Keep It Real

If we didn't weep, we weren't human
Friday, May 05, 2006
Jarvis DeBerry
My moment came Sunday morning, Sept. 4. When I walked into the sanctuary at Second Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, the congregation had already begun singing an Andrae Crouch composition taken verbatim from Verse 1 of the 103rd Psalm. Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.

I had trouble with the second verse of the song, the one that repeats: He has done great things. First, there was a theological hurdle: How could I sing such a thing after the destruction I'd just seen? Then there was the physical hurdle: How could I sing while sobbing?

Soon after the strongest of the winds died down Aug. 29, I stood on Interstate 10 and looked down on people who had already taken extraordinary measures to keep their heads above the rising water. Three men paddling a boat yelled that they'd just left a house on North Miro Street where 13 people, including some elderly folks and a pregnant woman, were stranded. I don't know if the men realized it, but they, too, appeared to be in danger. There were power lines above their heads, and if the water kept rising, there was the potential they could be electrocuted.

After seeing those men paddling and that woman sitting on her roof and that old man with his arms thrown around an orange water cooler hanging on for life, after asking firefighters about the billows of smoke rising in the distance and hearing them say they'd have to let it burn, after seeing people wander the interstate barefoot and despondent or emerge from attic windows like so many wingless butterflies, I heard myself saying, "OK. My house is probably gone." There may have been resignation in my voice, but if so, that was the only emotion. That was neither the time nor the place to mourn. Nor was it the time to let worry about my house distract me from the important work ahead.

I held the tears at bay for six days. But on the seventh day. . .

That Sunday morning service wasn't the last time I cried. Nor was that cry the most cathartic. Such designation belongs to the weeping I did more than a month later in the parking lot of The Mall at Cortana on Florida Boulevard in Baton Rouge. I was on the phone explaining to a therapist how the loss of some family heirlooms made me a failure as a custodian and how I'd hoped that my mother would validate my guilt by yelling at me. My mother never yells, least of all at me, so there was no chance she'd bring down on me the punishment I thought my failure warranted. And yet, it was the fact that she didn't respond angrily that intensified my guilt and prompted me to reveal my anguish to a therapist.

Mayor Ray Nagin cried, too. We learn this from historian Douglas Brinkley, author of the upcoming book "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast," excerpted in Vanity Fair magazine. That's hardly remarkable. If Nagin had not wept, one would have to question his humanity.

Had another writer chronicled Nagin's alleged moments of sorrow, frustration, anger and fear, it probably would have come off as the kind of thorough history the public has come to expect. But in a television interview last year, Brinkley heatedly accused Nagin of having blood on his hands. In his written account, Brinkley relies on some of the mayor's political enemies as sources. As a result, his focus on Nagin's private emotional moments seems intended not to flesh him out but to humiliate him.

Perhaps that will play well in Peoria. Maybe Brinkley will find readers so far removed from our situation they'll find it easy to ridicule a weeping man. But here in New Orleans, the man who hasn't wept sticks out, and the man who seeks approval for mocking the tearful would do well to search for another audience.


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Jarvis DeBerry is an editorial writer. He can be reached at (504) 826-3355 or at jdeberry@timespicayune.com.