In the Land of Dreamy Diaspora, Part II

"Calling Bush an oilman is like calling Pretty Boy Floyd a banker." ~ heard in the Mello Joy Coffee Shop, Lafayette

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The Second Month Out

A vintage yellow-and-white pickup sits on Jefferson Street in downtown Lafayette, Louisiana. Its seat covers are made from old coffee bean gunnysacks, and the name painted on its doors matches the one on the building where it sits, "Mello Joy Coffee"

It is lunchtime. Inside a crowd of hip downtown workers, bankers, art lovers, and the displaced souls from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita order black bean soup and New Orleans style muffalatas. A muffalata is a cheese, cold cut and olive-crush sandwich on round Italian bread that looks kind'a like a large muffin. It was invented at Central Grocery on Decatur Street in New Orleans' French Quarter. The original version is not much like Mello Joy's.

Their muffalata not withstanding, the Mello Joy has pretty good food. It also has the local papers that always gather at such places, and free Wi-Fi Internet connections. Hurricane refugees read The Times-Picayune online, and receive e-mails bundled into harvests of many thoughts and names: Have you found so-and-so? Do you know where some musician is playing? Are you going back? Did you hear Chef Austin Leslie, the inspiration for the short-lived but critically acclaimed tv-show, "Frank's Place," evacuated to Atlanta and then died?

Diana Sullivan, President of RHINO, the New Orleans artist cooperative located on never-flooded Saint Peter Street and torched Canal Place, writes from Memphis of hopes to reopen one, maybe both locations. Sara Ash, another RHINO artist, writes from Baton Rouge where she returned from her Vermont escape to volunteer with FEMA.

Everyone writes and talks about their good-and-bad times in exile, and high or low hopes for returning to The City FEMA Forgot.

A volunteer lawyer from Wisconsin, another e-mail says, quit FEMA in frustration after the second hurricane and new bureaucratic obstacles. Sara and others toil on knowing they will do some good, somewhere, sooner or later. She is of dogged Eastern stock, and was once a Peace Corps volunteer.

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The Road In and Out

A few blocks away from Mello Joy, at the Amtrak Station, a sign on the departure-and-arrival board informs us that trains north to Chicago, usually joined in New Orleans, must now be boarded in Jackson, Mississippi, nearly two hundred miles from Lafayette. That train usually originates in New Orleans and is named "The City of New Orleans." Now it no longer reaches our City of dreamy wet dreams.

"The Sunset Limited," the train west, must be joined in San Antonio, Texas, over four hundred miles away. There are no trains listed to the east, and no information is given about getting to these departure sites.

The train does not look like a likely evacuation choice should a third hurricane appear.

A scruffy young man with a guitar sits on a bench outside the depot strumming the chords of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land." He stops singing and tells us that his pockets jingle with FEMA money, but his memory jangles with the images of those horrific days when others sat for days on rooftops, cowered in hospitals without food or medicines, and drowned in nursing homes awaiting rescue.

He sings Guthrie's line, "Some will rob you with a six-gun / And some with a fountain pen."

"Government that governs not at all is government that governs best," he says, in a pretty good imitation of George W. Bush, complete with his punctuating snorting laugh.

FLASH: The City of New Orleans has returned to New Orleans as of October 9. The Crescent to New York City has also resumed service. The westbound Sunset Limited to Los Angeles via Lafayette is said to not be far behind. The eastbound train will end in New Orleans until 2006 due to extensive damage to the bridges between New Orleans and Florida.

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Friends Indeed

Like displaced persons everywhere we recognize folks from home as instant friends. I find myself calling people "baby," a common New Orleans expression, more than I ever did in New Orleans, and hugs are given and received much more easily. We ask each other how we are doing. Where did you live, and the all-important question, "How's your house?" Sometimes they don't have to say.

"We were two blocks up from the Seventeenth Street Canal," an elderly couple tells us at Lafayette's Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist, after a special memorial mass conducted on the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Acadian exodus from Nova Scotia to Louisiana, when the English forced French Catholics out of Protestant Canada. This is the subject of Longfellow's poem, "Evangeline," and the origin of the French in southwest Louisiana - a long and isolated distance from New Orleans before Interstate-10 traversed the Atchafalaya Basin. It is from this exodus we gained the word "Cajun," (a linguistic evolution from Acadian); and the unique music and cuisine beloved by locals and - since Chef Paul Prudhomme - the whole world.

This year, the Most Reverend Michael Jarrell, Bishop of Lafayette, added the New Orleans Diaspora to the Cathedral's Commemorative Mass for Refugees. Zachary Richard, a revered Cajun musician, sang "Ave Maris Stella" (Hail Star of the Sea), a cappella, as tears dropped all around us.

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Back at the Mello Joy

After mass, we searched for satellite pictures of our houses, bars, banks, and neighborhoods. We looked for our life. Our old life. And we looked for indications about our new one. We read an e-mail from FRENCH QUARTER FICTION publisher, Joshua Clark, who never evacuated. He stayed behind writing controversial dispatches for Salon.com about drinking at Molly's, dodging the militia, and wiring a cleanup-broom to the outstretched hand of the statue of Christ The Redeemer in the garden behind Saint Louis Cathedral. Some enjoyed them, but others read them as self-indulgent dancing on the lip of our grave. Prankish, perhaps, but he informed a dispersed population of "everyday life" in a most un-everyday time.

His e-mail asked New Orleans dispersed literati where-are-you-now and please post on the site K. A. R. E. S., Katrina Arts Relief and Emergency Support, where donations can be made and a percentage from FRENCH QUARTER FICTION sales is donated to such relief effort. http://www.NewOrleansLiteraryInstitute.com

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Another friend e-mailed this quote: "I think to a man, we will live with the pain of this experience." It is from Colonel Douglas Mouton, commander of the National Guard's engineers, and the man who halted their entry into the Morial Convention Center because his engineers were not trained in crowd control.

"The restoration of order at the Convention Center, "when it came," Mouton said, "was phenomenally quick. I think the frustration we all have - the country has - is, why couldn't it have been done a lot quicker?"

For a lighter take try, "Bush sells Louisiana back to le French" -- http://www.bsnews.org/articles/56.