2 posts tagged “racism”

You are Marty Cann, and this is the moment you've feared since your family's secret got out two summers ago. It's not where you are -- an ordinary gas station in this town your family has called home since the 19th century -- it's the guy walking toward you. You didn't expect anything momentous to happen when you stopped to fill up on this summer day in 2008, but there he is, and he sees you. The two of you have said hello since all this started, but now you want to talk. You want to make things right, even though you have no idea how to do that. He's taller than you, of course -- once upon a time, he played fullback for the local high school -- but he seems almost forbidding up close, with his bald head and soul patch tilted down at you. You've got to say something. "Hey, Darrell," you blurt out. "Do we need to talk?"

You are Darrell Crawford, 39 years old, and you weren't expecting to run into Marty Cann here. But Abbeville doesn't have a lot of gas stations, so it's not exactly a shock. You are still struggling with the fact that your family tragedy has become a public discussion, but you're a preacher, so you're used to having people watch you. No one would blame you if you yelled at him, or turned your back on him, or just kept right on walking as if he didn't exist. A simple murder would be tame in comparison to what happened. You have some anger pent up, to be sure, so maybe you decide not to let Marty off the hook that easily. You smile and say, "I'll let you know."

Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun"--a shotgun--"on them. We chased them down."

Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the suspected looters and considered killing him, but decided to be merciful. "I rolled him over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit in the back with the riot gun," he tells me. "I thought that was good enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood so people will know Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're not doing tours right now.'"

He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

Documentary film, Welcome to New Orleans, here: