Searching for the Face of Katrina and a Sign of Hope

The first time I met Justice, she was in the Louisiana Superdome, sitting sidesaddle on her mother’s lap and swinging her legs as if she were on a shady porch, not trapped in a defeated city.

At the time, two days after Hurricane Katrina struck, she was 17 months old, the same age as my daughter. I wrote about her that night, how she was eating trail mix rescuers had handed out, how I had foolishly advised her mother -- when there was nothing else to eat -- that babies shouldn’t eat raisins.

She became, to me, the face of the storm, the face I saw when I thought about everything the Gulf Coast had endured in those terrible months: the decimation of 93,000 square miles, the dead and the displaced, the unmasking of a forgotten American underclass. Did her family, like many who endured the hurricane, still live with a quiet sadness? Where had they ended up? Wherever it was, did it feel like home? As the first anniversary of the storm approached, I decided to find out.

There are suggestions of progress and recovery here. Billions of dollars in federal aid is headed toward the region. Some have suggested that New Orleans, long one of the poorest cities in America, could become a boomtown. But it’s easy to be pessimistic about its future.

Block after block remains abandoned. Crime is up. Suicides have tripled. City Hall -- where the facade is still missing some of the letters in “City Hall” -- announced recently that the anniversary of Katrina would be marked with comedy and fireworks. But there is a pervasive sense that the party is over, and amid public outcry, a more somber memorial has been planned.

Maybe, I thought, finding Justice would provide some hope.

*

The operator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency was reading from a script: “What state did your disaster occur in?” I told her that it was wasn’t exactly my disaster but that it had occurred in Louisiana, that I was trying to locate a family I had last seen in the Superdome.

She suggested calling the Louisiana Family Assistance Center and the National Next of Kin Registry.

The center said it would need an address, phone number and date of birth, which, I pointed out, if I’d had, I wouldn’t have had to call in the first place.

The registry operator said: “I can’t even tell you where to start.”

Next was City Hall in New Orleans. The operator offered a number for the Red Cross; it was a fax line. I called back to City Hall.

“Have you tried FEMA?”

*

The only concrete leads were on a list of addresses -- compiled from voting and property records -- where Justice’s family may have lived before the storm. The first stop was a house in the working-class Bywater district. One of Justice’s relatives appeared to have lived in this “double,” a fatter version of the city’s narrow shotgun homes.

Azaleas had taken over, and weeds had erupted through the concrete steps leading to the door. There was no one home, hardly unusual in a city where fewer than half the residents have returned.

Across the bridge that spans the nearby Industrial Canal, a scrawny man was wrestling the radiator out of a green pickup on the roadside. The truck had been struck by a tidal surge that had ripped off its roof. But in New Orleans, where scavengers pick through the rubble every day, it was a find. His hands coated in rust, sweat dripping from his nose, Tyrone Smith said the radiator might fetch $15 or more at the scrap yard.

Smith put in 13 years at a shrimp plant before the storm -- a job that vanished amid a crumbling economy. Now he gets $10 an hour rewiring flooded houses. The 42-year-old lives in a gutted house in the 9th Ward, and sleeps in a bunk bed next to exposed studs pocked with rusty nails.

A pickup truck rumbled down the street. It was a noisy arrival; clamshells swept in from the Gulf of Mexico still covered many of the streets. “The bossman!” Smith said. He raced off to retrieve the kneepads his boss had given him for work. Then he ran toward the truck, pausing only when he spotted a twisted piece of aluminum lying in the weeds. It was enough, he said, to get a couple bucks at the scrap yard.

*

House after house was vacant. No one remembered Justice or her family.

Next to one of the houses in the Bywater, neighbor Dymous Henry said seven people were living on the block of 21 dwellings. Even those who have returned, he said, are not really home.

“People here can’t take change,” said Henry, 48. “There were people who lived in this part of town who had never been Uptown, never been across the river. This has done something to them. Everybody’s changed.”

In the Gentilly neighborhood, close to Lake Pontchartrain, was a house where Justice’s mother, Tonisha, may have lived in 2002. Now, a meaty tree limb juts through the roof. The block is so quiet you can hear the warped houses wheeze as they settle.

Across the street were the block’s only residents. Renee Daw, 43, who works at a shipping warehouse, and her son, Raynau, 8, rode out the storm at home. When they were chased from the attic because the water got so high, they kicked out a vent and climbed onto the roof. They were rescued after three days. They returned in April, and live in a FEMA trailer parked in front of their gutted house.

New Orleans is not an easy place to be a kid these days. There are two boys Raynau’s age three blocks away. They came by to play, once. The local park is padlocked; the bleachers next to the baseball diamond are upside-down. Asked what he was going to do with the rest of his day, Raynau just shrugged.

“We mostly just stay in the trailer,” Daw said. “We’re inside people now.”

Raynau misses the black Labrador he had to leave behind when he and his mother were rescued. Other than that, he never brings up the storm, even though they still boil water to brush their teeth, even though a lifejacket, a remnant of the rescue, still dangles from the rafters of the attic.

“He’s let it go,” Daw said. “Just like his mama.”

In Pontchartrain Park, a neighborhood of postal workers and schoolteachers that was devastated by a breach in the London Avenue Canal, property records indicated that Tonisha’s mother, Winifred Jones, owned a tiny home. Today, the door is missing. There is nothing inside but a toilet and a bathtub full of chunks of drywall.

Down the street, a man living in a FEMA trailer was mowing a neighbor’s lawn, not because he had any neighbors, but because snakes and other critters had taken up in the overgrown lots.

“Tonisha?” he said. “That’s my goddaughter!”

This was Winifred Jones’ house, he confirmed. But when asked where they were living, he snapped: “Why are you asking me all these questions?”

He began to sweat profusely. He grabbed the sides of his baseball cap, pulled it low and retreated into the street, stumbling over a pile of empty bleach bottles, tree limbs and splintered boards.

“Do you know them?” he shouted. “Or don’t you?”

It was a valid question; despite the connection that I felt with Justice and her mother, I didn’t really know them at all. “I don’t mean any harm. I’m just trying to see if they’re OK.”

“Don’t you get it, boy?” he screamed. “Everybody’s gone! Everybody’s lost!”

*

Twenty-two houses, in Gentilly, in Pontchartrain Park, in the Bywater. Nothing. Fifty-three phone calls, to FEMA, to City Hall, to disconnected numbers, and to people in North Carolina and Oklahoma who appeared to be relatives or old neighbors, but none knew Justice and the family.

Where were they?

An Internet message board set up to reunite storm victims provided a clue I had missed: a note from Winifred Jones written from the Houston Astrodome, which after Katrina had served as a shelter. It included a cellphone number.

A recording said the phone network would not accept messages. Another dead end, it seemed. But a few minutes later, my phone rang. A woman was on the other end: “Who called this number?”

“I’m trying to find Tonisha Jones,” I said.

“I’m her auntie,” she said. She said they were living in Beaumont, Texas. “I’ll have her call you in 15 minutes.”

When the phone rang, I raced across the room to answer it. I said I was looking for a little girl named Justice.

“That’s my baby,” Tonisha said. “I remember you.”

*

The next morning, Justice was on the second-floor balcony of a tidy apartment complex on the west side of Beaumont, swinging around her mother’s leg, a smile on her face, her red gingham dress billowing behind her.

There were suggestions of home. A scooter was outside the apartment and, inside, a chicken was baking in the oven. Justice’s father, Joshua Lonzo, was tying on an apron getting ready to go to work at a grocery store.

But like half a million evacuees who remain scattered across the country, Justice’s family is still unsettled. Nothing feels familiar. They are still learning their way around the area. The stores don’t carry the Cajun spices they had cooked with, or the white Bunny Bread they had used for sandwiches. Dinner is eaten on donated plates, in front of a donated TV.

Tonisha and Joshua Lonzo -- she has recently taken his last name -- were products of the New Orleans projects. Gangs ruled. Drugs were everywhere. As a boy, Josh watched more than one man get shot in the head. Only God, he says, knows how he and Tonisha chose the straight path.

They met at a party when they were 15. They lived across the railroad tracks from each other and went to different high schools but saw each other every day. Their friends joked that they had turned into an old married couple before their senior prom.

Four years ago, they had their first daughter, Taylor. They married a short time later. Tonisha worked as a cashier at a drugstore. Josh was a cook on a riverboat and drove a truck for an upholstery company.

“We were poor,” said Tonisha, 25. “But we were making it.”

They rented a little clapboard house in the 7th Ward. They bought a bedroom set on layaway. They went into the French Quarter for an occasional daiquiri and stopped by her grandmother’s house on weekends for a slice of coconut pie.

On the day the storm came, they gave no thought to leaving the city, like tens of thousands of others. Generations of their family had stayed and ridden out storms and, in any case, they had little money and nowhere to go.

They went to the Superdome better prepared than most. They had crackers, sardines, smoked sausage. They had three changes of clothes for the girls and 25 diapers for Justice.

By the time they got out six days later, everything that had not been lost or stolen -- a couple of boxed meals, some medicine, keys to a Dodge Intrepid they would never see again -- fit into a child’s suitcase decorated with the Cat in the Hat. The girls were covered in mud and urine. They had lost their shoes, so Tonisha had made them new ones, first by tying plastic bags around their feet, then by tearing strips of fabric from a pair of pants someone gave her.

When a military helicopter flew them to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, Tonisha saw the flooded city. “I looked one way -- water. I looked the other way -- water. I couldn’t believe my eyes,” she said. “We had no idea what had happened.”

The next day, a Navy plane flew them to Corpus Christi, Texas. After three weeks at a shelter, Tonisha got in touch with her aunt, Galintha Harden, who had also ended up in Texas. Her aunt told her about an apartment in Beaumont that a church had found for another relative, so Tonisha, Josh and the girls took a bus there.

Days after their arrival, Hurricane Rita slammed into the city. “The double whammy,” Tonisha said. They fled again, 11 relatives in two cars. They stayed in a hotel in Lafayette, La., for two weeks.

Those were dark days. They were exhausted. Tonisha could not shake the putrid smell of the Superdome.

“I was crazy,” she said. “I just kept smelling it, no matter how much we washed. I would sit and cry, cry, cry. Eventually, I realized that I had to stay strong for my kids. I realized that it could have been worse, because we were alive.”

*

In October, Tonisha, Josh, the girls and three other relatives moved into the $550-a-month two-bedroom apartment in Beaumont. By then, Tonisha had discovered she was three months pregnant.

It was not an easy pregnancy; doctors hospitalized her for two months because her amniotic fluid was too low and her blood pressure too high. Josh had found work as an automotive technician. But juggling the girls’ care and his job proved too much. After he was late to work a couple of times -- even after bringing a note from Tonisha’s doctor explaining that she was in the hospital -- he was fired.

They were so strapped for money that at one point they borrowed a car and drove 260 miles to New Orleans to recover $240 in cash that Tonisha remembered she had left in the pocket of Josh’s jeans. The money was with the electric bill that Josh was supposed to have dropped off that week.

Looters had already been inside their house but had missed the envelope. Tonisha washed the mold off each bill with soap and water.

While there, they salvaged what they could.

Some of Josh’s trading cards survived, including an autographed Brett Favre football card he had wrapped in plastic. Tonisha recovered a bag of photos that had been on top of a bookshelf. Inside was the only record of their old life -- photos of prom night, he in a tux and she in a silver gown, and of Taylor at her first birthday party, a handful of dollar bills pinned to her shirt in a New Orleans tradition.

They miss New Orleans -- the pickled meat and the gumbo, the raucous parades held by the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. “But it’s peaceful here,” Tonisha said one recent afternoon, as her girls ran through the courtyard of their apartment complex and pretended to make spaghetti with a pile of twigs.

Justice is a typical toddler, “always looking for trouble,” Tonisha said. She gets mad when told she cannot store her toys in the microwave. She is scared of bugs and loud noises. She uses a broomstick to flip on the lights. She is too little to remember the storm, or New Orleans. Tonisha figures that’s for the best.

Zoey, the baby, was born in April. She sleeps between Tonisha and Josh. Justice and Taylor sleep in a single bed on the other side of a nightstand crowded with sippy cups, toys and the Bible that Tonisha and Josh recently bought to replace the one they lost in the flood.

Earlier this month, 10 months after Tonisha applied, FEMA gave them $10,000 to cover the contents of their house. They have received a bit of additional aid, from the Red Cross and from a local church. They have no health insurance; the children are covered through Medicaid. Josh, 24, has a new job working at the deli of a grocery store. He makes $7.80 an hour. The three paychecks that come into the apartment are pooled; they total about $700 a week, which pays for rent, bills and food for eight, but not much more.

*

On July 4, Tonisha’s aunt was driving the car they all shared when she was rear-ended by a woman with no insurance. The girls’ car seats had been stored in the trunk, which was so badly damaged they couldn’t get in to retrieve them.

Tonisha and Josh needed a car of their own. Josh found an ad asking $4,500 for a 1997 Chevrolet Suburban. It was big enough for all of them, but the purchase would sap about a third of their net worth -- and the car had nearly 200,000 miles on it.

Tonisha and Josh borrowed her aunt’s crumpled car and drove to the seller’s house in a middle-class neighborhood. Josh hopped out to take a look. “What do you think?” he asked when he came back.

“It’s up to you,” Tonisha told him.

Josh took the Suburban for a spin. The seller told him that it had a new transmission and air conditioner. Josh paid, in cash, and drove it home.

“I just hope it lasts,” Tonisha said as she pulled out behind him.

Justice had been in the car for a while, and was getting antsy. Without the car seats, she and Taylor were not strapped in: Taylor was sitting on top of a case of bottled water, and Justice scooted over to the window to peer out.

“Justice!” Tonisha yelled. “Get away from the door! You want to get hurt?” Justice slouched in the back seat and pouted. Tonisha fiddled with the radio, trying to distract her so she wouldn’t cry. “Justice!” she called. “It’s your song!”

It was Mariah Carey’s “Fly Like a Bird.” The song is a prayer for strength: “Don’t let the world break me tonight.... I pray you’ll come and carry me home.” Justice bobbed her head to the beat, her braids swaying back and forth. Then she put her head on my shoulder and her hand on my arm. Soon, she was asleep.

I stared out the window, thinking about the storm, about everything I’d seen in the last year, about how silly it had been to think that a 2-year-old would be able to provide me with a happy ending.

*

Gold has covered Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and their aftermaths for the last year.