My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the struggles and survival of a family during a natural disaster, highlighting resilience and adversity.
Jesmyn Ward's quote captures the traumatic experience of her family during Hurricane Katrina, illustrating the devastation wrought by the storm and the desperate measures people took to survive. It emphasizes the harsh reality faced by many during disasters, where community support can falter, and the instinct to survive prevails, even amid tragic circumstances.
In practice
Sharing this quote during a speech about the importance of family in times of crisis.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
I never missed a birthday. I never missed a school play. We carpooled. And the greatest compliment I can ever get is not about my career or performance or anything; it's when people say, 'You know, your girls are great.' That's the real thing for me.
The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.
A mother has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.
My kids are the most inspiring thing that pushes me. It used to be because they were born, and I had to take care of them. Now it's because my son raps, and he's better than me. So now I gotta keep up with him, you know what I'm saying?
Before I was married to Martin and became a King, I was a proud Scott, shaped by my mother's discernment and my father's strength.
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