Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six

By Jordan Flaherty
Haymarket Books, 2010, 320 pages (paper), $16.00
Reviewed by David Billings

Jordan Flaherty’s Floodlinesis a love note to New Orleans. His book evoked many emotions in me: memory, sadness, and horror, but ultimately a feeling of great pride and hope for the future of this unique city.

Flaherty has great narrative flair in his writing. He tells the story as a novelist might, with authentic passion and much local color, yet he has a reporter’s eye for detail and a historian’s gift of context. Flaherty writes as an eyewitness to the events he describes, but also from the perspective of locals whose voices have, too often, been left out. He writes not so much as a reporter interviewing victims, but as an organizer familiar with his terrain. He knows not only what he is talking about but also who.

Flaherty makes no effort to be unbiased or objective. He is firm in his allegiance to those systemically coerced. He does not pretend to be someone he is not. He is on the ground and on the roof. He writes as one who was, himself, evacuated, and what it was like for those who had to endure it.

Read this book, not just to be enlightened about the situations described and detailed, all of which take place in Louisiana, but read it for what Floodlineshas to say about race, poverty, and oppressive power arrangements in this country. The author is an unabashed critic of structural and systemic racism. He takes the cauldron of the nation’s racial dynamics, adds a good helping of Louisiana’s notorious Angola State Prison, and mixes a roué with a little bit of Jena Six thrown-in — and spews out a gumbo just right for America’s racial palate.

As one who participated in some of the organizing events Flaherty writes about pre-Katrina, the book conjured thoughts about a few nuances he might have missed. Would he be willing to critique the progressive Left and even venerable long-time New Orleans movement veterans? Would he question the behavior of the volunteers who descended on New Orleans by the hundreds?

Flaherty is careful, but he notes a few times that ego and hubris got in the way of effective organizing and accountability to those most impacted by the storm; the government abuses rampant in the prison; and the nooses that hung in the schoolyard at Jena High School. He laments that the powerful coming together of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund was split asunder by differences of approach and strategies, which ultimately broke it up.

He points out the inherent disconnect between white activists and grassroots black leadership. And he perceptively identifies how few whites responded to the local Jena black community’s call to mobilize against the racism being played out in this rural, small town hamlet, far from the sights, sounds, and second-lines of New Orleans.

Flaherty doesn’t stand above the fray. He admits that no matter how whites, like himself, steep ourselves in the smells and drumbeats of black New Orleans, we are still white.

Floodlinesis a primer on the importance of community organizing. READ THIS BOOK.

David Billings is a community organizer and trainer with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. He lives in the Bronx, New York, and McComb, Mississippi.