By Zenitha Prince
AFRO Contributing Editor

Being in Mississippi and Louisiana to report on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was an assault on the senses. The then-Category 3 hurricane made landfall on the Gulf Coast states on Aug. 29, 2005, leaving devastation in its wake.

What I remember most are the smells–the scent of rot, of decay, of mold and mildew…of death. 

Then there was the sound–a deafening silence in the neighborhoods where giggles and laughter, raised voices or blaring music, the roar of an engine or the sizzle of a grill once bore witness to the full lives lived and the generations of Black heritage and culture rooted into the communities’ foundations.

And I certainly cannot forget what I saw: large riverboats lying mangled and askew, tossed onto the shores of Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., like discarded toy boats; houses chewed up and spit out onto street corners; upended vehicles held aloft by tree branches; nightmare forests of mud and mold smothering the hard-won earnings and memories invested into homes. And then there were the large X’s etched onto houses, macabre epitaphs telling the stories of lives lost when the rapidly rising waters swallowed entire communities.

It was all too easy to lose sight of that hallowed journalistic tenet–objectivity. Hopelessness, despair, even anger were paramount–but never pity. The main focus of our coverage–the survivors–negated any such feeling.

Seeing and chronicling the survivors’ stories – their spiritual strength and resilience, their community spirit and bravery in wading into putrid waters to save scores of their fellow residents, their optimism despite the devastating losses and their dogged determination to return and reclaim their heritage and rebuild their homes – renewed my own sense of purpose and reignited my calling to journalism.

It was the stories like that of Herbert Gettridge, a stonemason who in 1950, with his own hands, built a three-bedroom house on North Prieur Street in the Lower Ninth Ward for his wife and young children. And who at 83, one year after the floods ravaged his neighborhood, returned to New Orleans, determined to rebuild the battered house and bring his ailing wife home.

Those were the testimonies that gave me a sense of hope, left an indelible mark on my memory and made my coverage of this unprecedented disaster among the proudest moments of my career.