Doobie Doo
Veteran
I was reading this story and I don't get it. You're poor, you lost everything then why not stay where you at now and live better? Why go back, just cuz you and your family are from there? I never been to NO but I've been to Houston, ATL, etc and feel its probably better cities to prosper in. WHY GO BACK?
After fleeing Hurricane Katrina, Doris Banks has returned to New Orleans. Was it a mistake?
By Lisa Belkin10 hours agoYahoo News
still faces many who fled with her in August 2005. There were 480,000 people living in New Orleans before the levees broke, and now there are about 380,000. Given that many current residents are not returnees but newcomers (recent college graduates is the fastest growing group right now) that leaves well over 100,000 still out in the diaspora. And of those, the people least likely to return are people like Doris — African-American, lower income — who lost what little they had to the floodwaters.
As the 10th anniversary of the hurricane nears, Banks, while back home in body, is still deciding whether she is here in spirit — and whether she will ultimately stay. “It feels like home, but it doesn’t,” she says. “It’s the same but different.”
Banks's story, distinctly hers but also emblematic of a slice of displaced society, shows how far New Orleans has come in the decade since Banks and her young son fled. And her choices, entwined with those of the many who have returned and the many others who have not, will shape the future of this still fragile place.
******
It started out as just another storm. Doris Banks had been through many in her 20 years, and like most natives, she assumed she was hurricane-proof. “I thought the power would go out and that it would get hot and uncomfortable but then it would be normal,” she says. “I never thought we’d have to leave home.”
Home at the time was the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, in the Lafitte housing project where she had lived most of her life. Her father was a roofer, her mother stayed home with four children, of whom Doris was the youngest by many years. By the time she was old enough for school, her sister and one brother were addicted to crack cocaine and her other brother to alcohol. So “with me, my mama got strict,” she says. “I think she felt like she made enough mistakes with the previous children and I was her only chance to get it right.”
Doris had to be home early, tell her mother where she was at all times, do her homework, stay away from boys. But when her parents separated in 2000 and she began to split her time between their two apartments in the project, “I managed to sneak things by her,” Banks says. At 16, she became pregnant with Michael, Jr., named for his Dad, “Big Mike,” who was himself only 17 at the time.
Morial Convention Center, where they became part of a desperate crowd of what would later be estimated at 30,000. Asked about conditions there, Banks — who had been open about her teen pregnancy, her arrest on drug charges, her siblings’ addictions – refuses to answer. “I can’t even talk about it,” she says of the two nights she spent there. “It was that nasty. There was no food or water, nothing for anyone. If you were with your family, all you could do was love one another, that’s all.”
She says she isn’t sure where the cars came from — just that they were abandoned when her boyfriend and some others found them, and that a police officer had helped hotwire them because the world had turned that upside down. Just before she got into one of the cars, Banks saw her mother in the crowd — airlifted from the roof of her building by helicopter, sweltering in the convention center crowd. “I said, ‘I don’t know how she is going to fit in this car, but she is going to fit in this car,’ “ Banks says, noting that her mother had never, in the 20 years her daughter had known her, ventured outside of New Orleans. “But she just refused. In her head she was thinking, ‘Soon I’m going back home.’”
“I’m on my knees on the ground begging her to come,” she says. “A neighbor is with her and says, ‘Ms. Eleanor, go with your daughter, we’ll be OK.’ But Mama wouldn’t budge.”
*****
The Houston Astrodome was a cleaner more organized version of the Convention Center — the same shell-shocked pandemonium but with cots, working bathrooms and donations of food and clothes. With no way to communicate with the rest of her family, Banks lay awake that first night, exhausted and out of her mind with worry. Was her son safe? Was her mother alive?
The next morning she decided to go out and look for a job. “I started thinking that home wasn’t there anymore, so maybe now this was home,” she says. In the Texas heat, she walked for miles looking for Taco Bells, and found two or three, but none that had openings. Hours later she trudged back to the Astrodome and collapsed on her cot, her first sleep in days.
helped women find jobs. Like the rest of the country, she had watched the televised aftermath of Katrina with horror. Unlike most of the country, she bought herself a plane ticket and headed to Houston to do something.
She spent her first day fielding questions and giving the best information she had: Harrah's had an 800 number for employees to check in; Walgreens would transfer New Orleans jobs to other locations. Taco Bell? That company had said they would guarantee jobs for New Orleans evacuees at any company-owned location. The stores Banks had visited, as it happened, were all franchises.
By the time Banks approached, Johnson had become overwhelmed by the enormity of the task at hand. Now that she was on site she realized there was nothing she could do that could really make a difference for all of the people who were filling the cavernous arena. But she could make a difference for at least one, and when Banks began to cry, Johnson chose her.
By the next morning, Johnson had used her hotel computer to print a list of company-owned Taco Bell locations in Houston and had cross-referenced their locations with a second list of available subsidized housing vacancies in town. By the end of the day, Banks had the key to an apartment near the Galleria shopping mall, a job at the Taco Bell three blocks away, and $4,000 worth of furniture, clothing, linens, kitchen utensils, a TV and a cellphone with a liberal calling plan, all thanks to Johnson.
With that cellphone, Banks could finally check on her son, who had in fact reached Alabama. It would take another month before she would also use it to find her mother.
“Tory called and said, ‘Call this number,’” Banks remembers of the Dallas area code. “When my mama answered, at first I didn’t have words.”
returned was but a vague approximation of the one she had left. The Lafitte Projects, which she visited on her first court date, stood moldy and abandoned two years after she’d fled. The only thing worth salvaging in her old apartment was the new pair of shoes that she’d bought for what should have been Michael’s first day of school, though they were far too small by the time she came back for them. Eventually the whole complex would be rehabbed and she would be offered a chance to move back in, but she declined. Even brand new, the apartments were filled with too many memories. Mostly, she realized, she would be haunted by what wasn’t there — the network of familiar faces whom she’d known since childhood.
inviting them to come home. He cited statistics: $1.63 billion invested in new roads, parks and playgrounds; $1.51 billion in new recreation facilities, $320 million in transportation, 170,000 potholes filled, rehabbed housing, improved schools.
What the numbers can’t measure, though, is the slackening of the ties that keep residents connected to their city. Michael started high school this week, and Banks is pleased with the place — particularly the marching band, which he loves. But she had to fight a dense bureaucracy to get him accepted to that school, and it is a 20-minute bus ride away.
View gallery
.
Doris Banks comes to drop off her son's, Michael Banks, marching band boots and money for his instrument locker …
Her mother died a few months ago. The rest of her family feels temporary now, where before they felt entrenched. On a recent afternoon, with storm clouds on the horizon and the air as dense and damp as it gets only in New Orleans, she and several cousins sat in the Banks’s living room, with toddlers playing around them, and talked about whether or not they would stay.
One niece dreams of moving with her four children to Atlanta; she has never visited, but has heard from relatives who spent years of exile there that it is an easy place to live. Another dreams of a farm somewhere. And Banks dreams too. Of an apartment near the Galleria and a neighborhood with less dirt, less crime and fewer memories. Of New York City, where Johnson brought her to visit once or twice over the years.
“I never thought of living anyplace else, but now I think this is not my final destination,” she says. “I’m not unhappy here, but I’m not 100 percent happy, and now I know that I can be. Katrina changed everything.”
After fleeing Hurricane Katrina, Doris Banks has returned to New Orleans. Was it a mistake?
After fleeing Hurricane Katrina, Doris Banks has returned to New Orleans. Was it a mistake?
By Lisa Belkin10 hours agoYahoo News
still faces many who fled with her in August 2005. There were 480,000 people living in New Orleans before the levees broke, and now there are about 380,000. Given that many current residents are not returnees but newcomers (recent college graduates is the fastest growing group right now) that leaves well over 100,000 still out in the diaspora. And of those, the people least likely to return are people like Doris — African-American, lower income — who lost what little they had to the floodwaters.
As the 10th anniversary of the hurricane nears, Banks, while back home in body, is still deciding whether she is here in spirit — and whether she will ultimately stay. “It feels like home, but it doesn’t,” she says. “It’s the same but different.”
Banks's story, distinctly hers but also emblematic of a slice of displaced society, shows how far New Orleans has come in the decade since Banks and her young son fled. And her choices, entwined with those of the many who have returned and the many others who have not, will shape the future of this still fragile place.
******
It started out as just another storm. Doris Banks had been through many in her 20 years, and like most natives, she assumed she was hurricane-proof. “I thought the power would go out and that it would get hot and uncomfortable but then it would be normal,” she says. “I never thought we’d have to leave home.”
Home at the time was the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, in the Lafitte housing project where she had lived most of her life. Her father was a roofer, her mother stayed home with four children, of whom Doris was the youngest by many years. By the time she was old enough for school, her sister and one brother were addicted to crack cocaine and her other brother to alcohol. So “with me, my mama got strict,” she says. “I think she felt like she made enough mistakes with the previous children and I was her only chance to get it right.”
Doris had to be home early, tell her mother where she was at all times, do her homework, stay away from boys. But when her parents separated in 2000 and she began to split her time between their two apartments in the project, “I managed to sneak things by her,” Banks says. At 16, she became pregnant with Michael, Jr., named for his Dad, “Big Mike,” who was himself only 17 at the time.
Morial Convention Center, where they became part of a desperate crowd of what would later be estimated at 30,000. Asked about conditions there, Banks — who had been open about her teen pregnancy, her arrest on drug charges, her siblings’ addictions – refuses to answer. “I can’t even talk about it,” she says of the two nights she spent there. “It was that nasty. There was no food or water, nothing for anyone. If you were with your family, all you could do was love one another, that’s all.”
She says she isn’t sure where the cars came from — just that they were abandoned when her boyfriend and some others found them, and that a police officer had helped hotwire them because the world had turned that upside down. Just before she got into one of the cars, Banks saw her mother in the crowd — airlifted from the roof of her building by helicopter, sweltering in the convention center crowd. “I said, ‘I don’t know how she is going to fit in this car, but she is going to fit in this car,’ “ Banks says, noting that her mother had never, in the 20 years her daughter had known her, ventured outside of New Orleans. “But she just refused. In her head she was thinking, ‘Soon I’m going back home.’”
“I’m on my knees on the ground begging her to come,” she says. “A neighbor is with her and says, ‘Ms. Eleanor, go with your daughter, we’ll be OK.’ But Mama wouldn’t budge.”
*****
The Houston Astrodome was a cleaner more organized version of the Convention Center — the same shell-shocked pandemonium but with cots, working bathrooms and donations of food and clothes. With no way to communicate with the rest of her family, Banks lay awake that first night, exhausted and out of her mind with worry. Was her son safe? Was her mother alive?
The next morning she decided to go out and look for a job. “I started thinking that home wasn’t there anymore, so maybe now this was home,” she says. In the Texas heat, she walked for miles looking for Taco Bells, and found two or three, but none that had openings. Hours later she trudged back to the Astrodome and collapsed on her cot, her first sleep in days.
helped women find jobs. Like the rest of the country, she had watched the televised aftermath of Katrina with horror. Unlike most of the country, she bought herself a plane ticket and headed to Houston to do something.
She spent her first day fielding questions and giving the best information she had: Harrah's had an 800 number for employees to check in; Walgreens would transfer New Orleans jobs to other locations. Taco Bell? That company had said they would guarantee jobs for New Orleans evacuees at any company-owned location. The stores Banks had visited, as it happened, were all franchises.
By the time Banks approached, Johnson had become overwhelmed by the enormity of the task at hand. Now that she was on site she realized there was nothing she could do that could really make a difference for all of the people who were filling the cavernous arena. But she could make a difference for at least one, and when Banks began to cry, Johnson chose her.
By the next morning, Johnson had used her hotel computer to print a list of company-owned Taco Bell locations in Houston and had cross-referenced their locations with a second list of available subsidized housing vacancies in town. By the end of the day, Banks had the key to an apartment near the Galleria shopping mall, a job at the Taco Bell three blocks away, and $4,000 worth of furniture, clothing, linens, kitchen utensils, a TV and a cellphone with a liberal calling plan, all thanks to Johnson.
With that cellphone, Banks could finally check on her son, who had in fact reached Alabama. It would take another month before she would also use it to find her mother.
“Tory called and said, ‘Call this number,’” Banks remembers of the Dallas area code. “When my mama answered, at first I didn’t have words.”
returned was but a vague approximation of the one she had left. The Lafitte Projects, which she visited on her first court date, stood moldy and abandoned two years after she’d fled. The only thing worth salvaging in her old apartment was the new pair of shoes that she’d bought for what should have been Michael’s first day of school, though they were far too small by the time she came back for them. Eventually the whole complex would be rehabbed and she would be offered a chance to move back in, but she declined. Even brand new, the apartments were filled with too many memories. Mostly, she realized, she would be haunted by what wasn’t there — the network of familiar faces whom she’d known since childhood.
inviting them to come home. He cited statistics: $1.63 billion invested in new roads, parks and playgrounds; $1.51 billion in new recreation facilities, $320 million in transportation, 170,000 potholes filled, rehabbed housing, improved schools.
What the numbers can’t measure, though, is the slackening of the ties that keep residents connected to their city. Michael started high school this week, and Banks is pleased with the place — particularly the marching band, which he loves. But she had to fight a dense bureaucracy to get him accepted to that school, and it is a 20-minute bus ride away.
View gallery
.
Doris Banks comes to drop off her son's, Michael Banks, marching band boots and money for his instrument locker …
Her mother died a few months ago. The rest of her family feels temporary now, where before they felt entrenched. On a recent afternoon, with storm clouds on the horizon and the air as dense and damp as it gets only in New Orleans, she and several cousins sat in the Banks’s living room, with toddlers playing around them, and talked about whether or not they would stay.
One niece dreams of moving with her four children to Atlanta; she has never visited, but has heard from relatives who spent years of exile there that it is an easy place to live. Another dreams of a farm somewhere. And Banks dreams too. Of an apartment near the Galleria and a neighborhood with less dirt, less crime and fewer memories. Of New York City, where Johnson brought her to visit once or twice over the years.
“I never thought of living anyplace else, but now I think this is not my final destination,” she says. “I’m not unhappy here, but I’m not 100 percent happy, and now I know that I can be. Katrina changed everything.”
After fleeing Hurricane Katrina, Doris Banks has returned to New Orleans. Was it a mistake?