Treme Observations: “Meet The Boys On The Battlefront”
While strolling through the city, Albert and his friend have a quick conversation about the state of the projects. They refer to the fact that the buildings didn’t take much water, and had in fact withstood hurricanes before Katrina. This ties into some of the current issues in NOLA, as discussed by Colorlines. As Tram Nguyen writes:
For 29 years, Sam Jackson lived in a three-bedroom apartment in central New Orleans. He and his wife, Shirley, raised their five children in a tight-knit community within the sprawling, 1,546-unit public housing complex known as the B.W. Cooper. Every summer, Jackson boarded up the windows during the hurricane season, and the family always managed to ride out the storms inside the sturdy walls of one of “the Bricks”—the local name for New Orleans’ public housing projects.
In 2005, the Bricks survived Hurricane Katrina, too. The Jacksons had no water or electricity, though, and after hearing about broken levees and flooding in other parts of town, they packed up their truck and drove to Baton Rouge. A month later, Sam Jackson drove back to check on things at the B.W. Cooper. He found the door to his apartment broken open and the apartment ransacked. When he returned a week after that, there were “No Trespassing” signs everywhere. A metal fence had been put up around the property, and Jackson soon realized that it was the residents themselves who were being kept out.
The Bricks made it through Katrina with little flooding and minor damage. But none of the city’s four big public housing developments—the B.W. Cooper, C.J. Peete, Lafitte and St. Bernard—survived the demolition plans of the government and private developers in the post-Katrina rebuilding. Two years ago, the New Orleans city council cast a controversial, unanimous vote to tear down and redevelop what became known as the Big Four. The demolition of all those homes turned Sam Jackson into an activist.
“We had nowhere to stay when we came back, and I said, ‘We should go and make some noise,’ even though we had only a few residents here to protest,” Jackson recalls.
With a few other returnees, he held one of the first press conferences on the demolitions; eventually, he traveled to Indonesia and Thailand as part of an international delegation to meet with tsunami victims and share rebuilding strategies. “As the process went on, I wanted to let people know we were forced out of our place and we couldn’t return. We have to be the ones keeping the noise up about it. You just can’t give up.”
Community advocates estimate that almost 20,000 people, all Black and low-income, remain displaced and separated from their communities. Worse, the 4,500 or so Big Four households have been thrown into a tight rental market, competing with thousands more low-income people also living precariously in a city where rents spiked almost overnight. This includes nearly 9,000 families transitioning out of the Disaster Housing Assistance Program, which provided subsidies for people whose homes were destroyed by hurricanes Katrina, Rita or Gustav.
Finally, the progression of Albert in this episode threw me for a loop – not as to what was happening on screen, but because of discussions held during the viewing. It really has me thinking of how important reference points are in cultural critique. In the first episode, Albert was established as a headstrong pillar of the community, a respected elder, and the keeper of a long standing tradition. Near the end of the second episode, he’s beating a local thief down with a pipe. Some of the folks I was with read this as a contradiction in character, as proof that even the best people have an inner darkness.
But watching the episode showed a lot of markers that Albert’s background was kind of rough. His first response when his tools were stolen was anger – but not at the theft, more about the fact that someone “punked” him. Later on, he asks around about his tools – and they are returned to him, with an apology, and with the person who bought the tools taking a $250 loss. Nice people garner sympathy, but since when does a nice person have their stuff returned after it was stolen, by the person who purchased them? By the time Albert confronts the thief, it is clear something is about to go down. So how did folks think this move was out of character, when the scenes in the episode do refer to this part of a person’s character? Pondering that…
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