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A SCHOOL NOT SUBMERGED
At the moment, New Orleans needs optimism;
it needs upbeat stories about the indomitable
spirit of decent human beings. Otherwise, the
front page news is dire. The city sits half-empty.
Local political hijinks and a stagnant federal bu
reaucracy are delaying crucial recovery funding.
District Attorney Eddie Jordan is either feckless
or cautious to the point of inertia; Attorney
General Charles Foti is both cruel and vindic
tive. An inconceivable murder rate (at least 110
this year) threatens to turn New Orleans into
Baghdad Lite. In the two years since Katrina,
only one hospital has returned to full operation.
And so on. Enter Michael Tisserand and his grati
fying book about the perseverance of one com
munity to survive and flourish in the storm's im
mediate aftermath. Tisserand is the former editor
of New Orleans' alternative paper Gambit Weekly,
and has gained recognition not only for his
1998 book The Kingdom of Zydeco, but also for
his "evacuee journal" chronicling his experience
after Katrina, published serially by alternative
weeklies across the country including Flagpole.
His new book, Sugarcane Academy: How a New
Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students
Created a School to Remember (Harcourt, 2007),
culls together some of those dispatches from
the New Orleans diaspora to fashion the story of
an impromptu school in Cajun country and the
tremendous efforts of parents to rescue their
children front the storm's chaotic wreckage.
The book's hero is Paul Raynaud, a first-grade
teacher from Lusher Elementary in Uptown New
Orleans, who, along with a group of displaced
parents, established a school in an old account
ing building in the little town of New Iberia.
Sugarcane Academy took its name from the crop
fields the children passed on the way to school
each morning, and this new, strange environment
began to symbolize an improvised kind of peda
gogy: active, immediate, participatory, introspec
tive. For the children, a curriculum of field trips,
seed-planting, and journal-writing was the only
way to cope with the experience of living, in all
of its joy and heartlessness, especially as that
experience continued, day-to-day, brimming
with strident loss and pain. For the parents,
the school was a gravitational engine, cohering
them when their customary social organization
had crumbled. But their sense of confusion was
always just as powerful as the kids' was. What
happens now, what happens next—still a vital
question—was always anyone's guess. The adults
had more information but no answers.
Tisserand, thankfully, also describes the
destruction outside of the national media's spot
light. Yes, the Lower Ninth Ward was decimated,
and, yes, the skin color of its uprooted residents
pointed to environmental injustice and systemic
class problems, not just in New Orleans, but in
every American metropolis. But the plight of
St. Bernard Parish, just east of the Lower Ninth
Ward, has been largely overlooked. Tisserand is
not dallying with hyperbole when he says that
"every home and business" there was flooded or
that, once the water receded, the parish looked
as if it had suffered inundation, drought, bomb
ing and conflagration. One should add a par
ticularly egregious modern
plague to that list: a tank
from the Murphy Oil plant
released 800,000 gallons
of oil into the floodwater,
masking yards and homes
with a black, deathly pall.
Nevertheless, the book's
most necessary accomplish
ment is publicizing the col
lateral effects of Hurricane
Katrina. This is the truth:
Nobody escaped the storm.
The story of Sugarcane
Academy itself is about the
total recalibration of your
life. Most North Georgians
cannot fathom what that re
ally means. Think about the
destruction of your house,
your family photographs and
heirlooms, your emotional
center: the hearth in its
most spiritually nurturing
terms. Tfink about the de
struction of your church and
school. Think about your
favorite hardware store,
seafood market, Italian
restaurant—all of them
owned by the same families
for generations—suddenly
being gone. What if home
no longer looked like home?
Tisserand outlines the result
in the death of Dr. Kent
Treadway, his wife's employ
er at Treadway Pediatrics
and this writer's former doctor. After Katrina,
Kent Treadway found himself without a practice,
without the patients he adored. And he, like
too many others, took his own life, succumbing
to the almost insolvable, overwhelming burden
of what has to be rebuilt: not just a building's
moldy walls, but your whole existence.
Michael Tisserand is starting all over with his
family in Evanston, IL. His book is praisewor
thy for its tender portrait of New Orleans, and
southern Louisiana, as a unique and intoxicat
ing place, but it lacks the vitality and urgency
of someone still in the scorching crucible. It's
understandab 1 ' that Tisserand would move away,
for his children's sake trying to avoid the kind of
cataclysmic trauma that New Orleans is wont to
produce. But that's another good person, another
dose of intelligence and love, the city has lost.
But not everyone's lost, yet. A couple weeks
ago at a bar on Magazine Street, Dr. Jimmy
Treadway, Kent Treadway's son, swore calmly
that one day he'd be back Uptown, practicing
pediatrics like his father. Hopefully, he will not
be alone.
Donn Cooper
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