our crew chief, is up on the rafters pulling down wallboard at the eaves. The three guys from Goshen College , Tim and Luke and Isaac, are ripping insulation board out, a terrible job. The dried mud is astounding. It’s on every flat surface, even up high, even behind the insulation. It’s cracked like a jigsaw puzzle, like the mud I’ve seen on tidal flats in the hot sun, curling up at the edges. Don’t touch it with bare hands. Toxic. Emmanuel drove us by his grandmother’s house. It’s what I think of as a railroad house; here they call it a “shotgun”: one room behind another, straight back. The lower 9 th isn’t as dolled-up as the upper, and the houses are mostly made of wood, with only the occasional brick or block house, like the brick house across the street from the church. Emmanuel points out where his grandmother’s garden used to be, where the chickens used to run, where the fence was before the flood washed it away. All the plants are gone except for some weedy grass. Emmanuel talks about the way she used to cook. If we can get the church cleared out it can be a community center for the lower 9 th residents who want to come back. When it’s clean and safe, they can stay there if they need to. That’s what Common Ground has done in the upper ward with St. Mary’s School. The rector has given Common Ground permission to use the building to house volunteers. We were on cots in a large room, but while we were there two new rooms were opened with bunk beds and real mattresses. Parts of the closed-off upper floors were cleaned out and made ready for more beds. I feel like I’m living in Dorothy Day’s words: “People say, what is the sense of our small effort. They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.” If she had been in New Orleans , she might have said, “We must remove one chunk of moldy wallboard at a time.” Common Ground started when a couple of 9 th ward residents decided to step in and start distributing food and water. They worked in the beginning out of a truck that sometimes was up to its hips in floodwater. Then they gutted and cleaned a community center, and brought in cots. Volunteers came in, doing whatever they could do. One man was a tree removal expert, and with local residents and other volunteers he cut apart the fallen trees that had crushed houses and torn down electric lines. Now the local residents he trained have formed a tree-removal company, and they donate 25% of their profit to Common Ground. Dorothy Day said that a “pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.” Common Ground is like that. Some people are very good at asking for donations. They call up places and get the food that keep the volunteers eating and the tools that help them work. Doctors and nurses volunteer in the clinics. There’s a preschool and an after-school program, for the kids who have a school to attend. For the others, there’s a “stay on track” program. Farmers and scientists work with residents to restore the soil; they use toxin-eating bacteria and make the earth safe again. Lawyers are working to halt the evictions, to get FEMA trailers for residents, and to stop the city of New Orleans from bulldozing the whole lower 9 th ward into a park where no one lives. The volunteers look at each other and say, “These are people’s homes.” One young woman said, “How can I come here, and see what I’ve seen, and not help? I don’t think I could live with myself.” No one gets a salary. Everyone gets meals and a place to stay—nothing great; cold showers, iffy electricity, mostly beans and rice to eat. But the glorious thing each volunteer gets, what I got, what keeps people there or brings them in for a week or two weeks or a month or longer, is a chance to help: to lay on hands and heal this neighborhood. The volunteers do what the community’s residents ask them to do. There is a list of 1,500 homes. Each takes a crew of 10 about a week. This month 2,000 college students will be coming to spend their spring break gutting houses. There will be major progress. I pulled nails for a day and a half. Monotonous, tedious, annoying, necessary. Martin Luther King said, “We shall hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” This is a mountain of despair, a calamity. But with each wheelbarrow full of moldy wallboard, with each bit of rubble, people are giving each other hope. I think of Emmanuel’s grandmother, standing her ground firmly for fifty years in the love and pride she felt for her family, her shotgun house, and her little church. With each nail I pull, I am standing with her. We stand together, on common ground. |
