Behind 'Broussard's Lament'
By Margaret Moser, Fri., Jan. 15, 2010
They told us Friday they would come,
Saturday came and still the dying lived on
It's one of the most striking tunes on Sarah Jarosz's Song Up in Her Head, "Broussard's Lament," one that leaves the topic of love far behind the questions of governmental culpability and human dignity.
"I was 14 when Hurricane Katrina happened, and it was one of those songs that came very quickly in the aftermath of all that," explains its author, Jarosz. "I saw an interview on TV with this man named Broussard, and he was telling the story of a woman during the flooding. They kept telling her, 'Thursday, the buses will come tomorrow; Friday they will come; Saturday they will come.' And he cried as he's telling it.
"I thought, 'That needs to be a song.'
"Those things are so real and human, it's really touched me as a young person. A lot of my songs are personal and about love, so it was nice to write about something else."
The story of Aaron Broussard wasn't simply a sound bite. It earned him national notoriety, a Wikipedia entry, and even anti-Broussard sites (www.aaronbroussard.info). The president of New Orleans' neighboring Jefferson Parish, Broussard made an emotional appearance on MSNBC's Meet the Press just after Katrina in 2005 that caught national attention when he broke down describing the death of a colleague's mother, drowned in a nursing home that was not evacuated (www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9dJjAEVZ4g).
Broussard, it turned out, may have helped create chaos in Jefferson Parish when the levees broke, because, according to Wikipedia, "he followed a years-old 'doomsday plan' in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and evacuated more than 200 drainage pump operators north to Washington Parish. The pumps remained off for more than two days and sections of the parish, including Metairie and Kenner, experienced severe flooding as a result." Furthermore, although his colleague's mother did drown in her nursing home, it appears to have happened as much by operator neglect. Broussard kept his position as parish president and remains a controversial figure in Louisiana politics.
It's sobering to juxtapose the tawdry reality of Broussard's appearance with the bleak reality of what happened when the levees broke in New Orleans. Yet within the murky blur of truth under the glare of the media amid unquestionably disastrous conditions, Broussard's lament, no matter how grandstanding or specious, spoke of a terrible truth echoed timelessly in the folk tradition in Jarosz's song.
For most, the buses never came.
