Doolough

Doolough is a haunted place.

In March 1849, several hundred starving Irish peasants in desperate straits after five years of the potato famine -- The Great Hunger, it is called -- collected in the town of Louisburgh in County Mayo. When they petitioned the local relief officer for assistance, he informed them that only the Board of Guardians "was authorized to hand out food or tickets for admission to the workhouse." The Board, he told them, was meeting at Delphi, a lodge owned by the Marquess of Sligo some 12 miles south of Louisburgh on the other side of the Doolough Pass. If they wanted assistance, they must go to Delphi and ask the Board for it.

Next morning, the mass of starving people undertook the trek across a broad, rolling bog to the pass alongside Doolough (Black Lake), a long finger of water situated between the Mweelrea Mountains and the Sheefry Hills. Rain fell relentlessly and winds gathered in the pass, exacerbating the already biting cold. An 1849 letter to the Mayo Constitution bitterly recounted that "...in obedience of this humane order, hundreds of these unfortunate living skeletons, men, women and children, might have been seen struggling through the mountain passes and roads for the appointed place...it being the most remote part of the union."*

The exhausted multitude reached Delphi early in the afternoon only to be told that they must wait until members the Board finished their lunch. Salmon abound in Doolough and in the rivers and streams around Delphi, so there's a good chance that the Board dined on salmon -- a luxury denied the peasantry (which fed exclusively on the potato and buttermilk) in the best of times. After taking another hour to enjoy their meal, the Board heard and denied the pleas for assistance and ordered the people to return Louisburgh. Mentally and physically broken, unwanted refugees in their own land, they began the return journey, which quickly became a death march. Because of the poor record-keeping of the day, it's unknown exactly how many perished on the two walks, but the generally accepted figure is between 400-600.

Today, the keening winds of Doolough mourn the dead. Two small monuments observe their passing, and every year people gather in Louisburgh to make the walk to Delphi to honor the victims and to keep their memory alive. I've been to Doolough on fair days and foul, and the place never ceases to move me. On sunny days, I've climbed the hills to read and contemplate in solitude, for it is unquestionably on a road less traveled. It is a place I return to time and again -- for me, the most beautiful and tragic place of a beautiful land with a tragic past.

Yesterday, T. and I parked the Nissan on the side of the road and hiked around the north end of the lake. A paved road led us to the foothills of the Mweelreas. The mountains themselves, looming straight up as they do, were more than a bit daunting, so we struck out across the small hills to a waterfall in the distance. Upon reaching the waterfall, we followed the banks of the resulting stream to what looked to be a sheep-shearing station. From there, we connected with the road, pausing occasionally to study flora, admire fences and stone walls, duck into the ruins of an old cottage, and examine the sudden oddity of the skeleton of lone sheep, apparently the victim of a fox. The eroded, pockmarked side of a hillock revealed a complex of swifts' nests; we stood quietly and watched the agile birds emerge to dart and swoop on their eternal hunt for flying insects. Aside from the birds and the bugs and the ghosts, we were alone. As in: The. Only. People. There. Just us. Ourselves alone. Sinn Fein. For an American, this is one of the great charms of Mayo. Think of the most beautiful place you've ever been in the United States and of how many people were there. (For me, that's the central coast of California.) Then consider it without people. That's what Mayo is like.

Like Hurricane Katrina, the Great Hunger was an avoidable catastrophe that ultimately resulted in the death and displacement of 2.5 million people. The peasants who lived off of the potato farmed and fished a rich land: Throughout the famine, Ireland exported a variety of foodstuffs to the profit of its British overlords. Fearing the creation of a culture of dependence (a phrase too often thrown around today to blame the people of New Orleans for their own suffering), the English government repeatedly declined to offer meaningful assistance. Landlords took advantage of the famine to organize their estates more efficiently, which included evictions for failure to pay rent and buying ships' passage for reluctant but depairing native Irish to migrate to England, America, and Australia. Thus were the Irish emigrants to America distinguished from all other ethnic groups: Far from perceiving America as a land of opportunity, they saw it as a place of exile. As their fortunes improved across generations, the Irish in America provided significant funding to the Irish Republican Army, whose guerilla war against the British from 1919-21 resulted in the establishment of the Irish Free State, which subsequently became the Republic of Ireland. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

*Source: The Famine in Mayo: A portrait from contemporary sources - 1845-1850, A Mayo County Library Publication (1998).

Witness

A week ago today, we joined ten other people and toured the Katrina-damaged areas of New Orleans. This amounts to 80 per cent of the entire city, an expanse of 144 square miles, or the size of seven Manhattans. Katrina-related damage extended to four parishes: Orleans, Jefferson, Placquemines, and St. Bernard's. As we discovered on the tour, little of it need have happened: Although touched off by natural forces, Katrina was largely a man-made disaster.

Rose, our tour guide, was herself a victim of the hurricane. She led the 3-hour 45-minute tour with good humor and no discernible rancor, but with a powerful narrative in the voice of an authentic New Orleans accent that commanded attention throughout. The tour circled the perimeter of the affected areas and cut though the key areas near Lake Ponchartrain, East New Orleans, and the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards.

A retired P.E. teacher who grew up in the French Quarter, Rose eventually settled with her husband in a middle class development, most of which is now slated for destruction. Rose and her husband tried for two years after the hurricane to keep their home in the hopes that they could restore it, and finally gave up. High school volunteers from Iowa helped them remove what was valuable from their home before they sold it to the city for 10 cents on the dollar. The city quickly slapped a red X on the house, meaning that damage to the home is so extensive that it must be torn down:


Katrina collided with New Orleans on August 29, 2005 as a category 5 hurricane assaulting an eroding and poorly maintained system of levees. A storm of historic but not unprecedented proportions, Katrina was the sixth most powerful Atlantic hurricane and the 3rd strongest to make landfall in the United States. New Orleans is located 3-8 feet below sea level in a basin between the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain, the largest American lake outside of the Great Lakes. (You can't see across the lake: It's large enough to have its own horizon.) Canals connecting the river to the lake cut across the city.

Nonetheless, its likely that New Orleans would have escaped catastrophic damages were it not for the failure of the decaying levee system, which breached in 53 places. Rose drove us by a number of the breaches, generally a hundred yards long or more. This picture shows the extent of one breach: The repaired area of the flood wall is bright white. The back yards of this neighborhood literally abut the flood wall:


As the tour progressed, we learned to read the damage. Notice the irregularly shaped hole in the roof of this picture:

This indicates that the family trapped in this home escaped by forcing their way through the roof from the inside. A square hole means that someone rescued the family from the outside by cutting the hole into the roof with a chain saw. Note that the rescuer could only have gotten there in the first place in a boat.

As volunteers arrived in New Orleans to assist with cleanup, a system emerged that allowed all teams to know whether a house had been inspected, who had done it, and what had been found, shown here with the X and characters spray-painted on this home:

A team from Georgia, denoted by the "GA" in the left quadrant of the X, examined this home on September 27 (the 9/27 in the top quadrant) and found no bodies (the zero in the bottom quadrant).

The last part of the tour took us through East New Orleans, including the now famous Upper and Lower Ninth Wards, the sites of the great majority of Katrina-related deaths. Billy Sothern, in his fine book Down In New Orleans: Reflections From A Drowned City, relates the development history of the area, which was originally two large tracts held by old New Orleanian and corporate interests. Although ownership of the tracts can be traced back to the 18th Century, they remained undeveloped until the '60's. Then, a combination of advanced pumping and drainage techniques and a federal grant to build up the levee system made it feasible to drain the wetlands comprising the tracts and develop them as a haven for whites fleeing the urban core of New Orleans.

The tracts were developed over the objections of scientists who predicted their vulnerability to a powerful hurricane. Not wishing to discourage potential buyers, developers conveniently omitted mention of hurricanes as they marketed new homes with scruples of a con man selling the Brooklyn Bridge. Over time, white families continued an eastern migration as the black working class moved into the Ninth Ward, which became the largest concentration of African-American owned homes in the city. Contrary to the images popularized by the conservative media, the Ninth Ward was not a massive network of government housing projects. Instead, as Rose explained, it was the backbone of the New Orleans working class.

Bisected by a canal connecting the Mississippi River to Lake Ponchartrain, the Ninth Ward was flooded when levees breached in two places to create an enfilade of flood waters that swept homes from their foundations and drowned over 1,500 people, primarily the old and the infirm who were unable to evacuate.

Now, the Ninth Ward is faced with the very understandable, very human desire to rebuild a close-knit community -- to return to what was -- in the face of virtually unanimous assessments from scientists and ecologists that the area is simply not meant to withstand hurricanes, that the victims of what amounts to environmental classism will get more more of the same if the answer is simply to build higher levees. Geography professor Peirce Lewis warned in 1976 during the early development of East New Orleans of the "wisdom, much less the safety, of the new New Orleans" and of the "real estate speculation by people who were either unwise or dishonest."* Moreover, the reality of global warming means that future hurricanes may well be more powerful and more destructive. The dilemma of the Ninth Ward is replicated further east in almost all white St. Bernard's Parish, which at one point was completely submerged by flood waters.

Sadly, Mayor Ray Nagin's political leadership has been adrift, allowing citizens to return to the Ninth Ward in the absence of any master plan for reconstruction. Not that much appears to be happening: While we witnessed no shortage of people attempting to reclaim their homes, there appears to be no systematic, coordinated activity. And there were any number of abandoned homes and lots as well.

Indeed, the only complete stretch of newly developed homes was the musician's complex in the Ninth Ward. However, this came about because of actor Brad Pitt's personal interest: He donated $5 million of his own money and raised another $5 million. The artists who live here pay according to their means and take out low interest mortgages. It's not a bad model, but it's questionable that the Ninth Ward is the appropriate place for it. As Professor Lewis explains, "Putting off limits rebuilding of heavily flooded areas will prevent more death. If you restore New Orleans as it was ten years ago, you are inviting a human disaster of catastrophic proportions."** In other words, if you think Katrina was bad...

There's also the question of whether New Orleans even can be restored to what it was or whether that is desirable. The pre-Katrina population was 700,000. Current official estimates are 400,000; Rose said that it was 250,000 at the most. I will say only that the activity we saw does not suggest a city of 400,000.

For all of its spirit and historical importance, pre-Katrina New Orleans was arguably America's poorest, most neglected city. Along with massive federal assistance, the city, state, and federal governments that have already failed the city must cooperate and coordinate their activities to an unprecedented extent. The governing bodies must not only work together effectively, they must regain the trust of the community -- a difficult obstacle that can only be surmounted by consistently delivering results over time.

New Orleans itself requires a comprehensive redevelopment plan assembled with the input and approval of community groups and business leaders. This is a tall order in a city long riven by class, race, and blood lines. Groups with no history of working together will have to, but it's unclear that they share the same interests. Indeed, groups that one would think have common interests spend too much time and effort squabbling among themselves: Sothern's depressing account of community organizers arguing over who is doing the most good does not bode well for the future of the city.

And yet, the city soldiers on. We danced that night away at the seventh annual Ponderosa Stomp, which celebrates the blues, R&B, swamp rock, and rockabilly of the past. Tourists and locals of all ages congregated happily, many dressed in the kinds of costumes that typify the city's insouciance. Still, I couldn't help being reminded of Huey Long's brilliant peroration given under the Evangeline Oak in St. Martinville, Louisiana:

“…It is here under this oak where Evangeline waited for her lover, Gabriel, who never came...Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but it lasted only through one lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations."

One fears that many bitter tears remain to be wept.

Citizen K. Read:
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

Down In New Orleans: Reflections From A Drowned City, Billy Sothern

The World That Made New Orleans

The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, Ned Sublette (Lawrence Hill Books)

In 1682, the French-Canadian explorer Rene-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, undertook an epic journey to discover the mouth of the Mississippi River. Traveling by canoe, La Salle and his party crossed the Great Lakes and successfully negotiated the entire Mississippi. He claimed all of the territory drained by the great river for France and named it "La Louisiane," for his king. Thirty-six years later in 1718, French colonists under the auspices of the French Mississippi Company established the settlement of La-Nouvelle Orleans or, as it is known today, New Orleans. Thus began the remarkable history of the most extraordinary, culturally rich, and complex city in the United States. Ned Sublette recounts that history brilliantly in The World That Made New Orleans.

New Orleans is a great paradox. Its contributions to American and world culture in terms of music and cuisine are unmatched. At the same time, it is hard to imagine a less typically American city than New Orleans, which evolved from the confluence of six historical forces: Spanish and French colonialism, Roman Catholicism, and three strains of slave importation from Africa, Sainte-Domingue, and Virginia. Sublette's ability to meld the economic, cultural, political, and geographical aspects of these forces into a cogent, literate account is always impressive and at times breath-taking.

A musician himself with grounding in Cuban and Caribbean forms, Sublette is especially strong on the early development of New Orleans music. For example, because Spanish regulations regarding slave gatherings were considerably more lax than those of France or the United States, New Orleans' forty years of Spanish rule proved vital musically. Slaves from different parts of Africa gathered weekly in Congo Square and shared their their varying traditions of music and dance. The transfer of American slaves from Virginia to Louisiana added an element of Protestantism to a slave community grounded in Catholicism and voudou. (The influence of voudou on New Orleans is complex, to say the least. Sublette traces the development of this vital religion from Africa through Sainte-Domingue and Cuba to New Orleans.)

Along the way, Sublette demolishes any remaining myths about benign slavery, and yet he is able to do it with resorting to torture porn. It was news to me that United States stopped the importation of slaves in 1808 at the behest of the state of Virginia. Virginia had a surplus of slaves and wanted to sell the surplus south. Not an act of surpassing moral fitness, the 1808 decision was bald economic protectionism. 

Similarly, he explains how slavery itself destroyed any semblance of the black nuclear family. Among other things, slaves were chattel for breeding, the most valuable economic resource a Southern "gentleman" could have. Slaves not only provided free labor, they could be used as credit. Cotton and sugar plantation owners lived lives of great opulence and great debt. Upon the death of a slave owner, his slaves were often sold (without regard for family) to pay the owner's debts.

I've read more than a few books in my life, and I know National Book Award caliber work when I see it. The World That Made New Orleans is that kind of book, and deserves as wide an audience as possible. It's an articulate, forceful reminder of New Orleans' historical and cultural meaning. As Sublette said in an interview after Hurricane Katrina, "You cannot abandon New Orleans. You can say that New Orleans has no viability as a business or industrial city. But if our history and culture as a nation mean anything, New Orleans is central to it." Highly recommended.