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A Shared Uncertainty
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Since Gary knows carpentry (he built much of the house himself), he and wife say that a $150,000 flood insurance payment should cover rebuilding costs. They have not heard whether their application for a $75,000 rebuilding loan from the Small Business Administration will be approved. If not, they will rebuild anyway -- no matter what the neighbors do.
The Quaintances will not be lonely pioneers for long, said Jay Batt, City Council member for Lakeview.
"Even before the federal government announced that it would rebuild the levees, we printed up 3,000 signs for people who are rebuilding and coming back," he said. "We quickly ran out of signs."
Family Ties
On a recent cold, wet Saturday in Atlanta, Joseph and Kesa Williams left their two kids with a babysitter in the suburbs and drove downtown to Morehouse College to hear Nagin make a pitch for them to return home.
"The New Orleans swagger is coming back," the mayor told the Williamses, along with more than 2,000 of his displaced constituents, most of them black.
In a promise that cuts to the core of racial politics in the city, Nagin said every neighborhood would be rebuilt. While there are no precise numbers, New Orleans is now a much whiter place than it was before the storm.
When time came for questions, it seemed that the mayor's upbeat tone had infuriated the exiles. Their questions were tearful and accusatory, and many of them were driven by racial suspicion. One woman wanted to know why a black mayor has so many white staff members.
"I don't see where that meeting had any results whatsoever," Williams said after he and his wife had driven back out to their sparsely furnished apartment in the suburbs, collected their kids and eaten pizza in the dining room. "It was just a rant-and-rave kind of thing."
Joseph and Kesa Williams have the cold comfort of clarity. They say they won't go back home.
It's not that they have fallen in love with Riverdale, their new home town south of Atlanta. Kesa commutes 2 1/2 hours round trip a day to the city and says traffic is "horrible." Joseph misses his kin from the Lower Ninth Ward. They have moved to the Dallas area, and he wants to join them there.
As they see it, the deck is stacked against blacks returning to New Orleans.
"Your upper-class white neighborhoods are first in line and we are very last," said Kesa, who works in Atlanta as an accountant.
