Introduction and Overview
Welcome to “SHE LEFT US TO SALVAGE”: REFLECTIONS ON HURRICANE KATRINA IN U.S. LITERATURE AND CULTURE, a digital exhibit created by students in English 2253-01: American Literature After 1865 (Spring 2025).
In Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011), which won the National Book Award for Fiction, the protagonist Esch Batiste describes turning stones and shards of glass she has collected into a commemorative piece of wall art that can “tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered.” An avid reader of Greek mythology, Esch imagines that the ancient devotees of myths would envision the hurricane as a chariot so grand and formidable that it would be “harnessed to dragons.” Although Hurricane Katrina is a “murderous mother,” this maternal force of nature spares Esch and her family from fatal wrath, leaving them and other survivors in the fictional community of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, alive but in dire straits. “She left us to salvage,” Esch says.
The idea of salvaging in the wake of Hurricane Katrina struck the creators of this digital exhibit as an apt metaphor for what writers, artists, photographers, and musicians started to do in the wake of the storm and have continued to do ever since. This exhibit features works from various genres (literary fiction, memoir, documentary film, and graphic novel) and perspectives created by people engaged in the same endeavor as Esch Batiste: to “tell the story of Katrina.”
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On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall, registering as a category 3 storm, at Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. The storm was one of the worst on record, with winds reaching 175 mph. The hurricane moved northeast, crossing the Mississippi Sound and making landfall again near the mouth of the Pearl River. Storm surges with waves rising more than 25 feet struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast, causing severe flooding and wreaking havoc.
In New Orleans, the initial consensus was that the city had avoided the worst-case scenario—an assessment that held only as long as the levees. The New Orleans levee system was no match for the more than ten inches of rain that fell and the storm surges that formed. Levees along the Industrial and 17th Street canals, in addition to others, gave way, releasing an inundation that flooded twenty percent of the city by the afternoon of August 29. Residents who had been unable to evacuate or had decided to ride out the storm and survived were trapped on rooftops or wherever they could reach to escape the deep and toxic waters. In the wake of the storm, a public health and humanitarian crisis arose, with evacuees crammed into the Superdome or taken to shelters in other cities.
In New Orleans, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and in other areas hit by Katrina, the damage to homes and infrastructure was catastrophic. The official death toll reached 1,392, unleashing a flood of loss and grief that reflections on the storm and its aftermath for the past twenty years have confronted in profound and myriad ways.
TED ATKINSON