False River, page 22
City to be Abandoned. Now we were back in that abandoned place, the place that could not be lived in at all. Everyone had a story about the place where our homes could not house us: of driving into town where men in camouflage driving armoured vehicles were waiting to turn us away; of spending days dragging saturated belongings and stinking fridges out of mouldy houses; of waiting months to get gas, electricity, a phone line; of seeing street after street of emptiness, roofs smashed and cars toppled, weeds the only sign of life; of seeing migrant workers sleeping in a van on the corner or hanging around in a gas station waiting for work …
In CC’s coffee house on the corner of Magazine and Jefferson, people sat around telling stories. Like me, everyone had an evacuation narrative — how many hours it took to drive away, how long we had to spend away from home, how much we lost, how many feet of water. Sometimes I thought we should all wear badges, just to cut down on statistical competition. Mine would have read: ‘Five and a half feet, but we live in a raised house so it could have been worse.’
People who’d come back asked each other the same questions: Where did you live? Where did you go? How many feet? People stuck in trailers got extra sympathy, as did people who lived in Broadmoor, or Lakeside, or anywhere near one of the canals or levees improperly constructed and negligently maintained by the US Army Corps of Engineers. When we weren’t reading about our plight in the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune — now devoted to reports on the slow-grinding cogs of FEMA and the Road Home recovery programme, interspersed with triumphant stories about LSU’s football team, pictures of debutantes, flood zone maps, and a scene-by-scene analysis of the TV show K-Ville — we were waiting for our turn to speak.
My husband went back to work at Maple Street Book Shop, where people swarmed to buy books about Katrina. There were dozens of choices: picture books, testimonies, anthologies. Their titles were a found poem’s worth of soap opera: Down in New Orleans, Missing New Orleans, Why New Orleans Matters, Heart Like Water, After the Deluge, Dispatches from the Edge, Life in the Wake, Eye of the Storm, Eyes of the Storm, 1 Dead in Attic, No Ordinary Heroes, The Ravaging Tide, Hurricane Season, Painting Katrina, Katrina: Ruin and Recovery, Katrinaville Chronicles, The Post-Katrina Portraits, Year Zero, Spoiled.
For a while, I thought that living at the centre of things, disaster-wise, was a great thing for a writer. This is what I said in a 2006 essay in the journal Landfall:
I’ve written about New Orleans before, but only from a distance. My challenge is to write about it now from inside the city, about the place it’s become and the place it’s becoming. La Nueva Orleans is shrill with stories. You hear them in every coffee bar, in every meeting, above the sounds of all the drilling and hammering in the street. Everyone has a story about the flood, their evacuation, their home, their neighbourhood. Tempers are running high, provoked by traffic and lawlessness, the political in-fighting, rumours and suspicions, corruption and bureaucracy. A writer would be a fool to leave such a place now.
But after a while I wondered if this was true. When people outside New Orleans asked me how things were going, how the city was doing, I didn’t know how to answer. ‘It’s OK,’ was my most typical answer. How to explain it all? Where to begin? Where to stop? I tended to say very little or way too much, talking until the glazed eyes of my regret-filled interrogators warned me it was time for the story to end. They weren’t interested in my inventories and histories and questions: they wanted a quick report, a prognosis. Buy the book, I should have told them — buy one of the books. Buy all of the books — and buy them from a local bookstore: they need your money.
Sarah Doerries told me she couldn’t write at all anymore. Before the storm, she showed me a stack of old engraved cards she’d come across in the drawer of a sewing table on sale at an antiques auction. Each card read:
YOUR STORY HAS TOUCHED MY HEART. NEVER BEFORE HAVE I MET ANYONE WITH MORE TROUBLES THAN YOU. PLEASE ACCEPT THIS TOKEN OF MY SINCEREST SYMPATHY.
‘Who knew those cards would be so useful?’ she said. There were too many stories. We were sick of them. We were sick of ourselves.
One story stayed with me, though, something I heard in Marksville when we were evacuated there. A man who was out of New Orleans on business when everyone had to leave the city couldn’t find his wife and kids. She’d taken the opportunity to leave him. Ten years later I sat down to write that story. Sarah had died, suddenly, at the age of forty-three, felled by a brain aneurysm while she was visiting friends in Strasbourg. We were living in the United Kingdom now; on regular trips back to New Orleans we always stayed with Sarah. Now she was gone, and the city, for me, was gone as well. She died four years ago, in 2013. I haven’t been back. I can’t imagine being in New Orleans without her.
I wrote ‘False River’ for her, and for Marksville, and for anyone who remembers the terrible sadness of that September when we were all lost, waiting to go home.
Acknowledgements
Early or alternate versions of the following works were first published in Five Dials (‘False River’); the New Zealand Herald (‘Premises’); Stories on the Four Winds: Ngā Hau e Whā (‘Three Princesses’); New Writing Dundee (‘La Rondine’); Katherine Mansfield and Psychology (‘Isn’t It’); Gutter, Ora Nui and Black Marks on the White Page (‘Great Long Story’); Ika (‘In Antwerp’); Metro (‘Billy the Kid’); Takahe (‘Women, Still Talking’); and The Journal of Urgent Writing (‘Inheritance’). Some sections of ‘City to be Abandoned’ appeared in different form in chapter nine of On Coming Home, a long-form essay published by Bridget Williams Books in 2015.
Photography credits: Matthew Hill, pp. 286–287; Tom Moody, pp. 52–53, 104, 126, 179, 219, 260–261; Paula Morris, pp. 1, 254 (Latvian house), 288; Kevin Rabalais, pp. 8–10, 34–35.
Many thanks to the residencies that made work on this book possible: the International Writers’ and Translators’ House in Ventspils, Latvia; the Brecht House in Svendborg, Denmark; the Passa Porta International House of Literature and Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium. For additional funding support, thanks to the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia; the Hoover Presidential Library Association; and the Faculty of Arts and School of Humanities at the University of Auckland.
For reading, fact-checking, insights and excellent company, many thanks to Jennifer Levasseur, Kevin Rabalais, Rodney Rabalais, Ieva Balode, Elisabeth Bekers, Kirsten Skou, Lone Kristensen, Deborah Keyser, and Selina Tusitala Marsh. I’m indebted to the patience and support of Harriet Allan and Jenny Topham of Penguin Random House, and to the good sense of my editor, Anna Hodge. This book is dedicated to my dear siblings, Lynn-Elisabeth Hill and Stephen Morris, and would not have been possible without the love, scrutiny and wise words of Tom Moody.
Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Whatua) was born in Auckland. Her first novel, Queen of Beauty (2002), won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book of Fiction at the 2003 Montana Book Awards. She has published three other novels, Hibiscus Coast (2005), Trendy But Casual (2007) and Rangatira (2011), the winner of the Fiction Awards at the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards and the Nga Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards. Her other books include the story collection Forbidden Cities (2008), Hene and the Burning Harbour (Puffin 2013) and four young adult novels published in the United States. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (2009). Paula teaches at the University of Auckland and is the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.
“An extraordinary literary achievement and probably the best of recent New Zealand historical novels.”
— Nicholas Reid, New Zealand Books on Rangatira
“One of the best short story collections written by a New Zealander in years … These stories are fresh, engaging, and tinged with all those raw emotions that make for excellent fiction.”
— New Zealand Herald on Forbidden Cities
“Fresh, witty and delectably readable … Trendy But Casual … deserves to be the talk of the season.”
— Murray Bramwell, New Zealand Books
“Not only is Morris a seriously good writer — the tone doesn’t jar, the characters are satisfyingly complex, and there is an interesting reflection of the way we are now — she can also deliver entertainment. Like Dickens, she can tell a great story but also “catch” the world we live in, with all its complications and ambiguities.”
— Lydia Wevers, New Zealand Listener on Hibiscus Coast
“A stunning debut novel … Queen of Beauty had me mesmerised from the first words … a masterful work.”
— Penelope Bieder, New Zealand Herald
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First published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2017
Text and photography © Paula Morris, 2017
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ISBN 978-0-14-377164-7
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Paula Morris, False River
