The Water I Walked Through

I couldn’t write about Katrina yesterday.

Not because I had forgotten. I never forget August 29th. There are dates you remember because the calendar tells you to, and there are dates your body keeps for you.

Instead, I spent the day with friends. We explored the outskirts of New Orleans. We talked. I laughed. I enjoyed the company of people I care about, people who care about me. Nothing particularly extraordinary happened.

Maybe that was the extraordinary thing.

Twenty-one years after Hurricane Katrina, I spent August 29th simply living in New Orleans.

For so long, the date has been tethered to what we lost: the water, the fear, the displacement, the people who never came home. There is the New Orleans that existed before Katrina and the city that emerged afterward. Those of us who knew both understand that they are not quite the same place, even when the street names remain.

Yesterday, though, I moved through this city without trying to survive it. There was something powerful in the ordinariness of that—in simply being present.

At twenty-nine, I had done the opposite.

Katrina arrived fifteen days after my twenty-ninth birthday. My little brother was sixteen. We ended up inside the Louisiana Superdome with thousands of other people who had gone there because it was supposed to be a place of refuge.

My grandmother—my MawMaw—was there, too.

I remember the wind. I remember watching pieces of the roof tear away. Rain began falling inside, and families gathered their belongings and moved away from the places where the water was coming down.

And I remember MawMaw.

Her health had already begun to decline. The woman I had known all my life was changing in ways that were difficult to watch and even harder to accept. But inside the Superdome, amid all that chaos, there were flashes of who she used to be.

The smiles. The love. The strength.

For brief moments, I could see my MawMaw again—not simply the woman whose health was failing her, but the woman I remembered, the woman who had helped shape me.

Everything around us was coming apart, and somehow, for a moment, pieces of her were coming back.

She was alive then. Less than a year later, she wasn’t.

It is strange what the mind holds on to.

Then came the water.

Eventually, we left the Superdome.

There are photographs from Katrina that have become part of the country’s visual memory: people on rooftops, people standing on the interstate, people outside the Convention Center, water filling streets that were never supposed to become rivers.

When I look at those photographs, I don’t see history.

I think: This is the water I walked through.

The water came up to my waist, and my sixteen-year-old brother and I kept walking.

We didn’t have much of a plan. We knew only that we wanted to get somewhere with less chaos. Our grandmother’s house was on the West Bank, across the Mississippi River, so we walked to our familiar place.

There is a photograph somewhere of my brother and me walking through that water. I have seen it only a few times. Maybe that is enough.

Photographs are useful when you need proof that something happened.

I don’t.

My body remembers. My heart remembers. My soul remembers.

We walked through the floodwaters until we reached the bridge exit near the Superdome. We climbed the exit onto the bridge and began the long walk toward the West Bank.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from walking toward a place you know is waiting for you.

By the time we reached the Tchoupitoulas entrance, we had already been on the bridge for some time. But what I remember most clearly is not the distance. It is what I could see from up there.

We had just walked through waist-deep water near the Superdome. From the bridge, I looked toward St. Charles Avenue.

It was dry.

I remember trying to make those two things make sense. Behind us was the water we had just walked through. In another direction were streets that seemed almost untouched by it.

Same city. Same storm. Two completely different realities.

Even now, I remember how disorienting that was.

The divisions had always been there—the haves and the have-nots, the New Orleans protected by money and access and the New Orleans accustomed to making do without either. Katrina did not create those divisions. It made them impossible for the rest of the country not to see.

We kept walking.

At some point, a Hispanic man driving a truck stopped.

I don’t know his name. I wish I did.

My brother and I weren’t the only people he picked up. Eventually, there were about twelve of us riding in the back of that truck.

Twenty-one years later, I think about the simplicity of his decision.

He saw people walking.

He had room.

He stopped.

The systems around us had collapsed, and a man whose name I never learned looked at a group of strangers and decided to make space. He drove us across the river and dropped us near DeGaulle and Whitney. Then he continued into his life, and eventually I continued into mine.

I still remember him.

When I remember Katrina, I remember that a stranger saw us walking and stopped.

Maybe that is why I have always had difficulty with the word that became attached to New Orleans after the storm: resilient.

People meant it as praise. New Orleans was resilient. New Orleanians were resilient. Black New Orleanians, especially, seemed to be assigned an almost supernatural ability to survive.

I understand the impulse. I have also never entirely trusted the compliment.

Resilience can make suffering sound like a personality trait. It can transform survival into something noble enough that nobody has to ask why people were required to survive those circumstances in the first place. It can allow people to admire how beautifully you endure conditions they might otherwise feel obligated to change.

I am not a magical, mythical New Orleans Negro.

I didn’t walk through waist-deep water because there was something extraordinary in my DNA. I walked because I had to get somewhere. My brother walked because he had to get somewhere.

And when we couldn’t get there alone, somebody stopped a truck.

That is a different story from resilience.

It is a story about interdependence.

Somebody had a truck. Somebody had an auntie on our side of the river. Somebody had food. Somebody had gasoline. Somebody had bottled water. Somebody knew something you didn’t know. Somebody had a phone that worked. Somebody had room on a floor.

Somebody could hold you up when you were tired in ways that had nothing to do with walking.

My little brother did that for me.

When systems failed us, my people did not.

Community cannot only show up when the water rises.

It has to exist before the storm.

I understand that differently at fifty than I did at twenty-nine.

At twenty-nine, I was trying to get somewhere safer.

At fifty, I have decided to stay.

There were years between those two decisions when I left New Orleans in search of opportunity. Leaving is its own New Orleans tradition, although we don’t romanticize it the way we romanticize staying.

For generations, New Orleanians have left because somewhere else offered something this city could not: a job, a salary, an industry, a connection, a possibility.

There is a peculiar heartbreak in having to leave the place that made you in order to become the person it prepared you to be.

You can love New Orleans and still need to leave it.

I did.

The question that interests me now is what happens when you come back.

What do you bring home with you?

And what can you build here that you once had to leave to find?

I work in a creative industry, and I think often about the young people coming behind me: photographers, filmmakers, designers, writers, musicians, strategists, stylists, and people doing creative work for which we haven’t invented names yet.

New Orleans produces them effortlessly. We produce culture with an almost reckless abundance.

The world comes here to consume it.

People come for our music, our food, our festivals, our architecture, our language, our traditions, our style, our stories, our joy.

What we have not always produced with the same abundance is the infrastructure that allows the people creating that culture to make sustainable lives from it.

So they leave.

Or they stay and struggle. They take internships they cannot afford. They work jobs unrelated to their gifts and create at night. Small creative businesses compete against one another for opportunities none of them has the capacity to pursue alone.

Then somebody looks around and calls it a talent problem.

It isn’t.

New Orleans has never suffered from a shortage of talent.

What we have too often lacked is infrastructure around that talent.

That realization is shaping what I am building now through The Curated Misfits and The Misfit Creative Network. I have become less interested in building another agency than in asking what an ecosystem might look like: creatives finding one another, small businesses combining their capacity, young people getting paid while they gain experience, institutions investing in the New Orleanians whose creativity they depend on.

The question I keep returning to is simple.

Not, How do I get this?

But, Who could we build this with?

That, too, is community.

Community can be an introduction. A contract. A referral. A paid internship. It can be one small business deciding another small business is not necessarily its competition. It can be an institution deciding that if it profits from New Orleans culture, some of that money should find its way back to the New Orleanians who create it.

It is somebody opening a door.

Somebody paying a young person while they learn.

Somebody deciding there is enough room at the table to bring somebody else with them.

Sometimes community is your sixteen-year-old brother holding you up when you are tired in ways that have nothing to do with walking.

And sometimes community is a stranger stopping his truck.

At twenty-nine, I needed that stranger. I needed my brother, too.

I was trying to get across the river.

At fifty, I find myself asking a different question:

What can I help build so that the next generation of New Orleanians doesn’t feel that leaving is the price of having a future?

That is why I am staying.

Not because New Orleans is easy. Any native can tell you the “Big Easy” hasn’t felt particularly easy for a long time.

And certainly not because I have forgotten.

Quite the opposite.

I am staying because I remember.

I remember the Superdome. I remember the sound of the wind and the rain coming through the roof.

I remember MawMaw—the smiles, the love, the strength. I remember seeing pieces of the woman she had been returning to us while the world around us was coming apart.

I remember that she was alive.

I remember my sixteen-year-old brother beside me, sometimes holding me up.

I remember the water at my waist.

I remember climbing onto the bridge.

I remember looking toward St. Charles Avenue and seeing dry ground.

I remember the stranger.

I remember his truck.

I remember walking.

Twenty-one years later, I am still walking.

The difference is that I am no longer asking only how I can get somewhere.

I am asking who else needs to get there.

What do I have that might help?

Who has something I don’t?

What could we do together that none of us could do alone?

Is there enough room to bring somebody else with us?

Maybe that is what survival eventually asks of us: not simply that we remain, but that we use what we remember to make remaining possible for somebody else.

Perhaps that is why I couldn’t write yesterday.

I was busy living the answer.

I spent August 29th with friends in New Orleans. We talked. We laughed. Nothing extraordinary happened.

After everything, I have come to understand the privilege in that sentence.

For one day, I didn’t need New Orleans to prove its resilience to me.

I didn’t need to prove mine to New Orleans.

I was simply here.

Alive. Loved. Present.

I don’t want another generation of New Orleanians to have to become exceptionally good at surviving this place.

I want us to build a city in which more of them can simply live here.

Yesterday, I lived.

Today, I remember.

Tomorrow, I build.