Don't Worry 'Bout Me: Introduction to the Ella Mae Project

---

I look at my hands and my hands are new
I look at my feet and they are, too...
...don't worry 'bout me.

Slightly Broken

Ella Mae Hogue, from under her umbrella, sings quietly to herself while she waits for a breeze to relieve the suffocating August heat. From her front porch on Seventh Street, she looks out on the cemetery across the street, the massive spreading canopies of live oaks along Washington Avenue, and the tops of the office towers of the Central Business District perhaps half a mile away. The trees have always been there, as far as she's concerned, but the office towers are new to her.
Ella Mae is 84 years old, we think, which would mean she was born around 1925. In her lifetime, New Orleans has been knocked flat by hurricanes four times. That sounds like a lot, but consider this: the Crescent City has been brushed or hit directly 37 times just since 1879 (when someone started counting). Brenda, Esther, Hilda, Betsy, Camille, Bob, Elena, Florence, Andrew, Hermine, Bertha, Isidore, Matthew, Cindy, Katrina, and Rita have all come to town, and that's just the ones that have names. There are nineteen more that remain anonymous. On average, it feels the effects of a hurricane every 3.73 years with a direct hit every 12.55. This math neatly predicted that, after Katrina, New Orleans could expect a large hurricane to pass within 60 miles during August or September of 2008. This is exactly what Gustav did, right on schedule, making it 38 times. This is all old news to Ella Mae, however.

A battered white van labors along Seventh Street and bounces up on the curb. Amidst the slamming of doors, a wiry looking man with a maniac grin leans his head out of the van window and shouts at the top of his voice, "el-LA MAE!" Her face breaks into a broad smile and she answers softly, running all the words together, "Arighthowyahdoin?" It's 8:10 AM and the unloading begins: an air compressor, our one fully functional nail gun (aka Bam-Bam), a shop-vac, buckets full of button-cap nails, framing nails, gyp. board screws, decking screws, screw guns, a "bucket of hammer," a skill saw, sawhorses, and that wonderful all-purpose problem solver called a "Saw-Zall" (or SawSall, depending on who you ask). There's a large, rather heavy grey plastic bin full of plastering tools, a bag full of utility knives, chalk lines, speed squares, tape measures, levels, scrapers, a big blue water cooler, and work gloves of various kinds. There's a first aid kit, bug spray, hornet spray, sunscreen, ear plugs, battery chargers, drop cords, electrical splitters, the plumbing bag, a steel box of "miscellaneous tools," a milk crate full of safety glasses, and a giant magnet for picking up stray rusty nails. All of these items have scrape marks and paint splatters. The bright orange, bright green, or bright yellow coatings from the tool manufacturers are mostly worn off. Everything looks well used, everything is on the verge of wearing out, everything has been dropped, lost in sawdust, buried in mud, reclaimed, mended, left out in the rain. The cord on the skill saw features a cluster of butt-connectors and a bird's nest of electrical tape. There's even a broken hammer. Who breaks a hammer? Who breaks a hammer and then puts it back on the rack?
I used to classify things as simply broken or not broken. I now subdivide broken into a number of constituent subcategories. The skill saw with the patchwork cord is "slightly broken" meaning it works, but don't drop the cord in a puddle of water while it's plugged in. The big orange cooler was also slightly broken in that it leaked, but as long as you set it outside it was okay. A new hole in the spigot downgraded its status to "fully broken." In between "slightly broken" and "fully broken" is a "mostly broken" designation which applies to tools that can be used, but only by people familiar with their idiosyncrasies. The other nail gun, after its precipitous drop from the roof of the Wesley Church, is now "mostly broken" because you have to know how to hold the magazine together when you reload it or it will snap shut on your fingers.
"Fully broken" comes in more than one flavor, to wit: a French girl didn't see a cement block in the tall grass and ran one of our lawnmowers right over it. The shank of the bolt that held the blade sheared off just inside the bolt-hole. This can be fixed, but it takes a specialized tool we don't have, so we designate this lawnmower "temporarily fully broken" and park it in the lawnmower graveyard outside the tool shed. The white van, on the other hand, used to be considered slightly broken on account of it having to be jump-started every other morning. A neighbor diagnosed this as a short in the stereo, which was never used because the stereo was considered "permanently fully broken." This gave rise to a new sub-category: "not only fully broken but screwing something else up while it's at it." The offending stereo was the leading contender in this new weight-class until a young electrical engineer from Taiwan stayed with us for two weeks and installed a new stereo that eliminated the short. He also restored the overhead light in the pantry from intermittently fully broken to intermittently slightly broken, although it later reverted. Now we do our laundry by the light of a floor lamp that is slightly broken.
The safety equipment wears out especially quickly, which you may find disconcerting. Most of the safety glasses are splattered with primer or abraded by debris, the gloves are mismatched and full of holes. Nobody (except maybe Amee) minds wearing mismatched work gloves, but whenever I'm rooting for safety glasses and pull out a pair deeply scored across the lenses, I must pause to reflect upon the importance of wearing the damned things. People have to be constantly admonished to keep them on. Why is this? I know they're stylish and convenient, but seriously, the pair with the marks from a flying nail head may be ruined, but they sacrificed themselves to save the wearer an eye. Common sense would dictate that people would be clamoring every morning for a good pair of safety glasses, right? Of course not. The most experienced construction workers have to be threatened with unemployment to wear their safety glasses and they'll ditch them the moment the boss isn't looking. They adopt this attitude to prove...I don't know what this proves, but they insist on proving it whatever it is.
While we're unloading all of this stuff and nagging people to get their safety glasses on, each person will break off momentarily to pay their respects to Ella Mae. This is something of a ritual now that she has achieved celebrity status among the small non-profits around the city. Everyone wants to meet Ella Mae. Everyone wants to work at Ella Mae's. Everyone wants to hear her sing.

United Saints Recovery: a case study in the world South of I-10

What happened to Ella Mae's house, best I can tell, is that The Storm blew large chunks of the siding off, tore up the roof, and let the rain in. The rain never stopped coming in and the endlessly probing vines soon followed. Now the dining room ceiling is on the dining room floor, the living room walls are a pile of debris on the couch and the whole house leans dangerously towards a low spot at the back of the kitchen. Her cabinets are just hoping that the floor is still there to catch them when they finally fall. The now exposed second floor joists have buckled into a parabolic shape to which no plaster, however flexible, can cling. The roof deck has largely taken leave of the exterior wall, exposing the top of the wall framing right where it is most in need of protection. Now that the top plate has eroded away, water has been pouring into the end-grain of the old studs with the expected results. There is no exterior sheathing, not so much as a layer of felt to shed the water, so it just runs down wherever it likes and bleeds through the walls, puddles on the floor, and steadily gnaws away at the ribbons. About every other light fixture works, but only one outlet in the house is functioning. The plumbing has corroded away and now the fixtures are useless. She has been living without indoor plumbing for at least three years and sitting on the front porch singing, "Don't worry 'bout me."
The state determined that, despite signs of dementia, she is fit to live alone and then the state walked away. As for her family, Ella Mae's husband, long-time pastor of Beautiful Zion Baptist Church, died ten years ago. She has an older sister alive in Memphis who is in no position to lend assistance. We found a high school diploma for Ella Mae's daughter but no one can find the daughter. All Ella Mae really has now is her church and a house that's fully broken. In fact, it's crumbling.

Outside Louisiana, which is to say in the developed world, various state agencies have steadily taken over the role that local social institutions like church and family used to fulfill with varying degrees of success or failure. Inside Louisiana, a state so hopelessly inept and so thoroughly corrupt that the only thing that distinguishes "government" from "organized crime" is the word "organized," those small, highly personal institutions are the only form of effective relief from hardship that anyone can count on. Enter: Miss Gail. Gail is also a member of Beautiful Zion Baptist Church and she considers her responsibilities to members of her congregation a sacred trust. When the state stepped away, Gail stepped in and contacted Daryl. Now, while Gail makes sure Ella Mae takes her medications, sees that she eats regularly, gets her to the doctor, and tries to get the home nursing agency to actually show up for the semi-weekly visits for which they have been charging, Daryl is figuring out what to do about the house.
We'd love to gut the entire house at one go and then stabilize the structure enough to safely raise it up and make it level again. Then we could do a roof tear-off, extend the eaves, re-deck, re-roof, remove what's left of the siding, take out the doors and windows, re-frame the openings, sheath the house, put a weather barrier up, replace the doors and windows, seal (and, heaven forbid, flash) until the house is dried back in. Then re-side, re-trim, prime, and paint. Next we could redo the electricity, plumbing, etc, and refinish the interior; but where is Ella Mae while we're doing all of this? She doesn't have anywhere else to go. We can't just stash her in a hotel for a few weeks, she might never recover from the shock. There is also, of course, the matter of funds. Right now we have two thousand dollars of private donations and we know how deep those individuals had to dig for it. So we "prioritize," which means staunching the flow of rainwater through the house as best we can and doing some work out of sequence so that she can take a bath in her own house and not get rained on all night. Yes, this means water will ruin some of the work we just did; yes this means we will have to do some of it again in October when things dry out a bit; and yes, this means some solutions will be compromises, but the alternative is to do nothing (or "strategic visioning," as some call doing nothing). It sounds like too much for a half-dozen people, but we do get a little help from time to time.

The one week volunteers are a blessing. These are mostly college students spending their breaks to go help someone. You might be surprised how common this is and you might think this is a ploy to spend a cheap week goofing off in New Orleans, but they're serious about the work. They restore our enthusiasm and they push our projects forward by leaps. The way they tell it, they have five days to do something that matters and they want to make the most of every minute of it.
The Deloitte College group is a good example. Eight people, some of whom didn't even knew each other, got in a couple of cars and drove down from Wisconsin with no idea of what to expect. Up until now, everyday at Ella Mae's began with moving furniture, boxes, and all manner of things over to one side of each room so that we could get at the work, only to move it over to the other side later in the day and we had to put it all back before we left. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but we just didn't have anywhere else to put all this stuff. Just before their arrival, Daryl came up (somehow) with a pod for storage and they completed a massive clearing operation. This is dirty work, but they did it with a smile. They weren't done amazing us yet, however, not even close. You "exceeded expectations" is one way to put it, but the Irishman occasionally named Sean put it better, "Ye rock."
I'll go into more detail another day, but one of the reasons they occupy a special place in my heart is that they brought Fall with them. Friday morning, their last day, we were puttering around in the pre-dawn and noticed something. Where's the heat? Where's the humidity? It was gone. It left in the night. The long fever was broken. I will forever associate the moment when my first New Orleans Summer ended with Jorge, Lee, Jake, Emily, Anna, Jeremy, Steven, and Sean. Truly, ye rock.
The week long volunteers are the bread and butter of an organization like this, and how best to employ them is the subject of much of our thinking. Different NPO's handle it different ways. Daryl is uncompromising in his conviction that we have to give them meaningful work to do, not just whatever tasks we can make up on the spot. It doesn't always have to be glamorous, believe me, but it has to be genuinely necessary. A less scrupulous organization might send a group of visiting volunteers to install something, then have the long-term people take it down for another group to re-install the next week. I've heard of this sort of thing going on around New Orleans and elsewhere. I've also heard of certain celebrities painting one section of a fence, posing for pictures, and then de-camping an hour later to make room for another photo-op of someone else painting a different section of the exact same fence. Chet can testify to this foolishness first-hand. I'm not going to name the organizations responsible for the Potemkin Village approach to volunteerism, but I share Daryl and Chet's disgust at the particularly dishonest practice we call Volun-tourism.

Squandocracy

An organization like this needs money, obviously. It's surprising how little it can get by with and it's surprising how much it can take. The United Saints Recovery Project is officially a 501c Non-profit, which means people making donations can get the tax credit they deserve. It also makes us theoretically eligible for a share of the billions of federal recovery dollars available, but this does not come without a catch. For example: you pretty much have to have a full-time staff researching and writing proposals for these grants. This means a large share of the money goes to pay the staff. You could have volunteers write the proposals, but then you would be specifically excluded from these types of grants. This means, in order to qualify for grant money, you have to transform your organization from one focused on accomplishing field projects into one focused on obtaining grant money and consuming grant money in seeking more grant money. That kind of beast can't even feed itself, let alone put a roof on Ella Mae's house. Welcome to The Great Squandocracy.
Squandocratic organizations do not make it a habit of pointing out that they don't actually do anything, that would look bad in their promotional literature. Instead, they call themselves "clearinghouses" that "direct resources" to/for "other grass-roots organizations." They also decorate that literature with what they called "missions," which would properly be called "categorical errors." Missions like "striving to achieve social justice" are categorical errors. "Make it right" is a categorical error. The problem is defined so badly or so broadly that it is unsolvable, but then it's not meant to be solved, it's meant to soak up federal grants. The Problem of Social Justice, whatever it is, is so expensive to tackle because it isn't there at all. It's a distraction, an excuse to avoid doing anything useful by replacing your neighbors and their real needs with abstract concepts that you can fiddle with forever and never have to sweat. "I can't help you move that couch, I'm striving to achieve social justice for you just now, sorry." Grand Designs are garbage, all of them; it's all a lot of talk.
Before I finish ranting and get back to the subject of Ella Mae, I want to mention another way tax dollars can be made self-squandering. Maybe we're eligible for a grant, but we would have to spend what money our operating budget can afford on something as patently preposterous as a handicapped-accessible shower stall in our facility to accommodate people who could not possibly work on these job sites. The grant money then replaces the operating budget that was pissed away to obtain it and we get...no net change other than a shower stall is now rendered more convenient for handicapped volunteers who's very existence is wholly imaginary. The blue "accessible" sign on that shower stall may as well say, "Wasted Effort," or better yet, "Unicorns Only."

So, what do you suggest, smart guy?

Daryl's approach may seem disorganized...hell, it is disorganized, but it's based on delivering the maximum benefit of what we have right now to people who need help right now. It's plain. It's simple. It's effective. It's what the phrase "grass roots" is supposed to mean. It's also incomprehensible to members of The Great Squandocracy. Squandocrats secretly hate actual grass roots efforts. Actual grass roots organizations are sloppy with their paperwork and, most importantly, The Squandocracy does not get its administrative cut of the funds. You should see the layers of murky institutional haze through which chronically overworked, shamefully underpaid, emotionally exhausted caseworkers for the Salvation Army must plow in order to secure a voucher for a refrigerator for a guy who lost his entire house in 2005. What year is this? Ella Mae needed a refrigerator, too. Miss Gail went to the church. A day later, there it was. I'm sure this new refrigerator is part of a complicated, multi-party arrangement that involves person A getting a month's rent free, person B (his landlord) getting Miss Gail off his back about not going to church lately, person C (person A's cousin) getting his lawn mowed by person D (one of Daryl's volunteers), person E loaning Daryl a gallon of gas to do it, and person F (Ella Mae) getting a fridge. So where did a refrigerator enter that flowchart? Go back and look for it if you like, but it's a mystery to me and I saw it happen. How is it that a refrigerator appeared, a lawn got mowed, someone's rent got paid, and all of this in a day or two? Where are the receipts? Where are the reports? Who paid for the gas? There's just no way to put this into a standardized form, so there's no way an official agency can accept this way of getting things done. They have to go through the murky institutional haze that costs a billion and takes four years and all so that they can say, with serious faces, that "our processes are in place to avoid waste." These are the morons that spend a million to make sure nobody misplaces a dime but fail to detect that someone in the chain is stashing hundreds of thousands away in a pizza box in the freezer. Forget the cash in the freezer for a moment, calculate how many lost dimes it would take to justify the million spent counting them.
So The United Saints Recovery Project doesn't have much by way of "processes in place." What we have is hustle, improvisation, and the sense of frugality that comes from not being able to afford misplacing a dime no matter who's counting them in the end. It means almost no overhead: if someone gives us a check for $500 to help Ella Mae, $500 goes for materials and labor to help Ella Mae, it doesn't disappear into slippery, ill-defined "administrative costs."

So what exactly are we doing? Let's recap: Ella Mae's house is bleeding water at every pore. We have to stop the bleeding. This house was balloon-framed without benefit of any exterior sheathing, so it relies on the siding and the roof shingles entirely to keep the water out. This has all long since failed. The roof has no eave overhanging the exterior walls (not an inch) and the shifting and settling has pulled the attachment between the roof edge and the walls completely free for most of the perimeter. You can see daylight from the inside. On a positive note, I think all of the termites drowned.
Serious re-roofing and re-siding has to wait for funding, but, with the interior of the house rapidly turning into the exterior, we can't do any work on the inside that won't get destroyed over a weekend by the capriciousness micro-climate of New Orleans. So what does Daryl have to work with? He has some leftover rolls of roofing felt sitting in the yard by the tool shed alongside piles of roof shingles. He has some salvaged lumber donated by Hands On New Orleans. He has a couple of groups of volunteers coming through and he has Chet the carpenter. His solution, which would be unacceptable under any other circumstances, is to pull off the siding around the failed areas, apply the roofing felt to the exterior studs, and re-install the old siding. Chet can quickly train dozens of people to do this, including people who have never used a power tool or stood on a ladder. Daryl can take another group up on the roof to install new shingles over the old ones to act as a temporary roof or tarp areas that are too damaged to shingle. There's even some caulk, primer, and recycled paint so the neighbors don't complain about yet another half-finished eye-sore on the block. That will hold the majority of the water out while we hunt down the less obvious leaks and plug them. Then we can do some essential structural work without watching the product of our efforts rot before our eyes and without kicking Ella Mae out of her own house. The volunteers get to meet Ella Mae and do something that really helps her, United Saints gets a little more funding trickling in, a dozen college girls from Maryland can now use a skill saw without endangering themselves or others, the three plumbers coming the following week can run the supply lines, and Ella Mae can sleep without it raining on her bed. Daryl can now start worrying about the next steps. Bear in mind, this is only one of our on-going projects and every week brings inquiries for more.

A few months go by and I'm watching all of these overlapping patchwork solutions begin to knit together. Ella Mae walks through the house that we are rebuilding around her. She takes very short steps, always eying the floor in front of her. This is how you walk when you know you cannot afford to fall. She pauses to pick up an old silver ice bucket, or a doll, or a string of glass Mardi Gras beads. She's perfectly lucid today and has been all week. She seems to respond well to having all of these "young people" clamoring around the house. Everyone wants to sit with her for a while and this seems to make her more aware. She's been living alone for a long time.
I'm covered in fine white dust and she's telling me about getting her car stolen last year. It was a late model Trans Am, a turbo. She says she's always liked cars like that and there's a little bit of fire in her eyes that I've seen before, like when Miss Gail is telling her she has to take a bath to visit the doctor. Ella Mae bristles, her chin juts out, and she talks with her shoulders, "My Grandmamma taught me to take a bath, same as you." Ella Mae doesn't like being bossed around, but eventually Gail cajoles her into using the shower we just finished installing. Gail then tells me about the car, "You wouldn't believe it, but she used to drive up to the church in that thing. It's probably best she doesn't still have it. Ella Mae's always liked cars like that." The Trans Am was just gone one day. Ella Mae couldn't find the paperwork or explain to the police what happened. It's highly unlikely they would do anything about it anyway. It's probably already been through the chop shops near Sand Mountain, Alabama, the body tossed into Little River canyon.
Sometimes Ella Mae will tell you a little about where she came from, or explain why she kept one of the enumerable objects piled throughout the house, "My sister got a birthday present and she had to give me something too 'cause I'm the baby." Other times, when she's a little absent, she talks about the little man that lives in a wooden box on the porch who keeps trying to sneak into the house (although I am beginning to suspect she's having a little fun with us sometimes). She fought Miss Gail over the new stove; she didn't want an electric, but she can't have a gas stove anymore. She might start a burner and wander off. Chet showed up one morning to find the kitchen full of the smell of gas. Ella Mae still didn't want an electric stove; she was firm on this point. Miss Gail was firmer.

Beautiful Zion

I have asked the Internet, that deep if somewhat erratic well of raw data, for all it can give me about a gospel song or spiritual entitled "Don't Worry 'Bout Me" and all it can give me is Billy Holiday. That's not the same song. Billy Holiday was singing about being left by a lover ("Don't worry 'bout me, baby"). Ella Mae is singing about taking leave of this life, "I am baptized/I am satisfied." She may have made the whole song up for all I know. I'm trying to piece together her lyrics a bit at a time and so far I'm pretty sure "I look at my hands and my hands are new/I look at my feet and they are, too" is about reaching the afterlife. It also says something about being redeemed and ends, interestingly enough, with "Thank God almighty, I'm free at last."
I said "she sings quietly to herself" but I did not say "she sings softly." A fine distinction, I know, but let me explain. She may speak softly, running all of the words together, but her singing voice has the confidence and clarify that betrays long years of practice. She may keep her voice low, but the sound is precise, assertive, and effortless; there is power behind it. If enough people gather around her front porch to listen, she may show off a little. So it came as no surprise when the clearing operation in her dinning room unearthed, next to an enormous stereo receiver cabinet with a still functioning 8-track recorder, a case of 45 rpm. records, one of which featured her on both sides from her days as a gospel singer. The label is gone, so we don't know who recorded it, we don't know when, and we don't know if there are more, but Amee was able to get someone to re-master that old 45 into a digital format. We all got to hear what her voice sounded like when she was younger. In its essence it was the same then as it is now.

So we keep going. It keeps moving forward, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. We get the help we need somehow. Apparent divine intervention has become almost a given. Let me cite some actual instances:

"No, I didn't bring a hacksaw today, I didn't think we'd need one. Sorry"
"That's funny, 'cause you're standing on one."
"Where did that come from?"
"Don't know, never seen it before."

"Hi, I'm Eugene. I'm a plumber, do you need some help?"
Funny you should ask.

"Do you mean to tell me our very last scrap piece of pressure treated 2x4 just happened to be exactly 33 inches long? Guess I can go ahead and install that window after all."

"If we just had a 10" lenght of 4" PVC we could get this done."
"How about a ten foot length? It's behind the volunteer house. Found it yesterday while I was cutting back the vines."

But solutions to every obstacle can't appear by magic all of the time. Sometimes our efforts just grind to a halt. We don't have the manpower, we don't have the funds, we can't get the materials, we lack the skills. We're pecking away at an intractable problem, we're moving a mountain with a spoon, we're paving the ocean. You're tired and your hands look like you've been given a manicure with a metal grinder. You can't bear to climb up on that roof one more time. It's not coming together. It's not working. You can't see the end of it.
You've been living and working everyday with the same people and you're suddenly sick of the sight of each other. You find yourself getting irritable over petty things. Every mannerism that used to be funny now seems intended specifically to get under your skin. "That's it, if he says 'Snap out of it!' one more time I won't be able to keep this flatbar out of contact with his eye socket." This, of course, is stupid, but it's what happens when the reason you're doing what you're doing gets drowned out in the everyday frustrations and physical exhaustion combines with the emotional kind. All it takes is one personal setback, something that was keeping the wind in your sails is gone, and you just can't do this anymore. You need a break. You have to get away.
Funny thing is, your foot isn't even on the pavement before you know how much you'll miss it. You know you'll be back. The sound of trumpets will get into your head and you'll want to see your New Orleans family again. When you're contemplating coming back, because you left so many things unfinished or unsaid. Then, while you're sitting on a North Florida beach, someone sends you the pictures of Ella Mae's house and you're on a plane. The petty stuff didn't matter. They understand. It turns out they left the kitchen door open for you the whole time you were gone. Volunteer exhaustion isn't like corporate burnout. It's very personal. It hits you in the heart.
So, guys, it looks like this is the end of my second tour. It won't be my last, I'm sure. If nothing else, I'll have to see St. Charles Avenue, my favorite street in the world, ankle deep in beads again. Forgive me for the short notice and thank you for understanding. Thanks also for the concerns you've all expressed and the ones you haven't, and don't worry 'bout me.

---

Photos

The Neighborhood
The view from Ella Mae's front porch. The "white van" is parked across the street.

The Neighborhood 2
The situation just around the corner.

The Neighborhhod 3
Ella Mae's house is to the right. To the left is a house that could use a little work, too.

The State of Things 1
Before anyone could do anything, a path had to be cleared.

The State of Things 3
All plumbing in the house had long since become useless.

The State of Things 4
The aleged kitchen.

Phase 2: Get Her a Working Bathroom
You may be wondering why I'm holding a crescent wrench if I'm working with PVC.

Give a Girl a Nailgun and...
Note the look of extreme concentration.

Hand Off
One group leaves, another arrives to carry on Phase 2

We Have Water!
Just don't ask about the "First Flushing Ceremony."

Hack Job
...and don't ask what idiot put this together or why it looks like this.

Phase 3 Begins
Next phase is to make the first two rooms livable so she can move into them while we work on the rest.

The Deloitte Group
I've just decided that they get their own entry. Look for it soon.