Abe Louise Young is the Story Keeper — an Austin poet who has spent the past year seeking out survivors of Hurricane Katrina and posting their oral histories on a Web site called Alive in Truth. Young has listened to so many stories, in fact, that they’ve become a part of her. She knows what it was to fear the killing waters, even though she never got wet.
Young wishes the rest of us might know that sensation, too. She believes it’s important for the sake of New Orleans, one year after Katrina.
“The huge drama of the hurricane has dimmed. But the human drama is ongoing,” says Young, 30, who has interviewed scores of New Orleans evacuees as part of one of America’s largest oral history projects related to Katrina. “I feel the disaster is growing in concentric circles, getting bigger in people’s lives — and it’s very much in evidence by the evictions that are beginning to happen.
“I wish this were a happy story, where people got out of the cesspool of New Orleans and came to a better life with more opportunity. But the truth of their transition is this: You can’t just leave everything you’ve ever known and everyone you’ve ever known. You can’t leave an economy that was 50 years behind the rest of cities’ economy and get a shiny little apartment in a new place and be OK.”
Emotion pours out of Young as she talks about New Orleans and the hurricane. She talks fast, as if there’s not enough time to tell the whole story. There’s no need for her to state the obvious: The sheer experience of bearing witness to the plight of others — so many tales of courage, desperation and death — has changed her life.
“I feel as though I matured 10 years in the first two weeks after the hurricane,” says Young, a graduate of the Michener Center writing program at the University of Texas who came up with the idea for Alive in Truth after interacting with Katrina evacuees at the Austin Convention Center last year. “I’m so grateful for the experience, and the sense of purpose that has come with it. There’s no other way I could have understood what these people have gone through. It’s almost beyond comprehension.”
The water
Young was born and raised in New Orleans, and it was affection for her hometown that compelled her to volunteer at the Austin Convention Center. Her first job there was to hand out towels in the shower area. Very quickly, she learned that evacuees needed to be heard — and touched, and respected — as much as they needed things.
“I remember approaching one woman in a wheelchair, to ask her if she wanted a shower,” says Young. “She just looked at me with this unfocused expression and said, `The water. The water. The water. The water.’ She was stuck in trauma. So I just sat with her and started massaging her hands, asking if she’d come with me to see the doctor.”
As she met more evacuees, Young heard tales of crisis and courage. She began to wonder: What if everyone could hear these stories? So Young asked Katrina survivors, directly: “Would you want others to know what has happened to you, to know what you’ve gone through?”
With very few exceptions, the answer was a resounding “yes.”
“An entire generation has suffered this ethnic-group trauma that has basically gone unrecognized — and there’s no way to comprehend the way it will play out over the next decades in American cities,” says Young. “So if we’re going to hold this story honestly and make sense of it, on an institutional level or a personal one, I feel there needs to be a space for every single person to tell what they went through, to tell what they saw and to tell what they know.
“I mean, I think there should be some kind of non-partisan national tribunal that will travel to people’s homes, in any city or town in America, to listen to anyone who has suffered. Whether we’re talking about the trauma of living in the city under martial law … or the breaking of the levees … or sheer personal loss.”
In the spirit of listening, Alive in Truth (www.aliveintruth.org) has opened its doors to everyone — to grandmothers and ex-cons, to high school students and street dancers. Although many of the first oral histories were collected at the Austin Convention Center, Young and her friends (writers, social workers, members of Austin’s Story Circle network) continue to post new ones, some gathered outside Texas. No money changes hands.
Out on the street
Among the storytellers, tent city grandmother Rose Guy describes the sorrow of being denied access to her abandoned New Orleans projects building, even as she watched work crews dump her belongings onto the street.
“I’m not sure the rest of America comprehends how much the city of New Orleans is a part of people’s bodies,” says Young, whose family has operated a hardwood floor refinishing business in New Orleans for generations. “There are people who can tell you where the slaves lived who laid the bricks on the street they live on and where their descendants live now.
“So the city is all about story, all about talk. Talk is the No. 1 currency of New Orleans. In terms of written literacy: Yes, New Orleans is far behind. But when it comes to the literacy of human kindness, the literacy of interaction between strangers, the literacy of oral narration, New Orleans takes the prize.”
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