Life Before Katrina—And After It

The scene earlier than me appeared and disappeared and reappeared once more with each breath I took, the recent air from my lungs fogging the fuel masks that match snugly over my face. My mom, father, and little sister stood in entrance of me sporting hazmat fits. It was October 2005, and we’d been among the many first in Gentilly, our New Orleans neighborhood, to obtain permission to return to our residence after Hurricane Katrina. I used to be nervous. Gentilly had sat beneath as much as eight ft of water for weeks. I didn’t know what I’d see, or how I’d really feel.Discover the September 2025 IssueCheck out extra from this subject and discover your subsequent story to learn.View MoreOur neighborhood had by no means been this quiet earlier than. There had at all times been youngsters driving bikes, or somebody enjoying music from their automotive or their entrance porch or their shoulder with a bass line that made the road vibrate. There had at all times been the sound of a basketball colliding with concrete as boys went in the hunt for a court docket and a hoop and a recreation. Squirrels had at all times scurried by timber, the place birds sang. Now there have been no birds, no balls, no squirrels, no bikes. Solely an eerie silence.A silver automotive with clouded home windows had crashed into the trunk of the previous oak tree in entrance of our residence, its hood bent right into a crooked crescent. Branches from that previous oak—some as thick as our bodies—have been scattered throughout the road and the yard. On the boarded-up window subsequent to our door was a spray-painted orange X, an emblem utilized by search-and-rescue groups that could possibly be seen all through New Orleans within the days and weeks after the storm. Every quadrant of the X had a unique quantity. The highest quadrant confirmed the time and date the home had been searched; the left one recognized which staff had carried out the search; the fitting indicated any hazards discovered inside; and the underside was for the variety of individuals, lifeless or alive, discovered there. Our backside quadrant learn “0,” however I’m nonetheless haunted by the orange spray paint on properties we handed that mentioned one thing else.The search-and-rescue staff had smashed the glass subsequent to our door to be able to open it. It remained ajar. As we entered the home, the odor bombarded us, detached to our masks. I had by no means encountered something so pungent in my life; it bodily knocked me again past the doorframe.Pay attention: Floodlines, the story of an unnatural disasterWhen I stepped inside once more, I noticed that the partitions have been coated with mildew. Blue-green spores have been in all places. The floorboards have been warped; some had come free. The fridge door hung open, rotten meals spilling out. The tv in the lounge was face down on the ground. My mom’s marriage ceremony gown, which had been designed and sewed by a neighborhood seamstress who had made clothes for generations of Black New Orleans girls, lay ruined on the ground beneath the stairwell. A kitchen stool hung by one among its legs from the chandelier in our eating room, however the dining-room desk was now not there. The rising water had lifted it up and carried it into our front room.As the home flooded, rising water carried thedining-room desk into the lounge. (Courtesy of Clint Smith)We discovered the mahogany desk misshapen, however upright. Sitting on prime of it was a glass-domed cake stand with a part of a birthday cake nonetheless inside, a time capsule unaltered by the destruction round it. Twenty years later, the cake is the factor I bear in mind most clearly.I’ve by no means been a lot of a cake particular person. I don’t have a candy tooth, and I hate chocolate. However I made an exception for the vanilla-almond cake with pineapple filling from Adrian’s, the bakery simply down the road. I cherished the sweetness of the frosting; the mushy, slight crumb of the cake; and the candied viscosity of the filling. My dad and mom obtained it for my birthday yearly, and even now, the style of it makes me really feel like a toddler once more.On August 25, 2005, I celebrated my seventeenth birthday by consuming a considerable slice (or two) of this cake with my household earlier than heading out with my buddies to see a film. When my mom positioned the leftover cake contained in the dome, we didn’t know that it might keep there for weeks.Evacuating was not new for us. It was virtually a routine: The meteorologists would warn residents a few storm. We might pack some duffel luggage with just a few days’ price of garments, board up our home windows, put fuel in our automotive, and drive to Jackson or Baton Rouge or Houston till the storm handed. Then we’d come residence, decide up just a few branches, take away the boards from our home windows, and proceed on with life because it was earlier than. In 2004, my household had evacuated to Houston forward of Hurricane Ivan, sitting in 20 hours of site visitors for what was usually a five-to-six-hour journey. We’d stayed with my aunt and uncle till the storm handed.The relative normalcy of hurricanes made many in New Orleans really feel as if evacuating wasn’t price it. Some would determine to remain residence and trip out the storm; some didn’t have the flexibility or means to go away even when they wished to. We had been instructed so many occasions that this storm could be completely different, just for it to not be. However this time it was.For Smith (pictured right here on his fifteenth birthday, in 2003), consuming vanilla-almond cake from a neighborhood bakery was an annual custom. (Courtesy of Clint Smith)On August 28, simply earlier than 9:30 a.m., Mayor Ray Nagin issued a compulsory evacuation order for each resident of New Orleans, the primary within the metropolis’s historical past. By then, my household and I have been already gone. My father recollects waking up at 2 a.m. the morning of August 27 with a sense of unease. He’d turned on the TV and seen that meteorologists have been predicting that Katrina would develop right into a Class 5 hurricane—the best class potential for a storm. And so we packed the baggage, secured the home windows, and crammed the automotive with fuel. My father instructed me to seize our photograph albums off the shelf and put them in thick rubbish luggage. This, we had not executed earlier than. We did the identical with items of artwork from our partitions, work by native Black artists that my dad and mom had collected over the many years. We left the baggage in my dad and mom’ second-floor bed room.Lastly, we obtained into our automotive. That evening, we arrived at my aunt and uncle’s residence outdoors Houston. For the following a number of days, I watched nonstop protection on CNN. I noticed individuals begging for assist from rooftops. I noticed individuals wading by shoulder-deep sewer water to achieve greater floor, pushing their kids in ice chests. I noticed footage of floating our bodies. I noticed properties just some blocks from mine that have been utterly submerged. I knew then what had occurred to mine.Learn: The issue with ‘transfer to greater floor’After just a few days of sitting on the sofa in a catatonic state, I obtained a name from the soccer coach at Davidson School, in North Carolina. I used to be being recruited by just a few completely different Division I faculties, and Davidson’s coach requested if I’d wish to make my official recruiting go to to the college now, as a distraction. I mentioned I’d, and my father and I boarded a airplane.At Davidson, I watched the soccer staff’s thrilling time beyond regulation victory in opposition to a neighborhood rival, the College of North Carolina at Charlotte. I attended a political-science class on the historical past of the presidency, went to my first faculty social gathering, and skilled the particular pleasure of getting late-night wings and quesadillas from the scholar union. On the finish of my go to, I instructed my dad that I knew the place I wished to go. I dedicated to Davidson the identical day. I understand now, wanting again, that I made a decision on Davidson so shortly as a result of I wanted an anchor. I didn’t know the place I’d be going to highschool the following week, however at the very least I knew the place I’d be going to school subsequent 12 months.My sister and I ended up staying in Texas for the whole faculty 12 months, dwelling with my aunt and uncle after my dad and mom returned to New Orleans in January for his or her jobs, bringing my youthful brother with them. They lived with my grandfather in one of many few areas that had not flooded. That fall, I went to Davidson and my household moved into a brand new home, one which I used to be grateful for, however one which by no means felt fairly like mine.One of many partitions in our previous household room was coated with mirrors, and as youngsters, each time my brother, my sister, and I stepped into the room, it felt as if that mirror-lined wall was beckoning us to bounce. So dance we did, as quite a few residence movies attest—bobbing gleefully in our striped hand-me-down Hanna Andersson pajamas to the sound of my dad’s data and CDs. Because the trumpets from Earth, Wind & Fireplace’s “Let’s Groove” blared from the audio system, we’d begin leaping like the ground was coated in lava, and we’d spin like a band of small, graceless tornadoes whereas my father laughed behind the camcorder.My father had been amassing data since he was in highschool, within the ’70s. He had a whole lot—artists resembling Chaka Khan, Stevie Marvel, Funkadelic, Grover Washington Jr., Miles Davis, and John Coltrane—saved within the household room’s floor-level cupboards. However amid the haste and chaos of our departure from New Orleans, we hadn’t had time to maneuver them, and after we returned in October, we discovered the gathering destroyed.The songs we danced to are nonetheless out there, after all; nowadays, we will stream them anytime we would like. However the albums themselves have been artifacts, a tactile manifestation of all these completely satisfied recollections—they usually have been irreplaceable.This 12 months, I went residence to New Orleans on the finish of June, as I do each summer time. I deliver my kids, as a result of I would like them to really feel a connection to the town that formed who I’m. Lately, every time I’ve arrived at my dad and mom’ home, I’ve been struck by the truth that they’ve now lived there for longer than we lived within the residence I grew up in. The conclusion defies my sense of time and language; I’ve referred to this place as “the brand new home” for the previous 20 years.One wet afternoon, whereas my youngsters have been out with their grandparents, I drove down my previous road and stopped in entrance of my childhood residence. A brand new household had ultimately moved in, after the home was gutted. There have been new home windows, new fences, new partitions. The pink brick facade had been painted white. The previous oak tree was nonetheless there on the entrance garden, its branches extending farther over the road, its trunk having grown darker and thicker with time. The birds had returned, as had the squirrels. Folks walked their canine. Two ladies threw a softball forwards and backwards.Though a lot of the properties in our neighborhood had been torn down and rebuilt, the home throughout the road from ours appeared largely the identical because it had after I was a toddler—apart from the 2 canoes and the kayak conspicuously tied to its roof, as if its inhabitants have been getting ready for the following catastrophe.I then drove to Adrian’s, which had additionally moved after the storm. There, I used to be met by the odor of glazed doughnuts and recent cinnamon rolls. White desserts gleamed from inside glass show instances. Sitting on prime of the glass have been particular person slices of cake wrapped in plastic. I walked nearer and noticed golden pineapple filling seeping out from between layers of sponge. I purchased three items.Again at my dad and mom’ home, I opened a cupboard and took out our household images.I’ve at all times felt grateful that the photograph albums and artwork survived the storm. I attempted to think about what it is likely to be wish to now not have entry to those pictures: the birthdays, the graduations, the baptisms. The seashore days, the tenting journeys, the lazy Sunday afternoons. My father and me flying a kite on a windy day on the lake, his hat turned backwards and his sun shades glimmering; my mom and me on Easter morning after I was 3 years previous, she in an exquisite blue gown and me in a pink bow tie and brown brimmed hat; my sixth-birthday social gathering, my face painted like a tiger, wanting down on the thick slice of vanilla-almond cake on the desk in entrance of me.Alongside the albums sat a ziplock bag of different pictures—pictures we took of our residence after we returned to look at the harm after the storm. As I unfold them out throughout the dining-room desk, I used to be introduced again to that day—the wretched odor, the buckled floorboards, the fungus-laden partitions.I eliminated the Saran Wrap masking one slice of cake and sank my fork into it, making an attempt to seize the sponge, the frosting, and the filling in a single chew. It was nearly as good as I remembered it being, and I ate with such abandon that I dropped some frosting onto the pictures in entrance of me. After I moved an album to wash it off, I observed a picture within the Katrina pile that I hadn’t seen earlier than: an previous clock that hung above the doorframe in our kitchen, its arms frozen in place. It appeared as if it had spores spilling out of it.An previous clock above the kitchen doorframe at Smith’s childhood residence (Courtesy of Clint Smith)Whenever you speak with individuals in, or from, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina is usually the best way by which we demarcate time. When making an attempt to recall an occasion, a second, or an expertise, somebody will ask “Was it earlier than or after the storm?” For many people, that demarcation additionally displays our bodily relationship to the town—it’s a query that always means Was that earlier than or after I used to be pressured to go away my residence? As a result of I used to be a senior in highschool when Katrina made landfall and since I completed faculty in one other state, I by no means lived in New Orleans once more. After I got here again residence for the vacations, I’d keep on a pullout sofa within the visitor room.Typically I consider what that 12 months may have been had Katrina by no means occurred. What it might have been wish to be the captain of my soccer staff throughout my ultimate high-school season. What it might have been wish to attend homecoming and promenade with buddies who had recognized me since I used to be a toddler. And what it might be like now to deliver my kids again to the home that I grew up in.However I nonetheless have my recollections of rising up in a metropolis in contrast to some other on the planet—a metropolis that some mentioned mustn’t have been rebuilt. Twenty years later, New Orleans continues to be right here. I’m in a position to make new recollections with my very own kids: taking them to Saints video games within the Superdome, as my father took me. Enjoying with them on the timber in Metropolis Park, the best way my mom did with me. Consuming the cake I cherished from Adrian’s at my dad and mom’ dining-room desk—even when their style buds don’t match up with my nostalgia. My daughter mentioned she wished the cake have been chocolate. My son prefers ice cream.This text seems within the September 2025 print version with the headline “Going Again.”