Katrina story so believable it’s painful

• By GREG LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: Aug 24, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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CITY OF REFUGE
By Tom Piazza
Harper, $24.95

The story of Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans can never be told adequately in one book, fiction or nonfiction. The best you can do is to personalize the experience by telling what happened in the voices of those who experienced it, either real or fictional. In the case of Tom Piazza, the best is very, very good indeed.

Piazza won renown last year for his book-length essay, Why New Orleans Matters, a passionate defense of the city he loves and an argument for rebuilding and restoration. But sometimes telling the facts and telling the truth are not the same. What can’t be said by someone in a nonfiction book can easily be put in the mouths of characters you invent. And Pizza’s characters have plenty to say.

City of Refuge begins just days before Aug. 29, 2005, when Katrina blew ashore in Louisiana and Mississippi. One of the main characters is widower SJ (Samuel) Williams, a Ninth Ward handyman/carpenter/entrepreneur  with a sister, Lucy, and nephew, Wesley, who are both deep into life in the city’s black culture. SJ is old-time New Orleans. His father built the house he lives in. His sister, Lucy, a former drug user, is coping with middle age and diabetes, heart trouble and anxiety about what will happen to Wesley, who doesn’t have a real father and never has had one. But SJ is solid. He’s in his 50s and not rich but successful, a Vietnam veteran who would like to forget what he saw in war but remember the good lessons the military taught him. He is happy in the city. It’s an identity, not just a zip code.

“He loved living in the Lower Ninth Ward. Its rhythm was his rhythm, despite the danger, the violence. It was their place; it belonged to the people in the Ninth Ward and they knew it and they managed as they could, and they were proud to have made lives there. No one had ever promised them, of all people, that life was going to be easy or without a daily struggle, and there, at least, they took pride that it was their own struggle.”

The Donaldsons — husband Craig, wife Alice, daughter Annie who is 7, and son Malcolm who is just turning 3 as the story opens — are transplants from Ann Arbor, Mich. Craig is editor of a magazine called “Gumbo,” and he began his career as music writer. They are well-to-do with a comfortable Uptown home. Like so many people who come to New Orleans from other places — the North, California, Texas, Florida, etc. — he fell in love with the city, its food, its rituals, its music. New Orleans becomes a sort of religion to him. But even after 11 years in the city, Alice doesn’t feel exactly the same way. The crime bothers her. When she is called to Annie’s school because the child has used a very inappropriate yet common street slang term, she is appalled. And Craig has to admit, she makes some good points.

“Friends had been robbed at knife point; others had had their houses burglarized or cars stolen or vandalized; there was fear involved in walking the streets at night even in their quiet neighborhood, the public schools were overwhelmingly lousy, the infrastructure was decaying …”

Yet, Craig loves the city. “Craig had found noting less than himself in New Orleans …” As the storm approaches and the mayor urges evacuation, Craig and Alice figure they’ll leave and be gone a little while, then come back to clean a few limbs out of the street after a nice vacation in Oxford, Miss. It’s not so simple for the Williams family.

“They had heard it all before, and most of the time it turned out to be a false alarm. The regular challenge made them defiant. Especially in the working-class neighborhoods. The poorer the neighborhood and the harder people had to fight to stand their ground over the years, the less likely they were to jump ship and head for higher ground, even if they had the means to do so.”

That is a concern for the Williamses. “Evacuating was expensive. It cost money for gas, money for hotel rooms. Those who had family had a leg up, but if you didn’t have the cousin in Baton Rouge or Brookhaven or McComb or Holly Springs, it was a hotel and it was expensive, not just the hotel but eating out every meal.”

So the Donaldsons leave. The Williamses stay.

When the storm hits, SJ’s house is way too close to the Industrial Canal to survive. He and Lucy barely make it out. In the chaos of the flooded city, the family gets separated, sent to the Morial Covention Center, then Houston and on to different states.

As the Donaldsons are staring in disbelief at television reports in Mississippi, Piazza works in some of the issues that suddenly became white hot. Like levees.