Al Kennedy
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPROWELL: You live in Metairie. Was your home affected by Hurricane Katrina or by the flooding?
KENNEDY: My neighborhood is on the side of the 17th Street Canal opposite New Orleans. Although there was flooding, it was caused by water backing up in the drainage canals after the parish government evacuated the pump operators and switched off the pumps. We didn't have the catastrophic flooding caused by the canal breaches, but the fact that there are so many FEMA trailers all around my house shows that many people were affected by Katrina.
My house did not flood. I was grateful that the damage was limited to the roof and some uprooted trees. Most important, we could still live in it. The residents of Jefferson Parish were given one or two days to come in, check property, and leave again. It might have been September 7 when we were allowed to return. When we returned home, we just stood motionless in front of our house. After all that we had seen on television, we were so relieved our home was dry and still standing.
ROWELL: When did you see the catastrophic devastation in the City of New Orleans? That is, apart from what we all saw on television?
KENNEDY: My first glimpse of the destruction came as we were leaving town again after our one-day return to check our property. My wife and I stopped long enough for me to climb a wooden pallet that had been propped against the side of the floodwalls lining the 17th Street Canal, and I peered over into Lakeview. I saw the Corps of Engineers furiously working to fill the break in the levee, and beyond them I saw the water reaching almost to the rooftops of Lakeview homes. In that moment the reality hit me, and I held onto the concrete wall and went numb.
Against the roar of the diesel engines trying to pump water out of the city, I suddenly saw the faces of friends, and I knew their homes were gone and they were gone. Warm memories of the people of New Orleans—the very heart of New Orleans—came to me. I thought of the city's public schools I had worked in for 21 years, and I knew the schools were gone. For some reason I remember thinking of the Dr. Martin Luther King School [End Page 1406] in the Ninth Ward—a relatively new school with a public library attached. I knew it was gone, too. And I began to understand the horror.
ROWELL: When did you evacuate?
KENNEDY: We left at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, August 28, and we took with us an 80-year-old friend. I have lived here since coming to New Orleans to attend Loyola University in 1971, and this was my first time in to evacuate for a storm. Among the few items we could fit into a car, I packed two boxes of manuscript materials related to the late Donald Harrison, Sr., Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame Mardi Gras Indians. That is the book I am working on.
When we first evacuated, we stayed with family members in Ruston, Louisiana, and Mabelvale, Arkansas. All along the way we searched for public libraries to use the Internet to see if we could locate neighbors and friends and co-workers. When we returned to wherever we were spending the night, we would see more and more televised horror on CNN. We could not even imagine they were talking about our city. And only later did we realize television did not convey the intensity of the pain of those still trapped in New Orleans.
Because the agony of not knowing was so great, I volunteered to work in a Little Rock Food Bank for as long as we were in Arkansas, particularly since the food was going to New Orleans evacuees in Arkansas. And I remember one day I happened to pick...
