Abstract
Surviving Katrina: The Experiences of Low-Income African American Women reveals the unimaginable reality of surviving and moving forward post disaster for a large group of the residents who experienced the 2005 Katrina hurricane and levee breach in the city of New Orleans. The book honors their experiences. It also details the realities of disaster impact and survival of community members rarely noted by official reports: women, low-income residents, mothers, female family members, and urban residents. The experiences revealed by this research show amazing courage, survival skills, and failures caused by the magnitude of the experience and the limitations of what it means to be poor in the United States. While we can marvel at the descriptions she offers us of the ingenuity of the respondents in how they created their survival “package” of behaviors, we cannot let the celebration of how these respondents “made it” to obscure the fact that they had to do so. The important lesson of what her respondents revealed to her is that they were in such a financially impoverished condition within a community that failed to provide for their safety—devoid both of an evacuation plan for those without transportation and a survival plan for those “left behind,” that they had to find a way to merely survive.
The themes that Pardee covers are critical ones: how the decision to leave (or not) was made—seeing themselves and their families as safe or at risk, how they left (caravanning multiple family cars when they were available to provide for a safe exit for multiple resource-strapped family members and friends), what the experience was for those stranded—especially within the infamous Super Dome and Convention Center, how initial shelter was achieved and how sheltering evolved during the displacement and then upon return, and finally what recovery meant. Poverty inculcated survival skills; it also imbued unimaginable challenges for those who lacked the safety nets of higher social class and ethnic majority status. Poverty also dominated the framing of their recovery. “Every day in poverty is like a disaster; so what’s new about Katrina?” became a cynical response by the poor when they were asked about surviving Katrina. Pardee’s research ties the everyday disaster to the Katrina event.
A concern about the research methodology used in the book arose with the author’s description of the experience of some of her respondents who were “sheltered” in the Super Dome. Pardee typed the phone interviews instead of recording and transcribing them; she did not share the transcripts with the respondents for verification. The violence that took place within the Super Dome during the sheltering is one of the most contested issues of the catastrophe, perhaps even exceeding the question of whether survivors left in the city shot at rescuers or whether the Lower Ninth Ward levee was dynamited. Pardee’s subjects describe extreme violence within the Dome. She lacks the recordings of the interviews, that is, the direct transcripts, to substantiate her note taking of the specific observations the respondents had of the violence. In Chapter 7, “Seeking Shelter,” she describes the trauma experienced by those “left behind” (p. 132). Some might argue that the respondents’ description of the violence was affected by the traumatic state that they were in when within the Dome. Recording the interviews would have given the reader assurance that the quotes were “exactly” what the respondents said and thus better honor the respondents’ voice. She gives no reason for not having used one of these two verification methods.
Pardee’s research has the potential to contribute to the reinforcement or alteration of public policy related to the experiences of lower-income women and families following a disaster. It is hoped that the price of the cloth-bound and the lack of a paperback book will not prevent the findings from being known.
She concludes with “Housing matters.” Stable housing links the disaster survivors to both formal and informal recovery support. Moving about strikes a possible extreme blow to true recovery. So important is this resource that Pardee declares the lack of housing a structural impediment. Second, the social safety net of HUD, FEMA, food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, etc. became a convergence of resources. Some of them are linked to state residency and are often offered for different intervals. Coordination and assessment of how they could be offered in a much more coordinated manner after a disaster that dislocates people across state lines could not be more important. This study sheds significant light on the chaos that the current disaster response reality for lower-income women and families begets and begs for improvements.