Originally appearing at: Voices of New Orleans

The Katrina Papers
By Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Univ of New Orleans Publishing 2008
ISBN 0-9728143-3-7
233 pages

Of all the books written about post-Katrina New Orleans, there has yet to be anything as revealing or intimate as Jerry Ward Jr.’s The Katrina Papers. Ward, a professor of English and African American World Studies at Dillard University in the city, began keeping a diary immediately after the storm. Here are his thoughts from the trip out of New Orleans on August 28th:

You defied Hurricane Ivan but Hurricane Katrina makes you enter the I-10 contraflow traffic and flee New Orleans for Mississippi. Katrina is a 5, a force to retreat from. You hurriedly pack –- vital documents, granola bars and water, sports clothing and toiletries for a week, put on your Army dog tags for good luck [You did survive Vietnam], lock up the house and leave at 12:06 with a backward glance at John Scott’s “Spirit House” on the corner of St. Bernard and Gentilly. Is Katrina a post-modern war goddess or God’s agent come to punish New Orleans or Satan’s gumbo, poisoning for Lake Pontchartrain? You don’t clock the miles or the hours: New Orleans to I-55 North to MS 98 and Natchez (no available rooms), Vicksburg (no rooms), Monroe, LA (no room) and back to a rest stop and fretful sleep after 15 hours of driving. Monday afternoon you find shelter, a much-needed hot shower, and food at the First Baptist Church of Vicksburg. You had planned to teach Rousseau’s The Social Contract this semester? You shall live it now as a “homeless” person among other displaced strangers.

Ward then spends a year chronicling the damage to his city and its thriving literary culture, his struggle to return to his home and his job, his continued outreach to friends and family and his endless frustration by how difficult the simplest things become in the face of all-consuming layers of bureaucracy. He also writes about activities related to his profession, which is, of course, something he continues to pursue even in the face of such extremely altered personal circumstances. And he records the little things, the common things, which now seem so distant as to be unrecognizable. From the shelter in Vicksburg:

I have become weary of the small talk, the mumbling and grunting that passes for conversation. I am saddened by the loss of rich conversations with my friends in New Orleans. I am going deeper into a Grand Canyon of dissatisfaction. I begin to feel listless. I mumble and grunt.

Ward’s struggle with depression continues throughout his post-Katrina year, but what makes his journals so riveting is his constant fight against the abyss; his determination to find value and a “real life” in this new world that has been thrust upon him. He must fight the scourge of mold and flood damage in his home just as everyone else, but he is also still a professor at heart and so cannot resist his love of language and learning. Here is an example from December 22:

In telling stories about the South, Faulkner worked like Jackson Pollack. He dripped ink all over his pages to achieve the sense of plenitude. In contrast, [Ernest] Gaines does not fear a vacuum. He tells stories of the South with the economy of a gifted Chinese painter. A few words suffice.

It is Ward’s continued focus on working, his diligent determination to not stray from his love of students and learning that propels The Katrina Papers forward. His losses are great, however, and it is lists like this (written in the third person in vain hope of achieving some distance perhaps) that will hit home for fellow writers:

The room used as an office sustained losses that will cause Mr. Ward to be in agony for months. He will grieve over the loss of his two-volume Oxford English Dictionary. Many reference books, autographed books, papers pertaining to the Richard Wright Encyclopedia and the Cambridge History of African American Literature, Ward’s manuscripts for Reading Race Reading America, Hollis Watkins: An Oral Autobiography and To Shatter the Iris of Innocence (poetry) are beyond recovery.

Later, while clearing out so many water damaged and molding documents and books, Ward comes to a sorrowful conclusion:

It is strange. Emptiness fills you. It is strange. As you dump one load of the poetry chapbooks and poetry volumes from the wheelbarrow, two chapbooks fly to the sidewalk. They are works by Dudley Randall and Audre Lord. You lovingly gather them up for deposit in a safe, dry place. There is a message here. The English language needs a new word: MISSAGE. The second message is this: For several years you had considered starting the Project on the History of Black Writing database by using your collective hard-to-find or totally limited self-published poetry books. The dream deferred is now your dream destroyed. Live with the emptiness.

In many ways, those of us not on the Gulf Coast have become jaded about destruction, invulnerable to descriptions of destroyed homes, decaying refrigerators, piles of debris that used to be important and now are only so much trash waiting to be dealt with and masking our collective vision of a reclaimed, revitalized landscape (and thus reclaimed and revitalized lives). Ward’s patient revelations of what he has lost –- of the plans now derailed, the goals that much more difficult to achieve, the sheer volumes of history that dwelled only in his particular office and home -- forces readers to reconsider post-Katrina New Orleans. (The work lost on his Richard Wright Encyclopedia is particularly painful for the author.) There was a thriving intellectual world in that city that many of us have never acknowledged, are blissfully unaware of, and now it has been tossed and trucked away. Ward is a witness, however, and his pain, so vividly depicted on the days in which it is felt, cannot be ignored.

I think, though, that the highest value of The Katrina Papers lies in Ward’s careful recording of life in general in the city. He recounts additions to the local language: “The new New Orleans lexicon will include hurrication (a hurricane vacation) and traumaticalize. We may also begin to speak of people who have been FEMAed by the Federal Excuse Making Agency.” They are jokes to a certain degree, but born from real events and real frustrations; evidence of a new country growing on our shores, a city cut adrift in so many ways from the way the rest of us live. Ward is a man still stunned by the foreignness of so much of his daily life; he is a man who cannot let go of his uncertainty:

Last August, I had completed the syllabi for my courses and had great expectations for 2005-2006. This year, I am sad and loaded with limited expectations. I have not written any syllabi. This inactivity frightens me. I feel disconnected from course objectives or goals. I fill my mind with trivia that has nothing to do with my helping any student to think well. I am on a road in 1959. I am walking with Mack the Knife, Venus, Charlie Brown and Stagger Lee. We have blown out 16 candles and are going to Kansas City.

Unless you were there, the full force of Katrina and failure of the levees on New Orleans will never be fully understood; it will always be something that happened far away to someone else, to “those poor people.” But Jerry Ward has accomplished something unique and powerful with The Katrina Papers: he has found a way to bring readers along on his journey through the storm and what came next. His careful recording of fleeing the hurricane, returning, and rebuilding a life of letters in a city he loves is less a compelling narrative and more a possession of the life of another –- a prolonged exposure of one man’s heart and soul and intellect. We do not visit with Jerry Ward through The Katrina Papers; we inhabit him. The power of this connection cannot be overstated. The value of Ward’s record should only grow in the years to come.