Happy Mardi Gras...

as it is...

New Orleans, La.:
Dear Mr. Robinson,
Many of us in New Orleans wish you would move here and run for mayor.

You are one of the few in the national press who has provided an honest evaluation of the post-Katrina realities that New Orleans will live with for years to come. Today is Mardi Gras. While some of our residents celebrate with their homes intact, hundreds of thousands (mostly black) are scattered across the country with dim prospects of ever being allowed to return home.

On this, Mardi Gras Day, and at a point now six months after Katrina, what is your honest opinion about the future prospects for New Orleans?
James W. Bailey
Eugene Robinson: Thanks for your kind words, which are, in fact, much too kind.

I just had to take a question about Mardi Gras, because I've been sitting here watching CNN cover the festivities and I'm struck with how unreal it all seems. I didn't have any particular connection with New Orleans before Katrina, but since going there the week after the flood I've been haunted by the city and its plight. Unless you've seen it, you have no idea how extensive the damage is.

Pictures don't tell you how much of New Orleans is literally a ghost town. I think that a city called New Orleans will eventually rise again, and it will be a smaller, whiter city, and it will have Mardi Gras every year and gambling and drinking and music and everything. But it won't be the same New Orleans that existed before.

That city is gone.
More than 1,300 Americans are dead, most of whom were from New Orleans.
More than 400,000 New Orleanians (most of whom are black) have been scattered to the winds with little prospect of ever being allowed the right of return.

More than 200,000 homes have been destroyed, most in the majority black neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth Ward and East New Orleans.
Renting homes during Mardi Gras isn't much of an alternative income option for many these days in New Orleans.
This first A.

K. (after Katrina) Mardi Gras finds me reflecting on the many tragic Mardi Gras Day photographs I've taken and conversations I've had over the years.
Mardi Gras has always been filled with tragic irony.

MARDI GRAS is from Chapter Louisiana of my book of poetry entitled, Dead Nigger Blues. Dead Nigger Blues was published in 1994.
(In remembrance of a long ago Mardi Gras Day conversation with my friend and former co-worker from New Orleans, Joe Pugh.

)
"Joe, I'm very sorry to hear about what happened to your cousin."
"Adolph was born singin' the dead nigger blues, James."
"The dead nigger blues.

That's the song some of us black folk in New Orleans start singin' when we know before it happens that we'll be killed for one reason or another, whether it's our fault or not, whether we're guilty or innocent, by the cops. The dead nigger blues is a sad song that a black man in this damn city like my cousin Adolph sings about his destiny to be delivered up into the hands of angry white cops."
The history of N.

O.P.D.

violence repeated itself on March 22, 1990, when Adolph Archie, an African-American, was accused of killing a white officer, Earl Hauck, during a shootout downtown. On the way from the scene of the shooting to the hospital, the police transporting Archie, who had been injured during the incident, took twelve minutes to travel seven blocks. When they arrived at the hospital, approximately one hundred officers were waiting for them after hearing that Hauck had died.

During this period, officers were broadcasting death threats against Archie over police radios. Those transporting Archie, including a close friend of Hauck's, stated later that they thought there could be a lynching at the hospital where the officers continued to threaten Archie. The officers transporting Archie decided not to enter the hospital, but instead of following department policy and taking him to another hospital, they drove him to Hauck's police station.

At the station, officers claimed there was a scuffle with Archie, and that he slipped and fell. The station's sergeant denied ever seeing the officers or Archie and did not raise questions about the bloodstains that appeared on the floor; instead he simply ordered a trusty to clean them up.
By the time Archie got to a doctor, he had been beaten severely, yet no officer was held accountable then or later.

Once they got to the hospital, events became more confused. Some of Archie's hospital x-rays, showing his injuries, reportedly vanished. Medical staff were unable to determine Archie's name or his background (even though officers knew his name) and injected him with iodine for a medical test, to which he was allegedly allergic, leading some to conclude this had killed him.

Two pathologists said he was beaten to death, and it was reported that he had exacerbated his condition by pulling out tubes in his throat at some point and that the injuries to his throat prevented breathing without them. His death was ultimately called a "homicide by police intervention" by the coroner's office.
In a settlement with the city, Archie's family was paid $333,000, with one-third designated for the family of Officer Hauck.

According to all reports, no officers were criminally prosecuted or administratively sanctioned; in fact, within hours of Archie's death, then-Superintendent Warren Woodfork cleared all the involved officers of any departmental violations. It was also reported that the rookie officer who initially apprehended Archie and did not shoot him on the spot, was vilified by fellow officers for his restraint.
Unfortunately, my "Alien in Ice" was not juried into this prestigious nature photography exhibition.

I was unable to convince the jurors that my alien was in fact part of nature. They were unimpressed with my arguments and saw far too much of "the hand of man" in this shot.