Remembering Vera, the victim who still haunts New Orleans
She became a symbol of authorities’ apathy
FOR FIVE days after Hurricane Katrina struck, the body of Vera Smith lay where it fell, alone on the roadside and partly covered by a tarpaulin.
Realising authorities had neither the resources nor inclination to remove the corpse, a man eventually buried her under a makeshift grave. He said prayers, fashioned a cross and placed a plastic sheet over the soil onto which someone painted the words: “Here Lies Vera. God Help Us”.
Ten years after the storm that killed 1 833 people and whose destruction topped $100 billion, the death of 66-year Smith and the breakdown of authority symbolised by her abandonment continue to haunt the city. In a place where many have an intense relationship with the dead, there are some in New Orleans who literally believe they have felt her spirit.
Visiting the junction of Magazine Street and Jackson Avenue in the Garden District today, it is hard to imagine the scenes that played out 10 years ago in the chaotic aftermath of the storm, when Smith went to a shop to try to find supplies for her and her partner Max Keene.
Around the world, people watched stunned and outraged at the images of seemingly countless corpses left stranded by the storm. They lay rotting on the roadside, floating in floodwater, hanging from wires.
The US government appeared hapless and heartless, failing to come to the aid of some of its most vulnerable people, a large percentage of whom were black.
Smith didn’t die in the storm but was killed in the lawless aftermath, apparently the victim of a hit-and-run accident. Her frail partner, who died the following year, did the little he could to provide some dignity for her body. After five days of intense heat, someone decided that more serious action was required.
John Lee, an engineer and businessman, remembers going to the police station and asked them to remove Smith’s body.
Lee said they declined to do so and refused him permission to move it. Eventually, they said he could bury it but couldn’t move it. He dug the grave in the pavement.
Lee has written a book of his experiences, Our Sleepless Nights: Surviving Katrina and Burying Miss Vera. In it he details the looming fear that permeated – some of it exacerbated by inaccurate reports about looting – in the 10 days after Katrina. His book is also testimony to the acts of quiet heroism, the coming together of people, often strangers, to try to help one another. “I think of her often,” Lee said of Smith, who he used to see around the neighbourhood. “I do have faith. I do wish she is at rest.”
He said he remembered the prayers that he and two black women – people he had met that day – spoke as they buried her. “We were praying for her soul.”
Smith, whose full name was Elvira Briones Smith, was born in Mexico and grew up in Texas before she moved to New Orleans. She was married four times, and has two adult daughters.
Smith’s family learnt of her death from the front page of a Texas newspaper. Three months after Katrina, her body was collected, taken to a mortuary and her ashes returned to her family in Santa Rosa. In 2005, they were interred in a family plot.
Smith’s daughter, Cindy Briones, said she and her sister’s emotions were stretched every year on the anniversary of her death. “I still have flashbacks. I have seen her body on the internet, pictures of before it was buried,” she said.
Smith’s family were fortunate; some of those killed remain unidentified and unclaimed.
In the City Park neighbourhood, a memorial to Katrina, designed in the shape that the category 5 storm assumed as it made landfall, was erected in the memory of those who died. It contains the remains of 43 people who were never claimed, 30 of whom were never identified.
Jayson Orlando, who works at a coffee shop, said New Orleans was less carefree since Katrina hit. “Even cities feel trauma,” he said. “It’s not just people.”
Since 2005, several memorials have been erected in Smith’s honour. The one that stands attached to a wall was built by an artist, Simon Hardeveld, and metal worker Scott Evert. Hardeveld, whose memorial features a working fountain, said he had been asked to make it two years ago by the owner of an adjoining burger restaurant, built on the site where Smith’s grave had stood.
Blaine Presenbach, the owner of the Charcoal restaurant, said he had commissioned the memorial out of respect for Smith.
Evert, who did the metal work for the memorial, said it upset him to recall what happened to his city. He likened the memorial to small shrines he had seen when he visited Thailand, a place where a spirit might sit.
“The point we wanted to make was that we wanted to remember Vera,” he said. “It was just to say ‘this was someone who lived here and something terrible happened to her and people think she was worth remembering’.” – The Independent
Even cities feel trauma, it’s not just people