What Water Can Do -- Remembering My New Orleans Home, Lost for Now

NEW YORK--It is a storm-dark Harlem day, 24 hours until the night last year when New Orleans, the city from which I’ve sprung, took its biggest salt-water bath ever. I have just struggled mightily through Act I of Spike Lee’s documentary, "When the Levees Broke," caught myself averting my eyes, especially during scenes of great water, so that by the film’s end I could not look straight on to the TV and peeked out the corner of my right eye. It is neither lie, nor exaggeration, to say I feel shaken past the marrow now, after having been reminded, in the space of just one hour, of all that water can do.

I do not mean only to say that I am reminded of houses gone swimming down the block, or a refrigerator nestled in a tree. I am talking intimate particulars here, like how one week past the storm Katrina there were birds living in my childhood home, so that when you approached it they flew away en masse, and how that sound was like the scrambling of fat thieves at gunfire. I mean how my 11 siblings are everywhere and nowhere together, or how my grown brother Troy unpacks 18-wheelers at a California Wal-Mart after half a life of masonry, or how he is making $8 dollars an hour, more than my sister Karen, a former social worker, who now reads prisoners’ mail for less than $20,000 a year with two children to support. I mean how my long-legged brother Carl is living again with my mother, at age 40, after the FEMA trailer he wanted so desperately (oh to have something all one’s own) was too long to fit his property.

Ten days past the water, I sat down to write an account for Oprah Magazine about how you try to face morning, slip on your A-line skirt and kitten-heeled pumps, board the subway and fold yourself up into the seat in the proper way, taking up the least amount of space, then get to work and pretend calm when two of your brothers are missing in your drowning city.

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