After reading the articles provided, think of a way in which public folklore could be used in your own community. What would be your first step in beginning this project?
Legends of Hurricane Katrina: The Right to Be Wrong, Survivor-to-Survivor Storytelling, and Healing Legends of Hurricane Katrina: The Right to Be Wrong, Survivor-to-Survivor Storytelling, and Healing Author(s): Carl Lindahl Source: The Journal of American Folklore , Vol. 125, No. 496 (Spring 2012), pp. 139-176 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of American Folklore Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.125.496.0139 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.125.496.0139?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press and American Folklore Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American Folklore This content downloaded from ������������128.193.164.203 on Fri, 07 Aug 2020 15:12:08 UTC������������ All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.125.496.0139 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.125.496.0139?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.125.496.0139?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents Journal of American Folklore 125(496):139–176 Copyright © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois carl lindahl legends of hurricane katrina: The right to be Wrong, Survivor-to-Survivor Storytelling, and healing In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, media-borne legends overwhelmingly portrayed poor New Orleanians as criminals; the reports carried the force of truth in dis- couraging rescues and conferring upon their tellers the right to be wrong. In con- trast, survivors’ narratives assigned guilt to government elites, depicted fellow survivors as heroes, and met rejection from the media. Thus emerged a pattern of divided narrative communities, narrative content, and narrative reception. This study of Katrina legendry surveys the damage wrought by culturally embedded double standards of credibility; one offshoot is the “David Effect,” through which blame is attached to the most vulnerable survivors. One corrective is to counter the media legendry with insider accounts, as in the project Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston (SKRH), the world’s first in which the survivors documented their own disaster experiences. SKRH employed “deframed,” “kitchen table” techniques to record survivors on their own personal and cultural terms. Survivor legendry reveals depths of reasoning, compassion, and introspection rarely found in media accounts. The success of SKRH suggests a new public health strategy, based on the premise that the most humane and effective response to disaster-spawned trauma is to give survivors the support and wherewithal to document themselves. how often does some strange truth crowd you on the couch and in its fierce innocence unknowingly dismantle yours? Judi rice of San Antonio was one of thou- sands of texans who answered the call of conscience in September 2005 and opened their homes to new orleanians uprooted by hurricane katrina. Judi’s stranger was ruby, a middle-aged woman who had been plucked from her island house and float- ed to an overpass where she went for two days without food in blazing heat and slept for two nights on ant-infested pavement—all of which was mere prologue to the inferno of the Superdome. Five days after the fact, and more than five hundred miles from new orleans, ruby sat in Judi’s living room describing the events of Friday, September 2, 2005, when uniformed troops finally reached her: they “put up barricades around us and we stood in the sun as the national guard walked past us into the Superdome. next they made carl lindahl is martha gano houstoun research professor in the Department of english at the university of houston JAF 125_2 text.indd 139 3/26/12 9:12 AM This content downloaded from ������������128.193.164.203 on Fri, 07 Aug 2020 15:12:08 UTC������������ All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 140 Journal of American Folklore 125 (2012) us go back into the Dome. none of the guards smiled or looked friendly, and they were all armed with their guns pointed down. When we went back into the Dome, that was covered with trash, excrement and dead bodies, they made us all lie on the floor face down like criminals. They threw bedding, mre’s, water—and then left us there” (quoted by Judi rice, e-mail message, September 5, 2005). listening to ruby, Judi instantly recalled that she too had witnessed this same scene, but in her own home, on television, from a profoundly different angle: “This is what we saw from the media helicopters. bush lands in louisiana. immediately after he departed for another area, you could see a humvee, followed by huge military trucks loaded with supplies . . . and everyone watching this thought these people were to be rescued.” The cameras panned to a fleet of parked buses seemingly marshaled for an immediate evacuation. but, on the ground, ruby and her fellow sufferers in the Dome got no solace from the soldiers, who returned to their trucks while the buses stood empty. Judi was shaken: “none of the public were aware of that. We were left with the orchestrated false impression that they were being rescued.” As ruby’s strange truth rent and remade Judi’s, numberless kitchen table encoun- ters between survivors and Samaritans throughout the nation were exposing percep- tual gulfs even in the act of erasing personal distances. people formerly secure in the visual evidence projected from their tV sets were now watching those same tVs in the company of the survivors who had recently been pictured on the screens. instance after instance, the news lost its purchase on truth. Students of the human sciences, like other culture voyeurs, tend to reach their worst conclusions when the humans they study are out of the room. even those folklorists who have so carefully researched the power of legends to shape, and take shape from, group perceptions, sometimes find themselves trapped in a legendary bind, prone to accept those accounts that emerge from media and governmental sources and to dismiss those shared by witnesses who were present at the site when the legends were born. The following study of hurricane katrina legendry first surveys some of the damage wrought by a culturally embedded double standard of belief, then proceeds to describe one folkloric means of allaying the traumatic effects of legends, and con- cludes by asserting that the most humane and most effective response to disaster- spawned trauma is to give the survivors the support and wherewithal to document themselves. Legend, Belief, and Urban Disorder Far more often than being struck suddenly by an uninvited truth, we begin to hear the strangers in the room only when we see their truths through ours. The varied and opposed truths born in the midst of disaster will find their expression in legends: stories, told as true, that are accepted unconditionally by some, rejected flatly by oth- ers, and half believed, half doubted by others still. As linda Dégh stresses, legend is by nature a debate about belief, an expression of our warring convictions concerning what is possible, what is probable, and what is right (Dégh and Vázsonyi 1973; Dégh and Vázsonyi 1995; Dégh 2001). Folklorists were not surprised by the range of con- JAF 125_2 text.indd 140 3/26/12 9:12 AM This content downloaded from ������������128.193.164.203 on Fri, 07 Aug 2020 15:12:08 UTC������������ All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms flicting truths that began to take on story-shape the instant that katrina’s pinwheel clouds parted. The death of a city is the ultimate urban legend. nothing is more characteristic of legend than the movement from the vicarious to the visceral. until you feel it, a legend is no more than another story—one that will not stick without first-person engagement. true, folklorists define legend as a third- person narrative and tend to distinguish it sharply from a personal experience story. but, also by definition, legend engages belief, and belief is as personalizing a trait as a story can encompass. Still, the deep-seated third-person bias of legend research often serves to exaggerate the impersonal aspects of such stories at the expense of the personalizing dimensions that give it life. Whether we believe them or not, legends tend to affect us personally; they are made at least part-true by a twinge that hits us as we hear them. Those legends that iden- tify human threats to our lives can become real by feeding on fear of strangers. A white mother waiting for her young son outside the men’s room of an urban shopping mall hears screams and then sees two black men charge out the bathroom door; she runs inside and finds her child with his throat slit. A black girl disobeys her parents’ warnings against walking outside alone at night, disappears, and is never seen again, except by the white medical students who kidnap and dissect her as part of an ex- periment (ellis 2003:162). A lonely girl swiftly courted by the stranger of her dreams is sent a package that, she believes, contains an engagement gift; unwrapping it in the presence of her parents, she finds a tiny coffin inscribed with the words “Welcome to the world of AiDS” (goldstein 2004:100–15). Whether such things ever really hap- pened, something acutely real happens to many of those who listen. When the visceral is discounted and legends are depersonalized, their study can rapidly degrade into a game of true or false. it is conceivable to all of us that the urban legend of the customer who finds a dead rat at the bottom of her coke bottle (or deep-fried among the thighs in her bucket of fast-food chicken) may have happened once. indeed, dozens of successful lawsuits attest to the likelihood that many mice have indeed found their ways into soda bottles (Fine 1979). even so, the fact remains that the bottled mouse has been reported many, many more times and in many more places that it has been actually seen and used as evidence. Folklorists who collect hundreds of similarly plotted narratives recounting the “same” awful event, each tale attached to a different locale and set of actors,