No direction home

Aug. 28, 2006 | AUSTIN, Texas, and NEW ORLEANS -- On Sunday afternoon in New Orleans' Congo Square, Kevin Goodman, Big Chief of the Flaming Arrows, performed with fellow Mardi Gras Indians and musician Cyril Neville in a drum circle, part of a series of performances to bring healing to the city. The event was a memorial to the thousands who lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina or have died in the year since from illnesses and stresses associated with the disaster. Held on the spot where slaves once drummed and the Storyville neighborhood, leveled long ago, gave birth to jazz, the performers were joined by hundreds of the city's residents in the grand New Orleans tradition of celebrating life while grieving loss.

Goodman's Flaming Arrows, a tribe founded by his father, Therdot, marched the streets of New Orleans' 7th Ward for more than 40 years. A lifelong resident of the city who worked as a house painter before the hurricane, Goodman has served as Big Chief for 16 years and had never missed a Mardi Gras. But a year after the storm breached the levees and flooded his neighborhood with 6 feet of water, Goodman, 46, is still living in Austin, Texas, where he was evacuated with literally nothing but the clothes on his back after surviving for days in harrowing conditions.

With people like Goodman gone, New Orleans' unique culture remains at risk. Many of the neighborhoods that nurtured its wild creativity lie in ruin, their artists and musicians flung apart by the disaster. Goodman's story also reflects the personal devastation and displacement experienced by so many following a natural disaster and a government failure of historic proportions.

"It still makes me angry when I think of the way we suffered," Goodman says, his usually infectious smile falling away as he recalls the desperation of the many people who waited days to be rescued.

Everyone important in his life has been scattered across a thousand miles of the South, from San Antonio to Atlanta. Like so many other New Orleanians who loved their city but lived by modest means, he finds that Katrina continues to take a toll. In recent months, two members of Goodman's family have died and another remains in critical condition in a Dallas hospital, all from illnesses that took a turn for the worse after exposure to toxic floodwaters and the stresses of dislocation.

The New Orleans that Goodman lost was 10 or so blocks of the 7th Ward, where he grew up, centered on the corner of Frenchmen and North Rocheblave streets. Places like the 7th Ward were the soul of a city defined by its patchwork of neighborhoods. Schools and churches, corner stores and bars, and extended families that went back for generations wove a network of support and survival, and were a source of the city's culture and creativity.

"Even though New Orleans was ragged, it was beautiful to me," Goodman said recently over a soul food dinner of country-style steak with gravy and butter beans, in his new south Austin apartment. "I know New Orleans like the back of my hand, every Indian and every Indian suit. I loved sewing, I loved masking, I loved singing and dancing -- anything that went on with a tambourine and a drumbeat, I was there."

Goodman believes that the New Orleans he knew will never recover and that, despite their deep ties, many survivors like him will not return. "The city was always about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer," he says. "They didn't care about us. I don't want to live in a place where if a hurricane blows through again, then the ones with the money make it out and the ones who don't get left to drown."

While long in coming, signs of recovery are beginning to appear in the city's devastated neighborhoods. New Orleans has reached nearly half its pre-Katrina population, and funds from huge federal block grants are finally arriving to help with the rebuilding. Among hurricane evacuees, Goodman is fortunate to have settled well into life in a new city, finding a warm welcome in Austin and new opportunities in his career as artist and musician. He says he will always be an Indian, and he has performed more in the past year than any other. But the scars of what he has lost may never heal.

After the levees were breached last August, Goodman and his family waded through the floodwaters and used a wood door to float the small children to a nearby church. Huddled with dozens of other survivors with little food or water, they were picked up the next day by some men from the neighborhood with a boat and taken to an I-10 overpass. By then the Superdome had been closed to additional evacuees. They hiked the elevated highway in hundred-degree heat, past unforgettable scenes of suffering. When they reached the drier ground of the Morial Convention Center, more disaster awaited them. They spent four days in the heat with little food and water, no toilets and no electricity. Around them, diabetics went into insulin shock, elderly people died in their wheelchairs, and bodies lay under sheets on the sidewalk.

"I couldn't even take the smell on me, and everything around smelled worse than I did," Goodman recalls. "I couldn't eat -- my stomach just shut down. I felt like I was losing my mind, but I knew I wasn't. What was going on wasn't supposed to be." His brother Brian's two grandchildren, 3-month-old twin girls, nearly died in Goodman's arms from dehydration. Several times he had to wrap the twins in his body to keep them from being crushed by the crowds, which rushed the curbs expecting rescue buses every time headlights were seen coming down the street. On Saturday, a man was shot dead by police in front of Goodman and a crowd of hundreds. (Amid the wider chaos, the circumstances of the shooting of Danny Brumfield, 45, were disputed. Witnesses claimed he obstructed a police car in the street to plea for help. A statement released by the New Orleans Police Department last October said the shooting was in self-defense.)

"The cops just kept driving like nothing had happened -- that was cold-blooded," Goodman recalls. "What scared me the most was the way they shot like that toward the crowd, with thousands of people for blocks around. That was the straw that broke it for me. I was done. I didn't care where I was going, as long as it was out of that place."

Next page: In Austin, jamming with a wheelchair-bound friend who survived the flood lashed to a rafter in his attic