Narratives from Students at the Center

Preface

Adriane Frazier has been a part of Students at the Center since her sophomore year at McDonough 35 High School in New Orleans. She graduated from Howard University in 2005 and now works with Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies on partnerships with Students at the Center.

Journal: Journey to a Memory

The sun wrapped itself around me, each ray a ribbon of heat with its stubborn Southern grip. It was pretty warm for a February evening. I had driven the whole day from Atlanta with the windows down. The air was thick and heavy, the smell of death suspended. Abandoned cars dotted long stretches of highway whispering tales of past lives. Crumbled cypress and mangled iron were swept into the streets, and dreams were carried off into the wind and scattered. I wonder what happens to a tree when it is uprooted. Is it dead forever? Or do the roots go so deep that once toppled it can grow again, even if only beneath the surface, hidden from sight? My mind drifts when fatigue finds love in humidity. I had after all been driving for over seven hours. I found myself back home, back in New Orleans. But it wasn't my beloved where I could lose myself in Louie's trumpet song. I used to bathe in magnolia-scented water and fantasize about long pirogue rides down bayous where moss would stretch out its fingers to caress my shoulders. Instead it was empty, fragile, and anemic. No longer an elder of Creole antiquity, it seemed infantile and helpless. I drove down streets that were starved of sound, of any life at all, and I began to wonder why I had come back. Why would I subject myself to witnessing the slow unravel of centuries of the culture-making threads that were woven into the fabric of who we were, to see skeletons dusty with deceit released from closets and hands made bloody with inaction? I did not know all the answers, but I knew that I had driven all that way without vacillation. The uncertainty was more about what to expect from the young people I was soon to meet.

Worse Than Those Six Days in the Dome

Maria Hernandez was a senior at Douglass. She served as primary researcher/writer for Plessy Park: The New Orleans Civil Rights Project. She plans to continue this work while she finishes her senior year of high school in Oklahoma.

When Katrina hit New Orleans, I was two weeks into my senior year at Frederick Douglass Senior High School. My friends and I were frantically trying to keep our school from closing. Douglass was one of the lowest ranking schools in the district, so the state, using its accountability plan, was trying to shut it down or take it over. We were running a campaign called Quality Education as a Civil Right, doing our part in this one-year-old national campaign by continuing the work we had been doing at Douglass: involving more parents and students and community members in working together to improve the school and to demand all the resources we needed to do that.

A lot of people were finally looking at our school as more than just a place where criminals are reared, which is the impression you'd get if all you knew were news reports. The media always ran to the school to report a fight, but no one said anything when my classmates placed first in a competition against professional journalists for a series they wrote on public education at the 50th Anniversary of Brown vs. Board Education. But for folks who knew what we were doing and spent time with us, you could see them actually smiling when Douglass was mentioned.

In the midst of all this, I was extremely bummed out. I was bored of walking the same old halls and knowing everybody who walked by. I was ready for a change. I got more than I bargained for when Katrina hit.

So far I've had to start my senior year three times at three different schools in three different...