Remembering Katrina: 'We called on the Lord all night long'

For Jackie Landry, New Orleans is home. She lived there for 54 years. But on Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina changed that.

“I’ve rode out storms before, but we never dreamed that it was going to be like this,” Landry said. She lived in the 17th Ward in a neighborhood nicknamed “Graveyard” because it was situated between two cemeteries. The people in Landry’s neighborhood were friends. They called themselves the Graveyard Posse. When Katrina hit, 18 members of the posse, including Landry, stayed in the neighborhood. None of them had enough money to leave.

Landry has enough storm stories to make listeners cry, but she laughs as she recalls how her cat refused to go outside in the driving rain.

“We still had joy through it,” she said.

The night of the storm, she was startled awake by the sound of her kitchen window blowing out.

“I said, oh Lord, oh Lord, what am I going to do? And I turned around in my house and you could hear the walls just drinking the water, how hard it was raining,” she said. Landry was scared and didn’t want to be alone. She’s not quite sure how, but she made her way across the street to a friend’s house.

“And then we decided to pray,” she said. “And we called on the Lord all night long.”

The next day, after Katrina moved inland, Landry and the handful of Graveyard residents who had not already evacuated realized they could no longer stay. Some made their way to Dallas, some to Little Rock, Ark. Landry and four others headed east to Mississippi. Landry’s 11-year-old daughter was staying away from New Orleans with a friend, so when she left the city, she had to leave without her daughter.

“It was five days before my family even heard anything from me. They didn’t know where I was, you know,” she said. It was a much longer search, nearly a month, before she was able to locate her daughter. By then, Landry had gone to stay with relatives in Raleigh, N.C. The organization Angel Flight brought her daughter to North Carolina on a small jet.

Landry found churchgoers showed the most care and concern for her and her daughter.

“I met people that were a member of the church and anything we thought we’d wanted … all we had to do was call up the church and tell them what we need,” she said.

Landry noticed a difference in her own faith after she came to Raleigh: “I praise Him more since I got up here, because He brought me a mighty, mighty long way.”

Listen to Jackie Landry talk about Hurricane Katrina on The World and Everything in It.

Andrew Branch contributed to this report.