Storms of Memory: New Orleanians Surviving Katrina in Houston

The Birth and Purpose of the Project

New Orleans and Houston: at first glance, an unlikely couple. Yet the two cities are now twinned in American memory. In the first days of September 2005, with New Orleans under water, as hundreds of buses emptied the Superdome into the Astrodome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center into the George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston's population grew by as many as 250,000 while New Orleans's dwindled to a few thousand. With stunning swiftness, Houston had become New Orleans West.

Well over a year since the disaster, Houston's survivors number more than 100,000; arguably, more black New Orleanians now live in Houston than in any other city, including New Orleans itself. The two cities now stand at the center of a national debate, a profound soul search over how generous Americans can afford to be. To put it simply, New Orleans is now known throughout the world as the site of the America's most gratuitous abandonment of its own people, and Houston represents a rare and courageous affirmation of humanity, responsibility, and hope. In the days of the deluge, with pathetically few exceptions (notably the heroism of the US Coast Guard), the governmental response to the older city's need was at best inadequate and more often criminally negligent. The norm has been inexplicable indifference, broken promises, aid presumably marshaled but as yet undelivered.

Some three hundred miles to the west, the response of Houston was compassionate, bipartisan, generous, and smart—to my mind, the nation's single greatest act of civic heroism in recent years. Bill White, the city's Democratic mayor, and Robert Eckels, the Republican judge of Harris County, worked selflessly in tandem to staff two enormous refuges, the Astrodome and the Brown Convention Center. At the Dome, Dr. David Persse and the staff of the Houston Fire Department Emergency Medical Service performed on-the-spot triage for tens of thousands of evacuees. The Second Baptist Church deployed more than 40,000 volunteers to the Dome and the Convention Center, and numberless other private citizens, from the Houston area and around the world, converged in the city to offer their time, their skills, and their hearts to the survivors.

But something was happening in these shelters that transcended the generosity of the volunteers. All the volunteers who have shared with me their thoughts about those times told me that they left the shelters knowing that they were bringing away much more than they had taken there: they had been transformed by their human contact with the survivors. My experience accords with theirs.

At the George R. Brown Convention Center I was assigned the job of sorting donated clothing and helping the male survivors find the shirts and pants and undergarments that they needed. Walking into that vast space, I was stunned by the superabundance of material aid: acres of tables piled high with clothes and surrounded by hundreds of still-unemptied cartons running over with more clothes. The National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC displays a mountainous pile of shoes gathered from the Nazi death camps, each pair representing a life cruelly taken. The mountains that stretched around me in Houston conveyed the opposite message: the promise of life restored. Yet among these hills of hope, the survivors seemed so small, dwarfed by gifts that we had readied for them.

The material needs of the survivors were undeniably great, and they in turn expressed great gratitude for our gifts. Yet, in listening to these men and women, I discovered immediately that they needed something far less tangible and far more valuable than their third second-hand shirt or their second tube of toothpaste. They needed to tell us their stories. And we needed to hear them. The tellers were transfigured in the act of speaking, certainly in our perceptions, but also in theirs, as they began to see on our faces that we were finally beginning to understand something about their ordeals.

From the minute I met them, Katrina survivors were telling me their stories. As a folklorist, I...