From SAQ Online, the magazine for alumnae and friends of Smith College

Daughter of New Orleans
After being rescued by rowboat, author Patty Friedmann ’68 contemplates her return to the hurricane-battered city she loves
By Patty Friedmann ’67

It is my nature to find irony everywhere, and when I was trapped in New Orleans for a week after Hurricane Katrina hit, I was amused, despite the horror, thinking about the essay I had sent to the Quarterly a month before. My opening paragraph had read:
“When a tropical storm starts building toward hurricane strength in the Gulf of Mexico, I begin to imagine that people all over the place think about me, worry about me. The storm is located 294 miles southeast of New Orleans, the meteorologist will say, and quite a number of people know only one person in New Orleans, me. The city isn’t just my birthplace; it’s my identity. I squat here furiously. . . . I never evacuate during hurricanes.”

As an individual, but probably more as a writer, I don’t like to be away from New Orleans. Last year, when Hurricane Ivan was heading toward the city, I was in Houston. When the airport closed, I rented a car and drove back, my plucky little Taurus the only vehicle heading east while a traffic jam was inching west on the other side of the interstate. New Orleans always has been a mother to me. Vain, disheveled, and not very responsible, but the only mother I’ve ever known.

A critic once said that the reason Southern writers are particularly skewed is that they never leave home. He explained that staying in one place allows a writer to watch the generations go by. He was thinking of small towns, and oddly, even before the flood, New Orleans always was a small town, a water-locked trap where absolutely everyone was a gossipy old woman. What has paralyzed and mesmerized me forever are this small town’s very urban traits that are playing so poorly in the national media: the squalor and lawlessness and strange beauty. These are the reasons I’ve never been able to leave.

My departure was arduous and inevitable, by rowboat and waist-deep wade through filth and truck rides all over Louisiana and finally a pick-up by my son, who came from Houston to get me in Baton Rouge, his car loaded with seventeen one-gallon cans of gasoline. I never cried until we crossed the Texas state line and I saw that big ol’ star and knew I was leaving behind my greatest love, who perhaps would be taken off life support by the federal government. That’s when I burst into tears.

I’ve been asked whether I’m having trouble with my identity as a New Orleanian now that I’ve been taken out of place. So far, it’s just the opposite. As I write, the hurricane is still front-page news, and wherever I go in Houston, all I have to do is say, “I’m from New Orleans,” and people are kind and gentle and generous. New Orleans is suddenly a national treasure. I thought my novel Side Effects, due out in January, would have to be abandoned because it is about a city that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter to my publisher. To everyone who doesn’t live there, New Orleans is an imaginary place. To me, everywhere else feels the same. I’m like Ciana, one of the characters in the book. This is how I expect to go back to New Orleans:

Every trip Ciana ever has taken ends exactly the same way. She descends at the Carrollton exit, and where she has been is relegated to memory, to perspective stored deep. Carrollton Avenue is that way, dilapidated and out of place in America, and it makes her find it hard to believe she just has been somewhere else. . . . Ciana figures this is probably why no one ever moves away from New Orleans; natives find everywhere else impossible to believe. This stretch of Carrollton works like Versed, inducing retrograde amnesia. Tonight she has forgotten whatever has happened to her in the past three days.

I’m going back. And I’m going to forget.

Patty Friedmann ’68 is the author of a number of books, including Eleanor Rushing and Odds. Her new novel, Side Effects, is due in January.