THE LOST YEAR.(New Orleans one year after Hurricane Katrina)

The downriver side of New Orleans has always evoked strong emotions. The French avoided it, settling the high ground of a Mississippi River oxbow that would become the heart of the city. The Americans, who took over in 1803, reviled it as a pestilential swamp. "A land hung in mourning," the novelist George Washington Cable later wrote. "Darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay." Free blacks and European immigrants too poor to crowd into the upriver districts felled the cypresses to build clever, elongated houses that ventilated well, and assembled a rural neighborhood that was pencilled onto city maps as the Ninth Ward. Without much in the way of schools, hospitals, or transportation, the people of the Ninth Ward depended on each other, organizing mutual-aid and benevolent societies to care for the sick and the indigent. At the turn of the century, when New Orleans's civic leaders began developing plans for a so-called Industrial Canal, connecting Lake Pontchartrain with the river, they routed it through the Ninth, cutting off the area that came to be known as the Lower Ninth Ward. Three bridges eventually joined the Lower Nine, as it is called, to the city, but the district remained isolated.

Only fourteen thousand people lived in the Lower Ninth Ward at the time of Katrina--fewer than three per cent of the city's population--but the neighborhood instantly assumed an importance out of all proportion to its size. Depending on who was talking, the two sodden square miles represented either the indolence, poverty, and crime that Katrina had given the city a chance to expunge or the irreplaceable taproot of African-American New Orleans. The Lower Ninth Ward became, in the aftermath of Katrina, a vortex of overwrought emotion and intemperate rhetoric, a stand-in for conflicting visions of the city's future.

New Orleans had a tradition of intermarriage going back to the French period, and the blacks living upriver of the canal tended to be light-skinned. The Lower Nine came to be known simultaneously as the dark-skinned side of town and as an area that was exceptionally integrated. Cane cutters from surrounding sugar plantations poured into the city after the First World War, in search of good dockside jobs, and the housing lots in the Lower Nine were cheap enough for them to buy yet big enough to keep gardens, chickens, even hogs. Schools, of course, were segregated, but Frank Minyard, who has been the Orleans Parish coroner for more than thirty years, grew up in the Lower Nine in a white family so loyal to the neighborhood that his mother forbade him to swim in the Audubon Park pool, in the city's tony Audubon Park section. "My mother used to say, 'They don't like us poor whites uptown,' " he told me. "I didn't get to swim in the pool until I was out of the Navy."

The neighborhood's racial weave began to unravel on November 14, 1960, after Brown v. Board of Education, when federal marshals escorted a six-year-old black child named Ruby Bridges through a jeering crowd and into the William Frantz Public School, on North Galvez Street. Leander Perez, the political boss of adjoining St. Bernard Parish, which was almost entirely white, urged white New Orleanians to resist. "Don't wait until the burr-heads are forced into your schools," he said. "Do something about it now!" Whites gradually fled New Orleans. By the time Hurricane Katrina struck, the city had lost about a quarter of its people, and more than sixty-five per cent of those who remained were black; in the Lower Nine, the figure was more than ninety-eight per cent. A quarter of New Orleanians were poor, double the national average; in the Lower Nine, most households were getting by on less than thirty thousand dollars a year (the national average is fifty-seven thousand), much of it from public assistance. For years, the city has been one of the most violent in America. Ruby Bridges's brother was killed in 1990 at the housing project where he lived; last July, her oldest son, Craig, was shot dead on a New Orleans street while on a brief break from his job on a cruise ship. The Lower Nine was particularly dangerous. By the eve of Katrina, it had become, in the words of a local criminologist, "the murder capital of the murder capital."

The Lower Ninth Ward does not lie particularly low. Large portions of New Orleans--including some wealthy areas near Lake Pontchartrain--sit four or more feet below sea level, while almost all the Lower Nine sits within a foot and a half of sea level, and parts of it are a couple of feet above. What doomed it during Katrina was its position near the junction of the Industrial Canal and another canal, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, or Mr. Go, which extends eastward from the city. The two waterways funnelled Katrina's surge into a wedge that burst the Industrial Canal's levee with a sound like cannon fire early on the morning of August 29th. The violence was tremendous. A huge wave scraped half a square mile of houses off their foundations and ground them to rubble. A red iron barge the size of an airplane hangar rode through the breach and landed on top of a school bus. Not a house in the Lower Nine was spared; most of those which didn't collapse or slide off their foundations flooded to their rooflines. Their residents--among the least able to evacuate, for want of cars and money--drowned in the oily brown floodwaters or hacked holes through attic ceilings and sat on scalding tar-paper roofs for days, waiting to be rescued. The most famous, Fats Domino, was carried from the roof of his house--an incongruously grand white mansion in a particularly bleak part of the Lower Nine--by Coast Guard helicopter in the middle of the night.

Televised images of desperate people wading out of the Lower Nine shocked the American people--the obesity and missing teeth, the raggedness and strange English. Commentators of all persuasions were astonished and outraged that these citizens' plight had been ignored by the government and the national media for decades. "A Third World country had suddenly appeared on the Gulf Coast," a Times article said. Shepard Smith, on Fox News, declared that the country would be "forever scarred by Third World horrors unthinkable in this nation until now."

Even as the city remained underwater, prominent politicians and businessmen began speaking of Katrina as a quick fix for generations of mistakes and neglect, a deus ex machina that would finally eliminate poverty in New Orleans. Some of the best-publicized early rhetoric seemed to confuse eliminating poverty with eliminating the poor. Twelve days after the storm, the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire column generated a furor when it reported that Richard Baker, a Republican congressman from Baton Rouge, had been overheard telling lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." (Baker claimed that he had been misquoted.) A former maker of shipboard electronics and a wealthy private investor named James Reiss told the Journal that, in rebuilding, he wanted to see the city transformed "demographically." A number of people I encountered--often barricaded in their homes and heavily armed--explained the distinction between the "good blacks" they'd welcome back and other blacks, or passed along a bit of back-fence etymology, saying that the root of the word "Katrina" is "cleansing."