George was an old-timer. His grandfather had opened the store straight after the second world war, and George had begun working there as a boy and been there ever since. Altogether, apart from a break for military service in Korea, he had worked at the store for 60 years, been married to Carolyn for 50. Neither of them had ever known anything like those days after the hurricane hit and the displaced black population of New Orleans headed north to Baton Rouge. No, sir, nothing like it in 60 years, said the Simons. They had locked the doors of the store for three weeks, for the first time in living memory. It wasn't safe. Nothing was safe. People might say they were prejudiced. Well, hell, they were prejudiced! Prejudiced for us white folks, and prejudiced against those worthless evacuees from New Orleans who had never worked a day in their lives and had come to Baton Rouge to rob and loot and burn and live off handouts, and whine and gripe about how hard done by they were.

That was all you heard about these days: New Orleans, New Orleans, New Orleans. What about all the other places that had been so devastated by Katrina? What about the 4,000 dead cows in Cameron, and the lumberjacks of Bogalusa who got out there with their chainsaws and started clearing up and didn't sit around waiting for Fema (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) to come and feed 'em?

George would show you the e-mail he'd received from a like-minded citizen up in Utah (subject: "Civilised Nation") outlining in several hundred words, dribbling with racist irony and unbelievable detail, the scenes that had occurred when a planeload of New Orleans evacuees had landed in the Mormon state, laden with weapons, marijuana, crack, heroin, mountains of cash and looted jewellery with the price tags still on, being carried by children. Like the concerned citizen had written, New Orleans was a toilet - a toilet long overdue for a flush.

They had soaked all this up, George and Carolyn. So far as they were concerned, it was all true. But surely, I said, the stories of misconduct by evacuees in Baton Rouge, had turned out to be no more than rumours?

No, sir, said George. Why, the Chevron garage three blocks down had been robbed at gunpoint; a house two blocks west had been torched; shoplifting had been rampant. And then there was the River Center, that multi-million-dollar state-of-the-art downtown entertainment complex that had become the primary shelter for evacuees in the days after the storm. How had they repaid this kindness? By trashing the place, tearing it up, destroying the carpets, wrenching every fitting they could from the walls of the restrooms, causing millions of dollars' worth of damage. It was, as George said, unbelievable.

Only the other day his friend Cliff had been in the shop telling them about the evacuee that he'd overheard complaining to a Fema guy about the trailer park up there in Baker. The evacuee was unhappy because everyone else's trailer had graphics painted on the side and his was plain.

"I don't want a plain trailer," he was whining.

"I want a trailer with graphics on the side, like everyone else." As Carolyn said, the evacuee had probably daubed graffiti all over his trailer.

Carolyn had heard what had happened over at the astrodome in Houston, which had also been turned into a shelter. When the evacuees at the astrodome had received their $2,300 emergency handout from Fema, they had all gone down to the Galleria, that crown jewel among Texas malls, and bought themselves Gucci shoes. Gucci shoes! And we all know what they cost.

Eula Badon had been at the Houston Astrodome, though designer shoes were the last thing on her mind. She had stayed there shortly after the storm, in the early days of September. She told me how she had become separated from her family and had been alone there, and had lain down in the seats of the stadium and hoped to die. She had just about given up on life by then. Dying was all she wanted.

By the time we met, eight weeks later, Eula was living at the trailer park on the northern outskirts of Baton Rouge, in the town of Baker. The park was on the outer edges of Baker, out of sight, out of mind, across the tracks, on the wrong side of the railway line, right where the mostly poor, mostly black people lived. It had been named Renaissance Village and was an extraordinary spectacle to behold: a 63-acre unfinished car park, lined with rows of mobile homes, about 600 in all, every one of them white and shimmering in the winter sunlight.

Just don't ask me how many people were living there. I asked Fema who was in charge of the site but they didn't know, and became very shirty at my persistent inquiring. Stories of Fema incompetence were 10 a penny, but even so, I couldn't believe they hadn't counted. "Look!" said the exasperated Fema press spokesman, James McIntyre, finally (and, believe me, I heard that exclamation mark), "you and I aren't going to see eye to eye on this one." All I had asked was the population of the trailer park. All he could tell me was that they had only counted heads of households, and at the time of asking there were 554 families in 573 trailers. The park was a Fema initiative that had been set up and funded as temporary housing by the federal authority.