Storm lifted veil on America’s poor

We can’t delete those faces from our minds: those haunting images from New Orleans, from Biloxi, from apartment building rooftops, from convention center chaos. We can’t erase those anguished faces with their pleading mouths and sunken eyes. We can’t – and must not – ignore their plight and the poverty that swamped them even before floodwaters from a deadly hurricane.

Those faces we’ve seen before, not from live TV coverage but from a lifetime shared between Mississippi and Maine where poverty is around the corner, up that hill, into those woods, over the river. Doesn’t matter: the poor we always have with us.

They may live in dog-trot houses in the Deep South or in rusted trailers in Down East Maine, but the poorest and the neediest are inevitably the hopeless … the helpless.

Such has been the case across the Gulf Coast where thousands of Katrina’s victims have become either corpses or refugees in the land of milk and honey. The “poor individuals,” reporters called the victims; they got that right.

CNN anchor Jack Cafferty said on Sept. 1: “Almost every person we’ve seen, from the families stranded on their rooftops waiting to be rescued, to the looters, to the people holed up in the Superdome are black and poor. Many of them didn’t follow the evacuation orders because they didn’t have the means to get out of town.”

On our coffee table is a treasured book of Eudora Welty photographs published in 1989 but taken in the Depression-era Deep South. The photographs tell a story not unlike those Eudora Welty put into words. As Reynolds Price wrote in the foreword to the book, “Welty explained that her years of snapshooting in rural and small-town Mississippi were among the forces that brought her to the realization that her prime compulsion was to push beyond the silent voice of image to the stronger but slower voice of words.”

Those photographs depict the poverty of the 1930s across the Deep South, black-and-white photos of black-and-white poverty.

Returning to those photographs this week, we reread the words of Reynolds Price: “The pictures here will go on bearing clear witness to a time and place much like all others, where life is lived in bolted rooms called men, women, children to which the only passkey is impassioned care – the calm assurance that their lone plight is seen in earnest and deeply shared and told to others, the only news.”

That IS the “only news” these days.

Someone said, “Few, save the poor, feel for the poor.” That cannot prove true.