As part of an ongoing relationship between the PEN Children’s Book Committee and the Martin Luther King School of New Orleans, author and photographer Susan Kuklin and author Elizabeth Levy went down for a visit. The MLK is the only school reopened in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. The school once had been a neighborhood school with kids able to walk  there from home. Now almost all the children have to be bussed because there are literally almost no homes suitable for habitation that have been rebuilt near the school.

The principal and teachers, all of whom had to be relocated after the hurricane, vowed to return to New Orleans and to their school. We were shown the other schools in other neighborhoods (full of mold and decay) that the city tried to foist off on the community as a suitable replacement. The principal, teachers and parents marched on city hall and fought to get their school reopened. Now with six hundred students and a waiting list, they have full enrollment.

Once inside the MLK, the warmth was instantly palpable—including the fresh donuts and coffee awaiting us. Then it was time to meet the kids. Talk about being prepared. When we met our classes, everyone had read our books. They were wide-eyed and enthusiastic about meeting real-live authors.  Susan went to meet the second graders, all of whom made books about their families, based on her book, Families. All the children told her how much they loved reading and writing and that they kept journals. Susan and the students talked as ‘writer to writer’ about interviewing techniques, photography, and shaping a non-fiction story.

Liz met with the seventh graders in the ‘library.’ They had all read My Life as A Fifth Grade Comedian. They were full of jokes and had great questions. They were wonderful, willing to act out with her how to deepen a story and to talk about the times that you can hurt someone with a joke.

The day flew by…class after class, all wonderfully prepared and seemingly not noticing that the authors were becoming a little hoarse. The kids found that funny. During fifteen minute breaks, Susan and Liz ran to each other’s rooms to take photographs of each other’s classes.

Both of us had been to New Orleans before and love the city. This was our first visit after Katrina. The French Quarter has never looked so clean.  As soon as our plane landed, we left a message for Karen Ott, the kindergarten teacher and our liaison at the MLK School, and took off for the Acme Oyster Bar and Grill which became our second home.  We had our first order of charcoal grilled oysters.

Karen called us. She offered to come over to meet us and go over the schedule. We met at the hotel bar, which just happened to have once been a brothel, and thought about coffee.  We ended up with champagne. As we sipped our champagne with Karen, we knew we were with the right person in the right place at the right time. But as Karen talked about the paperwork that she and all the administrators and teachers are still filling out daily, the homes still in need of repair, and most touchingly, the loss of her family history, Katrina was never far away.  Karen’s father was a well known painter and graphic artist. Her mother kept every bit of family history going back five generations in Louisiana, and all of it was lost in the flood.

Karen took us on a ride through the Lower Ninth Ward at dusk. What we saw was mostly emptiness—imagine your city block with maybe only one house lit up, the others either crumpled or gone.  The light was very eerie and the emptiness brought home something more than you can possibly see on television.

On Sunday, Freddi Williams Evans, a fellow children’s book writer, who is a friend of Fatima Shaik, picked us up and we were able to see New Orleans in daylight, and so much of it is as eerie on a bright perfect sunny day as it is at night. The population of New Orleans has shrunk by half since Katrina. We also saw the new houses built by Habitat, and the Musicians Village, sponsored by the Marsalis family and Harry Connick Jr. These houses are raised and almost ready to be lived in—but just picture them standing in the middle of desolation.  Almost every block had houses still empty and boarded up with the Xs, faded, but still visible. These were the Xs painted by the National Guard indicating who died, who was still left, and what pets were left behind.  We saw the trailers, just recently announced to be full of formaldehyde. 

Later we had lunch with Pat Austin, the professor of Children’s Literature at New Orleans University in the position formerly held by the immortal Colleen Sally, a children’s book writer, story teller, and doyen of the children’s book community for decades. It was the perfect day in a beautiful little café, but the conversation inevitably returned to where you were and what happened to your home and your history. At the end of the school day, we packed up all the stories, artwork, and gifts from the children, but our day with the MLK School wasn’t over. Karen met us at Colleen Sally’s extraordinary home in the French Quarter where we had ‘bourbon milk punch’ with Freddi and a group of Austrian college students whom Colleen was entertaining (naturally).

Later we had lunch with Pat Austin, the professor of Children’s Literature at New Orleans University in the position formerly held by the immortal Colleen Sally, a children’s book writer, story teller, and doyen of the children’s book community for decades. It was the perfect day in a beautiful little café, but the conversation inevitably returned to where you were and what happened to your home and your history. At the end of the school day, we packed up all the stories, artwork, and gifts from the children, but our day with the MLK School wasn’t over. Karen met us at Colleen Sally’s extraordinary home in the French Quarter where we had ‘bourbon milk punch’ with Freddi and a group of Austrian college students whom Colleen was entertaining (naturally).

Then it was on to Ellis Marsalis’s Snug Harbor with a group of teachers and volunteers from the MLK School. Charmaine Neville was singing and Liz has long been a fan of the entire Neville family. Almost all of our teachers knew Charmaine, and both during and after her set, we had a sense of what a community New Orleans was and still is.

Everyone we met gave us a sense of the incredible way that the people of New Orleans identify with their city and their determination not to abandon it.

The MLK School, standing alone in the ninth ward as the only cleaned up and beautiful building, is so much more than a symbol of this spirit. The wonderful thing about our author visits is that now the children and the teachers feel that the children’s book community is part of this spirit too.

The day after our visit, Karen Ott wrote to us: 

I’m so happy that you enjoyed your visit.  I enjoyed the company as well the conversation, both, before, during, and after the visit to the school. I will definitely call when I get to NY.  

The teachers were very impressed with the presentations. I can definitely see the difference on my children’s faces when I speak about the author of a book read at story time. This information is no longer abstract to them. Now they have had hands-on experiences with real authors.

Fatima’s visit, followed closely by you and Liz, has definitely made the experiences real for the children.  

It was also a pleasure meeting Coleen Sally.  What a treat! 

Thank you! Thank you!

Sincerely,

Karen

When we made plans to visit New Orleans and the school, we were excited to meet them and to donate our books and to give them our time.  But what we got back was so much more.  It was a wonderful privilege and joy.  Thanks to Fatima Shaik, our own New Yorker/New Orleans writer, all of us on the PEN Children’s Book Committe are now part of the MLK Community.