Omnia Ab Uno

Even the best-laid plans change. What was supposed to be a week at the Essence Festival in New Orleans turned into a whirlwind three-day trip with a soon-to-be fractured family unit. I had lofty expectations of acclimating to Creole culture over a long summer weekend and taking Solange-esque Instagram photos. Instead my family and I were vacationing on a budget in the Big Easy.

Nine hours from home, we got to New Orleans and tackled breakfast, beignets, and Destrehan Plantation all before noon. I quickly fell in love with the city. I ate my weight in Cajun food and caught the joy you can only feel when you’re in the French Quarter. I also bickered with my parents—a lot.

Our second day in New Orleans left me with a memory I’ll never forget. After missing our tour of Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1, much to my verbalized frustration, we headed to the Mississippi River to board the Creole Queen riverboat. As we cruised down the river, our tour guide began to recount what happened to New Orleans on August 23rd, 2005. The consequences of Hurricane Katrina were both parts the fault of Mother Nature and the failure of levees designed to keep a city that is below sea level from flooding. Families refused to leave their homes that they had lived in for decades. People who didn’t heed the common New Orleans advice about keeping an ax in your attic couldn’t make it to their roofs and drowned in the flooding. The Superdome held hundreds of thousands of people with little resources and no running water. People waited days for food, to be rescued, and for the government to intervene.

After five days of chaos and loss, help finally came to New Orleans and the city began to rebuild. The spirit of the city could not be broken. As our tour guide finished his story, I realized I was crying. As emotionally repressed as I was from everything going wrong in my personal life, somehow the story of the resurrection of New Orleans had got to me. I left that weekend feeling a gratefulness and strength that I didn’t have before. Since that summer trip, Louisiana has felt the waves of grief once again, from the murder of Alton Sterling and the flooding in Baton Rouge. And yet, somehow Louisiana still stands. The title of my prompt is ironically the inscription on Nicolas Cage’s future tomb in St. Louis Cemetery (yeah I know, it’s weird). It’s Latin for “all from one.”

One hurricane changed the story of New Orleans forever. One mistake has changed the dynamic of my family forever. And one story about a city has changed the way I view the durability of the human spirit. All from one.

—By Ke’Renza N.