You Are Here

The cardboard sign staked in the ground in front of a house read: a country road, a tree, evening.

The neighborhood was sparse, at least three empty lots for every house, overgrown with green grass and tall weeds, as if the land could reclaim its wildness. On one lot, there were stairs that once led to someone’s front door, but now led nowhere. It was a stark juxtaposition between nature and the few brand new pastel pop architectural homes with modern angular roofs, big boxes atop stilts like robot legs.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, four months after the BP oil spill.

We rolled into the Lower Ninth Ward like many tourists: in a big charter bus. My students and I were studying wetland conservation and we had read about the destruction in the Lower Ninth Ward being linked to the loss of wetlands. We had done our homework, but nothing could have prepared us.

We got out of the bus, but the driver kept the engine and the air conditioner running. We walked around the streets with our maps, pencils, notebooks and iPhones taking photographs. Some people saw us and left their porches to go inside. A little girl stopped her tricycle to stare at us until we reached the end of the block.

Within a few minutes, I started to feel nervous. I didn't want to make a spectacle of the suffering that had happened here. I was a tourist in someone else’s real tragedy. A man walked to his mailbox and I said hello awkwardly. “What are y’all doing here?” he said. “We’re a school group on a service trip in the wake of the oil spill.” I wished we had never come here, but to my surprise he said, “Would y’all like to come inside and see my house? It’s a ‘Brad Pitt” house. I’ll show you around.”

He showed us how the house worked, his electric bill and washing machine. He showed us photographs of his sister and niece lost in the hurricane. He showed us a scrapbook from the play Waiting for Godot that was staged in the street a few years ago, the cardboard sign that still stands in front of his house. He offered us something to drink. He said with a sly grin, “it’s not my old place, but I guess it’ll do.”

I have often heard of the generosity and passion of the people of New Orleans, and after this day, I can say it’s all true. When I felt most out of place, a man welcomed me into his home and shared his story. Where so much has been lost, I learned about our shared humanity and about a neighborhood, it turns out, not so unlike my own.

A country road. A tree. Evening.