Scribble

Audie Cornish

00:00:00

I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment, and I usually don't talk about what it was like covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, because inevitably people assume or ask about the storm itself, but I wasn't there for that. I was there for the after, the November when people had to flag a Red Cross truck in the mud for Thanksgiving dinner.

NPR Archive

00:00:21

One church group and Red Cross volunteers prepared that many meals for families in New Orleans. NPR's Audie Cornish followed along and has this report. You ready for turkey? Hundreds of volunteers have cooked and packed.

Audie Cornish

00:00:33

The first Mardi Gras minus the million people who had fled the city and left behind whole neighborhoods.

NPR Archive

00:00:39

And one of the most frustrating things for Reverend Michael Zachary is that the neighborhood has become a destination for disaster tourism, but not much else.

Audie Cornish

00:00:48

The first day of school for kids in a school district that had almost collapsed.

NPR Archive

00:00:53

Clark is coming off a year in Mansfield, Texas, and she's not too interested in starting over in New Orleans. I want to go back to Texas because it's more fun down there. I barely have friends by my house. I got friends in Texas.

Audie Cornish

00:01:07

Little Dahlia Clark is probably in her early 30s now, maybe even with her own kids. And on anniversaries like this one, 20 years after the storm, I have wondered about the generation raised by the people who lived through it.

Amari Walton

00:01:21

My mom always says like, it's what you make it. The storm already happened and it was very catastrophic. Now it's how you decide to move forward from it. Like, yes, we lost so much, but I feel like the loss made us better because we came back stronger.

Audie Cornish

00:01:37

'So for this Assignment, I'm speaking with one of the kids who has inherited the legacy of post-Katrina New Orleans. Stay with us.

Audie Cornish

00:01:49

So to be clear, this is not gonna be a dramatic or traumatic retelling of what happened. This is about what happened after.

Amari Walton

00:01:58

I know what some of y'all are thinking. How is this girl gonna try and talk about something she ain't been through? My story isn't about the storm itself. More of what New Orleans gained from it. I want to shed light to something bigger that matters most to me.

Audie Cornish

00:02:11

Amari Walton is a high school senior basically skipping class to talk to me about this audio essay that she put together as part of a special project. It's called Born After the Storm and it's run out of a local outfit called Be Loud Studios. At 17, she is the same age her mother was when Hurricane Katrina hit and much of the family evacuated to Texas. They actually don't talk about it all that much and Amari didn't really ask until she joined the project. Even then, she was nervous to be involved.

Amari Walton

00:02:42

I definitely feel like if you haven't been through it, if you haven't experienced it, then you have no place to talk about it. And I was really nervous about entering this program because Mr. Alex was like, this is your story about Katrina, but I always felt like I didn't have one, I didn't really go through it. It's not something I can talk about from me. So I was definitely nervous.

Audie Cornish

00:03:07

Did it feel wrong to talk about it?

Amari Walton

00:03:09

'Yeah. It felt like it wasn't my place to talk about it. It felt, like, why is a 17-year-old girl that completely missed the storm is talking about something that has really nothing to do with her? But I wanted to relay the message that even generations after, years after Katrina, everyone is affected in their own way. Even if it's not as traumatic as, like being in it. In losing everything, even if it's something as small as making sure your phone is charged when you hear the crack of thunder, that's still a part of what people in my family and others experienced in the past, because if they hadn't gone through that, then that shapes how they raise their children, how we raise the children after us. It's like a domino effect.

Audie Cornish

00:04:06

Um, I've traveled all around and like, so many parts of the country have. They do have their own regional specialties and things like that. But with New Orleans, it's like, we're talking regional, you know what I mean? Like there's this set of dishes, this set of music, this said of restaurants, this set of slang, it actually really intense.

Amari Walton

00:04:31

'People that are new to New Orleans it's like a cultural bomb. It's just like, boom, there's so much to learn, so much know about New Orleans that you don't find everywhere else. It could be overwhelming. It can be. It's so, so much color, music, the smells, all the things-.

00:04:49

The smells. That is real. That is real, like the soil smells different.

Amari Walton

00:04:53

Yes, walk down the street and you just get you all five of your sensory details. They're just hitting you all at once It's like whoa, where do I start first? Where should I go first? It's just so much to experience at one time I know this like if I'm going down the Street in New Orleans, I'm like, okay, it's a little quiet Where's the where's the music? Where's that people chattering? Where's to the barbecue sizzling and it's just what it's quiet is like, ok, that's not New Orleans at all.

Audie Cornish

00:05:22

Something's wrong. Something's wrong.

Amari Walton

00:05:24

Because we're always doing something. We're always partying. There's always something going on. So when it's quiet, it's like, okay, something went down and it ain't good.

Audie Cornish

00:05:35

In the years that I would come back, and I would go back like every few months after a time, it was like one layer of that would return. So it was okay, all these restaurants are back. You're getting those smells. I would do stories with musicians. Okay, the musicians are coming back. They need money. They're trying to figure out what to do. They're trying to figure out where to live, but they wanna come back. There were also people who did not want to go back. You know, I remember talking to this woman in Tennessee and she was like, I don't want to start again. There were parts of New Orleans that weren't great for me and my family and finding work. And I feel like that changed something too. Like people who never would have left actually left.

Amari Walton

00:06:24

I think it's also just the feeling of having to start over. It's overwhelming because especially people that grew up there, I've heard countless stories from that week of how much baby pictures they lost, how much old cookbooks, even like the childhood couches you might have spilled juice on, all that is gone. And just to replicate it somewhere else, it's just, it is not going to be the same. It kind of reminds me, like, you know, when you get into an accident, your car is totaled and it's like you have so many repairs to do. I know a lot of people was like, we might as well just start from scratch, but New Orleans is such a unique place and it is really big. It's like, where do we start? How can we start from the scratch? Especially if some people are like, yes, let's rebuild, but others are like there's no point. We should just start new somewhere else.

Audie Cornish

00:07:19

So can I tell you something? Yes. In my basement to this day, I still have my emergency kit that I kind of keep because of New Orleans. Like I no longer live in a hurricane prone area, but like everything's in Ziploc bags. You know what I mean? It's like waterproof matches and food and water. And my husband thinks I'm crazy. But all I can picture is those people hauling things out of their houses.

Amari Walton

00:07:50

The what ifs. I think of the butterfly effect, like what if I didn't have this? What if I wasn't prepared? That one small decision on how you think is trivial, but when it actually happens, it's like, wow, I needed that. I'm glad I had it. I'd rather be over prepared than under prepared. And I kind of got that from my family because my grandma, her cabinet is just full of canned When a storm's coming, get your gas, get you money. My mom and my dad charge all your devices because what if that one battery percent that's left could make a phone call that saves us? Small stuff like that that could make a big difference in how you survive a storm.

Audie Cornish

00:08:37

Do you do the same thing? Has that been passed on to you? Comparing notes as people who, we didn't live it, but we're living with the legacy of it.

Amari Walton

00:08:46

'I'm definitely an over-preparer. I have a bag, a pouch, a list of everything just in case. And I always say just in, I have it just in case and there's always a time I would use it. There's not a time. I won't use it even like I have a med kit in my backpack for volleyball. Cause you never know, you might get a scrape.

Audie Cornish

00:09:09

'So you're the kid, you don't just have a couple band-aids, you're like ready for a full on something else.

Amari Walton

00:09:13

Yes, people always come to me if they need something. I feel like the Mary Poppins of the group. I just keep pulling stuff out of my bag.

00:09:23

Oh, my God. Amari, no, you're too young for that. I'm the one who's like that, I'm a mom now. I'm supposed to carry all the stuff in my purse. You're not supposed to be carrying all that stuff.

Amari Walton

00:09:33

I know, but I just can't shake the feeling of not being prepared, because the time that I don't have, I'm like, dang, I wish I kept it, I wished I had it. So instead of wishing I did this, I was like, okay, next time I'm going to be more prepared and proactive before something happens.

Audie Cornish

00:09:55

The other thing I'm weird about is, as you mentioned it, like baby photos and things like that, it's like getting everything in some digital form and like putting it in the cloud. And like the back of my mind is always, where is this, how can I save this if all of a sudden I don't have anything? Like even power, right? It's not just having it in cloud, It's like, oh, well, what other? What other way or format could I have of saving things? Even though 20 years on, it's actually even harder to do because everything's digital.

Amari Walton

00:10:34

And I find the authenticity in stories. So yes, you may physically lose pictures or books, but that's why I think the people of New Orleans is what makes it New Orleans because we have so many stories to tell. And I feel like the stories hit harder coming from the person. So you may have lost it, but as long as we have the people, I feel like New Orleans culture has never truly lost. No one's Stories are truly lost, especially if you're telling the story, it's gonna pass on from person to person, whether that's generational or not. It can be stories from a random person that you meet in a local shop, and they'll be like, hey, I heard this from somebody else at the local shop. And the story continues to spread. That's how I think New Orleans culture is found everywhere, because we have a way of sharing it. We're very open about sharing what we experience.

Audie Cornish

00:11:31

You are. Coming from Boston, I was very traumatized. I was like, why is everyone so nice? Why is everyone saying hi? And why is everyone willing to share the deepest part of themselves in our conversation? I mean, Amari, like, I would say in those first six months that I was there, because I was living there, right? Everyone I spoke to at some point cried in the conversation. And I'm a reporter, so in fairness, I'm literally like asking them this stuff. And it wouldn't come in the first five minutes, but it would come in first half hour. And it would always be something different that hit them.

Amari Walton

00:12:14

We find connections in everyone. It can be a stranger, it could be found— we're very much found family. I feel like a lot of families down here is found. They're not always blood. So when we find that connection in each other, that's what makes us bond together.

Audie Cornish

00:12:33

I wonder if it's even tighter because I was looking at this research that said like 33% of people had not returned.

Amari Walton

00:12:42

'Mm-hmm.

Audie Cornish

00:12:43

And a lot of them were Black.

Amari Walton

00:12:45

Yeah.

Audie Cornish

00:12:45

Like these neighborhoods were smaller, you know what I mean? Like, I just wonder if it made people more tight knit, especially when you had so many people coming from outside of the state to live in New Orleans.

Amari Walton

00:13:00

Yeah, I can imagine that must have been really weird at first, having outside people coming into a place that was so tightly bonded by people already here. So I know there's like a little hesitance to open up. When you see that, you know, we're all people, we are all here just to grow and trying to rebuild, recoup after the storm, the loss that happened, it made us connect because it's like hey, you're not as different as I thought you were and you always realize that at their roots we are the same. Even if we sprout into a different tree at the end of the day we come from the same place.

Audie Cornish

00:13:47

It's interesting using a tree analogy, because we're talking about being uprooted in a way. And we're also talking about legacy. We're talking, you know, like that's a good one. What are you planning on majoring in in college?

Amari Walton

00:14:01

Psychology.

Audie Cornish

00:14:04

Good. I thought for a minute there, I thought you were going to be my boss, but I don't need to worry. You'll just be my therapist instead.

Amari Walton

00:14:11

I want to help, my goal is to help people who don't have this outlet to really process their feelings. Not necessarily a therapist per se, but writing is my outlet, it's my outlet to get those feelings out healthily. And hopefully I want help people find their forte, their thing that they can run to when their emotions get too high.

Audie Cornish

00:14:41

Well, Amari, I think you're going to get there.

Amari Walton

00:14:43

Thank you.

Audie Cornish

00:14:44

I really do. Thank you so much. Thank you for talking with me.

Amari Walton

00:14:47

Thank you for having me.

Audie Cornish

00:14:51

Amari isn't alone in feeling like Katrina isn't really her story to tell, despite being clearly shaped by its legacy. After the break, we hear from Alex Owens, the teacher behind Be Loud Studios.

Alex Owens

00:15:04

'I will never claim this city even though I have a seven-year-old here.

Audie Cornish

00:15:08

Stay with us.

Audie Cornish

00:15:14

Some 30% of the people who left New Orleans pretty much stayed wherever they landed, mostly in cities in Texas, but some as far as Chicago. There was also this influx of new blood, housing activists and developers with competing ideas for rebuilding neighborhoods, also charter school lobbyists and all kinds of nonprofits. It was a population that was wealthier and wider than the one that left, and it changed the city. Alex Owens was among that wave, arriving in 2009 with AmeriCorps.

Alex Owens

00:15:47

'I'll never claim New Orleans, right? Like I'm not from here. People will say, where are you from when I'm outside the state? Or even it's the first question I get asked, where are from? What high school did you go to? Right. And it's like, I will never claim the city even though I have a seven-year-old here. I have the baby who was just born here. I got a mortgage. I got married here. I started a nonprofit here. But at the same time, you know, I recognized early on two things. One, there was an opportunity to put my unique skill set, to put energy to the fabric of this community. And not overnight, but as a teacher, as a AmeriCorps member, and now as a nonprofit executive director, and as a parent, and as partner, I find myself every day just trying to find ways to give back and to also be part of that community. The second thing that I recognize is like, there is reciprocity to what I get. I didn't come here to save a city. I didn't come here. I often felt this at the nonprofit. I call it the these poor people syndrome. People coming from outside to say, Oh, we're going to rebuild the house for these poor people. But at the same time, we get something. I get something from that, whether that's a culture, whether it's the relationships I've made, whether, it's just being part of a city that cares about each other. I have gotten so much from the city and recognizing that and being grateful of that and speaking to that is something that I think all transplants need to be doing.

Audie Cornish

00:17:17

Were there people you knew who didn't? When you said that these poor people syndrome, it reminded me of the fact that like, as a reporter, I can't tell you how many stories I did with nonprofits or just like even a celebrity who was like, we're going to do this for these, they didn't always say poor people. We're gonna build this special house. We're going do this solar something. We're go urban plan our way out of this. Like, there was a lot of that.

Alex Owens

00:17:48

You know, for the nonprofit I was part of, I was the person when that celebrity came through to greet them and shake their hand and say, let me give you a tour, right? And there was definitely part of that. There was the pageantry and there still is, right. That's kind of part of the nonprofit game.

Audie Cornish

00:18:02

Yeah, because there was a kind of disaster tourism.

Alex Owens

00:18:05

Exactly.

00:18:05

We started to worry about that as well. Like, we're going to give you a tour of the Ninth Ward so you can see how bad it is or how bad was. And we're ostensibly telling you the history, but there's something about it that doesn't feel... right.

Alex Owens

00:18:20

'Yeah, and even the term rebuilding, right? I think the nonprofits that exist today and the people that exist today, you know, who came here after the storm, recognize that this is a long-term investment. And so I think that's where some things were misguided. People in their early 20s coming and saying, I'll spend three years and then I'll go to law school or I'll spent three years and then we'll back home. And it's, I think what's beautiful about the city is that there are people who came after the storm and said, you what? No, this is where I wanna be. And I'm going to invest myself in my career as an educator. I'm gonna invest myself into long-term growth. You know, people ask me all the time, well, where are you gonna move next? I say, I'm not gonna move anywhere next. This is where I live. Again, this is where have children. This is my community. And there is not only like a sense of pride I have in that. Uh, but I also like, it's something I try to say as much as I can. And the fact that there are people not only like me, but Amari, her mom, there are families who are actively just trying to live a good life and project that forward, uh, is what makes this community so strong. Uh, and I heard Amari speak to how everyone's so friendly. I love to say like, you know, in other cities, you know, your Californians of the world, everyone's so nice, but they're not very friendly. Here's the opposite. You are super friendly, but sometimes they're not nice.

Audie Cornish

00:19:40

That is correct.

00:19:41

Yeah, they'll tell you. how it is, right? But at the same time, they will invest in listening.

Audie Cornish

00:19:46

It's interesting when I listen to all of the students' essays, I was struck by, in a way, how little they knew. I mean, obviously, they're young people, but like, they don't know that much about what happened.

Alex Owens

00:19:59

Yeah, yeah, that's actually that was going to be my immediate response to your question was, you know, again, we were so intentional, we brought in community members. As a transplant, we were like very like, okay, we're not going to teach them about Katrina. Let's get some community members in here. We had the Children's Bureau, which provides counseling in therapeutics, therapeutic services to youth across New Orleans, we had them come and kind of help with our curriculum. We were so like, how do we provide and make space for young people to feel safe and have outlets? But about halfway through the week, we just realized, you know, they were just like, no, I'm good. Right. And one young person was really struggling to write. And I said, well, what's going on here? He's like, I feel all this pressure to have a feeling. He's like, I really don't know what to feel. And I talked to my family, they met in Houston while they were evacuated. So it was like a beautiful love story. They're now married. And I said, that feeling of nothingness, that feeling of maybe confusion, that feeling of like, I don't know what to think is valid. That in itself is a story.

Audie Cornish

00:21:09

Yeah. Because it says something about, Amari pointed out, people being like, got to move on. That's right. Got to rebuild, got to go home. Am I going home? Like that there is a kind of, in the best case scenario, you've compartmentalized it somewhere so you can get done what needs to be done.

Alex Owens

00:21:27

That's right, that's right. I completely agree here. Maybe there's a lack of curiosity that we have, right?

Audie Cornish

00:21:35

Well, I mean, some of it's generational, right? Like, I feel it now when I talk to young people about 9/11.

Alex Owens

00:21:40

Yep. Yes, of course.

Audie Cornish

00:21:41

9/11 for people my age, that's like Pearl Harbor. It's this epic moment. And they're just like, sounds bad? You know, like they don't have a real, there's no visceral reaction to it.

Alex Owens

00:21:56

Yeah.

Audie Cornish

00:21:56

They'll have these other things that are their visceral defining moment.

Alex Owens

00:22:01

Yeah, COVID.

Audie Cornish

00:22:02

I think it's finally too far away.

Alex Owens

00:22:07

Yeah, that's so true. We asked them to, it's called a gallery walkway, where they write different things about memories and images they have about neighborhoods and from media and from their family and from politics. And so many of them, the kind of adults in the room were putting the images of George W. Bush looking down over the plane or the famous Kanye West moment. And a lot of them didn't know. And just like having kind of those images seared in their brain. They were like, well, what was that? But a lot of them also said, like, I haven't learned any of this in school. That was also really surprising to me for so many young people to say, like oh, we haven't talked about it. And so we are so quick as someone who's been in the standards before teaching the Louisiana Purchase, but not yet diving in authentically.

Audie Cornish

00:22:55

I know. Well, you know how we argue about our history. We're still arguing about the Civil War. That's right. You know, I think it's it's not clear. People would know, like, how do you talk about this thing that is both a natural disaster, a manmade, you know, emergency preparedness disaster, an engineering disaster, a climate disaster? Those are all things that I think we still haven't even reckoned with as a country.

Alex Owens

00:23:23

Yes.

00:23:24

And it's almost too much. It's a Gordian knot to try and get it out of the Katrina story.

Alex Owens

00:23:33

Yes, 100%. The storm was one thing, but the systems, again, before and after, I think, those are the stories that could be telling, how did they break down, how do they affect people, how did they impact, and how do those systems still exist today? It's something that we were trying to get across a lot, and we had a lot of organizers and a lot community members who are actively not just trying to be part of this anniversary movement but also be part the systems that affect people every day.

Audie Cornish

00:24:05

Well, thank you so much for sharing the students' voices with us.

Alex Owens

00:24:09

Yes.

Audie Cornish

00:24:10

Thank you for being vulnerable with me, because I asked you a lot of personal questions, and I really appreciate it.

Alex Owens

00:24:18

And we appreciate it. Thank you.

Audie Cornish

00:24:20

'That was Alex Owens, Executive Director of Be Loud Studios, the nonprofit behind the podcast, Born After the Storm, which shares the stories of the generation growing up in a post-Katrina New Orleans. Earlier, we heard from one of the students involved in that project, Amari Walton. And if you want to hear her essay and from some of the other students, you can check out a link to Born After The Storm in our show notes. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week.

The Assignment with Audie Cornish