Right Where He's Supposed To Be

BY DAVID SHAFER | November 11, 2005

Country: United States

Topics: Emergencies, Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans East, Louisiana - Staring at the facade of his ruined house in mid-October, Ken Williams still looks shell-shocked by what Katrina did to his home and his hometown. But by now enough time has elapsed, enough healing has taken place, that he can almost laugh at some of the more absurd parts of his hurricane story. Like, for instance, the fact that on the afternoon of Saturday, August 27 - the day before Katrina made landfall - Ken Williams mowed his front lawn.

"My son's never gonna let me live that down," Williams says now, smiling. "I thought the hurricane would give us a good watering. I wanted to come back to a neat lawn."

But by 3:00 AM the next morning, as he, his wife and son packed a few belongings into their car and evacuated to his sister's house in Atlanta, Williams realized deep down that nothing would ever be the same again.

"That Sunday morning," he says, "was the last time I was whole."

As New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast continues to dig out from the disaster, Ken Williams is helping heal himself - and his community - by doing relief work that combines two of his abiding passions: producing music and helping society's most vulnerable. A professional drummer and composer for more than 30 years, Williams has played with the likes of New Orleans' iconic bandleader Dr. John and former Beatle Paul McCartney. He's also put together an admirable career in social services, working to help adults with disabilities find jobs and distributing food to homeless shelters.

Today Williams is a program officer with Mercy Corps' Hurricane Katrina response team. One of only three team members based in New Orleans - more than a dozen more are in Baton Rouge and Portland - Williams is looking at a variety of ways to jump-start creative arts activities, with an emphasis on music and cultural heritage. Such programs play an important role in the agency's multi-pronged efforts to heal the emotional wounds of children displaced or otherwise affected by the massive storm.

Williams is reaching out to community groups to try to organize free concerts, sponsor drum-making classes and develop youth programs in theatre, painting and other arts. And, if funding comes through, he'll help carry out a Mercy Corps plan to re-supply some area schools with music instruments and band uniforms. He's keen on doing all he can to see that the music stays in his injured city - to soothe its shattered nerves, to call its children home.

"Everything that's happened to me until now was preparing me for this," Williams says. "I'm right where I'm supposed to be."

Music is an early calling

Ken Williams can't pinpoint exactly when music first entered his life. In New Orleans, he explains, music is just part of the culture. But his first serious embrace happened when, as a sophomore at Southern University in New Orleans, he enrolled in jazz studies and learned to play percussion under the tutelage of the "avante garde saxophonist" who ran the program.

It wasn't long before he was drumming professionally. At age 21, he joined the funk-and-soul band, Chocolate Milk, two weeks before they signed a recording contract with RCA. The group recorded three top-20 R&B hits in nine years (the last, "Blue Jeans," was in 1981). As a percussionist, he's accompanied New Orleans jazzman Allen Toussaint and Dr. John. He's recorded with McCartney as well as Joe Cocker, Patti LaBelle, the Neville Brothers and the Meters. He's toured internationally with the celebrated Olympia Brass Band and produced albums for New Orleans R&B legends Oliver Morgan and the late Ernie K-Doe, and for Louisiana blues giant Tabby Thomas.

In the 1980s, Williams began a parallel career in social service, working first with at-risk youth and then directing job programs for adults with developmental disabilities. In 2000 he got a job with Second Harvest, the nation's largest food-bank network, before being hired away in 2002 by the state of Louisiana to direct staff training and development for a program that served developmentally disabled adults.

Williams knows just how important music is to this city. Give him a chance, and he'll tell you how second-line clubs knit neighborhoods or recount for you the history of Congo Square or the evolution of the Indian Gangs tradition at Mardi Gras. Williams believes that in New Orleans, music can knit neighborhoods together.

"The jazz funerals passed by my house when I little. You'd hear the music coming and you'd run to the door, watch the parade," Williams recalls. "There were second line clubs in every neighborhood. I grew up in the middle of all that music. If it doesn't come back, it's dead. And that scares me to death."

Revisiting New Orleans neighborhoods

When Ken Williams returns to New Orleans now, he is like a doctor making rounds. The neighborhoods are the patients.

Williams grew up in Treme, the working-class African-American neighborhood known for its deep musical roots and high concentration of jazz parades. Driving through, he sees Ivory Johnson sitting on his stoop, waiting for a plumber. An older man, Johnson was a good friend of Williams' late father and is now one of the first people who returned to the block after the storm. This neighborhood had only taken a few feet of water, and Johnson's house escaped serious damage. But his jeep was stolen in Houston, where he had gone to escape Katrina. And when he finally got back to New Orleans, he found his parrot dead in its cage. "Starved to death," said Johnson. "That's the only thing I'm real sorry about."

Williams finds all this out. Then asks after other neighbors. Then asks how Johnson is getting food. Then it's time to move on.

"You see that plumber, you lasso him for me, hear?" Johnson says to Williams as they part.

In his own neighborhood, New Orleans East, Williams eyes each driveway, looking for the layer of grey mud - cracked like an alligator's skin - left behind by the flood. If that mud is undisturbed, as it is in many of the driveways on his block, Williams knows that those neighbors haven't yet returned home.

Outside his house, Williams opens the trunk of his car and picks up the backpack in which he keeps the gloves and masks and bleach wipes. Only then does he enter his house.

Inside, the mess is overpowering. Sodden piles of ruined things are piled in the corners. A line of grime runs across the walls a foot or so below the ceiling.

Williams is fascinated by similar high-water lines throughout the city: inside houses, on outside walls, foundations, cars. He finds the neat precision of those lines — as if drawn by a vengeful giant wielding a ruler — so oddly juxtaposed against the chaotic mess left by the receding waters.

The loss of his studio hurts him the most. In there was the physical accumulation of a 25-year career as a percussionist, composer, producer, session musician and touring musician. Photos, original masters, sheet music, conga drums, keyboards, computers, vinyl records and compact discs all slopped in a pile of soft, black ooze and left to fester. Certain things float, he discovered - like the plastic laundry basket that rode the flood like an ark and then beached itself gently on a conga case, clothes still dry inside.

Williams' wife hasn't witnessed this scene herself. She came back with him a few weeks after the flood, but she couldn't bring herself to go inside the house. So she sat in the car and cried.

Williams remembers crying, too, at his sister's house in Atlanta, when he was watching the news.

"Those were people I knew. They were my friends," he said, his voice like a long straight line. "I didn't cry because I felt sorry for them; I cried because I couldn't help them."

Hoping for a better New Orleans

Leaving his house, Williams spots a neighbor sitting in his pickup truck. They greet each other as old friends. For three days a week, this man dons a heavy-duty Tyvek suit and safety goggles and cleans out his flood-soaked house. He spends the other four days with his evacuated family in Alabama. Williams asks after the man's family, their common neighbors. They swap stories of aggravation over insurance. "I can't wait to be out here with you," Williams says to the man, as they part.

As Williams drives away — to catch a plane to visit his wife and 14-year-old son, who are still in Atlanta — he remarks that before Katrina he had never spoken to the Tyvek-suited neighbor. This is what makes him sure that there is some power in this event, that this tragedy can shake people up enough to change the way they do things.

Asked what he thinks New Orleans will be like in one year or in five, Williams answers without hesitation:

"Better. I can't tell you what better is gonna look like, but I know it's gonna be better."