Once More, a Neighborhood Sees the Worst

Crawford crested the levee, dipping into his neighborhood to search for his pit bull, after waiting out the flood across the canal at a brother's home with friend Terry White.

"You smell that smell?" White said once he reached the canal bridge. "That's dead-body smell."

No one knows for sure how many people have died here; saving the living has taken precedence over collecting the dead. But everyone seems to know someone who is missing or has peered into a disturbingly quiet house. The worst are the houses with holes in the roofs. People suffered there. Axes made those holes, axes dragged to upper floors by people with nowhere else to go when the water rose, nowhere but up on the roof.

At the base of the bridge, a Virgin Mary statue sits, her head just above water, outside a low brick house. "A chick named Kim lived there," White said. "I wonder if she made it."

This is a place, and a time, when men like White, men who have lived in New Orleans all their lives, get mad. There is something cruelly familiar about the deluge. Another storm, another black neighborhood flooded.

"I don't believe that levee broke like that," said Terry White, referring to the biggest of the busted-open levees that flooded the city. "I believe they broke that levee to save where the high-class people stay."

There's no evidence to support White's suspicion. But his skepticism, nonetheless, has ancient roots. In the great Mississippi flood of 1927, officials dynamited a levee to save the city of New Orleans, flooding communities south of the city. Few -- especially the poor -- ever forgot.

White is staying on, despite increasingly forceful calls for an evacuation of the entire city, to make money. He needs it, that's for sure, having scraped together a living doing odd jobs. When New Orleans starts rebuilding, he figures, jobs will come. He and Crawford want to be first in line.

Whatever the rebuilders offer is sure to be better than what the Lower Ninth Ward has now. The corner groceries all have "no loitering" signs out front, to steer away the junkies -- heroin is the vice of choice these days. Countless telephone poles, now leaning at crazy angles, have signs that read: "Free Me/Bert's Bail Bonds."

A few blocks from Crawford's home, a weary wood-sided place with a wide porch, a boat named "Palm Beach" sits in a front yard -- just the sort of craft that could have saved lives, he can't help but think. Of course, the boat, with its powerful outboard motor, doesn't belong to the owner of that house. It floated in from someplace where people can afford powerful boats, from someplace outside the Lower Ninth Ward.