We were awoken today by hammers on our roof. After four days of desultory activity, the roofers we'd hired to replace our roof post-Hurricane Gustav finally got down to it. We had four or five guys with hammers pounding in the shingles they'd laid over the tar paper that went up on Wednesday, and by six PM or so they'd finished the job.

Concurrently, our next door neighbor had a crew demolishing the part of his house that was destroyed by trees during the hurricane. There's a definite hierarchy in the building trades: our roofing crew had hammers and wore gloves, while the demolition crew next door wore no gloves, and worked mainly with planks of 2x4 they'd pried off the house. With these they'd pry more beams and other parts off, until most of the southern half of the dwelling was rubble, and could be carted away.

Try as one might, there's no way to see this as a simple hurricane recovery story; it's racial. The Mexican (or, for all I know, Central American) guys working on the roof are friendly enough, and some are fluent in English. Our conversation has been limited to negotiations over whether or not they can use our recycling bin to cart trash to the dumpster (sure, why not), whether they think they’ll be done today (yes), and whether they can use our water faucet to clean off an LSU baseball hat belonging to one of them that fell in the mud (of course). Every such work crew has a swaggering young white guy with a cell phone permanently affixed to his ear who appears intermittently and communicates to the work crew as little as possible. Overheard conversation fragment: “So I said to the head Mexican...”

A white family inside one of the houses, a white guy who owns the other house, Mexican guys on the roofs and in the dumpster: quite a multicultural experience. The missing dimension was invisible to anyone who didn't have a bit more background: the family who had been forced out of the house next door by Gustav was a black family of two parents and nine kids who had had a lease-purchase agreement with B, the (white) owner of the house. B had moved out when his second marriage went south. After years of trying to sell the place, he'd found E, who couldn't buy the place outright but agreed to a lease-purchase arrangement. According to B, E hadn’t been completely forthcoming about the size of his brood; he’d said he had “four” kids when he rented the place. The truth was that his three oldest sons, one of whom was a policeman, lived with him part of the time. The five youngest were also still at home.

E had stretched the truth to obtain a shot at the American Dream, home ownership in a good neighborhood. Despite the elderly, problematic trees that tend to fall on your house and try to kill you, our neighborhood is a pleasant collection of older subdivisions convenient to downtown and the university; I don’t blame him for wanting in. But the last straw for B was when a camera crew from the local TV station showed up a few days after the hurricane to hear the human interest story of how he and his family (and about half a dozen friends who were sheltering with them) braved death during Gustav. E identified himself as the “owner” of the house; for a followup story on the same station a month or so later E embellished his story still further. In our conversations E always spoke as though the home was his; he was critical of the progress of reconstruction and enthusiastic in his description of how “his” house was going to be repaired and rebuilt. Either the fact that his lease-purchase was now not worth the paper it had been printed on hadn’t penetrated, or he was hoping that by talking (to me and to the press) as though the house was his, it would come true. He got into a little trouble for telling FEMA that he was a homeowner; he spoke of this as a “misunderstanding” on their part, but in this one case I think FEMA was only going with the information they’d been given. Again, I don’t blame E for wanting things to be different from the way they were. B gave him back his lease-purchase deposit, and (according to B) an extra sum to help his family replace the furniture and other items they’d lost.

B was angry at the attention and attention that E was getting. I can’t say that there wasn’t a trace of Old Southern White Guy Entitlement in his anger; his attitude seemed to be that he had given E an opportunity, which had been withdrawn by the hurricane. Whatever. Evidently black people are held to a higher standard of gratitude than white people. Then again, I don’t know of any landlord/renter relationship where both parties don’t end up feeling ill served, so perhaps the racial element was merely an added wrinkle. Who knows?

So. Neighborhood in transition: the white folks who live there, the latinos who fixed the place after a hurricane, the black folks who almost made it in. Fast forward five years, and who knows? The old established African-American and white families in our neighborhood may be all up in arms over the Mexican and Central American interlopers looking to move in. The discrepancy in opportunity here is blatant; everybody in the scenario (except me, the college professor) works hard: B at a bank, where he’s a vice president; E at the printing shop at the university, where he runs the presses and loads trucks; our new Mexican neighbors, who had an unusually pleasant day today to work in, but would have had to work just as hard even if it were 106 degrees, and would have been seriously screwed if it had rained (no pay whatsoever).