1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina

by Chris Rose

Overview

Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor -- in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland.

They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair. And stories about refrigerators.

Dead in Attic freeze-frames New Orleans, caught between an old era and a new, during its most desperate time, as it struggles out of the floodwaters and wills itself back to life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439126240
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/04/2015
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	248,028
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Chris Rose is a columnist for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, an essayist for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and a frequent commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition. In 2006, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in recognition of his Katrina columns and was awarded a share in the Times-Picayune staff's Pulitzer for Public Service. Rose lives in New Orleans with his three children.

Read an Excerpt

1 Dead in Attic

I got out.

I’m mystified by the notion that so many people didn’t even try; but that’s another story for another time.

We left Saturday, my wife, kids, and me. We went first to Picayune, Mississippi, thinking that a Category 3 storm would flood New Orleans and knock out power, but that we’d be dry and relatively comfortable in the piney woods while the city dried out.

Sunday morning, of course, Katrina was a massive red blob on our TV screens—now a Cat 5—so we packed up and left again.

We left my in-laws behind in Picayune. They wouldn’t come with us. Self-sufficient country folk; sometimes you can’t tell ’em nothing.

We don’t know what happened to them. My wife’s dad and her brother and their families: No word. Only hope.

Like so many people around the country wondering what happened to those still unaccounted for, we just don’t know. That’s the hardest part.

If you take the images you’ve seen on TV and picked up off the radio and Internet, and you try to apply what you know to the people and places you don’t know about, well, the mind starts racing, assumptions are made, and, well . . . it consumes you.

The kids ask you questions. You don’t have answers. Sometimes they look at me, and though they don’t say it, I can see they’re wondering: Daddy, where are you?

My six-year-old daughter, she’s onto this thing. What is she thinking?

We spent Sunday night in a no-tell motel in a forgotten part of downtown Vicksburg; a neighborhood teetering between a familiar antiquated charm and hopeless decay. Truth is, it called to mind my beloved New Orleans.

Most of the folks in the hotel seemed to live there permanently, and it had a hard-luck feel to it. It was the kind of place where your legs start itching in the bed and you think the worst and you don’t want your kids to touch the carpet or the tub and we huddled together and I read them to sleep.

Monday morning, my wife’s aunt told us they had a generator in Baton Rouge. As Katrina marched north and east, we bailed on our sullen little hotel and drove down along the western ridge of the storm, mostly alone on the road.

Gas was no problem. We had catfish and pulled pork in a barbecue joint in Natchez, and the folks there—everyone we have met along our three-day journey—said the same thing: Good luck, folks. We love your city. Take care of it for us.

Oh, my city. We have spent hours and hours listening to the radio. Image upon image piling up in your head.

What about school? What about everyone’s jobs? Did all our friends get out? Are there still trees on the streetcar line? What will our economy be like with no visitors? How many are dead? Do I have a roof? Have the looters found me yet? When can we go home?

As I said, it consumes you as you sit helplessly miles from home, unable to help anyone, unable to do anything.

If I could, what I’d do first is hurt the looters. I’d hurt them bad.

But you have to forget all that. You have to focus on what is at hand, what you can reach, and when you have three little kids lost at sea, they are what’s at hand and what you can reach.

I took them to a playground in Baton Rouge Tuesday afternoon. They’d been bottled up for days.

Finally unleashed, they ran, they climbed, they fell down, they fought, they cried, they made me laugh, they drove me crazy; they did the things that make them kids.

It grounds you. You take a breath. You count to ten. Maybe—under the circumstances—you go to twenty or thirty this time.

And tonight, we’ll just read them to sleep again.

We have several books with us because—and this is rich—we brought on our evacuation all the clothes and things we planned to bring on a long-weekend trip that we were going to take over Labor Day weekend.

To the beach. To Fort Morgan, right at the mouth of Mobile Bay.

Man.

Instead of that, I put on my suntan lotion and went out in the yard of the house where we’re staying in Baton Rouge and I raked a massive pile of leaves and limbs from the yard and swept the driveway.

Doing yard work and hitting the jungle gym on the Day After. Pretending life goes on. Just trying to stay busy. Just trying not to think. Just trying not to fail, really.

Gotta keep moving.

Table of Contents

Introduction     XV
Who We Are     1
Early Days
Facing the Unknown     7
The First Time Back     10
Survivors     13
Life in the Surreal City     16
Hope     19
Rita Takes Aim     22
The Empty City     25
God and Strippers     28
The More Things Change     31
Enough to Feed an Army     34
Tough Times in the Blue Tarp Town
Blue Roof Blues     41
The Smell     44
The Elephant Men     48
Mad City     51
1 Dead in Attic     56
Despair     61
The Ties That Bind
My Introduction to New Orleans     67
The Funky Butt     72
The Hurricane Kids     75
Traveling Man     78
Have Barbie, Will Travel     81
Prep Boys and Jesuits     84
Good-bye     89
Groundhog Day     92
Coming Home     95
Life in the Refrigerator City
Civil Unrest     101
Refrigerator Town     105
Lurching Toward Babylon     107
The Cat Lady     110
Caving In     113
The Magnet Man     116
The Last Ride     119
Lights in the City     123
Let the Good Times Roll     127
Our Katrina Christmas     131
Tears, Fears, and a New Year     134
Misadventures in the Chocolate City
Chocolate City     141
Tutti-Frutti     145
He Had a Dream     147
He's Picking the Pairs for Nola's Ark     150
Rider on the Storm     153
Car 54, Where Are You?     156
Not in My Pothole     160
Survive This     163
Love Among the Ruins
September Never Ends     169
The Muddy Middle Ground     172
Misery in the Melting Pot     176
The End of the World     181
A Huck Finn Kind of Life     187
Our Very Scary Summer     192
Songs in the Key of Strife     196
The End of the Line     200
We Raze, and Raise, and Keep Pushing Forward     210
Echoes of Katrina in the Country     215
The Purple Upside-Down Car
Second Line, Same Verse     221
Don't Mess with Mrs. Rose     226
Shooting the Rock     229
The City That Hair Forgot     233
A Rapturous Day in the Real World     238
Big Daddy No Fun     243
Peace Among the Ruins     247
Artful Practicality     250
"She Rescued My Heart"     253
Miss Ellen Deserved Better     257
Things Worth Fighting For
Rebirth at the Maple Leaf     267
Melancholy Reveler     270
They Don't Get Mardi Gras, and They Never Will     274
Reality Fest     278
Love Fest     281
O Brothers, Where Be Y'all?     285
Funeral for a Friend     289
Thanks, We Needed That     292
Say What's So, Joe     296
A Night to Remember     301
Eternal Dome Nation     308
Falling Down
On the Inside Looking Out     317
A City on Hold     320
A Tough Nut to Crack     323
Hell and Back     327
Letters from the Edge     340
Where We Go From Here
Children of the Storm, It's Time to Represent     347
Thank You, Whoever You Are     353
A New Dawn     358
Acknowledgments     363

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The Crescent City's bard"

— Harry Shearer, The Huffington Post

"These are impressionistic cries of pain and mordant humor...they so aptly mirrored the sense of surreal dislocation experienced by New Orleanians that they turned Rose into a voice of the tortured city."

— Ken Ringle, The Washington Post Book World

"The most engaging of the Katrina books...packed with more heart, honesty, and wit...Rose was more interested in telling the searing stories of his shattered city than assigning the blame for its demise..."

— Michael Grunwald, The New Republic

Editorial Reviews

The physical and psychic dislocation wrought by Hurricane Katrina is painstakingly recollected in this brilliant collection of columns by award-winning New Orleans Times Picayunecolumnist Rose (who has already hand-sold 60,000 self-published copies). After evacuating his family first to Mississippi and then to his native Maryland, Rose returned almost immediately to chronicle his adopted hometown's journey to "hell and back." Rose deftly sketches portraits of the living, from the cat lady who survives the storm only to die from injuries sustained during a post-hurricane mugging, to the California National Guard troops who gratefully chow down on steaks Rose managed to turn up in an unscathed French Quarter freezer. He's equally adept at evoking the spirit of the dead and missing, summed up by the title, quoting the entirety of an epitaph spray painted on one home. Although the usual suspects (FEMA and Mayor Ray Nagin, among others) receive their fair share of barbs, Rose's rancor toward the powers that be is surprisingly muted. In contrast, he chronicles his own descent into mental illness (and subsequent recovery) with unsparing detail; though his maniacal dedication to witnessing the innumerable tragedies wrought by "The Thing" took him down a dark, dangerous path ("three friends of mine have, in fact, killed themselves in the past year"), it also produced one of the finest first-person accounts yet in the growing Katrina canon. (Aug.)

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Publishers Weekly

"The Crescent City's bard"
— Harry Shearer, The Huffington Post

"These are impressionistic cries of pain and mordant humor...they so aptly mirrored the sense of surreal dislocation experienced by New Orleanians that they turned Rose into a voice of the tortured city."
— Ken Ringle, The Washington Post Book World

"The most engaging of the Katrina books...packed with more heart, honesty, and wit...Rose was more interested in telling the searing stories of his shattered city than assigning the blame for its demise..."
— Michael Grunwald, The New Republic

From the Publisher