Weathering the Storm Together (Torn Apart by Race, Gender,

and Class)
Felice Batlan

NWSA Journal, Volume 20, Number 3, Fall 2008, pp. 163-184 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nwsa.0.0052

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v020/20.3.batlan.html

Access Provided by City University of New York at 11/22/12 5:31AM GMT

Weathering the Storm Together

(Torn Apart by Race, Gender, and Class)
FELICE BATLAN
This genre-bending piece blurs the line between a primary document and
a secondary document, a folktale and academic scholarship. It provides
a first-hand account from when the author, then a professor at Tulane,
first learned of a potential hurricane, through evacuation, homelessness,
and the reoccupation of New Orleanswhat she refers to as a newly
constituted city of men. Using the analytical lens of gender and feminist theory, the author attempts to make sense of her own experience of
Katrina, while situating the hurricane within a larger historical framework. Ultimately, the story, however, is about how the author, a white
woman, and her evacuation companion, an older black man, struggled to
find ways to communicate and express their grief, anger, and fears across
the chasm of race, gender, and class.
Keywords: New Orleans / Katrina / evacuation / disasters / gender / race /
masculinity / FEMA / rape
It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us,
the securest of our possessions, were taken from us,
the ability to exchange experiences.
(Benjamin 1969, 83)1

I do not know how to tell my story.2 There are too many strands and complexities to fit into one narrative. Yet I imagine that through the process of
writing, I can create order out of disorder; that I can slowly piece together
all the fractured shards of my life in New Orleans. As a historian, I yearn
to explain the past and as a human I long to exchange experiencesto
offer my story, to engage in my own cultural production. As a feminist,
I recognize the autobiographical form as a way to disrupt the seemingly
objective, to force explanations and theories back to the register of lived
experiences. As a historian of gender, it is through this lens that I perceive the larger narrative of Katrina as one about race, gender, politics,
segregation, neoliberalism, and the visible results of the end of the New
Deal state. As an attorney, I can speak of legal needs unmet and of due
process violations. On a more intimate scale, one that keeps me awake at
night, that makes me afraid of the dark, I recognize Katrina to be part of
my own history.
In the days and months after Katrina, the word unbelievable appeared
in every conversation from describing the images of a submerged New
Orleans, to trying to get gas, to enduring endless FEMA double-speak. It
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Felice Batlan

was not just unbelievable to those in front of their television sets in other
parts of the country and the world. It was unbelievable to me, to us, we
who were caught in the storm and its aftermath. But what does it mean
to be unable to believe what was lived reality? Perhaps it meant that there
was no way to explain what had so quickly become of peoples lives, what
had become of my own life.
In telling this as my own personal tale, I intend to challenge the boundaries between what historians understand to be a primary source and a
secondary source. I attempt to create a narrative of intertwined stories, of
fragments that only tentatively form a whole. I want to take my readers
through a lived journey that really has no beginning or end. I hope to keep
my story dialogic through refusing the conventions of academic prosethe
objectivity of the third person voice, the careful sifting through evidence as
a way to avoid personal bias, the fear of being revealed to harbor irrational
fears and hatreds, and the use of extensive references that allow an author
to hide behind others voices and that gestures towards truth. Further, and
what in part makes the writing of this story so difficult, is that I recognize
my own class and race privilege and how it cushioned and protected me
during and after the storm. At the same time my lived experience was one
of unmitigated fear, grief, and an utter sense of being lost. But most of all,
in narrating this story, I hope to make the relationships forged and broken
by the Storm live in defiance of its destructiveness.

Falling in Love
In the summer of 2005, I, a lifelong New Yorker, found myself a law professor at Tulane and very single after the breakup of a decade-long relationship.
As a femme sole living in New Orleans, a city where one could take on a
multitude of identities, where performance and the carnivalesque interwove
with everyday life, I played with who I was and what I might become. As
a historian well-acquainted with the racial history of this city and region,
I knew better than to fall into the myth of moonlight and magnolias. Still,
New Orleans worked its charms upon me. I fell in love with the architecture, the food, the people, the smell of jasmine and gardenias in the air, the
visible expression of African, French, and Spanish cultures, and especially
the music. What so enticed me was not the perfection of New Orleans but
its imperfectionsits aura of decay, the broken sidewalks, the sense of
potential danger that lurked in the streets, the heavy humidity that caused
mold to sprout everywhere, and the feeling of living in a city that was on the
brink of ruin. I imagined it as a Mississippi Veniceforever in the process of
sinking but by some miracle destined to escape such a demise.
Most of all, I loved the streets and the second lines. During much of
the year, African American social and pleasure clubs composed primarily

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of working-class people stage parades through their neighborhoods. Each

parade has a brass band that plays the traditional rhythms of New Orleans
while paraders and dancers (the second liners) follow the band. All are
invited to participate in the second line. Indeed, New Orleans African
American cultural performances are marked by how they blur the line
between observer and participant. As I would spend Sunday afternoons
writing and listening to WWOZ, New Orleans all jazz radio station, I
would wait for the announcement of a second line and quickly get into
my car. With building anticipation, I would join the second line and spend
hours dancing through the streets, allowing the rhythm to transport me,
amazed by being part of a pulsating, sweating, moving crowd that ricocheted between spontaneity, chaos, and control. I felt empowered when
we second liners stopped traffic. I was often overwhelmed by the sheer
amount of talent demonstrated by the musicians and dancers. In a blatant
act of cultural appropriation and sheer admiration, I mimicked the steps of
the dancers and did not mind, in fact experienced that particularly white
sense of perverse pride, when someone would compliment me by saying,
For a white girl, you can move. I was also often one of the few white
people who participated, as many whites imagined the neighborhoods in
which second lines occurred to be dangerously wracked with crime.3 Some
of my friends would advise me not even to drive through these streets.
I ignored such advice, made my way to second lines, and twice proudly
paraded alongside the Mardi Gras Indians.4 I also befriended an older group
of jazz musicians, treasuring the opportunity to hear their stories of a New
Orleans that no longer exists and may never have been.
I took great pleasure in my newfound city, but I was not nave.5 I saw
the staggering poverty, segregation, and racism in New Orleans.6 I was
often shocked that large segments of the city were practically abandoned
and leafed my way through old books of the city that showed these streets
as once vibrant centers of African American life. I read of how urban
development destroyed some of the principal sites of African American
culture and community. Especially striking was the building of highway
I-10, which literally cut Treme, the historic African American community
and center of African American culture, in halfdramatically and drastically cleaving it from the predominately white and high-profile French
Quarter.
I was also keenly aware of how, as an American but especially as a resident of New Orleans, I benefited from the wages of whiteness.7 I lived in
the primarily white Garden District, which had its own private security
patrol, and dined in restaurants that hired off-duty policemen to ensure
the safety of its patrons. Fearing coming across as something of a lady
bountiful, still I tutored in the New Orleans grammar schoolsthose
crumbling buildingsand witnessed the inculcation of discipline that
too often passes for education of the poor in this country. Everyday, I saw

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young black men seated in wheelchairs who were victims of gun violence,
yet I did not look away nor hide from the problems of my new city. New
Orleans contradictions, in fact, held my attention in a way no other citys
problems and pleasures had ever done. The contradictions themselves fascinated me, and I continually sought to learn more. By August 25, 2005, I
had lived in New Orleans for one year and marveled at how comfortable
I felt, in a city of such complexity, after such little time. I did not realize how stark those contradictions would become nor how difficult my
negotiating between them would be.
Of Hurricanes and Hardy or Helpless Women
On Friday night, August 26, I had only a vague idea that a hurricane was
approaching. I went out on a date. I ate, I drank, I danced. At dinner, there
was talk of past hurricanes. I heard a story of a great grandmother who
was Cherokee and lived in the bayous. She spent the hurricane of 1909 in
a canoe strapped to an oak tree. I marveled at her strength and ingenuity
and doubted the veracity of the story.
At six oclock on Saturday morning my landlord called, ordering me to
take in the patio furniture and begin boarding the house. I never felt more
like the stereotype of a helpless woman. The furniture was too heavy, I
couldnt use a hammer, couldnt reach the windows, and the idea of evacuating alone terrified me. All morning I spoke with friends. They apologized
that there was no time to help and no room in their family cars for me. I
felt deeply marked by my single status and profoundly alone. Evacuation
was clearly a family affair.
I called the airlines and was told there was still room on flights to
Denver or Chicago but that the airlines were pulling planes out of New
Orleans and might decide to cancel all remaining flights at any moment.8 I
could not imagine what I would do, where I would go, if I could not get out.
Then, my friend K, a renowned African American jazz musician, phoned.9
He, his family, and some fellow musicians were able to book rooms in one
of the old large brick hotelsthis was known as a vertical evacuation.
He explained that he had lived in New Orleans for seventy years, never
evacuated. A vertical evacuation was all that was required, he assured me.
He explained that we would have a good time, play music, eat, drink, and
wait out the storm. I would be part of his extended family. Tried, true, and
safe, I thought, and maybe even fun. I leaped at the invitation.
K came over to my place. I happily divvied up the responsibilities
along traditional gendered lines. I gathered up some food supplies, while
he moved my furniture away from windows and then left to shop for
hardware. I was thrilled for the masculine help and found myself looking
forward to what could not possibly be more than a few interesting days
spent with my family, black and white.10

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167

Go, Go, Go
Saturday night was eerie, hot, muggy, and intensely quiet. K, who had left
to finalize arrangements, phoned me just after midnight. To my surprise,
he did not direct me to the hotel room he had described. He had a bad feeling. This was going to be the big one. We should not vertically evacuate.
We needed to leave New Orleans, immediately. His children and grandchildren needed his car. We would take mine and the family would meet
up latersomewhere, we would figure that part out later. I thought of
my grandparents immigrating from Russia. My childhood was filled with
lessons of what one had to do when fleeing pogromssew your jewelry
into your skirt, take cash for bribes, remember your documents. I grabbed
my passport, my jewelry, three days worth of clothing, and a box of archival documents collected as a graduate student. As K loaded my car with
his musical instruments, the ones he most wanted to preserve, like his
grandfathers banjo and expensive German cymbals, a policeman pulled
up. Whose car is it? he demanded. The policeman entered my house
wanting to make sure that it was my car that this black man was loading
and that I was safe. He asked me if I was voluntarily accompanying
that man. Was he forcing me to go with him? Was I sure that I wanted
to go? I was stunned by this interactiona blunt reminder of my status
as a protected white woman in the South and the brutal history of black
men suspected of having relationships with white women. K was angry
but not shocked or even surprised. This is what happens, he explained,
when a black man is in a white neighborhood, with a white woman in the
middle of the night storm or no storm.
By four oclock in the morning, we were on the back roads out of New
Orleans, the ones that K had traveled as a child. No other cars were in
sight, just the chemical iridescent air of cancer alley, the awkward billboards beckoning us to experience real plantation life, and then suddenly the extraordinary traffic of half a million people just trying to get
out.11 Cars were stuffed with families, animals, belongings, pulling trailers,
and boats, and cars. K, who seemed so large and strong to me, was feeling
physically ill. I learned that he, like so many black men, had high blood
pressure, diabetes, heart disease. I suddenly became the caretaker, feeding
him, giving him his medications. We stopped at gas stations for him to get
fresh air and I fueled up the car. Like some hackneyed story from the Civil
Rights era of interracial couples, I could feel the ugly stares, gas attendants
who refused to talk to me or give me directions. As our journey continued, I felt as if I was losing my protected racial status, something I did not
actively seek but now felt acutely vulnerable without. As the ill-defined
companion of a black man, I was possibly no longer viewed as correctly
performing white southern womanhood. K joked that we should call ourselves driving Mr. Daisy. In some sense, he was correct. Our prescribed

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Felice Batlan

gender, class and racial roles, roles that had partly landed us together
in this fix, were quite suddenly in flux. About ninety miles from New
Orleans, I stopped at hotel after hotel. Each time, K insisted that I park
away from the windows and that he stay in the car, believing that there
was no chance of a white woman and a black man getting a room together.
I thought he was paranoid. I accepted as simple fact there was no available
room anywhere between Baton Rouge and Houston that night.12
Fourteen hours after our trip began, we found ourselves among the
sugarcane fields and bayous of southwest Louisiana. K recalled that the
children of friends lived nearby and by some miracle we found their home
and arrived, unannounced. We joined about ten evacuees as we crowded
into our hosts two bedroom house. The women of the familywonderful,
welcoming peoplespent the time cooking fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and red beans and rice, and the men slept and watched TV. I could not
imagine what these hard-working women thought of me, a white woman,
arriving with not much beyond a box of paper and possessing no cooking skills. I wore a sweat suit and sneakers. The other women, carefully
dressed, had on makeup, stockings, jewelry. They understood the importance of normalcy and clung to their performance as ladies. Whenever
they let me, I took over dishwashing, although I would secretly find them
rewashing the dishes after I left the kitchen. K slept. I served him food,
changed the TV channels for him, fetched him small things he asked for.
Everybody laughed that K had found himself a white girl to wait on him.
By Monday the storm was finished. As we listened to news reports, it
appeared that once again, New Orleans had escaped the worst. We decided
we had engaged in a needless and exhausting evacuation and began calculating when we should set off for home. For a brief couple of hours, concocting a strategy for avoiding massive traffic was our primary concern.
In a second, it all changed. We heard the news that the levees had
breached. The elderly parents of the people we stayed with found out
that their home was ruined. We learned that Ks home located in Treme
was under water. It remained unknown what had happened to mine, but
I soon realized that I, like so many whites in New Orleans, lived on high
ground. As orders were issued to evacuate the entire city and we realized
that none of us would be going home soon, I made quick plans to fly to
New York where many of my friends were located. I gave K my car. As I
made my escape, issues of class and race resettled into familiar patterns
of privilege.
Hey Mon, Shes a Refugee
Upon arriving in New York, I was confronted with where I would go,
whom I would ask for help, and what I would do. I checked into a motel, I
stayed at my dissertation advisors house, on friends couches. My women

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169

friends gave me toiletries, fed me, and put into place the Felice scale.
If I was able to shower, dress, brush my hair, and put on some makeup, I
passed for being okay. In some sense, this scale reflected whether I could at
least superficially and correctly perform my gender. News of my grade
would travel. I usually failed.
I felt that I had become what so many of us fearhomeless. I had
visions of myself as a bag lady, traveling from place to place, lugging her
possessions, unkempt, and a world away from being a respected professor.
I was familiar with the stories of how middle-class women became homeless through the loss of a husband, employment, or the physical destruction or forced sale of a home. I did not know what the future held for me.
I was sending cash to friends and acquaintances from New Orleans whose
desperation for clothes, motel rooms, food and gas was greater than mine.
If in my own mind I was homeless and lost, in the quite correct perception of others I had a multitude of resources and a very relative stability.
I veered between feeling utterly bereft, being thankful for the safety nets
I could access, and ruing the inherent class and race privileges that those
safety nets signaled. Increasingly, I became the stable hub and in some
ways the masculine breadwinner of a very extended family.
Still, I felt as if I were a refugee. I no longer had any place I actually
had to go during the day; capitalist time had ceased to exist for me. I wore
hand-me-down clothes, was constantly moving, and had no permanent
address to put on the multitude of bureaucratic forms which are part of
modern life. I sat on doorstops and spoke to homeless people. A friend from
graduate school temporarily loaned me her apartment in Brooklyn and one
day, the Jamaican men on the stoop next door called me over. I told them
I was from New Orleans. The response, Hey mon, shes a refugee, too. I
ate Jamaican patties with them. Welcomed into their enforced inactivity
and insomnia, I too became a stoop-sitter through endless nights. When I
was not on the stoop or in line to send money, I spent hours talking to an
acquaintance stationed in Iraq. It seemed like everyone in my world just
wanted to go home.

What Makes a FEMA House a Home?

As my New Orleans friends depended upon my social capital, I, in turn,
depended upon my connections to others with even more social, and material, resources. New York University, where I had received my doctorate,
opened its doors to me, giving me the opportunity to leave my borrowed
stoop to work on my manuscript about womens legal activism in latenineteenth century New York. I was glad to get back to my research
concerning how women settlement workers a century ago had provided
legal aid and legal education to poor immigrant communities. Yet the

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dissonance between writing about these settlement women providing

legal services, and the reality of New Orleans and the plight of the folks I
had left behind was too great. How could I, comfortably ensconced in the
academy, write about activism and a moral sense of obligation to ones
community when mine was in so much trouble?
This state of dissonance remained, until a New York law firm contacted
me and invited me to begin working on a pro-bono class action suit against
FEMA. FEMA only provided benefits such as emergency housing and cash
assistance to one person per household. Underlying this policy was the
presumption that people lived in nuclear families with one breadwinner.
It failed to take into account how people, especially the poor, actually
lived which was often with multiple family members, friends, boarders,
and women who cared for nonbiological children or sickly relatives. Nor
did this policy recognize that the majority of households had two income
earners and that the storm itself had separated households. Ironically and
perhaps for the first time, federal law unintentionally recognized that
gays, lesbians, and other unmarried partners all constituted a legitimate
household. Whether your family culture was one that relied on grandparents as much as parents, were poor and lived with four families to make
ends meet, were two lesbians living together for even a short time, or
were a married heterosexual coupleonly one person in the household
could receive benefits.13 This policy also had a discriminatory impact on
women. The first person to file for benefits in a household received them,
and often these people were men. Men had more mobility than women
who had children and relatives to care for, feed, and clothe. Furthermore,
in situations were husbands and wives were separated, and often not even
on speaking terms, husbands filed for and received the familys benefits,
leaving wives without recourse. Class, gender, and race all played a part
in FEMAs policies, yet these factors often remained invisible.
The law firm needed someone in New Orleans who could collect
firsthand stories. As I learned that my home had not been severely damaged and that water and electricity had been restored, I began planning to
relocate to New Orleans for the second time. Only this time I was going
home.
City of Men
Approximately seven weeks after we had evacuated the city, I contacted
K, who had fled to friends of his own up north, and we arranged to journey
back to New Orleans together. I can only compare the postapocalyptic
landscape that we encountered to photographs I have seen of Dresden
after the fire bombings in the Second World War. It was unbelievable, and
I was shocked that with all the news coverage I had pored over during
the weeks since Katrina, I had not understood the extent of the disaster.

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Another strange aspect of post-Katrina New Orleans was the gender composition. Everywhere one looked there were men. There were men from
the military who paraded through the streets, and drove their Humvees
down the narrow lanes of the Garden District; there were an unknowable
number of contractors who seemed to pour in from the southern states,
migrant construction workers from Mexico, and other Central and South
American countries, utility workers, Army Corps of Engineer personnel,
Homeland Securitys Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in
their futuristic black uniforms, disaster aid workers, missionaries, and
volunteers.14 There were a lot of men.
Following a disaster, as I abruptly concluded, space becomes masculine,
as the most important skills required for immediate rescue and rebuilding are understood as possessed primarily, or even exclusively, by men.
Exacerbating this, the response to Katrina was deeply militarized as tens of
thousands of soldiers clamored into the Gulf region. Furthermore, because
schools and hospitals throughout the city were closed, men returned to
New Orleans to repair homes, while women stayed in new locations
caring for children, the elderly, and the infirm. For those women who
did return, including me, gender functioned in newly complicated ways.
In some small part, it was as if all the women had become men since if
one was in the city, one helped in any way possible. Women, no less than
men, cleared massive amounts of heavy and often contaminated debris
from homes and streets. They picked through moldy items and began the
process of demolishing homes.15 Out of practicality, womens clothing
became masculine and uniformtee-shirts, jeans, work boots. There was
a sense that the world of fashion and femininity had no place within this
war zone environment and there was too much to do to worry about it. On
the other hand, with a dearth of women to perform the feminized tasks of
daily survival, men cooked and cleaned for themselves and each other.
Yet even with such a practical reconfiguration of gender, gender still
very much mattered. Over and over, friends and even policemen urged that
I get myself a gun and learn how to use it. New Orleans, they claimed,
was now a dangerous place for a single woman, especially one that was
unarmed. Silently, and by way of their behavior they also expressed their
fear that New Orleans was now a dangerous place for a white man, even
one who is heavily armed. Within this masculinized and racially tense
urban space, guns became more obvious and ubiquitous.16 Although there
was little actual crime in the city, an ethos of aggressive self-defense
emerged among many of the white men that I knew. The landscape itself
was marked with signs exclaiming, Looters will be shot. A collective
fantasy emerged that danger, crime, and disorder lurked everywhere. As
if a mythical Wild West had materialized, each man was on his own,
responsible for protecting himself, his property, and the women in his
circle. Men I socialized with walked around heavily armed; they drove

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with guns on the passenger seat and literally slept with them next to their
beds. The guns made these men hypermasculine, but their fear seemed
deeply feminine. I have never seen men so afraid.
The pervasive climate of fear seemed deeply racialized and gendered,
as my white friends imagined the danger they were guarding against to
come exclusively in the form of black men. My deeply history-inflected
mind made the connection between the present situation and how slave
owners continually feared that black rage would be turned against whites
and white owned property.17 Although in the immediate days after Katrina
looting of businesses did occur, what most struck me was that private
homes in unflooded areas within walking distance of the Superdome and
Convention Center remained untouched. Later these homes stood empty
as victims slept in cars and parks. Perhaps the question is: why during a
disaster when people are in need of water, food, shelter, and supplies is private property respected at all? There seemed to be a massive psychological
transference in which the actual crimes of the government in its failure
to provide for or even rescue hurricane victims or build an adequate levee
system was transferred onto imaginary black male bodies.18
Although I recognized the racism present in the fears of those around
me, this did not forestall my own fear from rising in my throat. At night,
the city was pitch dark and large sections were deserted. At times, friends
who were temporarily settled elsewhere asked that I sift through their devastated homes for some iteman insurance certificate, adoption papers,
passports. I hated these errands into the wilderness. I dreaded the overpowering smell of mold, the pervasive dampness, the darkness, the utter
destruction, and my own unmitigated fear, which was deeply gendered and
went beyond the fear of disease and dirt. Those fairly rational fears I could
contain. What I could not manage was my fear of being not robbed or murdered, but raped. I feared being raped by the men in the National Guard,
by construction workers, by the unknown masked assailant lunging at me
from the dark.19 In part, my fear stemmed from a sense of transgressing
what a responsible woman did to protect her own safety. First was avoiding deserted or poorly lit spaces. Since this described most of the city, my
inability to avoid the dark and the emptiness prompted self-criticismat
moments I thought that I would be responsible for my own rape. On some
of my errands, I brought male friends whose guns were carefully tucked
into their waistbands. This fed into their sense of masculine power and
their rationale for being armed.20 After all, I imagined that they thought,
The little woman needs protection.
Rescue, FEMA Style
Within days of returning to New Orleans, I visited the FEMA disaster
center, introduced myself, and opened a legal education clinic under the

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auspices of the local legal aid organization, which was suffering from a serious shortage of lawyers. The term clinic is really too grandiose a term.
FEMA had established a sort of one-stop disaster aid center, and I simply
appropriated a folding table. With literally hundreds of people coming
through the center daily, few attorneys who could handle cases, and the
closure of courts and most administrative agencies in New Orleans, the
traditional conception of legal aid needed to be rethought.
The FEMA center was an exceedingly depressing place. In the early
weeks, lines would form early each morning. By far what most people
needed was housing and cash assistance, which meant that FEMA was
their first and most important stop. People literally waited for hour after
hour, day after day, to speak to a FEMA representative and to register for
aid. Many found themselves at the center after FEMA denied their first
application for assistance and such delays caused victims endless anxiety
and anguish as they found themselves in a FEMA-created limbo, unable
to begin to piece together their lives. 21
I tried to employ the best parts of the settlement house model in my
own work. One of the elements of the turn of the twentieth century settlements that I most admired was how women settlement workers, most
without law degrees, engaged in community legal education projects.
Such projects, in part, were intended to make immigrants aware of their
legal rights. Simultaneously, the settlement houses saw law as only one
small part of the solution. Cautiously, I also understood that settlement
workers too often tried to impose their own bourgeois norms on immigrant populations.22 Along with a group of other lawyers, mostly women,
we began to collect as much relevant legal material as we could with the
idea of putting it into lay language. We would not provide legal advice but
rather legal education on the topics that people needed. With just a few
volunteers, our cell phones, and writing paper, we metaphorically opened
for business.
FEMA had infinite reasons for denying aid, including the single household rule. Most frustrating was that FEMAs actual rules and regulations
were not public. This still baffles me. How could the rules of an administrative agency, in a supposedly democratic country based upon the rule
of law, be confidential? Furthermore, the rules seemed to change on an
hourly basis. Often one FEMA representative would espouse one set of
rules and another representative would provide the opposite interpretation. My most important function became determining which FEMA representative would provide the interpretation that an applicant needed. As
soon as FEMA personnel, however, became familiar with issues, problems,
and individual applicants, FEMA would then transfer the employee. One
long-time FEMA supervisor informed me that FEMA policy was to ensure
that employees did not become too sympathetic to disaster victims and
a community, therefore making quick transfers of personnel necessary.

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She also confided that FEMAs overarching goal was not to help individuals but rather to jump-start the economy in a disaster area by sending
personnel who required lodging, food, and other necessities. I found this
heartbreaking; she found it policy.
In the three months that we staffed our table, we probably saw thousands of people. At first, all of New Orleans seemed to wind their way
through the centermen, women, black, white, poor, rich. As time went
on, the clientele became poorer and less white. Peoples problems were
remarkably similar, including conflicts with landlords, tenants, mortgage companies, insurance companies, contractors, lost documents of all
sorts, people searching for loved ones (alive and dead), lawyers, probation
officers, children, government agencies, and most of all a place to live.
There was surprisingly little anger, just increasing desperation. Although
I would like to tell tales of the women and children I saw, in actuality
there were shockingly few children. At times, the silence of the center
was deafening.
At one level, I saw many of the men who entered FEMA space as
becoming feminizedso many had lost their jobs and homes. They were
now dependent upon some form of government aid for which they had to
plead. Unlike dominant understandings of masculinity, these men were
no longer independent breadwinners but were deeply dependent with
little control over their lives. The FEMA aid process required extraordinary passivity with endless waits. When we picture the typical welfare
office, we traditionally envision lines of women with children. At FEMA,
men, black and white, now joined this line. At times, men resisted this
feminized posture, and many would begin their stories to me about the
denial of FEMA aid with the line, I served my country loyally in WWII,
Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm ... Iraq. Such tropes situated these men
as active citizens entitled to aid rather than as passive victims hoping for
help. These stories struck me as both commendable strategies as well as
exhibitions of gender privilege. In any case, such bold and proud narratives
did nothing to make FEMA benefits actually appear.
Each day, as the lines formed at the FEMA center, heavily armed
Blackwater security guards, on their way to or from Iraq or Afghanistan,
patrolled the center.23 The slightest displays of anger would attract their
attention. Although I wanted to dislike these hypermasculine guards,
mercenaries in the truest sense, they were friendly and insisted that they
walk me to my car each evening. I would protest that I did not need such
protection, but they would win the day with some corny line like How
could you deny me a couple of minutes with a beautiful professor? On
these walks, I once again became the white woman in need of protection
from the imaginary black bogeyman while these white men enacted the
roles of being officers and gentlemen. The reality was that at least part of
me was glad that they stood by my side. The night now terrified me.

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And I Never Tried to Rape You

As I began to spend increasing amounts of time at FEMA, the relationship
between K and I quickly deteriorated. K, whose house had been destroyed,
was now living with me, an outcome that neither of us imagined back on
that hot humid first night of our evacuation. K rightly seethed with anger
over what had become of his life and more specifically over his dependence
on me. I seethed as my house began to fill with what were left of his possessions and growing piles of dirty dishes and clothes. I felt that he constantly made illegitimate housekeeping and caretaking demands upon me.
What I heard was bring me this, bring me that. I began to respond with
that stereotypical harried wifes line: Get it yourself; I am not your maid.
Without romantic love as a bond, we bickered viciously. He wondered out
loud why I was willing to spend my days helping other people when I was
not willing to bring him a bowl of ice cream. I wondered whether he had
a point. At the FEMA center, I had found a new professional identity; I
gained control over my own life while I advised other people about how to
proceed with their own. My work gave me a newfound status and removed
me from the category of victim. I was reminded of Jane Addams writing
about the subjective need for settlement houses. They provided women
settlement workers with an identity, useful work, and an alternative to
marriage. Addams astutely reminded her readers that the settlement
houses did more for the settlement worker than for the clients.
One evening, the simmering tensions between K and I came to a terrible
head in which issues of race, class, and gender collided like tectonic plates.
Our usual spate of Get me/Get it yourself was sparked by a request for
a plate of canned mango slices. In a pique, I informed K that I had graduated from law school, held a PhD, was a professor, and a lawyer and that
I had not worked so hard to become any mans maid. In my exhaustion
and frustration, I threw all my class and race privilege in his face. K was
infuriated and screamed that I thought that I was better than he because
of some fancy degrees and accused me of treating him like a nigger. I
felt shocked, but he was not through yet. I have lived in your house all
this time, he continued in a deeply offended tone, and you sleep down
the hall with your door open and I have never tried to rape you. I was
stunned and thoroughly confused. Of course he had never tried to rape
me. K was a gentle, kind, and wonderful man. What was he saying? Was
he implying that he ultimately possessed the ability to engage in sexual
violence and chose not to do so and therefore I should submit to his other
demands?24 Was he saying, I was making him feel like a stereotype, one
that includes rapist among its other elements? I could not decipher these
words as they echoed through my lovely, chandeliered, only slightly
damaged antebellum home.

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No The End in Sight

As I did not know how to begin my story, I do not know how to end it. K
eventually found other accommodations and then received a FEMA trailer.
We are still friends, but we never speak about that awful night when
inexplicable accusations rang loudly in the air. Instead K tells me that I
saved his life, and I tell K that he saved mine. Perhaps in the smallest and
most imperfect way our relationship is a microcosm of Americaa black
man dependent on a white women and a white woman dependent on a
black man without the ability to communicate the depth of our confusion, anger, and fear. Yet such an analysis is drastically too simple to be
satisfying.
I had worked for a great deal of my life to evade the traditional domestic
responsibilities associated with being a woman. To a significant degree,
my self-image hinged on rejecting the role of domestic caretaker. I was
more than happy to be a legal caretaker in the public sphere. This role,
both paid and unpaid, confirmed my identity as a lawyer, an activist, and
a feminist. As an outgrowth of my embracing a professional identity, I was
even comfortable fulfilling the role of breadwinner for others. K, however,
was asking me to take on the most traditional responsibilities of a wife or
daughter. From my perspective and in the heat of the moment, our argument was about gender. Although I cannot be sure, perhaps K simply saw
me as a woman who felt too superior to him as a black man to offer him
the care and comfort that provided the security he was craving. K had lost
his livelihood, community, home, and possessions. For months following the storm, there was little work in New Orleans for a jazz musician.
Furthermore, living with me in the white section of town, the least damaged, he saw my neighborhood slowly coming back to life while the black
sections of town still remained devastated. K had lost his own identity
and perhaps feared emasculation and impoverishment. In contrast, I had
regained a professional identity and had somewhere to go and something
to do during the day that made me feel empowered, if only to a certain
degree. As I was regaining a modicum of control over my life, he had little
control over his own. Perhaps one of his only ways of enacting masculinity was to ask me to perform the traditional role of a woman. As his own
identity receded perhaps he feared that I viewed him as just another poor,
homeless black mananother potential criminal, a rapist. Perhaps he
viewed himself in this way.
Within months following Ks departure from my home, I lost the lease
on my house and found myself living in someone elses home, with my
possessions in storage. Ultimately I decided to move from New Orleans for
a multitude of reasons, one being that I believed that I could not survive
another evacuation, another period of homelessness. I now live in Chicago.
I find it strange to think in these terms, but I am part of the Great Katrina

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Migration. Yet I say even this with hesitation, for there is a tremendous
difference between those who voluntarily left New Orleans like me and
those primarily poor and disproportionately black Americans with deep
roots in New Orleans who could not return. Once again, words to describe
even my own status fail me.
For months in New Orleans following the storm, all that one ever
spoke about was how we survived the aftermath of Katrina. It became
commonplace to say that there were as many Katrina stories as people.
Yet like New Orleans most treasured places and customs, the ones off
the tourist maps, these stories were for the natives, as we felt that others
simply could not understand. We told our stories, or at least pieces of
them, over and over as if through repetition, like prayer itself, we might
actually come to believe what seemed so unbelievable and inexpressible.
Perhaps it is only these hundreds of thousands of individual fractured stories that can form a whole and my story is neither unique nor representative of other peoples stories. I have, however, tried to bring my training
as a feminist scholar to the telling of my own tale even if my telling of
it serves to elevate my, relatively privileged, experience of the storm and
simultaneously exposes me to the judgment of others.
This story has been part of my attempt to understand how race, class,
and gender functioned together in the most intimate ways in my life
and in the much larger story of the aftermath of the storm. I continue to
struggle against the multiple dispossessions that Katrina visited upon me
and so many othersa dispossession not only of ones material goods and
community but also of ones ability to exchange experiences or that
which should be the securest of possessions as Benjamins epigram to
this essay reminds me. By continually renarrating such tales, we can bring
the disaster of Katrina back to lived experience while attempting to recognize that our own lives played out and were constructed against a potent
historical backdrop that infused every moment of the present.
Felice Batlan, having left Tulane, is now an assistant professor of law at
Chicago-Kent College of Law. She holds a doctorate in U.S. History and
specializes in feminist jurisprudence and womens legal history. She has
written extensively on the gendered origins of public interest law and
the role that women played as legal activists and lay lawyers in the late
nineteenth century. Send correspondence to fbatlan@kentlaw.edu.

Notes
1. Lipsitz (1988) uses the Benjamin epigram that I used to begin his article on
the Indians.

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2. In helping me to find the words to tell this deeply personal story, I am indebted
to Tracey Jean Boisseau, Lori Andrews, Carolyn Shapiro, Kimberly Bailey, and
Gillian Nichols-Smith.
3. Helen Regis (1999) has written an extraordinary article on second lines. In it
she discusses her own second line experiences and interprets the second line
as a way in which the quotidian order of inner-city poverty and spatial apartheid is disrupted. (472). For her the second lines taking it to the streets is
one way in which residents take back the streets from crime and an oppressive
legal, social, and economic order. She also writes that whites are so traumatized by media coverage of violence in the citys low-income neighborhoods
that they would not dare to drive into them (477). For a succinct explanation
of second line music and the dances that accompany it, see White (2008).
4. On Mardi Gras and St. Josephs Day, which occurs after Easter, tribes of
African American men and an occasional woman dress as Plains Indians
and parade through the streets accompanied by music, chants, and songs.
Residents and participants form a second line of dancers. Each Indian spends
months constructing his or her highly elaborate costume of feathers and beadwork. The precise origins of the Mardi Gras Indians are unclear. Some say the
practice derives from slaves escaping to Native American tribes. Others point
to its origins in the Wild West shows that traveled through New Orleans in the
late nineteenth century. George Lipsitz (1988, 105) theorizes that Mardi Gras
Indians combine identities in complex ways that point to American racism,
slavery, and genocide while simultaneously creating a space of solidarity,
resistance and self-affirmation. On multiple occasions, the Indians clashed
with police. I worked as a legal observer in 2005 and 2006 to document possible instances of police interference. I viewed the opportunity to walk with
the Indians as an observer as a great honor. Many Indians lost their homes,
costumes, and possessions during the storm.
5. As Marline Otte (2007, 829) writes of oral histories that she conducted, In
many cases individual despair expressed itself in the idyllic terms subjects
used to portray New Orleans prior to its destruction. Few if any mentioned
the crime, staggering poverty, the failing public school system ... Instead,
respondents used terms like pleasant, peaceful, fun, organized, complete,
laid-back and stable.
6. Pre-Katrina, New Orleans was 67% African American and 28% white. The
median household income was $27,133. Over 27% of New Orleans lived
below the poverty line. (Barnshaw 2007, 99). Since the 1950s, the income of
white people had remained at least double that of African Americans (Frailing 2007, 58). Like elsewhere, New Orleans poverty is feminized. One third
of African American women in New Orleans are poor, and Louisiana ranks
last in the nation for African American median earnings for women (JonesDeWeever 2007, 22). Unlike the popular image of black unemployment in
New Orleans, 87% of the citys inner-city residents were employed ... but
remained impoverished (White 2006, 47).

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7. W.E.B. Dubois (1935) wrote that whiteness yields public and psychological
wages including access to public space, beneficial treatment from the police
and courts, entry into the best schools, and higher wages.
8. During Hurricane Ivan the previous year, I made reservations to fly to New
York. Shortly before going to the airport, I learned that the flight was cancelled. I then drove with a friend to Nashville, Tennessee. The drive took 28
hours and would have been impossible to complete alone.
9. I have chosen not to identify the people who appear in my story as I do not
want to appropriate their own stories more than I have already done.
10. Slave owners often used this phrase to refer to their own white family and
their slaves. Such tropes served to disguise the brutality of slavery by masking it in domestic paternalism. Ironically, slaves and their owners were often
biologically related as slave owners raped and impregnated their female slaves
(Brown 1996; Gordon-Reed 1997). I am using the phrase here to indicate my
temporary adoption into a black family where superficially race and power
relations were imagined as nonexistent.
11. Along the Mississippi River there are a number of former plantations open
to tourists. They also can be rented for events such as weddings. Often tours
are conducted by women in hoop skirts and antebellum plantation life is
presented as one of domestic leisure and racial harmony, erasing or severely
understating the harsh regime of slavery (Adams 1999; Thomas 2008). In close
proximity to the plantations are large industrial plants that spew forth pollution. This corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans has been dubbed
Cancer Alley. The local population, primarily poor African Americans,
suffer from high rates of disease. For example, Convent sits in the middle of
the industrial corridor. The population is over 80% African American with an
average income of $5,000 (Hines 2001). One author writes, The plantation
owner in the rural parishes was replaced by the petrochemical industry executive as the new master and overseer (Bullrad, 115). Jessica Adams (1999,
173) astutely theorizes that the renovated plantation is a deeply feminized
space that emphasizes domesticity, leisure, and the pastoral. In contrast, the
petrochemical plants that continue to exploit low-wage black labor might be
coded as masculine.
12. Throughout our evacuation, K and I were conscious of the violent history
of what it meant for a black man and a white woman to travel together. In
the Reconstruction era and well into the twentieth century, black men were
lynched upon false allegations that they had raped white women. At times,
these accusations arose from consensual affairs. In general, such lynchings
were a reaction to struggles for political and economic power by African
Americans. Through discourses that constructed black men as rapists and
by avenging the rapes of white women, white men positioned themselves
as patriarchs and righteous protectors that white women needed (Bederman
1995; Hodes 1997).

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13. McWaters v. FEMA was filed in federal district court in November 2005. In
part, the complaint alleged that FEMA failed to provide housing assistance in
violation of the Stafford Act. Originally the suit primarily complained about
the shared household rule. Later other claims were added that included
FEMA attempting to evict Katrina victims from hotel rooms that FEMA was
paying for in the absence of other housing. The suit was successful in that the
court issued a number of injunctions against FEMA. For a discussion of the
shared household rule and the evictions, see Pierre and Stephenson (2008).
14. Researchers have now begun to study the influx of labor into New Orleans
following the storm. Male Latino and Mexican workers were lured to New
Orleans by high wages and a guest worker program which provided temporary
work visas. Workers lived in empty warehouses, trailers, and in tent cities that
began to pop up across the city. Much of the work was unskilled, strenuous,
and hazardous. At times, wages were not paid and workers were not supplied
with protective equipment (Donato 2007; Redwood, 2008).
15. Pamela Tyler (2007), a historian and New Orleans resident, has recently
written an article about middle-class and elite womens organized activism
in New Orleans following Katrina. She focuses on three organizations, one
which worked to reform how the levee boards were organized, the second
which lobbied Washington politicians for funds, and the third which organized
large clean-up crews. Such womens activism certainly existed, but it is my
sense that these organizations primarily developed after November. I would
also argue that the clean-up crew was engaging in traditionally male labor of
picking up debris. At the same time, there is a long-history of women taking
responsibility for cleaning up urban environments using tropes of municipal
housekeeping (Batlan 2008).
16. In 1973, Louisiana amended its constitution to protect the right of each
citizen to keep and bear arms. Louisiana prohibits the carrying of concealed
weapons in most cases but otherwise has only very loose registration requirements for firearms. Following the hurricane, New Orleans officials announced
that only police could carry firearms, and officials confiscated approximately
1,100 guns. The National Rifle Association filed suit seeking to have these
firearms returned to their owners (Halbrook 2008). Dan Baum (2006) in a New
Yorker article writes that every white person he met in New Orleans after
Katrina was armed. Cheryl Harris and Devon Carbado (2006, 98) insightfully
posit that [W]hile armed white men were presumed to be defending their
property, black men with guns constituted gangs of violent looters who had
to be contained.
17. This general fear of black men is of course not limited to New Orleans or the
South or even whites. As Kathryn Russell-Brown (2006, 113) writes Most of
us, regardless of race and gender, fear young black men. John Valery White
(2006, 41) demonstrates that the fear of black New Orleanians criminality
following Katrina was not limited to whites as the black Mayor of Baton
Rouge publicly played to and reinforced such fears. On discussions of crime

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immediately following Katrina and how the media and officials portrayed
the primarily poor African Americans in the Superdome and the Convention
Center, see Dynes (2007) and Harris (2006).
18. Kathryn Russell Brown (2006, 114) brilliantly asks why we are able to envision
real crime as street crime instead of seeing the massive crimes that are committed by the government. In connection with Katrina she lists delay in search
and rescue, denial of access to safe public spaces on the basis of race, absence
of an evacuation plan, infliction of emotional stress on displaced victims,
and refusal of the White House to release papers for a senate investigation.
Likewise, in the handling of Katrina the federal government failed to comply
with numerous international conventions (Wing 2006).
19. There were rapes primarily of African American women that occurred following the storm (Harris 2006). Poor African American women who sought
shelter in the Houston Astrodome and Reliant Center faced sexual harassment and sexual assault. In general, after disasters the incidence of rape and
violence against women increases (Bergin 2008, 1812). Kathleen Bergin
writes, Experts in the gendered dynamics of natural disaster agree that the
destruction and disorder created by Katrina undermined social constructs of
masculinity in a way that rendered women vulnerable to rape and violent
assault ... In Katrina, sexual violence provided a mechanism for reasserting
control and reestablishing patriarchy upset by social instability (182).
20. MacKinnon (1987) discusses how rape and the fear of rape is used to enforce
patriarchy and with it womens need for protection.
21. FEMA was created in 1979 pursuant to the Stafford Act. The Act provides that
in disaster areas FEMA can provide direct assistance and financial assistance.
Financial assistance includes cash for housing and utilities. Direct assistance
includes the provision of actual housing such as trailers. The Act also provides
the President of the United States with the power to provide financial assistance
for other needs. To qualify for such additional assistance, an applicant must first
apply for a Small Business Association loan. SBA was incredibly slow processing loan applications, preventing people in immediate need from receiving cash
assistance. Under the Act, FEMA does not have discretion in determining who
will receive housing assistance. Rather it must provide such assistance to each
person or family whose predisaster residence is uninhabitable. Theoretically,
eligibility should have been automatically determined based on where a person
lived prior to the disaster (Pierre and Stephenson 2008, 4846).
22. For a full discussion of the settlement houses use of law to both benefit
immigrants and to inculcate discipline see Batlan (2006).
23. Blackwater Worldwide is a private military company that supplies security
forces to the federal government including for use in Iraq. Blackwater also provided the security personnel for at least some FEMA centers. The Blackwater
guards that I knew were white and primarily from rural areas.

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24. Feminist legal scholar Robin West (1987) theorizes that women become
giving selves as a means of self-protection as men will physically take
things, including sex, from women if it is not freely relinquished.

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