TOMATOES OF WRATH
Burnell Cotlon’s unique fix for Hurricane Katrina’s damage: fresh vegetables,
“Somebody had to do something. No one else wanted to do it. That somebody happened to be us.” BURNELL COTLON OWNER OF THE ONLY GROCERY STORE IN THE LOWER 9TH WARD
NEW ORLEANS— This doesn’t look like a community-changing accomplishment. It looks like a bowl of tomatoes. Four tomatoes.
But they are fresh tomatoes, for sale in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, and that is something.
In the decade between hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the opening of Burnell Cotlon’s Lower 9th Ward Market last November, the isolated, impoverished neighbourhood most devastated by the storm had no grocery store and no fresh produce.
The nearest Walmart was an easy 10-minute drive for residents with a car. For those without, a milk run was a 50-minute bus expedition.
Cotlon’s bowls of fruits and vegetables are a lifeline. And a symbol, however modest, of returning normalcy.
“People have come in here and cried,” Cotlon said. “I’ve had total strangers high-fiving me.” The Lower 9th Ward Market was an abandoned apartment building before Cotlon bought the property for $4,000. In truth, it looks more like a low-budget convenience store than a grocery. The entire produce section fits on one table. The only breeze comes from portable floor fans set to high.
Cotlon stuffs his small supply of milk into a fridge Coca-Cola gave him strictly for its soft drinks.
Cotlon confessed his violation unprompted, with an unapologetic smile. He was making a point.
“You have to make this work,” he said. “No matter what.”
Burnell Cotlon is a slender black man with a shaved head and an easy laugh. He speaks with the effortless patter of a seasoned pitchman.
Which he is not. Cotlon, 47, was an army police officer, then the manager of a McDonald’s and a Family Dollar.
He lost his Lower 9th Ward house to Katrina. When he returned with his wife Keasha in 2009, they were the only people on a once-bustling block.
In 2010, Keasha spotted one of their few neighbours, a woman in her 70s, getting out of a taxi with groceries. Cotlon, who has a car, had not realized he lived in a food desert. Newly outraged, he suggested they open up their own store. Keasha agreed.
He quit his job, then spent his life savings, more than $90,000, to turn the dilapidated building into a three-store plaza with a barbershop, a sweets shop and the grocery.
Despite no relevant experience, he did most of the labour himself — sometimes with the aid of how-to videos on YouTube. The project took four years.
“We did this because it’s our home. And what are you supposed to do with home? You’re supposed to take care of home. And our home was lacking infrastructure,” Cotlon said. “Somebody had to do something. No one else wanted to do it. That somebody happened to be us.”
On a steamy August morning, the neighbourhood was silent except for the occasional passing car. He pointed to an abandoned building that used to be a funeral home, then to a vacant lot where a pharmacy used to stand.
The Lower 9th was one of the first communities to flood when the levees failed. It was the last community to get its power back. Always poor, it had also been a tight-knit cluster of black homeowners. But several top officials wrote it off.
“There’s nothing out there that can be saved at all,” the city’s emergency operations chief said soon after Katrina.
The Lower 9th was quieter than the rest of the city even when it had 15,000 residents. With less than half that number today, it feels nearly rural. The roads are rutted moonscapes. Hundreds of homes have vanished. Entire blocks are overgrown with weeds.
Hundreds of millions in government investment have not made the neighbourhood whole. Cut off from the rest of the city by a canal, the Lower 9th now feels cut off from the vaunted New Orleans recovery.
“If I didn’t have the rest of the city to compare it to, I would say this is great,” said Claudnisha Watson, 24, one of Cotlon’s regular customers. “But seeing what the rest of the city is doing and seeing this, this isn’t good.”
Watson had come in for snacks. She works retail 40 minutes away. By the time she gets home at 9 p.m., she is in no mood to stand in a long Walmart line for bananas.
“Small stuff like this makes it a little bit better here,” she said, then reconsidered. “A lot better, I’d say that.”
A harried young woman in a restaurant uniform dashed in. She had missed her bus, and she was going to be late. Keasha gave her a ride.
Then Cotlon’s phone rang. It was “Grandma,” a woman in her 70s raising five grandchildren. Cotlon grabbed a notebook and scribbled down her order: milk, gravy mix, beans, rice. He delivers.
He also sets up a bouncy house for neighbourhood kids. If he had more cash, he said wistfully, he would do even more: fully stock the shelves, get a real fridge, create a little three-washer laundry room. Some residents, he said, have to haul bags of dirty clothes on the bus.
Here he smoothly plugged his GoFundMe donations page. He is trying to raise $80,000.
He wants to turn a profit, he said, but his primary goal is altruistic.
“If we have to build the Lower 9th Ward by ourselves, one business at a time, we’re going to do it,” he said.
For now, even this business is insufficient. Jenga Mwendo, a Lower 9th food activist, said the area still needs a fullservice grocery store.
“It’s about what he has the capacity to offer. It’s really small,” said Mwendo, founder of the Backyard Gardeners Network. “To serve a community, a store needs to be able to offer more.”
Cotlon pondered the Lower 9th’s predicament: People don’t want to live in a community without stores; stores don’t want to open up in a community without people. “It’s like: what came first, the chicken or the egg?”
Someone, at least, is now selling eggs.