New Orleans Always Tempting Fate

It was a preposterous, reckless place to build a city--on a snaky bend in the Mississippi river, between Lake Ponchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. From the very beginning New Orleans knowingly, defiantly, tempted fate. Why? Because of the river. It was always all about the river.

A French aristocrat, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded la Nouvelle Orleans in 1718 against the advice of his engineers. In its first four years of existence, it was wiped out four times by hurricanes.

Spain got New Orleans as a prize of war in 1763. Napoleon took it back for France in 1800, but in 1803, turned around and sold the entire Louisiana colony, New Orleans and all, to the brand new United States, for $15 million dollars in the Louisiana Purchase.

Destiny arrived in New Orleans with the first steamboat in 1812. The population in 1820 was 25,000. By 1840, it had quadrupled to 102,000. It was about then that both whites and blacks in this flamboyant, eccentric, boomtown began celebrating Mardi Gras in the streets. There were so many different nationalities. There was so much racial blurring. It was human gumbo.

"I like to say to people that my family has been in New Orleans longer than the American flag has flown over the city," said Marc Morial, former new orleans mayor.

His ancestors arrived as Creole speaking free blacks from Haiti. His father, Ernest "Dutch" Morial, also was mayor, the city's first black elected to the post.

"New Orleans is a city of attitude and edge," said Morial. "It's a city of sweetness, spiciness, and stubbornness. It's a city with it's own personality and the sweetness. The spiciness and the stubbornness give us our soul.

His description of the city sounds like the city's famous food. You could be fooled watching New Orleans eat and celebrate and play the music it invented, jazz, fooled into thinking it was a city where the good times always rolled.

But twice it burned down. There have been terrible yellow fever, typhus, and cholera epidemics. Not to mention floods and hurricanes like Betsy in 1965.

"My grandfather and uncles had to literally barricade a door and nail it shut with a large 2 x 4, and I have a vivid memory of the power of this storm and having been displaced from our home, which probably got about a foot or two of water in it," recalled Morial.

The Big Easy has always concealed its uneasiness, preferring to put on its party face. But consider this quotation from mystery writer Chris Wiltz. "The past is written all over the face of the future in New Orleans. And darkness seethes beneath the atmosphere of bonhomie."

That's especially true where race is concerned. After the Civil War, after Reconstruction, New Orleans became what it never was before--a segregated city, racially and economically.

Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that legalized segregation, was a New Orleans case. Homer Plessy, was arrested and prosecuted after refusing to give up his seat in a whites only train car. The small group of white power brokers who ran New Orleans ruthlessly protected their self-interest. The classic example was their calculated treachery during the flood of 1927, until now the worst natural disaster in American history.

"People were killed from Virginia to Oklahoma, all of which is part of the Mississippi River system," said John Barry, author of 'The Rising Tide," about the 1927 flood. "Nearly 700,000 people were fed by the Red Cross. The overwhelming majority (were) in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

"Largely to reassure the financial interests elsewhere in the country that New Orleans had the power to protect itself, that it would never be threatened by the Mississippi River, the powers that be made a decision that they would dynamite the levee outside the city."

They had hoped to flood the outlying areas instead. They promised to pay for any harm done, but never did, leaving an estimated 14,000 people homeless.

If the stakes were that high then, think about now, and the aftermath of Katrina, and whether New Orleans can or even should be rebuilt.

Marc Morial says New Orleans must be rebuilt.

That is more than just wishful thinking on the part of a former mayor. Some statistics back him up.

The port of south Louisiana is the largest in the United States. Fifty two million tons of cargo go out every year-- automobiles, corn, soybeans and on and on.

Seventeen million tons come in--crude oil, chemicals, coal, steel. Half the United States relies on New Orleans, as does a significant part of the rest of the world.

So will the city be rebuilt? Undoubtedly. And will it continue to tempt fate? Yes. Because it's still all about the river.