Franklinton, La. ? Editor’s note: This is the second of a four-part series written by Leonard Pitts Jr. in connection with his visit to New Orleans, one year after Hurricane Katrina.

The last time we saw Barry Turner, he was single-handedly sweeping up this town, an hour and change north of New Orleans.

I met him last year a few days after Hurricane Katrina. Found him standing in front of his shop, Anything and Everything, which, as the name implies, sells sandwiches and comic books and videos and antique toys and knives and just about, well, anything and everything.

He was holding a broom. Which was appropriate because after the storm barreled through, he went to his shop and swept up the debris on the sidewalk. Saw a mess in front of the shop across the street and swept that up, too. Before he knew it, Barry Turner had swept up four blocks of the town’s main street and was working on the side streets. All by himself. Wearing out broom after broom after broom.

Why? “I’m not going to stand there,” he said. “I’ve worked my whole life. The city was dirty and needed cleaning, so why not do it?”

A year later, the broken windows are fixed, the lights are on and Turner, a genial 63-year-old whose friendliness is a force of nature, is offering sandwiches and sodas and free comic books. Su casa es tu casa. But all I want from him is a few words on the subject of self-reliance.

For some, self-reliance – or the lack thereof – has become the salient moral of the Hurricane Katrina story. For weeks after the storm, one could hardly open one’s e-mail box without being ambushed by conservative bloggers claiming the horrific images from New Orleans – poor people, sick people, old people, black people stranded, thirsty, hungry, homeless, traumatized – reflected the failure of a “welfare state mentality.”

Credit – or blame – Rush Limbaugh for the term. His argument: Years of dependency on government had left these poor folks too accustomed to looking to government for salvation. Had sapped their self-reliance.

Some of us found that argument, designed to absolve President Bush of richly deserved blame for the Katrina fiasco, charged with racial and class overtones. I’ve come here to find out what Turner thinks. Who, after all, is better suited to speak about self-reliance? Man’s town was tree-strewn and broken, cut off from the outside world, and he got a broom and swept it up. He knows a little something about self-help.

But when I ask him whether the rest of the country should expect the Katrina evacuees to do more to help themselves, the question seems almost to perplex him. He says, “Up to a point, maybe that’s accurate. But if you’ve been relocated, what are you going to do to help yourself?”

If you don’t have a car, he says, and you find yourself in Houston, Baltimore, Dallas, how do you get back to the Lower Ninth Ward to clear your yard or gut your home? “People are not moochers. If you give people a chance, they’re going to work. People say these people are standing (in) line waiting for a handout. Everybody standing in line is trying to help their families survive.”

But should it be government’s role to help them?

Government, says Turner, exists to do for people what no individual one of us can do for ourselves. “That’s why I pay these outrageous taxes.”

“You do what you got to do to help people,” he says. “That’s the way it should be. People should help people who are less fortunate.”

There is something in it Sunday-School simple, something that knifes through the rhetoric of political brinksmanship and pulls you back to things you used to know but forgot somehow along the way as life got busier and harder, colder and more anonymous. Things like, look out for the other guy. Like, lend a helping hand. Things of community that embarrass your smart mouth even to say.

But things that feel good. That feel right. Especially when you sit in Barry Turner’s small town, whole again, and marvel at what community can do.

There is no mystery here. “We pulled together,” says Turner, “till we got it done.”