Jackson Free Press

What a week of pure, unadulterated emotion. As we put out this issue—the first one with power and resources and staff fully restored—I am spent due to what I've seen, read and experienced in the last week.

I've bounced to roller-coast highs and lows ever since the day Katrina hit and I watched the trees bend to snapping points in my Belhaven neighborhood with Todd hundreds of miles away, my cats freaking out around my feet. I then moved into a house with anxious New Orleans evacuees because it was cooler than mine, if without power. I shared their emotions, too.

As I've manned the KatrinaBlog controls on our Web site, every bit of new information has punched a little more air out of me. Waveland flattened. Lost everything. Pets soaked in sewage. Elderly drinking contaminated water. Dead bodies on the sidewalk. Floating corpses. Rapes in the Superdome. Send help now. Starving to death. Babies in freezers. Suicides.

The horrors have been far too many for one week. We are not used to such macabre reality right here in the U.S., down the road on the Coast, even here in Jackson. How many tears I've shed as I've read the details, how many flashes of anger at every abdication of responsibility.

And not just at the mess down South—but right here in Jackson, a city that has seemed without a leader since this disaster happened. No coordination, at least that we can see. No communication. No pep talks. No nothing from City Hall.

By Friday, the abdication in my own city had me mad as a wet hen. Adam had been locked out of emergency briefings along with other media; we hadn't been allowed to ask a single question of the city. My phone was ringing off the hook about fuel, power, food, donations, evacuees, you name it—but nobody with the city would call us back. We weren't getting faxes or e-mails from the city. Nada.

On Friday, fit to be tied and feeling like I had just plowed a whole garden in the hot sun, I posted an Open Letter to the City on our Web site, demanding that the city step up and be more accountable, to de-hunker, to talk to the people, to at least make us feel better. I also left angry messages with everybody I could think of in the city who might respond. Talk to the people.

Within an hour, coincidence or not, I'd heard that there was an emergency City Council meeting in an hour at City Hall. The mayor would be there. Three of us attended from the JFP. Frankly, they still didn't take any questions, as a body, and they said very little we didn't already know. The mayor himself seemed flustered and out of the loop that, clearly, City Administrator Robert Walker and City Policy and Administration Director Peyton Prospere are trying to hold intact. As he is prone to do, the mayor offered vague platitudes—let's put children evacuees in park facilities and get retired teachers to teach them! (But he hadn't talked to education officials about it.) The feds will pay for it! (Comforting thought, this week.) We'll put evacuees to work rebuilding crumbling housing so they can live in them! (Really?) The power is on in Belhaven! (It wasn't.) And so on.

I left that meeting more frustrated than when I went, truly worried about the growing number of refugees in the city and how we're going to handle the pressures.

Then back to the blog, and e-mail, and phone calls, and news reports. By the weekend, it was so apparent to anyone not deaf, dumb and stupidly ideological that our country had simply bailed on a poor, largely black population, both on the Coast and in New Orleans. For a storm that we knew would hit, we had no evacuation plan for the carless, and we had no rescue plan once the disaster came.

Adding insult to injury, Washington officials—the lot of 'em from shoe-shopping Condi to a tactless, joking president to a Homeland Security chief with no clue what was going on in the homeland—had simply not responded to the greatest natural disaster that had ever hit this country.

I'm thinking they'd have been there had this happened on Cape Cod, or in Chevy Chase, or in Houston. But not in the Deep South, in the two poorest states, to the poorest of the poor in those states.

Needless to say—because you know already—all this reality really bites. Then, really mucking up the day, I hear that the White House is going to spin all the blame for this morass squarely back on the shoulders of Louisiana. We'll probably only be spared because our governor is part of Bush's Dream Team (although I suspect they'd sacrifice his butt, too, if it came to it). As I write this, the Rovian machine is in deep spin. It feels to me like Dixie is being slammed twice in one week.

But amid all this reality, there is still immense hope. I have found it in the people of Jackson, and the people who have moved to Jackson in the last week. Most are responding to this with deep kindness with a great outpouring of doing-what-I-can-do, the likes of which I've never witnessed. Luke and Charlotte Lundemo erecting a cyberstation at the coliseum; Ron Chane building steps at the Coliseum; David Banner playing hide-and-seek so Yamily Bass-Choate could conduct a wedding; displaced little Saints fans climbing all over Deuce McAllister; Rev. Emma Connolly requesting food and supplies to cook yummy meals; friends and readers from around the country sending it all, and more. People sharing homes, massages, food, love.

That is where the hope is found.

My favorite story of the week—and there have been many, tragic and heartwarming—came from my right-hand woman this afternoon. Casey was one of the first reporters in the Coliseum last Tuesday night and has been a regular there since. Today, she was over there checking in on some new friends, and she saw a little African-American baby crawl up to a large white man sleeping on his air mattress near her family. He had a pair of gym shorts over his head, blocking the light. The tot just started poking him, prodding his side. Casey was afraid he was going to be angry.

Instead, though, without moving the shorts, he swept his blanket open, and the little one scurried up onto his big stomach, settled down happily and went to sleep as he covered her up with his blanket.

That story will help me sleep tonight.