History I thought I already understood turned out to be considerably heavier, and considerably more personal, once I actually stood inside it properly.
Finally visited a museum exhibit about the Lower Ninth Ward that several friends and colleagues have been telling me for literally years now that I absolutely needed to see properly, a specific gap in my own local historical education I kept putting off addressing despite having lived in this city my entire life and having, I thought, a reasonably solid working understanding of the neighbourhood’s history and what it endured during Katrina and in the genuinely difficult years of recovery that followed.
I left the exhibit today genuinely unable to speak for a good while afterward, sitting alone in my car in the parking lot for close to twenty minutes before I felt composed enough to actually drive home, a reaction that surprised me somewhat given how much I already thought I understood about this specific history before walking in. What the exhibit provided that my previous, more surface-level understanding had never quite managed was scale, specific, individual stories and photographs and recovered objects laid out in a way that made an already familiar historical narrative land with a considerably heavier, more personal weight than I had been prepared for.
One particular section, a wall covered in photographs of houses before and after, paired with the specific stories of the families who had lived in each one, some who returned, many who never could, stopped me completely for what felt like a genuinely long time, reading name after name, story after story, in a way that transformed a historical event I thought I already understood in the abstract into something considerably more immediate and considerably more difficult to simply walk past quickly the way I might have moved through a less carefully curated exhibit.
I think there is something genuinely important, and genuinely uncomfortable in the right way, about actually confronting local history this directly rather than simply absorbing the broad-strokes version that circulates more casually in everyday conversation. I grew up in this city hearing about Katrina constantly, in one form or another, and yet today was the first time I think I actually, properly understood, at a genuinely felt level rather than a purely intellectual one, exactly what specific neighbourhoods like this one actually lost, and how unevenly the recovery that followed was ultimately distributed across different parts of this city.
I called my mother on the drive home, still somewhat shaken, to ask about her own memories of that period, since she lived through it as an adult in a way I, considerably younger at the time, only partially remember myself. She shared several stories I had genuinely never heard before, including a memory of a specific family friend from that exact neighbourhood who our own family lost touch with entirely in the chaos and displacement that followed, a loose thread of our own family’s history I am now, tonight, genuinely curious to try tracing further, not unlike the flood research I have been doing separately at the archive these past few weeks.
I think today taught me something important about the specific difference between knowing a piece of history exists and actually, properly reckoning with it, a distinction I suspect applies considerably more broadly than just to this one exhibit or this one specific neighbourhood’s story. I am planning to go back, properly, with more time to spend and considerably more emotional preparation than I brought with me today, and I intend to bring my mother along next time, curious what her own, considerably more direct memories might add to my own continuing education about a history I thought I already understood.
I have started thinking, in the hours since leaving the exhibit, about the responsibility that comes specifically with having grown up in this city without ever properly, fully reckoning with a piece of its history this significant and this recent. It is easy, I think, to let familiarity substitute for genuine understanding, to assume that having heard about something constantly across an entire lifetime is the same thing as having actually sat with its full weight even once. Today taught me those are, in fact, very different things, and I suspect I owe this city considerably more of exactly this kind of deliberate, uncomfortable reckoning than I have given it across the years I have lived here without fully realising the gap.
I am planning to write something more considered about today’s visit once I have had proper time to process it further, though I am not yet sure what form that piece will eventually take, whether a straightforward account of the exhibit itself or something more personal woven around my own family’s losses and my mother’s memories. For now, this diary entry feels like the honest, unfinished starting point that whatever comes next will need to build from.
I keep returning, writing this final paragraph, to one specific photograph from the exhibit I have not been able to shake, a young girl standing in front of what remained of her family’s home, an image the accompanying text noted had never been publicly identified despite decades of the museum’s own research efforts. I do not know who she is, or what eventually happened to her family, and something about that specific, unresolved uncertainty has stayed with me more persistently than almost anything else from today’s visit, a reminder that entire individual stories from this history remain genuinely, permanently unrecovered, however much careful documentary work institutions like this museum manage to accomplish.
More from this author at Siobhan O’Donnell, prat.uk.