Last of the Ninth

New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward was a historic black neighborhood, home to Fats Domino, abandoned by government, and the "murder capital of the murder capital." Now that it has been destroyed by Katrina, will its loyal inhabitants be able to return?

By Frank Etheridge

Sep 13, 2005 | Michael Knight lived on Flood Street.

An auto mechanic, Knight, 44, made a home for himself in the neighborhood he was raised in, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Bounded by water on three sides -- the Industrial Canal to the west, Bayou Bienvenue to the east and the Mississippi River to the south -- his impoverished neighborhood has long suffered from isolation and neglect. Yet, the Lower Ninth Ward was violently thrust into the national spotlight when it flooded after the first levee breach in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. America watched as a break in the Industrial Canal levee allowed water, death and destruction to flow into the neighborhood. The damage that occurred -- especially in the lower part of the Ninth Ward -- was so extensive that the head of homeland security for New Orleans, Col. Terry Ebbert, told the New York Times Sunday that "there's nothing out there that can be saved at all."

The night before Katrina struck, Knight secured his pirogue -- pronounced pee-row, these small, flat-bottom boats are omnipresent in south Louisiana, popular for a design ideal for navigating the area's canals and bayous -- by tying it to his house. After the rain slowed Tuesday morning, Knight went outside to survey the damage. That's when he saw the water rising. Fast.

"I've never seen water come up that fast," Knight recalls a week later. "It was collecting at the curb when I came out. By the time I finished smoking a cigarette, it was in the yard."

That's when Knight sprang to action. He untied his pirogue and recruited his brother Reginald Jackson and cousin Freddie Hicks to begin rescue efforts in the neighborhood. "It was a nightmare, just the noise," Knight says. "You never heard nothing like that. Wind howling, people hollering for help. Just scary."

Knight stopped counting at 200 the number of people he rescued -- from rooftops, from treetops -- but estimates he brought at least 400 people to safety. He worked nonstop for the first two days with no sleep, and then only took quick naps in his pirogue for the remaining three days of rescue efforts. Knight slept in his boat, securing it by fastening it to an antennae on the roof of his house, which was by Tuesday afternoon completely submerged in water.

"He's the neighborhood hero," says Democratic state Rep. Charmaine Marchand, a lifelong neighbor of Knight's who represents the area in the Louisiana Legislature.

"I must have been crazy; I must have gotten possessed," Knight says, speaking from Atlanta, where he's living post-Katrina.

Knight had been taking his neighbors to safety on the nearby rooftop of Krantz Elementary on Caffin Avenue. But after the Coast Guard arrived, he was ordered to stop using the school, directed instead to take everyone to the St. Claude Avenue bridge over the Industrial Canal, where they were instructed to walk three miles to the Superdome.

"I told them I could be making double time, saving double the people, if I could drop them off at the school," Knight says. "The trip to the bridge took twice as long. I asked them for gas. They said no. I had to siphon off gas from boats I saw floating around to keep going."

"People like Michael Knight came out in droves when the water started to come up," says Marchand. "Neighbors with boats helped other neighbors. We had a lot of effort, but just not enough manpower. No question the Coast Guard should have arrived sooner. The levee broke Tuesday morning. They didn't come until Wednesday."

Marchand sums up the delay with the same cause and effect that has contributed to the many problems her neighborhood faces: "We're the area everyone forgets about."

Next Page: Is the Ninth Ward the dumping grounds for New Orleans?

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