For Katrina Evacuees, A Chance to Be Heard
Their Votes May Be Pivotal in Texas

By Krissah Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 25, 2008

HOUSTON -- In a cramped guard booth on the edge of a community of luxury townhouses, the sense of helplessness that has become so familiar to Gregory Sam since Hurricane Katrina uprooted him from his home town of New Orleans can become all-consuming.

"I'm struggling," said Sam, 29, a college graduate who took an $8-an-hour post as a security guard after more than 20 job interviews led to nothing. "I feel like I'm isolated in the country somewhere . . . in a time warp."

For the nearly quarter-million people such as Sam who were evacuated to Texas after the hurricane and its floodwaters left New Orleans devastated in 2005, powerlessness has been a constant theme, exacerbated by their reliance on goodwill and the government for help in starting over again. Angry at the Bush administration for failing them both before and after Katrina, many view the March 4 Democratic presidential primary as a chance to exert some control over their futures.

"The big thing is rebuilding," said Martin Jones, an evangelical pastor who lost his home and church on the edge of the French Quarter and has settled in Houston. His former parishioners, Jones said, "are looking for a solution, for restoration. People are looking for some semblance of life again. How are [these candidates] going to benefit the folk who lived there?"

No one knows how many evacuees have registered to vote in Texas or how many will show up at the state's odd mix of primary and caucuses next week, but in interviews across this sprawling city almost everyone indicated an enormous desire to participate -- adding an unknown and potentially pivotal element in a race that polls show is deadlocked between Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.).

Overwhelmingly African American, the evacuees are likely to bolster Obama's already strong support among blacks, who by some estimates could make up as much as 30 percent of the Democratic primary turnout in Texas, which is expected to top 1.5 million. In some urban precincts, evacuees could account for 5 to 10 percent of voters.

Nearly every evacuee interviewed, including those who say they harbor no desire to return, said rebuilding the New Orleans area and restoring some measure of the lives they knew is their overwhelming priority in this year's election. They want a president who can relate to the downtrodden and is dedicated to rebuilding more than just the city's tourist attractions. They are angry, for instance, that Donald Trump will soon construct a 70-story hotel in the city's central business district while neighborhoods in the Ninth Ward are still rodent-infested wastelands.

Transplants such as Jones are also frustrated that the plight of New Orleans and its former residents has not played a larger role in either party's presidential campaign. The Democratic primary in Louisiana this month was largely ignored by the candidates and the news media. And the candidate who paid the most attention to New Orleans, former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), is gone from the race, dropping out at a news conference last month in the same part of the Ninth Ward where he kicked off his bid a year earlier.

Many here had kind words for Clinton, but most members of the New Orleans diaspora said they will vote for Obama, with whom they share a sense of racial kinship and who they believe will not let their city's historically black neighborhoods die.

"If you have not sacrificed, suffered throughout your life, you wouldn't understand us. [Obama] has," said Godiva Anderson, 49, a real estate broker who settled in Houston after Hurricane Katrina. "I'm not taking anything away from Hillary, but she's a white woman. She hasn't had the same struggles that we've had."

Anderson is one of about 100,000 evacuees who have permanently settled in Houston. An additional 60,000 or so are in metropolitan Dallas, 60,000 are located around Austin and San Antonio, and 10,000 are sprinkled across this vast state, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

The election has been a welcome diversion for many evacuees such as Anderson, who has fought depression since arriving in an unfamiliar city where she has struggled to find clients. She has lost herself in the excitement of Obama's historic run. Last week, she signed up to be a precinct captain for him, and lately she has spent more time cold-calling Democrats on the list she got from his local headquarters than she has calling potential homebuyers.

"I remember when James Brown made that song 'I'm Black and I'm Proud,' " Anderson said. "I remember seeing young black men and boys stick out their chest -- proud -- saying, 'Somebody acknowledged me.' With Obama, it's like that again."

Across town, Al Johnson, 68, who gained fame for singing the classic Mardi Gras tune "Carnival Time," lives in the Big Bass Resort, a retirement center in the suburb of Jacinto City. For four decades he lived in a home on Tennessee Street in New Orleans, traveled the country and performed. At Big Bass, he spends most of his time in his government-subsidized one-bedroom apartment because Houston so overwhelms him. His kitchen is cluttered with cardboard boxes of muddy albums and CDs salvaged from his destroyed home. A donated keyboard sits covered in a corner because the other people here don't want to hear him play what he calls the Lower Ninth Ward Blues.

"Everywhere I go, I get lost," Johnson said. "I just can't absorb Houston. I can't do nothing with it."

But he still snaps his fingers when he sings his newest song: "Hillary Clinton, need to be our president," he crooned. "When she gets into the White House, y'all, she's going to be the president of all."

He wrote the song because he admires Clinton and her husband, Bill -- and because he hoped Clinton's campaign would use it and pay him royalties. A couple of calls he made to a campaign office, playing the tune for an answering service, went unreturned.

"She need it in a sense," Johnson said. "Barack is giving her such a hard time." But the song is about all Johnson can offer -- he is still registered to vote in New Orleans.

When Martin Jones and his wife, Lenda, who is also an evangelical pastor, arrived in Houston they were brought on staff and given a small stipend at a sister church in the Assembly of God fellowship. Lenda Jones's employer, Shell Oil, transferred her from the New Orleans office to one in Houston, put her family up in an apartment and gave her a bonus. And a local car dealer knocked several thousand dollars off the price of a used car because he wanted to help.

"We've been blessed with everything we need, day by day," Lenda Jones said.

Nonetheless, the couple longs for New Orleans, where they want to restart the growing inner-city ministry they led. But the stale air, rodents and slow recovery have made it impossible for them to go back.

Martin Jones had a kidney transplant more than a decade ago, and when he and his wife returned to New Orleans to salvage what they could from their church and home, he contracted a bacterial infection that put him in the hospital for the better part of 18 months. "He nearly died," Lenda Jones said. "I love New Orleans, but I also have the common sense God gave me. We can't go back."

Gregory Sam doesn't think he can go back, either. He attended the University of New Orleans and graduated with a degree in art history. Two weeks before the hurricane, he graduated from the city's Delgado Community College with a degree in health information systems, prepared to search for a job managing data for a hospital or an insurance company. He knows such jobs do not exist now in New Orleans, where the medical system is still being rebuilt, but Sam's even had trouble finding a position in Houston, home of one of the largest medical centers in the country.

"Everybody is telling me I have to have a certain amount of experience under my belt," he said the other day, wiped out from working the night shift. "I'm like, 'Dang man, I've got a couple of degrees.' "

Despite his unhappiness, there have been moments of wonder during his time in Houston. Soon after arriving in the city, he applied for a house through a Habitat for Humanity program sponsored by Oprah Winfrey. In the application, he wrote about living in the Westchase Apartments, Unit No. 11, on the outskirts of New Orleans. There was a crack house a few doors down, Sam said. Police cruisers patrolled the complex, but it was home. Sam told Winfrey's committee he hoped that being a homeowner would bring some stability to his life and that of his 2-year-old son.

He was awarded one of the 65 houses, had a surprise meeting with Oprah and now lives on a tree-lined street called Angel Lane. The house came with furniture and a stocked pantry. Sam has an interest-free mortgage and pays $600 a month, but without a well-paying job he's still had to borrow money from family some months. His neighbor, also from New Orleans, could not find work in Houston and recently lost a house to foreclosure.

To Sam, Obama is fighting the same battle he is: The political pundits who say Obama does not have enough experience sound like all the people who won't give Sam a shot at a job.

"He meets all the requirements under the Constitution to be president. He is of age. He's a senator. He's a citizen, and he does have experience working in politics, working in inner cities, working with working-class people and poor people," Sam said.

He said Obama's past work as a community organizer in Chicago's Altgeld Gardens housing project convinced him that the senator understands where he's coming from and knows what it takes to rebuild New Orleans. "It takes a certain type of determination, especially from someone in politics, to want to go into an inner city and want to work, especially when you have a certain status," he said. "He just seems like a typical American that can relate.

"We're in an abyss right now," Sam said. "We cannot go no further down."