“They’re going to second line,” I said to Trish, and we left the Medicine Man to fall in behind the band. An older black man with gray dreads and a scraggly beard marched arm-in-arm with a bespectacled white woman of about the same age, both broadly smiling. Were they lovers? Friends? They shuffled in time with the second line. “Only in New Orleans can you get a second line at your protest,” the man exclaimed, beaming with pride and satisfaction. A thin woman with long, curly black hair and a hip hat danced like she was born to do it. She’d pulled up a sign from the median advertising the re-opening of Liberty Bank. “I am coming home! I will rebuild! I am New Orleans!” read the bank’s slogan. The woman held the sign above her head, waving it as she shut her eyes and shook a move loose. She said she’d just returned home. She’d been asking people around her to autograph the sign. Trish and I each scribbled our names, happy to return her enthusiasm. We spotted a friend, a musician who had been back and forth since the flood, living in New Orleans and then traveling and playing music in other parts of the country. He’d arrived in town earlier that day from San Francisco.

“This was the first time coming back to New Orleans that I felt like I didn’t want to come back here,” he said as we danced up Rampart Street together. The prospect had depressed him. “But this is helping a lot,” he grinned, and we all nodded.

“Say, we! We on a roll!” the Soul Rebels chanted.

“We on a roll!” we cried.

“Say we! We from N.O.!”

Clapping now, in time with the rhyme, “We from N.O.!”

And so we marched and danced, friends reunited with friends and together with strangers, amid the rubble and the wreckage of homes and lives, and I experienced a moment of grace, a moment of joyful defiance of fear, sorrow, apprehension, loss. We danced on the crumbling asphalt of our own mortality. A beautiful illusion, from which I became detached not long after the procession turned onto Canal Street.

The day had been chilly and gray all along, but I’d been able to forget about it. As we marched along the main drag of old New Orleans, all the windows on the brick and stone hotels and department stores, which rose high on each side of the street, reflected the opaque dinge of the sky. Scaffolding covered the facades of some of the older buildings. A damp wind blew down the length of Canal. The buildings felt empty, hollowed. Everything around – toppled traffic lights, tattered palms, shredded awnings – appeared to be in a state of desolate disrepair. The three lone workers high up on a scaffold looked tiny as they watched us pass. I felt as though we were parading through a ghost town.

The band took a break, and the emcee, who had been riding in the bed of a pickup truck at the front of the march, took up a bull horn. “I’m back,” call and response. “You’re back. We’re back. We’re back.”

I turned to look at those marching behind me. Many carried yellow picket signs that had been supplied by an organization called the Troops Out Now Coalition. The black writing on the signs promoted a number of different agendas. “STOP urban removal conspiracy, support the right to return,” read one. “Bush and FEMA guilty of racist genocide,” read another. And there were still others: “Stop Bush blocking Cuban and Venezuelan aid,” “Stop the December 13th execution of Tookie Williams,” “Anti-war movement in solidarity with Katrina survivors,” and “Power to Katrina survivors, evict FEMA.” I wondered how one might interpret a photograph of our protest if it appeared in a newspaper. Based on the signs we carried, no one would really know what we wanted. And some of the signs used language that I thought would unnecessarily marginalize our cause, words like “genocide” and “conspiracy,” boogey man concepts – even if the charges held merit – too easily dismissed by many of those who might otherwise sympathize with our message.

The march disbanded at City Hall, and a crowd re-formed around the steps in front of the building. City Hall looked just as broken and abandoned as Canal Street. Someone had set up a podium and the shrill, nasal voice of the first speaker cracked over the P.A. Cynicism and flashbacks to Austin darkened my mood. The white woman at the microphone chastised “white liberals” for not doing enough to support the interests of  “poor black people.” A moment later she declared that whites needed to stop interfering in the lives of blacks. “Haven’t we done enough harm?” she wanted to know. She insisted that “we,” wealthy white people, had to give the people of the black community control over their own lives. “Put their lives into their own beautiful, capable, gentle, nurturing hands,” she said, and with that series of adjectives, her screech gave way to a kind of syrupy lullaby voice. Trish bristled at the woman’s creepy, patronizing tone and feeble-minded contradiction. I’d had enough as well. It depressed me to end a day full of so much positive energy on such a sour note.

As we walked away, we passed the Soul Rebels who had gathered around a table where a few women were distributing pre-cooked hamburgers out of an aluminum catering tin. Though the dry burgers looked unappetizing, the gesture moved me, brought back to me what this event was all about: not the divisiveness of politics, but the unity of community, and in one of the last cities in the country in which it so strongly existed.

Perhaps I need to adjust my expectations. It seemed to me beyond dispute that the city, state, and federal governments had failed in their obligation to the people of New Orleans in the days and months following Katrina. Some may defend that failure, make excuses for it, rationalize it, but if the government’s lackluster response had driven home a single point, it was that one cannot rely on the government. Though the intent of the protests I attended was to demand change from the government, the real result was to unite communities of like-minded people under a common cause, even for a day, communities of people who might support each other when their government fails them.

If that’s the case, I’d rather join those dancing in the street than those railing outside the walls. I’d rather sing together than individually lecture, collectively seek solace in the beauty of our common humanity than in the angry camaraderie of impotent protest. I’d rather be part of a demonstration at Congo Square and second line to City Hall that put smiles on the faces of many who might not have been smiling otherwise in the devastated city where I was born, which is something we can do, even when no one else seems to be listening. And in that, I’m glad to have been counted.