18: Louisiana

Your family had always lived in New Orleans. Daddy was a long-gone bluesman; Mama worked the kitchen at Antoine’s.

Mama said the Mississippi was your blood, that the Big Easy would always be your home.

That was before you got sent upriver to Angola, before the flood took everything.


Mama called it “The Farm,” and she wasn’t kidding. Every day you plant corn or pick cotton, just like slave times.

Coming over the Tunica Hills in the morning, you can see the sun hit the Mississippi. You can feel the dark water creeping closer as you work the fields, circling you on the far side of the levees.

You want it to come. Let the waters rise. Let the parishes flood. Let the earth wash its hands of all of us.


You were visiting Delilah when Katrina struck, and you couldn’t get back through the barricades to get her out. “Mama,” you shouted over the rising wind, but you were herded onto a bus and sent to the Superdome.

You were locked down there for days. No light, no power, just a little food and water. When you heard more buses were coming in the morning, you escaped.


The business district was dark and quiet aside from a few sirens in the distance, the drone of helicopter blades. A single building was in flames.

You headed east on Girod, left on Carondelet and onto Bourbon. Cars were strewn across the streets like trash, stray dogs snarled from underneath them as you hurried past.

You turned onto Burgundy as the sun was rising. A house had come loose and settled in the center of the avenue, a black X spray-painted on its side.

Mama’s house was still where it belonged, but crumpled. Inside, it looked like God had picked the whole house up and shaken it. Gray mud covered everything.

You found her in the bedroom. You wiped her face and held her in your hands.

That’s when you heard the sound behind you, footsteps in the mud. You laid Mama’s body down and drew your gun.


You got a new cellmate two years ago, after Gustav hit.

He was in for looting, he said. Breaking into ruined houses, taking what he needed to stay alive.

You looked at him and thought about how easy it was to pull the trigger. How for a moment there hadn’t been any doubts, any questions – just a flash of light that filled that fleeting second between “What am I doing?” and “What have I done?”