New Orleans is America, Our Home

 As Hurricane Gustav bears down on the Gulf Coast, nobody can be sure just how much hell it will inflict. I have some things to say about the appropriate post-Gustav public policy response, and I will say them below. But I am thinking this morning mainly about the late Miss Betsy McDaniel. I am reflecting on how she and so many others I have encountered over the last three years in post-Katrina New Orleans got me, a lifelong Philadelphia boy who loves his own hometown with an irrational fervor, thinking from the heart as well as from the head about the great American home that is New Orleans, and about why it is our sacred civic responsibility as Americans to faithfully stand by it and rebuild it no matter what.

You see, after Hurricane Katrina, frail but feisty Miss Betsy rebuilt and reopened her local landmark Betsy’s Pancake House. Despite health limits, I have been to post-Katrina New Orleans nearly a dozen times, and on no trip except the early ones when the city was still a shambles and almost nothing was yet open have I skipped a meal at Betsy’s. On several recent visits there I have recognized other patrons’ faces—cops and firefighters, immigrant construction workers, and local leaders who I have come to know as friends, like Catholic Charities chief executive Jim Kelly.

I had noticed that when 72-year-old Miss Betsy knew and liked a customer she would call them “honey” or “darling” as she poured coffee with one hand while resting her other hand gently on their upper back. I had envied Jim Kelly that honor. I compensated by buying several Betsy’s Pancake House tee-shirts including, for my rotund self, a size 3X that the semi-toothless waitress with the beautiful smile who sold it to me did not so much as blink when I asked for (“Y’all don’t worry, we big too, sweetheart.”) Then, on my visit to New Orleans last May, albeit only on my refill, I got my New Orleans honorary native degree: Miss Betsy rested her hand on my upper back as she poured (“Everything good, honey?”).

In late July, I was back at Betsy’s, joined by Reverend Phoebe Roaf and Caroline Gammill. In the mid-1980’s, Reverend Phoebe, who pastors a New Orleans church, was a graduate student of mine at Princeton University, but I had not seen her since. In 2007, Caroline graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree and began working full-time in New Orleans in conjunction with the Penn undergraduate program that I serve as faculty director.

Under Caroline’s leadership, so far this year some two-hundred Penn undergraduates have done community service work in New Orleans, including fourteen student-saints from all across America who each spent ten straight weeks doing nonprofit work there this summer. All told, since September 2005, my beloved Penn undergraduates, some four-hundred strong, have given over 1,000 weeks to help the city’s slow but steady post-Katrina human, physical, and financial recovery process. Reverend Phoebe, Caroline, and I were there at Betsy’s to talk about the reverend doing the voice over for our low-budget video, “A Covenant to Serve,” about Penn undergraduates’ steadfast devotion to serving needy fellow citizens and communities in New Orleans.

But Miss Betsy was not there. In late May she died from a brain hemorrhage suffered after she was robbed and severely beaten in her home. The still at-large predator, known to be a man, got about $4,000 to $5,000 in cash (Miss Betsy was not big on banks).

When I heard about it I took both the loss and the crime personally. So did diverse New Orleans residents by the thousands. My first cab ride in the city after the tragedy was with a young man who had relocated to New Orleans from Pakistan when he was just seven-years-old. The only two things he wanted to know from me were did I think Louisiana State University (LSU) would be number one again next season and could I believe what happened to Miss Betsy. The unprompted eulogy to Miss Betsy delivered by an old, African-American cab driver ended with his personal vow to help find the “gutless son of a bitch bastard.” Another cabbie, a barrel-chested man sporting what sounded to my still-learning ear like a real Cajun accent, became tearful as we drove by her then-closed place, adding that “Shoot, dat reward ain’t nothin’ compared to her.” He was referring to the $10,000 reward for the killer’s capture put up by a citizens’ group and an anonymous local businessman.

As I reflected on post-Betsy New Orleans, it occurred to me that there was not another great American city, not even my own, where an unnatural disaster like what befell Betsy McDaniel would mean so much to so many different people. Different people: Miss Betsy happened to be Irish, but her heartfelt mourners were as diverse as the social and cultural gumbo that has for over three-hundred years made New Orleans the most unselfconsciously and organically cosmopolitan city in America.