Alfred Doucette, big chief of the Flaming Arrows tribe of Mardi Gras Indians, in 2002. His suit honors New York City and the Twin Towers.

Words and pictures by David Rae Morris (M.A. ’91)

New Orleans is a magical place—one of great complexity and contradictions. It is a city of elegance and old family wealth, of illiteracy and the most abject poverty. And despite the tourists who can’t always hold their liquor, and the young women who expose their breasts on Bourbon Street in exchange for cheap plastic beads, there is a charm about New Orleans that stays with you. I can’t put my finger on it, but I can feel it. I can photograph it. It’s a soulful place, evident in the people, the food, the architecture, and the very texture of the city itself. Once it possesses you, you can never shake it loose. I’ve spent the better part of the past 10 years trying to capture that soul in my photographs.

New Orleans is much more than the French Quarter, or Jazz Fest, or Mardi Gras. It’s a place where it’s acceptable to call someone—man or woman, even a stranger—“baby,” and it’s not harassment, but affection. It’s a place where many folks need only the slightest excuse to dance in the streets, where local musicians are often considered heroes, and where, when you die, friends have a parade in your honor, complete with brass band. It’s a place where hot sauce and Cajun spices are a staple on every dinner table, where we eat crawfish by the ton, and where we express lament for the rest of the nation for whom Mardi Gras is just another Tuesday in February. It’s where the culture is a gumbo of spices taken from the history of black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight.

There is magic here. And if you listen really hard, you can almost hear Louis Armstrong singing in the distance:

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans

And miss it each night and day

I know I’m not wrong . . . this feeling’s gettin’ stronger

The longer, I stay away

Miss them moss covered vines . . . the tall sugar pines

Where

Jazz funeral and second-line parade for Jazz musician Freddie Kemp, June 1997

mockin’ birds used to sing

And I’d like to see that lazy Mississippi . . . hurryin’ into spring

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana on Monday, August 29. At noon the Friday before, she was a Category 2 hurricane heading to Apalachicola, Florida. The 10 o’clock news that evening reported she was a Category 4 coming right at New Orleans. Overnight she grew into a Category 5, with maximum sustained winds of almost 175 miles an hour.

My partner, Susanne Dietzel, and I have lived in New Orleans since 1994, and I’ve always stayed to cover hurricanes for a variety of media outlets, from the New York Times to the European Pressphoto Agency. There were Erin and Opal in 1995, Danny in 1997, Isidore and Lili in 2002, Ivan in 2004. The locals still talk about Betsy, the last hurricane to make a direct hit on New Orleans, in 1965, and Camille, which devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969. The last major close call in New Orleans was in 1998, when Hurricane Georges struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but we’ve all been talking about the Big One for years.

I had never evacuated before. There was, however, something about Katrina that convinced me we needed to leave immediately. Plus, we have a 4-year-old daughter now. We beat the traffic out of the city, leaving Saturday afternoon and driving to Jackson, Mississippi, 200 miles north to stay with my father’s widow. We took our daughter (Uma Rae), two cars, our 14-year-old cat, and three changes of clothes. We left almost everything else behind. We thought we’d be back by Tuesday. Everyone did.

I did take my laptop and all of my digital files from the last four years. But I wasn’t thinking. I left my desktop computer, duplicate slides from long-term projects, years of negatives in boxes on the floor, and my most important work in safe deposit boxes in a downtown New Orleans bank. Almost as soon as we reached Jackson, I had this dreadful feeling that I was about to lose the bulk of my life’s work and there was nothing I could do but watch it on television.

At first it appeared that New Orleans

Members of the Krewe of St. Anne celebrate at the Mississippi River on Mardi Gras Day 2000.

had been spared. Katrina took a slight jog to the east Monday morning, reserving her wrath for the Mississippi Gulf Coast communities of Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, and Long Beach. On Monday morning, I spoke to a friend who had ridden out the storm in New Orleans. He said he could feel his whole house shaking, but the eye had already moved north and the worst seemed to be over. Then the levees broke, communications failed, and all hell broke loose.

Katrina hit Jackson Monday night as a strong tropical storm. We lost power for a week and so were spared the insanity that others had to endure on television. But we didn’t know if we would have anything to go back to. The New York Times reported that our neighborhood, the Bywater, was under 12 feet of water. But we had no way of knowing for sure. On the neighborhood blogs on the New Orleans Times-Picayune Web site people reported that certain intersections were dry or that water was here but not there. Then came the satellite images, which showed that the floodwaters had stopped a block from our house.

The realization that we had apparently lost nothing, coming on the heels of believing we had lost everything, seemed a miracle. But it was also bittersweet, knowing that there were many, many friends who did lose everything.

At first I was not ready to go back. The tragic conditions at the Superdome and the convention center weighed heavily on me. I didn’t want to see what had befallen our city. But I could not sit still either. So I started in Jackson, picking up a few assignments for the Jackson Free Press, the local alternative paper. Then I headed to the Mississippi Gulf Coast for a few days. The devastation was almost beyond words. I have been covering the news for more than 20 years, yet I had never seen anything like this. Entire communities were simply gone.

It wasn’t for another five days, until September 8, that I actually got into New Orleans. I had been trading text messages with my friend Lori Waselchuk (B.A. ’89), also a University of Minnesota graduate, who had recently returned to Baton Rouge after spending 10 years working as a photojournalist in South Africa. Lori told me to come to Baton Rouge that night and that we’d go into the city together first thing in

Search and rescue along Humanity Street in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans, September 2005

the morning. Tyrone Turner, a former staff photographer for the Times-Picayune, now shooting for National Geographic, was camped out at Lori’s as well. The two of them had convinced me to move to New Orleans a decade earlier.

The next day, with Tyrone at the wheel, we made the 70-mile drive down Interstate 10, passing the bayous and oil refineries into the Crescent City. We breezed through the checkpoints with Tyrone’s press credentials. The scene was surreal. Here were the familiar landmarks, some standing, others damaged, yet clearly everything was different.

We drove straight through the French Quarter and down Chartres Street into my neighborhood and drove up to my house. Except for the markings left by the search and rescue crew, it looked almost untouched. We immediately encountered a patrol of soldiers from the Oregon National Guard and followed them through the neighborhood as they tried to convince some holdouts to leave. We returned together again the next day. And I went again, by myself, the day after. Assignments began to come in the weeks that followed, and I began commuting back and forth from Jackson. My work became my therapy. It was the only way for me to make any sense of a situation that made no sense at all.

In the three months after Katrina, I photographed many of the neighborhoods of New Orleans, wandering down the familiar streets of the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, Lakeview, and St. Bernard Parish. They were almost beyond description. I ran into a Louisiana Army National Guardsman who perhaps put it best. I met him on the levee at the 17th Street Canal, not far from a breach that caused much of the flooding. He had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, and as he took photographs with a small digital camera, I welcomed him home and asked how New Orleans compared to his year in Baghdad. He shook his head. “Well,” he said, “nobody’s shooting at us here.”

I’d spend four or five days in New Orleans, then return to Jackson for the weekend. On Sunday evening, I’d be back on the road to Louisiana. In mid-September, I moved into a friend’s house across the river in the Algiers neighborhood. By mid-October I was back in the Bywater, staying in our house. The power and water had been restored, and the gas, too, if

Mardi Gras masks in the mud in Arabi, Louisiana, near the Orleans–St.Bernard Parish line, September 2005

you wanted to turn it on. The phones were still dead, however, and cell phone coverage was spotty at best. Susanne and Uma Rae remained in Jackson. New Orleans was no place for children yet.

Even though our house is not in a neighborhood that had been officially re-opened, people began to trickle back. Sugar Park Tavern, which makes the best pizza in town, was open down the street. All of the bars had opened up as well. Although a curfew remained in effect, it appeared to be rarely enforced, and people hung out on the streets. You’d see old friends, wave to the passing patrols of the National Guard, and sit down on the curb to catch up. There were reunions and long hugs. Everyone had a hurricane story. Always there was laughter mixed with the tears and the grief.

In the weeks and months following Katrina, there has been finger pointing, pleas to businesses and residents to return, and calls to rebuild the city and the levees. Now the question becomes, Whose New Orleans will rise from the ashes?

The old New Orleans had problems, many of which were simply not being addressed. And perhaps we were all living on borrowed time. Now, with entire communities of color substantially damaged, there is concern that New Orleans will be rebuilt as a “Disneyland for white people.” We will have no part of that. There existed in the city a delicate balance between the worlds of black and white, middle class and working class, gay and straight. These worlds often intersected in our day-to-day lives, and at its best the city offered a glimpse of what a truly multicultural community can look like.

“Do you like living in New Orleans?” my friends from around the country have asked over the years, before Katrina. “Do you think you’ll stay?”

My answer has always been the same: “Where do you move to from New Orleans?” New York? It’s just a little too hurried, a little too competitive. San Francisco? I don’t have a million dollars. Los Angeles? Far too pretentious. Berlin? Maybe some day. But for now, I would tell my friends, we’ll stay in New Orleans until the Big One washes us away.

Image Gallery: What it Means to Miss New Orleans gallery
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