2005: When the Levee Breaks/ A Love Poem for New Orleans

This story was selected by the Country Roads magazine editorial team as the representative piece for 2005 in the archival project "40 Stories From 40 Years"—celebrating the magazine's 40th anniversary on stands. Click here to read more stories from the project. 

I was born and raised in New Orleans, where my family has lived for at least two hundred years. 

Immigrant Catholics from France, Italy, and Germany, they settled in the French Quarter, where they were baptized and married in St. Louis Cathedral, and where they sold groceries and liquor, made roux and cooked gumbos and jambalayas and boiled crawfish and shrimp and crabs and played music and danced and sang to Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong, and drank too much and ate too much and often died of their excesses. 

Like their city, they were a people prone to flooding. There's so much drama to this place that nurtured us—not only flooding, but recurring hurricanes, heart-stopping heat and humidity, schizophrenic land that can't decide whether it's soil or water—that we've developed an appetite for the drama of excess. 

We eat too much and drink too much, and many of us are addicted to drugs or destructive sensual pleasures. There's a dark side to our vibrant passion that leads us to violence at times, the cost of the duende that fuels our spirit. As a people, we have been shaped as much by our dark and tempestuous environment as we have been by our rich and complex cultures.

Most of my ancestors are buried in the crumbling New Orleans cemeteries that now lie under water. My childhood home, now most likely flooded, is located three blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, the lake that's now drowning most of the city.

It was daily walks to that lake, often polluted in the days of my youth, that taught me something I deeply needed to learn, as a child, about survival. I would often see dead fish mouthing the polluted shore of the lake, but I also saw, in the shallow waters, crabs and catfish that fed on the rotting corpses, turning that stinky rot and decay into sweet, pure meat that fed us. It was an amazing act of transformation, one that I witnessed played out in different ways throughout the city.

I could hear how our music, for example, transformed disaster into unforgettable art, such as Memphis Minnie's "When the Levee Breaks," written about another devastating flood in 1927.

When my mother was sad, she played tunes like "Junco Partner," about a drug addict, and "St. James Infirmary," about a guy going to look at the corpse of his lover. My father, a Cajun, listened to "Les Veuves de la Coulee," a song about widows leaving their sorrow behind and going out dancing.

We are the only culture in the United States that honors and celebrates death by hosting jazz funerals, which also include celebratory drinking. And Mardi Gras is the grandest transformative ritual of all, the day in which the poor can become rich, a working-class man become a duke, and governors and presidents and bad political decisions can be mocked in our parades and floats.

Despite (or maybe because of) our grinding poverty, the violence for which we have come to be known, and our history of political corruption and scandal, we may be better than any other people at turning tragedy into exquisite, expressive art. 

We are a resilient people, shaped by the land and waters that gave birth to us. We are intimate with swollen waters, flooding and violent weather. Most of us have suffered through hurricanes or floods that damaged or destroyed our homes.

My family home, like many others, had the roof ripped off of it during Betsy, and tornados destroyed half the homes on our block. Camille turned our street into a river. We pulled together and rebuilt. We told stories and wrote poems and songs about the destruction. We have learned to anticipate it, the destruction. It is part of our cultural psyche. 

Our great art comes out of our great wounds. We know how to make music out of the darkness, which is the most valuable thing I inherited as a daughter of New Orleans. Katrina may have destroyed many of the things we have built on this swampy land, and she may have killed or wounded those we love, but she will not destroy our spirit.

We will find ways to transform this tragedy into words and music and art that will honor what is lost and keep the vibrant, unassailable spirit of New Orleans alive. 

I imagine my mother's small, drowned house, which I am not yet allowed to visit. 

I picture the water up to the roof, all the books she saved so long to buy, now swollen, pregnant with water, the family photographs on the walls, mostly of those now dead, quiet, bubbling and gurgling at the edges, trying to escape their watery grave. Floating in each room whatever my mother left when she flew to safety, a coffee pot, a frying pan, a vase, her jewelry box. The floor glitters with small treasures too heavy to float: my great-grandmother's ring, my mother's wedding rings, the urn that held my younger brother's ashes. 

Andre died unexpectedly a few weeks before Katrina hit, and I imagine his ashes dispersed into the waters that now may fill my mother's house. It is the ashes of my brother that my mother, evacuated to Florida, is most worried about. 

My brother was an accomplished fisherman who loved to fish Lake Pontchartrain, and I accompanied him on many trips over the years. One of the last things he did before he died was go fishing with his kids. We had intended to scatter his ashes in the lake when we could gather the family together. Instead, the waters have come to him, the waters have come to claim him as they've claimed the bones of those others who lie in cemeteries near this house. 

My sister was able to see my brother's home Sunday. It is destroyed. The roof has caved in, and she estimates there had been four feet of water in the house. She said it was like a war zone, helicopters everywhere, police at checkpoints, people walking around with guns.

My mother is homeless but safe. I am in Pittsburgh, watching the devastating images on the television along with everyone else, writing checks like everyone else, and surrounding myself with the spirit of my city, the most unusual, vibrant, resilient city in the world. I am grieving, for I'm certain that in my lifetime I will never again see the New Orleans that birthed and nurtured me. 

But I'm grieving in the way the city taught me to grieve. I'm listening to Memphis Minnie, to Louis Armstrong, to Sidney Bechet, Professor Longhair, George Lewis, Dr. John, Fats Waller, Pete Fountain, the Neville Brothers, Irma Thomas, Kermit Ruffins, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. 

I am listening, I am singing, I am dancing alone in my room far away from my city and my family, and I am not going to stop even when the waters recede. 

Sheryl St. Germain made her way hack to Kenner days prior to Hurricane Rita to assist her mother, whose home received a foot of water and lost most of the roof shingles during Katrina. A New Orleans native and author, Sheryl St. Germain is director of the MFA program at Chatham College in Pittsburgh. The widely published poet, essayist, and creative non-fiction writer is the winner of prestigious awards, including two NEA Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, and the William Faulkner award for the personal essay. Her poetry books include Going Home, The Mask of Medusa, Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, and The Journals of Scheherazade. Swamp Songs: The Making Of an Unruly Woman, a collection of lyric essays, was published in 2003 by University of Utah Press. River People columnist Susan Hymel interviewed St. Germain as part of the research about Lucianne and Joe Carmichael and A Studio in the Woods in New Orleans, published in this magazine in June 2005. After Katrina, Hymel contacted the Louisiana native and learned about the piece that appears here, which also appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on September 7, 2005.