A Morbid Memory Lingers 20 Years After Hurricane Katrina

Times Insider|A Morbid Memory Lingers 20 Years After Hurricane Katrina

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This week marks 20 years since Hurricane Katrina blew the doors off a late American summer, and all my memories, still swirling, come down to one man. One anonymous man.

A few days after the levees failed, The New York Times sent the gifted photographer Nicole Bengiveno and me to join its coverage of the catastrophe. One hot evening we were driving through the post-storm stillness of a catatonic New Orleans when something in the middle of a downtown street caught our eye. It couldn’t be. Could it?

It was. A man’s body, rigor-mortis stiff and partially covered by a blue tarp. Two traffic cones served as a bright-orange headstone.

I reported what we’d seen to a state trooper around the corner. He told me that the body, that of a Black man, had been there for days; a murder victim, possibly. In fact, the trooper said, he was the one who put down those traffic cones to prevent the body from being run over.

When six National Guardsmen approached the corpse a few minutes later, Nicole and I relaxed in the belief that the disturbing matter was being handled. Instead, the guardsmen gawked at the body, two of them made the sign of the cross, and then they left, though one paused long enough to take a photograph.

What were we witnessing? Where were we? Would this dead man be left there had he been white?

We returned in the morning with the expectation, the hope, that the corpse would be gone. But there it was, symbolizing a city in such disorder that it could not even collect its dead.