Voices Rising: Stories from the Katrina Narrative Project
Edited by Rebeca Antoine
Univ of New Orleans Press 2008
ISBN 0972814361
244 pages

In October 2005, the University of New Orleans began accepting interviews and personal narratives from Katrina survivors collected by the school’s students. Now housed in the UNO Library, these recollections represent the most personal and direct reflections on the hurricane, the failure of the federal levees and the national tragedy that unfolded across the city in the days that followed both. There have been many books written about these events in the past three years and there will likely be many more published in the future. But Voices Rising: Stories from the Katrina Narrative Project, which includes 31 of those narratives, represents a powerfully significant contribution to the social history both of the City of New Orleans and the United States. This is history as it happened and as such, it provides a unique window into the lives of those who experienced that history in the most dramatic and honest way.

One of the most impressive things about Voices Rising is the depth of experiences highlighted here. In “Welcome to Oklahoma,� for example, a man recalls his strange odyssey out of the city, which included being treated like a criminal by the Jefferson Parish police while trying to leave New Orleans by bus:

"The caravan left the airport and went over a railroad yard just to the west of the airport. Two dump trucks that had been parked to the side of the road pulled in front and in back of the caravan, trapping the buses on the bridge. The Jefferson Parish police had captured a thousand people in 24 buses. I don't know the reason for it. There were about 50-50, people from the Superdome and St. Bernard Parish. They wouldn't let us off the bus at first. The school buses just don't have any facilities at all. The National Guard warned us that the Sheriff's Office would shoot anyone who got off the bus. We were refugees not criminals. Even if there was one criminal among us; it wasn't worth treating a thousand people that way. The National Guard told us that a two-star general would negotiate our release somehow. I assume that happened because around 9:30 or 10:00 Friday night, they decided to release us. The buses just took off. You'd think they were Ferraris, they took off so fast."

The book includes the memories of many different perspectives that as a whole provide a complete picture of the impact of Katrina and the flood. The interviewees pull no punches. In one piece, "In the Same Financial Boat," Michelle Balot expresses her confusion over evacuees being referred to repeatedly as “refugees.� “I never knew that there were such strong cultural divides between the cities and states in the United States,� she writes, “that caused people to view evacuees as outsiders.�

While some of us may have forgotten or even ignored the words so commonly used three years ago, Balot reminds us of how wrong they were and how remembering them is an important part of not repeating that insensitive mistake.

Not all the memories are negative, however. In “Something Terrible is Happening,� Peter Ward describes assisting in rescues for days after the storm. Also NOPD officer Donovan Livaccari recalls some of the hard work done by “regular everyday people� in “We Still Didn’t Have the Big Picture.� It is the stories like the Ferrara Family’s in “I Just Need to Get These Old Bones Home,� which really hit home, however. Amy Ferrara Smith’s grandfather lost not only his home but also the grocery store that had belonged to the family for generations. She explains the pain of seeing him cut adrift from the places that mattered so much in the following excerpt:

“I cursed Katrina every day after that. She threw me out of my home and disrupted my life, but I knew I was young enough to start over. My grandfather wasn’t. He had already lived through enough adversity in his life. He and his family had survived the Great Depression by running a corner grocery store that my grandfather later expanded into Ferrara Supermarket. Katrina took his business. He had survived a World War, started a family, and later built a house on his earnings from the grocery. Katrina took his house too.�

She concludes with a description of his neighborhood and then the starkest truth: “Katrina took his city too.�

The interviews and memories in Voices Rising reflect a perfect combination of the Katrina experience, from those who left to those who stayed to those who could not go back. Its significance is not found so much in contemporary readings, however, as interesting as they might be. Rather, this is a book that 10 or 20 years from now will serve as a perfect time capsule of what happened at the end of August 2005. Unlike the work of historians and journalists, as valuable as their insight will be, Voices Rising is the record of those who there, on the ground. It is, quite frankly, as real as it gets. The University of New Orleans did brilliant work by having their students engage in such significant fieldwork; Rebeca Antoine’s sampling of what they gathered proves the worth of their larger record. With much of the country, I watched the flood on television and I have certainly read a great deal about the city in the years since the hurricane. But this is the first book that made me feel like I understood how devastating Katrina and the flood truly were. Now, finally, those of us who were not there can understand what happened that August to the city and the people of New Orleans.