Them Down There in the Treme

So I have been watching the HBO miniseries Treme and I have been fascinated by the perspective on the post-Katrina New Orleans that the show provides. Clearly, the show is only a snippet and it is fiction. Nonetheless, I found it interesting to think about the damage done and the recovery process from the viewpoint of the types of people that the characters represent.

First, I learned that Treme is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, and early in the city's history was the main neighborhood of free people of color. It is reported that the neighborhood was and is an important center of the city's African-American and Créole culture, especially the modern brass band tradition.

Viewers of the HBO program get a good look at the landscape, the interior of houses and businesses, and the exterior buildings, houses, streets, and land areas. The sense of the damage, the amount of problems encountered as people attempt rebuilding, and the simple things like water in the gas line that will not power the cooking stoves on the restaurant of one character.

I can see the livelihoods that derived from a tourism industry devastated and decimated but not completely deterred.... the musicians, the chefs, the hotel staff, and more.  The neighborhoods that look desolate, isolated, and damaged.  The houses that are no longer homes.

My heart broke as the lawyer and the sister searched for the missing brother while the mother, older, less in control of her faculties, held vigil. All three hoping, searching, slaving through a bureaucracy that encouraged all the wrong behavior and provided no incentive for integrity and valor. Yet they found a little along the way. In the end, the viewer gets a clear sense of what happens in a moment when the world as someone knows it is literally washed away. And we get to feel, only barely, what it feels like to be someone, like the college professor-husband-to-the-lawyer, who knew his government had been failing his community for years.  Not enough of the right people put the appropriate degree of attention on the problems to solve them before catastrophe took those problems away and replaced them with new, bigger ones.

Treme is a beautiful creation and I am glad to have seen the program in all its beauty and grace amid debris and desolation... with all its hope and faith in the face of loss and mourning.

Visit: HBO's Treme Website  and The Times-Picayune HBO Treme website


The one thing that stood out in my mind Sunday after Sunday as I watched was the awareness of them and their plight. "Boy, they sure have a mess to recover from." "Man, what a trauma that was that happened to them." "They sure had a great place down there." "I wonder how they are doing."

I, sitting in the comfort of my Washington DC residence, wondered about them and felt very little connection to the post-Katrina New Orleans of 2010. Before this HBO special, that community and its devastation had been off my radar for quite a while. Have I done enough? Yes, I sent charitable gifts.... in 2005 and 2006. But what about 2009 and 2010? Who needs my help now? Have I done enough? I am not situated to travel there and spend my tourist dollars just yet, but when I can, will I go? Will I remember?

And then I wondered, when the next drama hits DC, if my neighborhood is torn apart, will I wonder then, if I had done enough for "them down there."

Then I listen to the stories about the oil spill and how business and tourism in the region are experiencing even more hardship. Am I doing enough now? What else should I be doing?