Oyster fishermen in Pointe a la Hache never had it easy. Every day, Tinson Myron Lamar spent 10 hours on the Gulf of Mexico with his co-workers -- chugging out to the banks where the sought-after Gulf Coast Oysters were to be found. Deckhand Lamar was responsible for scrubbing the boat down while the others collected their edible treasure. In the evening, they split the take among them, with Lamar getting $2 per sack. On good days, he'd make $100.

But then came Hurricane Katrina -- and destroyed everything. The boat. The oyster breeding grounds. His house. His entire village, which used to sit in the Mississippi Delta just a few miles south of New Orleans, was virtually wiped from the face of the Earth.

Now, Lamar sits on a cot in Baton Rouge and contemplates the ruins of his life. He is 43 years old and for the last 24 years, cleaning fishing boats is all he's known. It wasn't much -- $2,000 per month was his standard take when he wasn't sick or didn't take a day off here and there for a short vacation. But it was just enough to support his wife and three kids and to finance a small trailer in a mobile-home park. It wasn't, however, nearly enough to pay for flood insurance, never mind picking up the pieces following a storm like Katrina. And he knows there's nothing left. He's seen aerial pictures of the small town he once lived in. "We have to start again from scratch," he says.

Camped at midfield

The River Center in Baton Rouge is one of the most important indoor sports halls in Louisiana. Now, it houses refugees like Lamar and his family -- they live on a couple of mattresses just to the left of the field. Right next to them, Lennox Battle is camped with his wife and three children. The 40-year-old was likewise an oyster fisherman. The gaps between his teeth attest to a life free of dentist visits. Too expensive, he says. Health insurance, too, was considered an unaffordable luxury for the Battle family. "It's damn near impossible to pay all the bills," he says.

Next to him, Dennis Lanico, a cook from New Orleans, dozes. He too, like virtually everyone in the building, has lost what little he had.

In all, there are over 4,000 people in the hall. All are now destitute. Most of them are poor, have a lot of children, are uneducated and are African-American.

America, it seems, looked into the floodwaters left behind by Katrina and saw suffering and poverty of inconceivable magnitude. Hundreds of thousands of society's poorest have been left behind by the ebbing floodwaters. Along with the corpses and toxic mud, Americans are looking squarely at the underbelly of their own society.

On the same day the levees broke, Charles Nelson of the US Census Bureau in Washington presented the most recent report on income and poverty in the United States. The numbers and graphs he unveiled offered an appalling insight into the USA.

The number of those in America living in poverty climbed by 1.1 million to fully 37 million people - the fourth jump in a row. While the official number of US poor dropped steadily during Bill Clinton's presidency, it has grown by 12 percent under George W. Bush.

The presentation of the poverty numbers is an annual, late-summer routine -- a statistical insight into a reality Americans prefer to ignore. This time, though, a fundamental debate about poverty in America has been triggered. The numbers, after all, were accompanied by televised images of an unimaginable catastrophe. America has taken a good look at itself in the last two weeks -- and is horrified by what it's seen.

Long shadows of slavery

Now, one of the richest countries in the world is talking about how it left an entire section of its society to fend for itself. It's been years since the long shadows of slavery, racism, and poverty have been so intensely discussed. Across the country, people are beginning to see the suffering -- from Detroit in the north, where fully one third of the population live under the poverty line, to the capital in Washington D.C., where the infant death rate is double that of Beijing.

But it's the South which has long delivered the most horrifying numbers. The region has always been far behind the North, never having really recovered from the Civil War 140 years ago. The primary victims of Katrina -- Louisiana and Mississippi -- are both among the very poorest of America's states. In New Orleans, where two-thirds of the population was African-American, 23 percent of city residents lived hand-to-mouth.

The hurricane dramatically increased the suffering and added a dash of anarchy along with it. Yale professor Jim Sleeper christened the newly lawless city, "Baghdad on the Mississippi," and Frank Rich, a leading Bush critic and editorialist for the New York Times, wrote of the "Titanic Syndrome." Below decks, he wrote, it was every man for himself. Only the first-class passengers had a clear path to the lifeboats.

In the meantime, some of New Orleans' wealthiest whites have returned -- by helicopter -- to their villas. In a field in Audubon Park, a rich settlement hardly touched by the hurricane and ensuing flood, helicopters delivered troops from an Israeli security firm to protect the expensive mansions. At the end of last week, some from the city's high society met with Mayor Ray Nagin to talk about rebuilding. The rich want to use the disaster to change the structure of the city, demographically, geographically and politically.

Biloxi High School, meanwhile, on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi, is serving as an emergency shelter. It is a place for the stranded. The elderly wander aimlessly through the halls; others lie directly on the cold floor. Many, like 27-year-old Charles Parfait, are exhausted and ready to give up. He is mentally ill and has long been fighting for state support in the courts.

Leaving New Orleans for a new life

But the courageous are also present. One of them is Ann Blackmon, an unmarried 29-year-old with two children. She used to earn her money selling sandwiches in a casino for $10 an hour. Now, she's homeless. So, too, is most of her extended family, including her parents, her children, her sisters, brothers, nephews and nieces. Thirty-four people in all. But they're not giving up. Instead, they're heading to Florida to start a new life.

And there are hundreds of thousands like her who will leave the area forever -- an exodus of historic dimensions. Even before the flood, they had virtually no money or car to escape with; Saving any valuables was out of the question. Now they have nothing to help them as they are forced to begin an entirely new life.

Two foreign worlds -- two different Americas - are confronting one another in these days after Katrina. And that is perhaps the only silver lining of this catastrophe. The Baptist church in Baton Rouge is a good example. Pastor Stuart Rothberg and his 4,000 congregants are all white, live in well-taken-care-of homes, drive SUVs and have well-paying jobs. At the moment, however, the church gym and Sunday school rooms are full. They're being used to house some 700 poor African-Americans from New Orleans.