Trouble the Water
TROUBLE THE WATER, a film by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. A Zeitgeist Films release.
On September 16th, 2009, five days after the eighth anniversary of Nine-Eleven, my nine housemates and I clustered around our basement TV. We were watching Trouble the Water, a documentary about Kimberly Rivers Roberts (rap artist extraordinaire), her husband Scott, and their 9th Ward neighbors. All were trapped in New Orleans during Katrina, and in the days after the hurricane and after the levees had failed, when the entire neighborhood was under several feet of water. Under so much water, in fact, that some people, after moving up the floors of their shotgun houses, had to axe their way through their roofs to keep from drowning to death in dirty, sludgy, toxic water. Perhaps the scene that sticks with me most from the film, like a recurring bad dream, is a dialogue between a 911 dispatcher and a woman who we learn is holding a knife and standing on a bloated, waterlogged table in her attic. She tells the dispatcher that her house is flooding and she, trapped inside, has no place to go. He suggests she try to cut a hole in her attic ceiling and crawl onto the roof; she replies that she’s already tried this, but she can’t get through. I’m sorry, he says. We’re not sending anyone right now. Nobody is coming.
“So I’m gonna die?”
Those words echo in my head as the ten of us New Orleans Avodahniks traipse upstairs to discuss and debrief. In the film, there had been no answer to the woman’s hallowing question. In our living room on Jefferson Avenue in uptown, a wealthier area of the city that had endured much less extreme flooding (although no street, no neighborhood, went unscathed, as I have learned)—in this living room, we attempt to make sense of that dialogue, of the film.
“Does anybody else,” I ask, “see a parallel between Katrina and Nine-Eleven? Does it seem strange to any of you how drastically different our country’s response was to each of these events?” The ten of us sit in a circle of sorts, sprawled out on couches and on armchairs and on the floor. We look at one another, some of us stunned out of words, others of us trying to voice the swirling eddies of confusion that ricochet inside our heads.
There’s something here that works, even though it’s new to most of us. Perhaps we fail at eloquently expressing the sentiments that Trouble the Water has evoked in us; perhaps no number of discussions and debriefings will ever erase that dialogue from my mind. And yet it is no small comfort to be able to look around at a circle of your friends—indeed, some of your closest friends, even though you have only known them for such short time—and know that your reactions of confusion, pain, empathy, awkwardness, and even helplessness are echoes in them.
The questions we have grappled with in the past weeks are immense and probably answer-less. What does it mean to be a white person from the North living in New Orleans and working at a non-profit? What does it mean to have moved here post-Katrina? What are the values of living in a pluralistic community? How can we take what we learn from our own communal living experience and apply it to our jobs? What place does our Judaism have in all of this?
Our communal meals, singing together and clearing dishes together and even splitting up the house chores—but mostly, talking and listening to one another—are a kind of response to all these question marks dancing in our heads. I haven’t been able to peel that dialogue from Trouble The Water off of my brain. And yet, part of our intentional community is this unspoken permission to begin exploring these questions and this city’s pain and our daily frustrations and successes, and, at the end of the day, to come home and share it all.
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