NOLA Neighborhood
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November 12, 2005
With the Future in Flux, Anxiety About Keeping Life on Hold
By DEBORAH SONTAG
HOUSTON, Nov. 5 - As a child, when Shantel Reddick dribbled her basketball up and down Delery Street in New Orleans, she drew comfort from the idea that the neighbors knew the very rhythm of her bounce. By college age, though, she longed to liberate herself from the vigilance of a community where everybody knew everybody else's business. She escaped to Atlanta on an athletic scholarship and started an independent life there.
Last January, however, Ms. Reddick, 28, feeling adrift and unfulfilled in her job as a letter carrier in rural Georgia, moved back into her childhood home in the Lower Ninth Ward and joined the Orleans Parish sheriff's department. Her mission, as she saw it, was to take care of the grandmother who had raised her and the town that had shaped her. It was "like the call of destiny," Ms. Reddick said, "and I felt whole again."
Then, in late August, destiny was foiled. Four days after Ms. Reddick graduated as the valedictorian of her class at the sheriff's academy, she fled Hurricane Katrina and entered that strange state of limbo in which many displaced residents of New Orleans now live. The Reddicks made a family decision to rebuild their devastated home in the Lower Ninth Ward, but, more than two months after the storm, their ravaged neighborhood remained sealed by troops; its future, and theirs, was uncertain.
So last Friday, with considerable ambivalence, Ms. Reddick took the first step toward planting fledgling roots in Houston. She spent the day taking physical fitness, intelligence and psychometric tests at the Harris County sheriff's academy. And, although a third of the day's applicants, including a 20-year veteran of the Orleans Parish sheriff's office, were eliminated, Ms. Reddick made the cut.
But Ms. Reddick, who is fresh-faced and androgynous-looking, with buzzed short hair and zirconium studs on the top and bottom of each ear, did not evince any joy. The difficulty of starting over was sinking in - she could not become a Harris County peace officer before the summer of 2007, she learned - and it was sobering.
"It's confusing," she said. "I have no history here. When I left Atlanta, I really thought the Lord had sent me to New Orleans with a purpose. Now I don't know what he has in mind. All I can say is that I'm tired of twiddling my thumbs. I might as well use this time to get some professional experience."
For older refugees from New Orleans, like Ms. Reddick's grandmother, there may be no moving beyond their little pocket of the Crescent City. For Lvinia Reddick, 68, the need to go home to Delery Street is almost physical, gnawing at her every day.
Those who are Ms. Reddick's age, however, feel a different anxiety, that of putting life on hold. They do not want to be evacuees forever, living on handouts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sleeping on air mattresses and pining for gumbo. Because the future of New Orleans is so unclear, many are impatient to establish something that feels like a forward-moving life.
Nobody wants to betray New Orleans, Ms. Reddick said, but nobody wants to be betrayed, either, by a city that may not include everybody in its plans for redevelopment. Residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, in particular, fear that their low-lying neighborhood, a close-knit black community woven together by family and faith yet undermined by poverty and crime, may never be rebuilt.
Ms. Reddick's attachment to the Lower Ninth Ward, while strong, is less sentimental than that of her family members. A few years ago, she said, she told her late grandfather that she was contemplating a return from Atlanta but that she wanted to live in a safer part of New Orleans. Charles Reddick Sr., a Baptist deacon and retired factory worker, responded that she should not bother coming home if she were going to abandon her family and her community.
"That was heavy," Ms. Reddick said. "I would never abandon my family. But do I have a responsibility to a place? I try not to talk too much because I get really spiritual or deep. But I don't want my life to be in vain. The wisdom and talents that God blessed me with - I think I have a duty to use them for good. But, where? Does where matter?"
Culturally, the Lower Ninth Ward was like a small town. Families rarely atomized into nuclear pods but stayed extended through generations, their lives interwoven with those of neighbors and church friends. Even now, when they are scattered, Lower Nine residents have managed to regroup in units large enough to allay some of the hardships of displacement.
Ms. Reddick remains ensconced in the warm and sometimes claustrophobic embrace of her family. Last week, she felt their familiar push and pull keenly as she tended to her hospitalized grandmother while preparing for her sheriff's department qualifying tests.
When her grandmother underwent colon surgery, Ms. Reddick spent 14 hours by her side at a Houston hospital. She did go home to sleep, however, which meant that her grandmother woke up alone, a fact that displeased her enormously.
"I'm disappointed in y'all," Lvinia Reddick said last Thursday when her granddaughter arrived at about 9:30 a.m. with other relatives. "Where were you? My teeth haven't been cleaned. My hair hasn't been combed. They were beginning to think that I didn't have any people! I know my son would have been here first thing this morning if he was in town!"
Ms. Reddick, who was wearing a pink Polo-style shirt with an upturned collar that said "Preppy Scum," rolled her eyes, laughed and took out a comb. She gently lifted her grandmother from her pillow and started working through the knots in her gray hair. Her grandmother softened. "That's my little love," she said. Then she started warbling a ditty, "Good morning, sugar bridges."
Lvinia Reddick, a retired seamstress, used to wake her grandchildren with that song, tickling their toes and putting on their socks.
When Shantel Reddick was a bald-headed toddler, her mother, Yolanda, dropped her off at 2144 Delery St. to be raised by her grandparents. Yolanda Reddick, 48, who describes herself as the "black sheep of the family," said that she was young and immature, with three kids under the age of five and a mother who disapproved of her. She wanted to "run the streets," she said, so she ceded to her parents the upbringing of her three children, who had different fathers.
"I don't know who my father is," Shantel Reddick said matter-of-factly at a recent family gathering. This sent Charles Reddick, her barrel-chested uncle, dashing across the room to sling his arm around her and put his chubby cheek beside hers. "Who's your daddy?" he asked.
Shantel Reddick calls her mother Yolanda and sends Mother's Day cards to her grandmother. "My grandparents were such good people that I was probably better off with them," she said. "But, man, were they strict!"
As a child, Ms. Reddick spent much time by her grandfather's side. He would mow the lawn and she would sweep the grass into a bag; she would shoot free throws and he would catch the rebounds; they would munch on crawfish while watching Monday night football.
Her grandparents sent her to parochial school and Sunday school, where she excelled at Bible-flipping, in which children raced through a Bible looking for a passage of scripture, and engaged all of Delery Street in a mission to watch over her. "Delery Street was my whole life except for church and sports," she said.
With the family's expectation that she would be their first college graduate, Ms. Reddick left New Orleans to attend Morris Brown College in Atlanta. On a full scholarship, she played three sports and intended to finish in five years. At the end of the fourth year, however, Ms. Reddick and her teammates accused a male coach of sexual harassment. He was dismissed, she said, but with him went the quiet deal that she would get a fifth year of free tuition. She dropped out just short of a degree in communications, entering a period of floundering, which ended when her grandfather's death started her on a path back to New Orleans.
Ms. Reddick worked as a civilian jailer before she started at the sheriff's academy in Orleans Parish, where she impressed her teachers. "I expected nothing but the best from her," Cpl. Walt Givens said. "When the class was required to give 110 percent, I told her she needed to give 20 percent more." He recommended Ms. Reddick for the mounted division, and she was supposed to start interviewing for placement on the day the floodwaters overtook New Orleans.
Ms. Reddick fled in her Chevrolet Cavalier with her grandfather's Bible, two plaques from the sheriff's academy - valedictorian and most physically fit - and a stuffed basketball pillow. She left behind 40 pairs of tennis shoes that she color-coordinated with her shirts - and a future that was beginning to come into focus.
At first, Ms. Reddick crowded into a cousin's apartment with dozens of relatives. Then she and her brother's family shared a place, and, a few weeks ago, Ms. Reddick finally moved into her "bachelorette pad," a flavorless space that she furnished with a bench press, black futon, red carpet, television, Playstation and electric waterfall. FEMA covers her monthly rent of about $400.
Ms. Reddick's grandmother, who lives nearby, recently received the offer of a trailer from FEMA. She politely informed the government that she had nowhere - yet - to put the trailer because her property was in a neighborhood sealed by the government. When she hung up, she tsk-ed.
The thought of living in a trailer in a ruined Lower Ninth Ward depressed Ms. Reddick, and Orleans Parish was making no promises to its recent graduates. Stir crazy, Ms. Reddick finally forced herself to show up at the sheriff's academy last Friday. Harris County is not Orleans Parish; the sheriff's office pays better, but it is also less diverse and Texan. Only 5 percent of the deputies are black females, and Ms. Reddick was the sole black woman to qualify last week.
There was a moment, when she was running around the barbed-wire perimeter of a jail with geese honking, crickets chirping and guns firing at a range in the background, that Ms. Reddick looked almost radiant. But by the time officials explained that applicants would work in the jail for a year before starting the academy and related stories of inmates masturbating to provoke "lady jailers," her radiance had given way to anxious determination.
"I don't know where the Lord wants me to be," she said. "But I really need a job."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
November 12, 2005
With the Future in Flux, Anxiety About Keeping Life on Hold
By DEBORAH SONTAG
HOUSTON, Nov. 5 - As a child, when Shantel Reddick dribbled her basketball up and down Delery Street in New Orleans, she drew comfort from the idea that the neighbors knew the very rhythm of her bounce. By college age, though, she longed to liberate herself from the vigilance of a community where everybody knew everybody else's business. She escaped to Atlanta on an athletic scholarship and started an independent life there.
Last January, however, Ms. Reddick, 28, feeling adrift and unfulfilled in her job as a letter carrier in rural Georgia, moved back into her childhood home in the Lower Ninth Ward and joined the Orleans Parish sheriff's department. Her mission, as she saw it, was to take care of the grandmother who had raised her and the town that had shaped her. It was "like the call of destiny," Ms. Reddick said, "and I felt whole again."
Then, in late August, destiny was foiled. Four days after Ms. Reddick graduated as the valedictorian of her class at the sheriff's academy, she fled Hurricane Katrina and entered that strange state of limbo in which many displaced residents of New Orleans now live. The Reddicks made a family decision to rebuild their devastated home in the Lower Ninth Ward, but, more than two months after the storm, their ravaged neighborhood remained sealed by troops; its future, and theirs, was uncertain.
So last Friday, with considerable ambivalence, Ms. Reddick took the first step toward planting fledgling roots in Houston. She spent the day taking physical fitness, intelligence and psychometric tests at the Harris County sheriff's academy. And, although a third of the day's applicants, including a 20-year veteran of the Orleans Parish sheriff's office, were eliminated, Ms. Reddick made the cut.
But Ms. Reddick, who is fresh-faced and androgynous-looking, with buzzed short hair and zirconium studs on the top and bottom of each ear, did not evince any joy. The difficulty of starting over was sinking in - she could not become a Harris County peace officer before the summer of 2007, she learned - and it was sobering.
"It's confusing," she said. "I have no history here. When I left Atlanta, I really thought the Lord had sent me to New Orleans with a purpose. Now I don't know what he has in mind. All I can say is that I'm tired of twiddling my thumbs. I might as well use this time to get some professional experience."
For older refugees from New Orleans, like Ms. Reddick's grandmother, there may be no moving beyond their little pocket of the Crescent City. For Lvinia Reddick, 68, the need to go home to Delery Street is almost physical, gnawing at her every day.
Those who are Ms. Reddick's age, however, feel a different anxiety, that of putting life on hold. They do not want to be evacuees forever, living on handouts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sleeping on air mattresses and pining for gumbo. Because the future of New Orleans is so unclear, many are impatient to establish something that feels like a forward-moving life.
Nobody wants to betray New Orleans, Ms. Reddick said, but nobody wants to be betrayed, either, by a city that may not include everybody in its plans for redevelopment. Residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, in particular, fear that their low-lying neighborhood, a close-knit black community woven together by family and faith yet undermined by poverty and crime, may never be rebuilt.
Ms. Reddick's attachment to the Lower Ninth Ward, while strong, is less sentimental than that of her family members. A few years ago, she said, she told her late grandfather that she was contemplating a return from Atlanta but that she wanted to live in a safer part of New Orleans. Charles Reddick Sr., a Baptist deacon and retired factory worker, responded that she should not bother coming home if she were going to abandon her family and her community.
"That was heavy," Ms. Reddick said. "I would never abandon my family. But do I have a responsibility to a place? I try not to talk too much because I get really spiritual or deep. But I don't want my life to be in vain. The wisdom and talents that God blessed me with - I think I have a duty to use them for good. But, where? Does where matter?"
Culturally, the Lower Ninth Ward was like a small town. Families rarely atomized into nuclear pods but stayed extended through generations, their lives interwoven with those of neighbors and church friends. Even now, when they are scattered, Lower Nine residents have managed to regroup in units large enough to allay some of the hardships of displacement.
Ms. Reddick remains ensconced in the warm and sometimes claustrophobic embrace of her family. Last week, she felt their familiar push and pull keenly as she tended to her hospitalized grandmother while preparing for her sheriff's department qualifying tests.
When her grandmother underwent colon surgery, Ms. Reddick spent 14 hours by her side at a Houston hospital. She did go home to sleep, however, which meant that her grandmother woke up alone, a fact that displeased her enormously.
"I'm disappointed in y'all," Lvinia Reddick said last Thursday when her granddaughter arrived at about 9:30 a.m. with other relatives. "Where were you? My teeth haven't been cleaned. My hair hasn't been combed. They were beginning to think that I didn't have any people! I know my son would have been here first thing this morning if he was in town!"
Ms. Reddick, who was wearing a pink Polo-style shirt with an upturned collar that said "Preppy Scum," rolled her eyes, laughed and took out a comb. She gently lifted her grandmother from her pillow and started working through the knots in her gray hair. Her grandmother softened. "That's my little love," she said. Then she started warbling a ditty, "Good morning, sugar bridges."
Lvinia Reddick, a retired seamstress, used to wake her grandchildren with that song, tickling their toes and putting on their socks.
When Shantel Reddick was a bald-headed toddler, her mother, Yolanda, dropped her off at 2144 Delery St. to be raised by her grandparents. Yolanda Reddick, 48, who describes herself as the "black sheep of the family," said that she was young and immature, with three kids under the age of five and a mother who disapproved of her. She wanted to "run the streets," she said, so she ceded to her parents the upbringing of her three children, who had different fathers.
"I don't know who my father is," Shantel Reddick said matter-of-factly at a recent family gathering. This sent Charles Reddick, her barrel-chested uncle, dashing across the room to sling his arm around her and put his chubby cheek beside hers. "Who's your daddy?" he asked.
Shantel Reddick calls her mother Yolanda and sends Mother's Day cards to her grandmother. "My grandparents were such good people that I was probably better off with them," she said. "But, man, were they strict!"
As a child, Ms. Reddick spent much time by her grandfather's side. He would mow the lawn and she would sweep the grass into a bag; she would shoot free throws and he would catch the rebounds; they would munch on crawfish while watching Monday night football.
Her grandparents sent her to parochial school and Sunday school, where she excelled at Bible-flipping, in which children raced through a Bible looking for a passage of scripture, and engaged all of Delery Street in a mission to watch over her. "Delery Street was my whole life except for church and sports," she said.
With the family's expectation that she would be their first college graduate, Ms. Reddick left New Orleans to attend Morris Brown College in Atlanta. On a full scholarship, she played three sports and intended to finish in five years. At the end of the fourth year, however, Ms. Reddick and her teammates accused a male coach of sexual harassment. He was dismissed, she said, but with him went the quiet deal that she would get a fifth year of free tuition. She dropped out just short of a degree in communications, entering a period of floundering, which ended when her grandfather's death started her on a path back to New Orleans.
Ms. Reddick worked as a civilian jailer before she started at the sheriff's academy in Orleans Parish, where she impressed her teachers. "I expected nothing but the best from her," Cpl. Walt Givens said. "When the class was required to give 110 percent, I told her she needed to give 20 percent more." He recommended Ms. Reddick for the mounted division, and she was supposed to start interviewing for placement on the day the floodwaters overtook New Orleans.
Ms. Reddick fled in her Chevrolet Cavalier with her grandfather's Bible, two plaques from the sheriff's academy - valedictorian and most physically fit - and a stuffed basketball pillow. She left behind 40 pairs of tennis shoes that she color-coordinated with her shirts - and a future that was beginning to come into focus.
At first, Ms. Reddick crowded into a cousin's apartment with dozens of relatives. Then she and her brother's family shared a place, and, a few weeks ago, Ms. Reddick finally moved into her "bachelorette pad," a flavorless space that she furnished with a bench press, black futon, red carpet, television, Playstation and electric waterfall. FEMA covers her monthly rent of about $400.
Ms. Reddick's grandmother, who lives nearby, recently received the offer of a trailer from FEMA. She politely informed the government that she had nowhere - yet - to put the trailer because her property was in a neighborhood sealed by the government. When she hung up, she tsk-ed.
The thought of living in a trailer in a ruined Lower Ninth Ward depressed Ms. Reddick, and Orleans Parish was making no promises to its recent graduates. Stir crazy, Ms. Reddick finally forced herself to show up at the sheriff's academy last Friday. Harris County is not Orleans Parish; the sheriff's office pays better, but it is also less diverse and Texan. Only 5 percent of the deputies are black females, and Ms. Reddick was the sole black woman to qualify last week.
There was a moment, when she was running around the barbed-wire perimeter of a jail with geese honking, crickets chirping and guns firing at a range in the background, that Ms. Reddick looked almost radiant. But by the time officials explained that applicants would work in the jail for a year before starting the academy and related stories of inmates masturbating to provoke "lady jailers," her radiance had given way to anxious determination.
"I don't know where the Lord wants me to be," she said. "But I really need a job."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
posted by Joe Paris at Saturday, November 12, 2005
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