Settling Into the L.A. Life

There are moments when Jamar Franklin feels as if it’s all a bad dream and he’ll wake up back in New Orleans, relaxing on the lakefront with a bowl of crawfish, coaching high school basketball and preparing to host a houseful of guests for Fat Tuesday celebrations.

“In my mind it’s like I’m still going to Mardi Gras,” the 31-year-old teacher said. “It still hasn’t hit me that I won’t be there. There are times when I’m in my room, I feel like I’m still in New Orleans, until I walk outside.”

For the last five months, Jamar; his wife, Tirzah; and their 2-year-old daughter, Marley, have been living in a neatly furnished 12th-story Park La Brea apartment with a view of the Hollywood Hills, part of the diaspora of Gulf Coast residents who made their way to California after Hurricane Katrina hit in August.

And now, as Louisiana celebrates its first Mardi Gras since the storm, the Franklins and other evacuees are asking themselves a wrenching question: Is New Orleans still home?

Officials there hope the sight of the annual festival will revitalize the city, which saw two-thirds of its 460,000 residents scattered across the country.

“We’re sure that it will beckon people back,” said Arthur Hardy, a Mardi Gras expert and member of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Advisory Committee. “We need to do this to get out of the Katrina funk. We’re finished mourning. Mardi Gras sends a message that we’re not closed for business; the city is open.”

But for families like the Franklins, it’s not that simple.

“There isn’t much left to go back to,” Tirzah said.

The couple’s decision to move to Los Angeles was hatched in a Dallas hotel, where the family had fled intending simply to ride out the storm. But as days turned into weeks and the full extent of the devastation became known, going home became a more distant prospect.

Anxious to get her family out of the hotel, Tirzah Franklin, 31, who had worked as a registered nurse at Tulane University Hospital and Clinic, began looking for a job outside New Orleans. At first it was difficult because her license and medical certificates were back home in New Orleans.

A break came when Louisiana released a list of registered nurses licensed to practice in the state. Tirzah contacted a traveling nurses agency about jobs in California, picking the state in part because getting relicensed to practice here is fairly simple for nurses.

After taking recertification classes in CPR and other procedures, she landed a temporary position in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s labor and delivery unit. A furnished one-bedroom apartment came with the job.

“When they told me Cedars, I kept thinking that’s the hospital in the movie ‘Volcano,’ not knowing that it’s one of the best hospitals in the country,” she said.

By late September, the family, with some assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross, was living in Los Angeles. Tirzah began working at Cedars-Sinai, and Jamar stayed at home to take care of Marley. The family joined a local church, whose pastor had known Tirzah’s family in Chicago.

“We have helped them to get acclimated to Los Angeles,” said the Rev. Perris J. Lester, pastor of Lewis Metropolitan Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. “They exemplify what it means to have a strong family. He has been a stay-at-home dad while she has been nursing. They are genuine.”

The congregation donated clothes and took up a collection. A church member gave a temporary home to the family dog, Tyra, a rat terrier who’d been rescued from their New Orleans house after surviving nearly a month on a few days’ supply of dog food left before the storm.

“We got a call saying, ‘We found your dog. She’s a little skinny, a little hungry, but she’s OK,’ ” Jamar recalled.

Jamar found ways to ease the transition from New Orleans, discovering po’ boy sandwiches at Harold & Belles and fresh crawfish flown in from the gulf by New Orleans Fish Market.

“I can have a taste of New Orleans in Los Angeles,” Jamar said.

But even as they searched out reminders of the Big Easy, they began to be seduced by life in California.

“New Orleans is a little behind,” Jamar said. “Nobody drives Mini Coopers. And to be quite honest, until I got to Los Angeles, I had never heard of an iPod. On my basketball team everybody had those big CD players.”

For Tirzah, there is something challenging about living in a city with so many cultures.

“Los Angeles is a big melting pot,” she said. “I work with Russian nurses, Pilipino nurses, Hispanics and whites, and they’re always asking me to taste their foods.”

Jamar and Tirzah met while students at Xavier University of Louisiana. She was from Chicago. He was born in New Orleans and had never lived anywhere else.

Their small two-bedroom house on Marigny Street in the Eighth Ward was next door to his mother’s house and had belonged to his grandmother before she died. Only minutes from the French Quarter, they could hear music from the Jazz and Heritage Festival on their front porch on hot and humid afternoons in April.

“I’ve been spoiled, living all those years so close to my mother,” Jamar said. “I really miss her stuffed bell peppers and gumbo.”

Before the storm hit, the Franklins had plans for this year’s Mardi Gras. They wanted to buy a ladder with a seat so Marley could have a bird’s-eye view of the parade. And they wanted to invite about a dozen friends and relatives to camp out on sleeping bags and inflatable mattresses in the “Hotel Franklin” living room.

Even after they arrived in Los Angeles, they thought they’d be in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. This was a temporary home, a port in the storm. Once things got back to normal, they told themselves, they’d be back home.

Silas Lee, a pollster and professor at Xavier, said the celebration won’t be enough to draw former residents back to the city.

“More important than Mardi Gras is the ability to rebuild their lives, quality of life, access to decent housing, public safety, education and concern about the levees.”

For many of the thousands of families who made their way to California -- by January, about 5,500 Gulf Coast households had filed California change-of-address forms with the U.S. Postal Service -- returning is still a distant dream. The American Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles estimates that some 1,000 families, or about half of all those to which it provided post-Katrina assistance in the region, were still living in the area at the beginning of the year.

The Franklins remain here in part because of what they discovered in New Orleans. In November and December, on separate visits to the city, they saw a house that had suffered so much storm damage that it would have to be gutted to be restored.

“I pushed back the door and what was in the kitchen was from the living room. I said, “My God, look at my house,’ ” Tirzah said. “The water shifted everything inside. The smell of stench was everywhere, not just in the house, in the airport.”

They packaged all that was salvageable -- a class ring, sorority pin, photographs, a Bible -- and returned to Los Angeles.

“If I were single, I would return,” Jamar said, “but New Orleans is no place for a family. What would we do? The best we could do is live in a trailer. That I wouldn’t do.”

Key to any decision to go back, he said, is the safety of his daughter, who takes daily medication for sickle cell anemia and needs emergency room care whenever she has a fever.

Earlier this month, the Franklins enrolled Marley in nursery school. “Every morning she brings me my shoes,” he said. “She’s ready to go.”

With his days free, Jamar said, he is considering enrolling in film school. He has no desire to go back to earning a living teaching and coaching basketball, even though he keeps in daily contact with many of his former high school players, who have been dispersed by the storm.

“The future I’m not worried about,” he said. “I know everything is going to be fine. We have been through the worst already.”

The Franklins have both kept cellphones with New Orleans’ 504 area code, but they are split about returning. Tirzah says never. Jamar says he may want to go back in five or 10 years.

“I love New Orleans,” he said. “I’d like to one day see my daughter marching in a Mardi Gras parade.”

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Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.