“Mom, Were You Alive for Hurricane Katrina?”
I nearly slammed on the breaks as I pulled out of car line. “What did you just ask me?”
It was May. School had two weeks left to go before summer.
“Were you alive during…that big hurricane? Katrina? I learned about it in school today.”
I was having physical and mental responses to this question that I would have never anticipated. I was white-knuckling the steering wheel, my heart was pounding, my stomach had dropped the way it does when on a rollercoaster. But my thoughts — they were swirling around — a mixture of how the hell do I answer this and flashes of my fourteen-year-old self holding Salvation Army clothes and MREs.
I took several long breaths before I responded. “Yes, I was alive for Katrina.” The weight of those words are heavier now as an adult who is aware of the thousands who did not come out alive.
“What happened? Were you here? Did you SEE it?” My eight-year-old’s voice was filled with curiosity from the backseat, eager to know more. It took everything in me to keep my composure and to answer factually, not emotionally.
“Why don’t you tell me what you know about it first? Then I’ll fill in the gaps.” I didn’t want to provide more information than necessary.
But what I really, REALLY wanted to do was scream — I knew what happened to Louisiana and Mississippi in August of 2005 would be in textbooks one day. We all knew that. Still, nothing could have prepared me for the day my child came home and asked me about one of the biggest traumas of my life as if she was asking what 2 +2 equals.
Her innocence is not her fault. I wasn’t angry or upset with her question. I was angry at how tender this wound still is, twenty years later. Clearly, what I had thought was healed is not. And it took my child asking me about it to bring that to light.
She told me how they didn’t talk much about Katrina specifically in class — just that they were learning about hurricanes, and there was a really, really big one that came before they were born that caused a big mess. And that’s when her classmates’ hands shot up, eager to tell what little they knew about their parents’ or grandparents’ experiences.
Her friends talked about people on roofs, waiting for helicopters. “Is that true, Momma? Did people really have to wait on roofs?”
Instantly, without meaning to, my brain recalled my grandfather and father packing up our 15-passenger van to the brim with bottled water, non-perishable food, OTC medications, first aid items — and firearms. They were headed back to the city. They were going to try to break into our shut-down city, with hopes of providing supplies in exchange for access. To rescue my grandmother, fresh out of surgery, from the roof of Touro Hospital.
“Yes, baby. That’s true.”
“Did you? Were you on a roof?”
“No. We evacuated to St. Francisville, a few hours north. We were safe. We didn’t have electricity for a while, but we were safe. But my Meme was not. She was on a roof of a hospital, waiting to be rescued. She ended up being okay, though.”
“Oh. Did your house have water in it? My friends said their parents’ houses had LOTS of water.”
Again, memories I had buried long ago came through my brain like a freight train. My house covered in debris, trees down everywhere. My childhood dog, miraculously alive, surviving off of the squirrels from the trees, the fish that poured into the yard from the Lake, and a kind neighbor who fed her Spaghetti O’s. My mom’s wedding dress, and eventually my wedding dress, hanging from the chandelier, stained and dripping wet. The walls ripped out of my parents’ bedroom.
“Yes, my house got a lot of water. The storm carried Lake Pontchartrain into my backyard. We couldn’t live there for months. We had to stay at our old house we had been trying to sell right before the storm. That house didn’t flood, but the roof was damaged badly. We had a blue tarp over it to keep the rain out.”
She was quiet.
“Do you have anymore questions, love?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, as we pulled into our driveway.
“Okay. If you do, you can always ask me. But I have to tell you, this is really hard to talk about, okay? That doesn’t mean you can’t ask or that you shouldn’t bring it up — I just want you to know, Katrina is a very, very sad thing that happened to thousands of people. And I almost lost everything I ever knew back then.”
We hugged. She clearly did not understand the trauma of the situation — but she seemed to understand that this topic was not fun to discuss, and she did not want to ask me anything else about it. We let it stay that way.
Until today, August 21st, when my seven-year-old daughter / middle child asked if she could go outside to play in the backyard. I glanced at my phone and saw the severe weather warnings, and checked the sky from my kitchen window. “That’s fine, but the moment you see lighting or hear thunder, or if it starts to rain again, come straight inside. I just checked the weather and the weatherman says there’s a bad storm coming.”
“Ha! Like Hurricane Katrina!” She said offhandedly, completely unaware of the impact of her words, skipping to the backdoor.
“Jo. No. Do not say things like that, please.” I literally felt the tears pressing against the back of my eyes. “Please, do not say that again.”
She stopped mid-skip. “Mom, why not? Did you almost die during Hurricane Katrina, too?”
I felt sick. Where did she hear that?!
“What? Where did you hear about that? Did you learn about Katrina in class today or something?”
“Well, no. We were learning about hurricanes. And my friend, S, told the class how her mommy and daddy almost died during Hurricane Katrina, but they didn’t. Did that happen you and Daddy, too?”
I felt like I had been gut-punched.
“No. I evacuated. So did Daddy. But not everyone did or could, and not everyone survived. I’m glad S’s mommy and daddy made it.”
My daughter nodded in agreement. Then I told her the same thing I told her big sister just three months prior. “Hey, you can always ask me questions about it, but I need you to know Katrina is really, really hard for me to talk about, okay? Also, please do not ever joke about a hurricane. Ever. It’s not funny to joke about something that kills people, okay?”
“Okay, Mommy. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
“You didn’t know; you don’t have to apologize. But now you do know, so please do not do it again. Do you have any other questions about it right now?”
“Where did you go?”
“I went to St. Francisville. We were safe there.”
“What happened when you got home? Did you have food to eat? S said her mommy and daddy didn’t have food, either.”
The same thing that happened in May, happened again. MREs with discontinued crispy M&Ms inside. Boiling water to brush my teeth. Standing in line in the hot sun in a parking lot for a plate of real, warm food. It was red beans. I hated it. I didn’t want it. I wanted to go home. I wanted my dad’s cooking. I looked at my mom and said, “I’m not eating that.” She shook her head and sternly said, “That’s all we’ve got.”
“No, we didn’t have food like normal. But we had things to eat. They were called MREs — the military eats them. They gave them to us so we would have something to eat — all of the grocery stores were destroyed. You fill them with water and they magically turn into a meal.”
“Did you like them?”
“No, not at all. But I didn’t have a choice. It was that, or be hungry.”
She stared at her feet for a second, clearly uncomfortable.
“Go play baby, before the rain comes.” She resumed her skipping, right out the door.
My birthday is tomorrow, the 22nd. Katrina came exactly one week after I turned fourteen. I never got to celebrate that birthday properly. In early November, my mom took me shopping at a Target somewhere — I have no idea what city or state we were in at the time — and I got to pick out a ton of new clothes and shoes. At the time, I didn’t realize why. She told me it was for my birthday, and while that was true, it was only half the truth.
The other reason was a tree had fallen through the window in my bedroom, and the rain had poured inside, destroying nearly all of my clothes and shoes, besides the ones I had taken with me and the donated items we received. I remember I picked out these brown, velvety loafers with pink velvet bows on them. They were my favorite shoes for years.
Twenty years later, to the rest of the world, Katrina is nothing more than a note in a textbook. A lesson in a history class. Something to memorize for a test, then forget.
But for us, and our children, and our children’s children, it’s family lore. It’s DNA-altering trauma. It’s nearly two generations of cajuns, creoles, culture, and so much more … gone. In an instant.
Nothing prepared us for that — and nothing prepared me for the day my children would learn about it in school. Because to me, it feels as fresh as last year. What do you mean it’s been long enough since to have TEXTBOOKS written about it?
So brace yourselves if you have little ones, Katrina Babies. Because one day, when you least expect it, your babies will come home with questions about one of the worst days of our lives. And we’ll have to tell them the truth.
I hope you find healing in sharing your story, your truth with your babies one day. It won’t be easy. It won’t be one conversation and done. It will probably come up throughout the entirety of our lives, as it already does. But this time, we’ll be telling our stories to our own blood — a literal piece of us who did not experience Katrina, but has the aftermath of it running through their veins — twenty years later.
