The Aftermath

My life has been divided into two periods, B.K. & A.K.

Before Katrina and After Katrina.


When I moved to Georgia, I didn’t know that I had actually moved. Living in New Orleans the threat of hurricanes comes with the territory. My family had only evacuated once that I can remember. And that time we came home only to find a few small trees and branches that needed to be picked up around our house, which was otherwise untouched.

This time was different. The ‘big one’ that everybody warned about had finally come. The most costly storm to hit the gulf coast since 1965, hurricane Katrina was the Billion Dollar Betsy of my lifetime. The news reports said that we couldn’t return home. They didn’t say we should not but that we could not. It would be weeks, maybe months before we would be cleared to return. And just like that, I was homeless. I was sheltered in a hotel in Albany, GA but homeless.

In the days that followed, I saw family members break down one by one. I also saw a side of some that I have had a hard time forgiving and forgetting. That storm really did bring out the worst in some people. Even through witnessing the tears and tantrums, I was OK. I guess it hadn’t quite hit me the way it did them. Not yet at least.

Until I took up classes at Albany State University. Having already spent five and a half years as an undergraduate student at the University of New Orleans, the fall semester of 2005 was supposed to be my last. Instead, it served a dual purpose. That fall semester was my first and last. It was a beginning and an end. Before the storm, class had only been in session for about three weeks in New Orleans. The books I purchased, the teachers I had just started getting accustomed to, the class mates I planned to study with. They were there one moment and just like that, they were gone. Well, the books weren’t gone. When we evacuated, I took them with me so that I could study. I still have them and I think I still owe the school for those books.

My first day at ASU, I looked around at all the people on the campus of this Historically Black University and felt different. Wearing a capped sleeved orange cotton shirt with dark blue jeans and flip flops, I looked at the students around me—young men wearing shirts and ties with slacks and hard bottom shoes and the ladies wearing three and four inch heels just to go from class to class. I sat down on a bench between classes, wearing those clothes that someone had kindly donated to me. This school was nothing like UNO where I had spent the last five years of my life. There were active Black fraternities and sororities. This school actually had a football team! And I was not home anymore.

They say that home is where the heart is. In that moment, I realized that my heart was broken… just like my home. I sat on that bench and cried because it wasn’t until then that I realized my home (and my heart) would not be mended for a while.

5 years later, it’s getting there. It is evident that the healing process has begun but there is still a long way to go. The hurt, the anger, the sadness… It’s still there and sometimes feels just as fresh as it did the day I sat on that bench.

Silly me. I thought that September 11 would be ‘that experience’ that I lived through and would tell my children about. Now I have two… Well, three. We do have a Black President.