New Orleans

April 25, 2022
Population: 387,564

On Joel’s last day in Louisiana, we circled back to New Orleans. I had purposefully not budgeted much time to spend in New Orleans for this tour - as most everyone knows, the music scene in New Orleans is unbelievably vibrant, on the streets and inside gathering spaces, and I didn't feel like I had much to contribute. I did want to spend time exploring the more neglected neighborhoods of New Orleans, though, and see where I might be of use.

We headed to New Orleans East, an often neglected part of the city that’s been suffering urban decay, high poverty, and high crimes since pre-Katrina. Then most of the neighborhood was flooded by Katrina. Joel wanted to go there because he had read the devastating memoir about a family living in New Orleans East, The Yellow House. We went to visit the site of the house, but nothing of it remained. On our way over to the house, I had spotted a nursing home. We made a U-turn and headed to it. It was adjacent to a church and run by a Black convent of nuns. I walked in to talk to the receptionist, and she invited me to play at lunchtime in their common room, which had a nice upright piano. It was all business for her - maybe they're used to strangers walking in and offering/volunteering whatever they each thought was useful to the nursing home.

I played for a good while, happy to be playing on a real instrument that was in tune for a big group of folks - the residents applauded after the Bach Partita Prelude and then went about their business eating lunch. Most were sitting in groups at tables further away, but a few loners sat at the tables closest to me. There was a man sitting on the couch facing me almost the entire time. I chatted with him and he was very happy to have me there, but he seemed to have some kind of cognitive dysfunction and it was hard to communicate via words. I’m glad I could play for him at least and communicate through music. You can see his reflection in the piano:

I later found a brief of a lawsuit against the nursing home, and it painted a harrowing picture of their Katrina experience. They had chosen to not evacuate 100 of their residents and stay put, since the nursing home is on top of a hill. The residents are frail, as I saw - suffering health/mental conditions (dementia, neurosis, heart failure). The nursing home had only a foot of flooding and all were able to evacuate upstairs; tragically, they did not have running water/electricity for days in 100+ temperatures and humidity, and 14 residents died.

The nursing home lost $1.4 million dollars in the lawsuit - they were accused of being selective about which residents to evacuate, and supposedly a bus had come to evacuate the rest but the nuns chose to stay. But I can only guess it wasn’t such a black-and-white situation. I know from what I've learned about Katrina that these “forgotten” (or, consciously overlooked) residents in more Black, more poor neighborhoods were left without evacuation options and without aid for many days following Katrina due to the disastrous federal response. These residents were left to their own devices to make life-or-death decisions on the fly. 40% of Louisiana’s national guard was unavailable because they were in Iraq fighting the war on terrorism while Louisianans died day after day waiting for relief.

This is America.

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And so Joel was leaving me that day, and the following day I would pick up Daniel Pettrow as my tour assistant. Daniel is no stranger to Gather Hear - he was the theater director of our West Virginia show “A Kind of Mirror” and had accompanied me for half that tour. He had spent years living in New Orleans, and I was excited to see him. As for Joel, this tour literally could not have happened without him - not only his superhuman filming skills which make footage look like I had a crew of 5, but in being solely responsible for figuring out the piano moving situation with his craftsmanship. He also ended up having a lot of invaluable opinions on which direction we should drive, where I should play, who should be our target audience, and I am so grateful. Thanks, Joel!!