Ghosts
I lived in a deeply rich pool, suspended in memory, surrounded by triumph and trauma.
Sometime around midnight in late September, I sat in the chair at a tattoo parlor on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, as I drunkenly agreed to get inked for my 26th birthday. I had wandered into the shop after one of the tattoo artists asked to bum a smoke off me. We got to talking and the inevitable came up. He asked me what I did. I told him I worked for the American Red Cross. “You guys saved my life,” he said.
Telling New Orleanians what I did for a living only encouraged the inevitable. I began collecting Hurricane Katrina stories, no matter that the storm happened when I was fifteen and three thousand miles away. I lived in a deeply rich pool, suspended in memory, surrounded by triumph and trauma. One of the first things I learned to do upon moving to New Orleans was to speak the language of Katrina. For, I assure you, she has her own dictionary. I told time by Katrina. I measured my own morality by this single storm. It consumed me and drowned me and swallowed me whole.
I had long been collecting stories by the time I met this tattoo artist outside of a karaoke bar that was too loud and too smoky. As Chris Rose said, “New Orleans was always a place where people talked too much, even if they had nothing to say. Now, everyone’s got something to say.” My position in disaster relief made me a kind of messenger to and from the storm, like Hermes from the underworld to the terrestrial.
I don’t generally make it my business to tell other people’s stories. But the story I am about to tell is both extraordinary and familiar. Back on August 28th, 2005, one day before the storm, the tattoo artist was left by his mother at his parents’ home in Chalmette, Louisiana. Enmeshed in a terrible custody battle, his father had won out. He would not evacuate with his mother. He would stay at home with his father and grandfather.
On August 29th, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the areas outside the levees that protected New Orleans and would begin to crack and break later into the day and the next, causing catastrophic flooding to the global city. Chalmette was under 12 feet of standing water. The tattoo artist, his father, and his grandfather felt the water rush into their home. They leaped on top of the furniture. When the water continued to rise, they went to the attic. As the water rose still, they took turns kicking a hole in the roof.
The patriarchs of the family, young and old, sat on that roof for five days before they were rescued by the National Guard. They were dropped off at the Superdome, the largest shelter of last resort in New Orleans at the time. When the tattoo artist exited the helicopter, he was met by a woman in a red vest, carrying a blanket, who hugged him tightly and told him, “You are safe now.”
The tattoo artist told me all of this and, curiously, stared blankly for a moment before puffing on his cigarette once more.
He was eleven years old.
I used to have a painting of a Hurricane Katrina rescue hanging in my bedroom in New Orleans. Looking back on it, I’m not entirely sure why. I purchased it directly from an artist in the French Quarter. I also wonder why she painted it. Why would tourists or artists want to profit off one of the greatest traumas the United States has experienced in living memory? I suppose I felt some solidarity with the painting. I could feel my clients in it. I could feel all the stories I had collected over the few short years I was there. People wanted, needed, to talk about Katrina. Other people didn’t want to be reminded of it at all.
I was once in a voodoo shop when the High Priestess happened to be home. She told me she had volunteered for the Red Cross during Hurricane Katrina. She gave me a personal gris gris bag as a blessing that I kept in my vest pocket for years.
One night in late fall, probably sometime around 2015, I responded to a house fire near Oak Street. The fire was a total loss. The homeowner, a man in his eighties, was a jazz musician, and I remember seeing all his melted instruments being carried out onto the lawn by NOFD. We sat on a stoop across the street, smoking cigarettes. He told me that he lost his home during Hurricane Katrina, so what’s a second time? I asked him about his instruments and he told me that he had learned that everything in life, except family, is replaceable.
I started experiencing flashbacks around 2016. They were nothing like you see in the movies. No me, waking my partner up in the middle of the night with my hands around their neck. My flashbacks were sneaky. Someone could be talking and suddenly, I would go into a state of perfect dissociation, remembering every minute detail of an experience from my disaster work. I would be almost frozen, unable to move until the memory passed. Once I was in the Columbia Tower in Downtown Seattle and I heard a phone ring. The phone had the same ringtone as my work phone in New Orleans. I went into an absolute tailspin.
I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2018. Six years later, I still struggle with what I saw during my time in New Orleans. I still struggle to scrub Hurricane Katrina from my memory.
A few days before I moved back to Tacoma, a friend and I trespassed onto the grounds of Mercy Hospital, a hospital that was destroyed during the storm. People died there in the days following landfall. Upon walking into the main entrance, there is a whiteboard that still says “Today is August 28, 2005.” It is a grim history.
We walked the grounds of the hospital, taking in the damage that a large disaster could do — not that either of us was a stranger to that. But Katrina always felt different. Something about it felt sadder, more destructive, more urgent.
I wrote once that Katrina felt like an older sister I never knew. Today, I think she is a ghost. She haunts a whole generation of a city. A city that so quickly gentrified over the skeletal remains of the storm. Families who have lived in their homes for a hundred years have been priced out of them. People who have built and rebuilt and rebuilt from storms get slapped with a Starbucks or a fancy cocktail bar in their neighborhood and suddenly their property taxes go up. Whole streets in the Treme or the Seventh Ward or Mid-City are now Airbnbs. Yet still, Katrina haunts.
There are few things in life that I love more than New Orleans. Yet still, when I close my eyes, I see its suffering. I tell myself that love can hold two things at the same time. It must.
