In the 11 years since my three sisters and I rode into Katrina's New Orleans to witness the effects of nature and human error on our beloved city, much has been learned and much has changed.
"Brownie," the director of the mismanaged Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was forced to resign, as was the New Orleans superintendent of police. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, criticized for inadequate evacuation efforts, didn't seek re-election. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, lambasted not only for failing to implement a workable evacuation plan, was eventually sentenced to 10 years in prison for receiving kickbacks during recovery efforts.
FEMA adopted a new mantra for future catastrophes, "Go big and go early," after making deadly mistakes inside the Superdome where 16,000 evacuees were forced to live without adequate supplies for five days.
Civil engineers learned from mistakes, too, when a report in the journal of the World Water Council concluded that flooding during Katrina could have been prevented, if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had retained an external review board to double-check flood-wall designs. As of 2010, a new $14 billion hurricane protection system was 92 percent complete.
Urban planners learned that wetlands, designed by nature to shield the mainland from storm surges but often destroyed by commercial endeavors, are in fact not dispensable. Wetlands indeed would have protected much of the city, including the hardest-hit Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood east of the French Quarter, a thriving neighborhood for 14,000 lower and middle-class mostly African-Americans that was affected by not one, but three breaches in flood walls.
Grass-roots activity also mounted, birthing organizations like the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, the Musicians Relief Fund and Brad Pitt's Make it Right Foundation, which pledged to build 150 homes in the Lower Ninth. Churches came together to create the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal, dedicated to the social, economic, environmental and racial justice systems which remain lacking in Katrina's aftermath: While 90 percent of residents have returned to the city since the storm, by contrast only 37 percent of Lower Ninth residents have returned, a direct reflection of continuing class and race problems.
Driving into the city that first day homeowners were allowed, my sisters and I saw the utter devastation we'd come to see. In the Lower Ninth in particular, it was as if the Mississippi River had been drained to reveal an abandoned city underneath. Deserted. Eerily silent. Doors of houses were half open like people had run away. Dried mud was caked on everything for miles in either direction. Wet piles of stuff that people had begun to pull out of their houses lay rotting in front yards.
My one older sister and I drove on for miles that day, through the city our free-spirited mama moved us to from conservative South Carolina in the 1970s after she divorced my father. We drove silently, holding onto each other, only occasionally seeing signs of life, including one lone man standing in the middle of the rubble with a handgun aimed at a pickup truck. He'd waited out the storm, he told us, tethered to the top of his two-story house for 10 hours. When the waters finally receded, his truck was gone, floated to this resting spot four blocks from his house. "I've been looking for this truck for four weeks," said the man, who at that point shot into the swollen door of the vehicle, the only way he said he could get it open.
Inside my mother's house between the Ninth Ward and the French Quarter, we found black mold and a line on the walls that showed water had risen and then sat to four feet up. The oak floors Mama had been so proud of, were buckled. The mementoes we'd stored on the second floor after she died in April were safe. As for the few pieces of furniture we set aside for ourselves, they were battered and beaten, the old cedar chest that held Mama's wedding dress, shattered into pieces.
Signs of Katrina's wrath were overwhelming and everywhere. And yet, among them, we saw glimmers of hope, and the undeniable power of human resilience. Neighbors stood in the street, hugging and sharing stories. A Salvation Army truck lumbered through the neighborhood, a man yelling out the window: "Hot meals! We've got hot meals!" As hopeful as anything was my sister's husband who had walked to a nearby Red Cross distribution center with his guitar. A prominent musician with nowhere now to perform, he sat and played for volunteers while they passed out mops and meals.
Today, my mother's house is fully recovered, thanks to some of the $10 billion in federal Road Home grants distributed to homeowners, thanks to the one sister who decided to make Mama's house her own. It's a home I return to every year, when I visit for the city's beloved Jazz Fest, a home my children and their friends have started making pilgrimage every year to, too, including this year when my daughter and her friend and I took a break from music to tour the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum.
A modest shotgun house on the outside, it might be overlooked by the casual tourist. Inside, though, is a treasure trove, a powerful history of race and community, beginning with slavery on sugar plantations and continuing through the ravages and injustices of Katrina, as told from the perspective of racial justice activists and Ninth-Ward residents. Included among the artifacts, stories and photographs, are hundreds of notes that museum visitors have taped to the walls.
"We stand with you" read one note. "Never forget who you are" read another. "Keep telling this story" read yet another.
These words of hope amidst the ruin reminded me of another collection of words my sisters and I found in my mother's house the day she died.
We had gone back to her house to look for clues that might tell us what happened the afternoon of the fire. There we found the clothes she'd last worn, a can of lighter fluid, a cheap cigarette lighter and piecemeal clues to her tragic ending: She apparently had been trying to fill up the lighter. The lighter was dripping on her clothes. When she went to ignite the lighter, her knee-length polyester sweater ignited like a cheap paper napkin, leaving her with third-degree burns to 38 percent of her body.
We found the items that would help us put together the story that ended our sad mother's difficult life four days after the fire, a life that began with an abusive mother 68 years hence, a life that would be riddled throughout with depression, low self esteem, substance abuse and ultimately, poverty.
We also found, tacked to the wall above her bed with a push pin, the first thing our devoutly Catholic mother likely saw in the morning and the last thing she saw at night.
It was a holy card.
"Weeping may endure the night," read the card. "But joy cometh in the morning."
