New Orleans Marches to a Fearless Drumline
1140 St. Charles Ave., Lower Garden District, New Orleans: This is where I work. I helped a co-worker paint these boards in February 2006, six months after Hurricane Katrina and one month before the Saints would sign Drew Brees, who would turn a disaster zone into a city of winners. I have installed them every Carnival season since then to protect this offshore engineering office’s windows and woodwork from the crush and craziness of Mardi Gras parade crowds. After Fat Tuesday, I take them down. It is a privilege I jealously guard.
In early 2006, much of the city remained uninhabitable. Large swaths of neighborhoods had no water or power. Traffic lights were out citywide. Most residents still could not get back into houses that had been damaged or destroyed when the levees failed and the city flooded. While they slept in spare bedrooms and on floors of family and friends many miles away, feeling like refugees, their broken homes moldered in the sun, possessions spread by the wind to parts unknown. Some people wondered if they would ever afford to rebuild, or if they should even try. Would life in New Orleans ever be the same, or had the magic been washed away?
In spite of everything, Mardi Gras parades – the big kind, with lavish floats and beads and bands and music and all manner of shenanigans – were given a green light by what was left of city government. We would turn to those few people who had made it back and do what we could, somehow, without tourists, just for ourselves, desperate to feel normal again. And so it came to pass; as the climactic final two weeks of Carnival season arrived, down St. Charles Avenue marched the patched-together MAX School band in bright yellow, blaring resilience past the biceps of ancient live oaks, up and out for the world to hear. Tears flowed from locals who lined the sidewalk and neutral ground as the combined bands of Xavier Prep, St. Augustine and St. Mary’s Catholic schools blasted death and sorrow from the air.
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.