This story is one of five stories in The Lens’ Embracing Katrina Narratives project.
Excited for her birthday on Monday, Cedrionne Powell, 19, sat in her family’s house on Reynes Street in the Lower 9th Ward and flipped through her baby pictures in a stack of old photo albums.
Like this house, the albums represent the last few generations of the family; they were made by her grandmother, Melba Gibson. “All the memories here, I would never give that up for nothing,” Powell said.
Within water-stained album pages, she looked through school pictures, photos with Santa, neighborhood block parties. And then she turned the page into gray, muddy tragedy: photos showing the remnants of the sacred family house, wrecked by Hurricane Katrina.
Powell was only six months old when her family evacuated to Baytown, Texas, ahead of Katrina’s landfall. She was a toddler by the time she returned to New Orleans with her parents.
“When I was three, we came back and I remember walking in and the whole house was gutted because of the water. You could see the waterline up to this door. It was really high,” Powell said as she stretched to reach that level with her hands. “I remember walking upstairs and seeing my crib. That’s literally the only thing I really remember from my mind because that was the only thing in the room.
Yet they had an advantage over other neighbors. “The crazy thing is the house was still standing,” she said. “Most houses around got knocked down. This house didn’t look like this at all. My grandmother rebuilt this entire house.”
Though she was an infant when the natural disaster happened, for Powell, Hurricane Katrina lasted far longer than the storm itself, stretching through her childhood into the present day, almost 20 years later.
Her family house has framed her world. With its doorway, marked with penciled hash marks to show her height over the years, the house tracked her growth at the same time she tracked its years of repairs after Katrina.
The storm was a constant in community conversations. Wherever she went in the Lower 9, she heard about what the floodwaters had done.
She could tell by the water line left on the outside wall how badly damage had enveloped the walls of her pre-k classroom in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School on North Claiborne and what was then Caffin Avenue. Closer to their family home, within Alfred Lawless High School, where all her aunts and uncles had worn the school’s trademark maroon and gold and robin’s egg blue, the water ruined the building to the point where it had to be torn down. (It was later rebuilt as King High School at the Dr. Alfred Lawless Campus.)
It was a fragile time, dominated by loss. Bullies poured salt into the open wounds, as children would tease Powell relentlessly about the dilapidated state of her family’s home.
“It was so bad for me that my grandmother had to come to the school and talk to the principal about it,” Powell said. “She was like, ‘It’s not her fault and it’s not my fault. The storm just happened and we didn’t expect for this to happen.’” King leaders ended up scheduling an assembly to talk to children about storm damage and the bullying associated with it.
Near her house, Lower 9 streets once lined with lively houses, were now peppered with empty lots. Sometimes, concrete house foundations or stoops remained, representing the ghosts of generations of families and businesses and the loss of a connected community.
Odor is also key to her childhood Katrina narrative. Rotten smells of trash and debris littered the streets, infiltrating every inch. “It smelled like something died underneath the house but you don’t know where it is,” Powell said, as she remembered playgrounds washed away into hazardous piles of rubble. Children were forbidden to play there; their grandparents feared that imaginative kids would naturally turn the rubble into makeshift jungle gym and slides.
The Lower 9th Ward has long been one of the poorest of New Orleans’ 72 neighborhoods. Yet at the time Katrina hit, the Lower 9 ranked toward the top in another category, with 60% owner-occupied housing. That’s largely because the neighborhood was dominated by family homes, which were passed down from generation to generation.
As Powell got older, Katrina moved farther in the distance. Some lots turned into businesses like gas stations. And slow rebuilding continued in homes like her grandmother’s, which took three years to become habitable and is still being renovated.
With this new phase of rebuilding came newcomers – “people who said they would never come to the Ninth Ward because it was so horrible,” Powell says. The new people moved into areas formerly occupied by Powell’s aunts, uncles, and cousins. And, like seeds of dandelions that began to sprout from destruction, they spread quickly, adopting homes with addresses that had once belonged to Lower 9 families with roots there.
Sometimes the newcomers hosted ”beautification” events in the neighborhood, to pick up litter and to plant trees and flowers together.
“They mean gentrification, because that’s what’s happening. It was like we’re going to bring these people in just to make it look like it looks better,” Powell said.
Next to her grandmother’s house, Powell’s family now mows the grass in unclaimed empty lots that used to be neighbor’s yards, where they used to throw block parties or gather on Sundays when her grandma would cook for everyone.
At first unsure if she should leave home after graduation, Powell opted to stay where her roots run deep, in the Lower 9. Her decision to stay was reinforced by her grandmother, who recently told Powell that she stands to inherit the family house in her grandmother’s will.
After Katrina, Powell’s grandmother vowed to stay and rebuild. The only way she would move was if she was washed away, she said. And despite the floodwaters that submerged the neighborhood, the house’s foundation stood.
Powell is similarly devoted. Certainly, after a childhood shaped by Katrina, Powell is ready to turn 20 and maybe even see the return of those neighborhood block parties. But she also is a devoted student of the Lower 9 history she learned from elders, even as they hung sheetrock and painted walls to bring back gutted houses.
Lawless High School was the hub down here, her grandma told her, describing how it was busy with students and band and sports all the time. And there were stores on many of the corners where kids could get a bag of chips or a cold drink. None of those stores exist anymore. And instead of signs of what used to be, there was visible life. Kids used to play in the yards while the elders sat on the porches. “My grandma always says, ‘We used to be outside.’”
That was in the days when it felt like a cohesive community, she says. For Powell, the neighborhood was not the same. But it’s if all of it – the Lower 9’s past and present – was imprinted on her from young. ”You could ask me to move someplace great. I would not move because this is someplace great,” she said. “Like, my height is marked on the wall here. I would never leave.”