The Kudzu Files

A Brisk Breeze And A Brief Rain

Jackson, MS Clarion-Ledger columnist Sid Salter wrote this morning what many in Mississippi are feeling these days.

"In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the venerable New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Louisiana residents feel "shortchanged" in the federal government's provision of hurricane relief and feel that Mississippi enjoys more political "clout" in Washington than does their state.

First, let's address the "clout" issue. Does Mississippi have more Capitol Hill political clout than does Louisiana?

Answer: Yes. Cochran, Lott, Barbour, Wicker, Pickering, Taylor and Thompson trump their congressional delegation big time.

Who is responsible for that "clout" deficit down on the bayou?

Answer: Louisiana voters, take a good look in the mirror and — as you folks like to tell us — "let the good times roll."

Louisiana got more

Has Louisiana been shortchanged? Let's take a look at the numbers.

As of last week, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency said Louisiana had received $539 million in community disaster loans while Mississippi had received $104 million.

FEMA said Louisiana had received $1.2 billion in public assistance funds while Mississippi had received $680 million. Louisiana had to date received $978 million in "other needs" assistance while Mississippi got $308 million.

Louisiana got $6.2 billion in Community Development Block Grant funds while Mississippi got $5.3 billion.

Bottom line: Louisiana has received the majority of the money and by far the lion's share of the nation's media attention in the storm's aftermath.

Were it not for Mississippi native Robin Roberts on ABC's Good Morning America and a few others, the national media would have had the nation believe that Louisiana was decimated and that Mississippi was hit by a brisk breeze and a brief rain shower.

Can I back that up? Yep.

Columbia School of Journalism conducted research in the aftermath of the storm that proves that Louisiana, specifically New Orleans, storm victims got more than twice the national media attention than did victims in Mississippi — where towns like Waveland and Bay St. Louis were almost obliterated.

Forgotten victims here

Mississippi storm victims toiled in virtual anonymity, digging out and getting by and suffering hardships just the same as those in Louisiana. When it got down to it after Katrina, Mississippians set about helping themselves.

At first, that meant Mississippi Department of Transportation crews clearing the roads and citizens cranking their own chain saws. It meant religious groups setting up hot food lines.

It meant Mississippi public officials — from Gov. and Mrs. Barbour on down to Waveland Mayor Tommy Longo — doing the hard work on the ground organizing and inspiring a meaningful recovery.

The power company crews, the National Guard and thousands of volunteers should be mentioned, too. But it was Mississippi's storm victims — proud, defiant, willing to work and to suffer — who are the real heroes.

New Orleans got Geraldo Rivera crying crocodile tears in prime time on Fox News. Mississippi got U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran working behind the scenes in Washington to bring unprecedented federal aid to both states.

So pardon Mississippians if we aren't moved by Louisianans' complaints of feeling "shortchanged." Mississippi politicians did the heavy lifting for the aid they're receiving. Nobody in Mississippi is taking about rebuilding "chocolate" cities or arguing with the president about who controls the National Guard.

Mississippi has set about rebuilding our state — for all citizens — and is using every tool in the toolbox to get it done."

Nobody in Mississippi believes Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular, didn't suffer horribly from Hurricane Katrina. But when some from here go to meetings concerning Katrina, and sit through the entire program agenda without hearing Mississippi mentioned at all, it gets to you. Maybe with all the attention on New Orleans flooding, people just forgot that Katrina actually made landfall in Mississippi, and that Mississippi bore the brunt of the wind and storm surge. Maybe they're aware that the casinos were shut down for a while.

Mississippi had somewhere between 65,000 and 100,000 homes totally destroyed - some neighborhoods haven't even had the debris shoved off of them yet, so they houses can't be assessed. Entire towns destroyed - Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Long Beach will take years to recover even a little. And yet something like 65% of the aid is going to Louisiana. The highways in New Orleans weren't destroyed like US 90 along the Mississippi Coast was; the bridges weren't washed away; the railroad tracks weren't washed away. Nobody here is pretending that New Orleans didn't suffer, but they feel like Mississippi has been forgotten.

Buy The Book

When the waters of Hurricane Katrina retreated back to the Gulf of Mexico last August 29th, when the wind died down, they left, as has been shown and described over and over, massive devastation. Among the things ruined in the storm were many library facilities on the Mississippi coast. The details are staggering:

• The Hancock County Library System lost nearly it's entire 117,000 volume collection, along with severe to total damage to 3 of the 4 facilities

• The Harrison County Library System lost perhaps half of it's 315,000 volumes, 3 of 5 facilities destroyed.

• The Long Beach Public Library lost all 60,000 volumes and the library building.

• The East Mississippi Regional Library lost all 97,000 volumes and it's only building. [Correction - thanks to James for pointing this out - EMRL does have facilities in other area towns, and I'm guessing that the 97,000 volumes were for the entire system, not just the one facility that was lost, so they weren't completely wiped out]

• The Jackson-George County Library System lost about 20% of it's 300,000 volumes.

While the numbers may seem relatively small when compared to, say, the New York Public Library's 49 million holdings, the effects of the loss of even small systems like these can be severe and long-lasting on the communities they serve, and replacing the holdings will be difficult when all public resources are stretched beyond breaking by more immediate needs. So, I think it's important to get the word out about an opportunity to directly help rebuild these libraries. A fund has been set up for this purpose:

Rebuild Mississippi Libraries Fund
c/o AmSouth Bank
210 E. Capitol Street
Jackson, MS 39201

Contributions are tax-deductible. If you love libraries like I do, please consider making a donation.

Dealing with the aftermath

We've all seen what's happening to New Orleans as a city. But more than that, New Orleans as a society, as a piece of civilization, is breaking down. Emergency personnel are backing away from armed people who are threatening their lives. Helicopters are being shot at. People are ignoring law enforcement and looting things that are useless to them, that will be useless to them. Regaining control there won't be a law enforcement operation, it will be a military operation.

The Mississippi Gulf Coast is ruined. The physical damage is done. Basic services will be unavaialbel for weeks or motnhs. But untold other types of damage will spin off from that. The personal damage, the thousands of homes completely destroyed, and the jobs of thousands which will be eliminated for months, if not forever. Big things, like the state's economy, and the state budget, which will both take an enormous hit at a time when they were beginning to show some signs of health after several years of weakness. The casino industry, which had led the state's recovery, has been eliminated on the coast, where it had it's biggest presence. Seemingly small things, like the school records that have been lost - something that will affect college applications and class rankings, unimportant to most but very important to those directly affected. Just as hurricanes spawn tornadoes in all directions, so the aftermath will spawn dozens of consequences in the immediate future and further down the road.

Away from the coast, damage is widespread, with power outages over a significant part of the state. At one point, nearly half the state was without power. Four days after the storm, probably a third is without power, including most of the state capital of Jackson. There is no bread, no ice - and most serious at this point, very little gas. The few stations with both gasoline and power are besieged with lines of a mile in some cases of people needing gas. Rumors are spreading that sales of gasoline to the general public will be halted, with only emergency and law enforcement vehicles, and utility company trucks being supplied. There have been cases of people refusing to allow ambulances to break in line to get gas. It's an ugly situation that could get uglier, but so far police have been present at every station with gas that I've passed. If more gas isn't available tomorrow, however, the patience of hot, tired, worried people may break.

But there are also many examples of the more typical response of Mississippians in times of tragedy. The Colliseum at the state fairgrounds in Jackson had to ask people to stop beinging supplies this afternoon - they had received so much they needed to sort it out and see what they had. People are offering shelter in their homes. Target in Jackson got a truckload of ice this afternoon, and gave it all away. It's not all bad news, but you have to work a little to keep some optimism in the face of it. Not too much. A little. Until the gas is gone, anyway.

Katrina from 200 miles away

Now What?

Edgar Ray Killen has been found guilty of manslaughter for the killings of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. Many Mississippians, many southerners, many Americans are relieved that justice was finally done. So what now? There was considerable argument that the Killen trial was a show trial, that after 41 years it was senseless to go through this against an 80-year-old man in failing health. Others argued it was a show trial because it was a symbol of a changed Mississippi. It was neither. It was a murder trial, one that should have been held long, long ago. But the failure of the State of Mississippi to do the right thing does not in any way lessen the guilt of Edgar Ray Killen. He has lived to be an old man, to enjoy the company of his family and friends, because he was never tried for denying those very things to the three men he helped kill. There should be no sympathy for him. So now what? In a narrow, local sense, the killings were done by a group. Some of those are still alive. It should now be their turn. Where evidence can be found, any one implicated should be investigated and tried. There are more never-investigated, never-prosecuted crimes dating from the civil rights era. Where those can still be investigated, they should be. If this isn't done, then indeed the Killen trial will have been just a show trial, Mississippi trotting out it's legal system to show the nation and the world how much we want to say we've changed.

It's perhaps not a coincidence that while this trial was beginning, the Senate was voting to apologize for never enacting anti-lynching legislation. 85 Senators co-sponsored the resolution making the apology. Mississippi's two senators, Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, refused to join. Cochran, who had earlier in his career co-sponsored similar resolutions apologizing for treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and of Native Americans for the way they were treated, said he felt he could not apologize "for something I did not do." Are we left, then, to assume he had some direct involvement in the internment of Japanese-Americans, or the breaking of treaties with Native Americans? I've mentioned before how much of a disappointment Thad Cochran has become to me. This, however, is shocking. And Trent Lott, who had told Ed Gordon of NPR, "“The important thing is to recognize the hurt that I caused and ask for forgiveness and find a way to turn this into a positive thing, and try to make amends for what I’ve said and for what others have said and done over the years. I’m looking forward to this to be an opportunity for redemption, but to do something about it", doesn't seem to think that apologizing for the Senate's failure to act qualifies. Both should hang their heads in shame today. They have embarrassed their home state. They have dishonored their home state. Was the apology a symbolic act? Hell yes! And that's all the more reason both Cochran and Lott should have been among the earliest co-sponors of the resolution. And their refusal to do so sickens me. We've come a long way. We still have a long way to go. And with attitudes like those of Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, we'll still be dragging lots of baggage around with us on the journey.

(Beltway Traffic Jam)

But Things Have Changed

While I was writing the previous entry, the news came:

"Killen guilty of manslaughter in slaying of civil rights trio"

It's been a long time coming, but Mississippi can hold her head a little higher today.

Mississippi Smoldering

The Edgar Ray Killen trial jury is now in it's second day of deliberations. I think I expected a longer time spent introducing evidence and building the case. I know I didn't expect hearing that the jury, at the end of the first day of deliberations, after only two hoursa of deliberating, would tell the judge they were deadlocked 6-6. I expected a conviction. I think most Mississippians have long assumed that Edgar Ray Killen was guilty of, at the least, significant involvement in the deaths of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. 41 years ago today, those three young men were brutally murdered by a group of criminals. Mississippi tried for many years to ignore that. Now, many believe that too much time has passed, that you shouldn't dig it back up. I wonder, however, if it had been three young white Mississippi girls killed by a mob on that day, would those same people be so willing to let the past slide. We in the South, who seem to so desparately cling to our "heritage", don't seem to be so interested in the parts of our history that don't involve plantations, Southern Belles, and the peculiar sense of "honor" that allowed wealthy southern men to spend their time being honorable while slaves created and maintained their wealth. But that's beside the point here, I've engaged in that other Southern habit of rambling. The one thing, as I said, that I didn't expect was another hung jury. So far, the national reaction to this trial has been mostly positive. But last night, as I listened to the news of the deadlocked jury, I had a sense of foreboding, of the image of Mississippi crashing back four decades as the nation says "see, we knew nothing had changed".

Driving through a Mississippi spring

I drove to our North Regional Office today, a roughly 3-hour excursion up I-55 to Oxford, MS. One of those bluebird days that makes you remember why you stay in Mississippi: clear, deep blue skies, warm sunshine, and a landscape that's practically vibrating with new growth. And I was reminded once again what makes Mississippi different from so many other states. Green is everywhere. An incredible array of textures, shades, tones. The most creative human artist could never select and use so many shades of green. Their imagination would run dry long before they approached the diversity that nature routinely paints upon her canvas. In Mississippi, it's mid-spring. The early bulbs - snowdrops, wild narcissus and jonquils, escapees from old homesites, have pretty much finished blooming. Crimson clover is beginning to bloom, along with roadside wildflowers in wide swaths of ywllow and blue (It's a little odd that we have few orange and red spring-flowering wildflowers). But these are just window dressing. Right now, it's the domain of green. And that's without the kudzu, which is still brown from winter.

Emerald Mound

North of Natchez, just a few miles off he Natchez Trace in the southwest corner of Mississippi, is the second largest temple mound, and one of the largest Native American ceremonial mounds, in the country. It's called Emerald Mound, and it was used by ancestors of the Natchez Indians. The mound is 35 feet high, and the broad flat top covers 8 acres, with a large secondary mound at one end and a smaller mound at the other end. The broad flat area was used for ceremonies and possibly games and feasts. The mound measures 770 feet by 435 feet at the base. I visited the site late on a winter afternoon several years ago.

To give you a bit of scale, the white line in the center of the secondary mound in the distance is the hand rail of a double staircase. The top of the secondary is maybe 15 feet higher than the main mound. Archaeologists think a temple sat on top of the secondary mound. This picture was taken near the opposite end of the flattened top of the main mound.

This picture was taken from the top of the secondary mound, looking down at the end of the primary mound. It's about 50 feet to the ground below.

This picture shows the smaller mound, taken from the base of the secondary mound. It is believed the house of a priest was built on top of this small mound.

The Treehouse Stays

If you've been reading KF for a while, you may remember posts about the treehouse in Clinton, MS. If not, you can catch up here, here, and here. Now, hopefully, sanity has prevailed once and for all. The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that the city of Clinton had failed to define an "accessory structure", which was what the city had claimed the treehouse constituted. Hopefully, this is the end of an absurd series of actions by a city government that deserves to be voted out of office at the next election. Story of the court victory is here.

Eyes on the prize

It was a very different time. And even though I drive over the same streets, and see the same buildings, it's hard to believe it was the same place. Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964 simply wasn't a good place to be black. I was only 10, but there were things I didn't understand. Not that I questioned them at that time, but it registered that something wasn't quite right. The water fountains at the zoo were labeled "White" and "Black" (maybe "Colored" - I can't remember). The bus station had separate waiting areas for whites and blacks. Those restaurants that admitted blacks had a separate room for them, and the accomodations were certainly not equal. And there were incidents - grown men squirting mustard and ketchup on a black boy simply because he sat at a lunch counter. Humiliating him. Fire hoses and police dogs. Policemen beating unarmed people to the ground with billy clubs. And then there were the three people in Philadelphia. Philadelphia wasn't far from the towns where my grandparents lived. What had happened to those three men? As a white child in Mississippi, you only saw fragments of these things, and the inclination was to somehow just make them fit into a way of living that was just the way things were.

But somehow, in the face of what I now know were incredible dangers, in the face of a society that was prepared to kill to make sure black people accepted their status as second- or third-class citizens - not citizens, really, inhabitants - somehow, there were men and women who reached deep down, overcame their fears, and stood up to challenge that society. They did this knowing that they weren't just endangering themselves. They were placing their friends, their neighbors, their children, in mortal danger. For many whites believed that the law would never challenge them for things they did to suppress the blacks who did stand up, to knock them back down in a way that would send the message to other blacks - "Don't do that again!". And for so long, they were correct. Yet in the face of this, there were blacks (and whites) who did challenge the Way Of Life. I'm not sure, today, that we can truly understand just how amazingly brave these people had to be, the deep-seated, blinding terror that they had to stifle time after time. I just know that we owe them a debt that can never be repaid.

(Beltway Traffic Jam)

The Treehouse Saga

TO read about one of the most absurd, misguided applications of city government I've ever seen, check out this website about a wonderful treehouse
in Clinton, MS. Surely Clinton has more pressing problems than this.

A Different Type Of August

Typically, by the end of August, the landscape, the grass, the trees, the shrubs, look tired. Worn out by the unrelenting heat, and the lack of rain, there's a withered feel to the world. Summer is a lingering furnace that bakes the enthusiasm out of everything. This year is different, though.

While it's been hot, it hasn't been that smothering, walking-through-a-hot-wet-sponge feeling. And we've gotten more rain than than normal this summer. So the grass is still green and full, instead of browning and thin. And with the first cool front of the season due later this week, we may miss that phase entirely. On the other hand, some of the leaves on my tulip poplars are already falling. This is 5-6 weeks earlier than normal. An early fall? Or just a kinder. gentler September?