In Tremé, life always seemed to teeter on the edge. Heat and humidity pressed down until it broke loose in sudden bursts: a fight, a chase, gunshots, sirens. Violence could turn savage without warning. And yet, on Sunday afternoons, a brass band would come down Villere Street, horns lifting the air, and for a while the same pressure fed joy instead of rage. That tension seeped into me, writes Andrea Claire Morningstar. When Hurricane Katrina arrived on Aug. 29, 2005, the levees broke, and the city slipped into nightmare on my television screen in Michigan, all I could think of were the dogs—the pack roaming my block, the puppy abandoned in the park, the neighbor’s chained rottweiler. I cried for the dogs. Where was my downstairs neighbor with her bandaged fist? Had the water reached the second floor with its shattered glass windows? The old man singing along to The Wizard of Oz? The second line band that graced Villere Street on Sunday afternoons?
