On August 28, 2005, the news of a category 5 hurricane barreling across the Gulf of Mexico toward the city sent them packing. They took Rosie the pig, but left two cats inside with a supply of dry food and litter. Like nearly everyone in New Orleans who had a car and evacuated, they assumed they’d return in a week or so. Paul, Helen, Francis, and Rosie drove for a day-and-a-half to Helen’s hometown of Columbia, S.C. From the safety of her parents’ house, they followed TV news as Hurricane Katrina assaulted the city. They felt agony as the levees broke, putting 80 percent of the city underwater. Looters marauded through streets; thousands of destitute people were trapped in downtown public spaces. Their own house took four feet of water, trashing the floors, walls, and most of their belongings. Paul’s clinic was one of several thousand small businesses forced to close.

The following week, Paul drove back to save their cats. He got through National Guard stops with friends who had press passes. The water had receded by the time he entered the house. Fetid mud caked the floor. The walls were coated with a gray slick that gave off a terrible stench. The cats were hungry but alive.

Paul rescued the screening prints for Helen’s films from an upper shelf, and imagined her relief at the sight of Florestine Kinchen’s dresses, most of which were above the water line. This is it, he figured. New Orleans is over for us.

Back in Columbia, he secured an eight-month contract as a physician. Helen’s folks were thrilled. Her mother, Becky Wingard Hill, and stepfather, Kevin Lewis, had recently moved into the larger home of Becky’s late mother. Paul, Helen, and the baby, nicknamed Poppy, moved into the house where Helen had grown up, a house with good memories—and a yard for Rosie.

All of which suited Paul just fine. The idea of moving back to New Orleans scared him. From his time at the clinic, he knew how dangerous the city could be even before Katrina. Now the city had skeletal public services and debris-lined streets throwing off unimaginable toxic hazards.

But Helen was emphatic about going back. “We can do this,” she vowed. She started a secret campaign to change Paul’s mind, sending pre-addressed postcards to friends, entreating them to write Paul, endorsing a return. Gradually, over the summer of 2006, she wore down his defenses. “She was truly fearless,” Paul says. “But she hadn’t had the same experience I’d had, treating drug addicts at the St. Claude hospital. I had seen another side of New Orleans.”

One year after their evacuation, Paul, Helen, and Poppy returned to New Orleans. Half of the city’s 444,000 population was gone.

Six weeks later, Poppy turned two. As Paul and Helen dealt with insurance issues on their wrecked home, they rented one side of a faded, white, shotgun double on North Rampart Street, a dozen blocks behind the French Quarter, in Marigny, an eclectic neighborhood of old houses, cafes, and music clubs. Paul rode his bicycle to a job at Daughters of Charity Health Care, just the near side of the sprawling, flood-battered Ninth Ward. They were trying to pick up the pieces.

Helen and Paul met in September 1988, in their first week at Harvard. She was a free-spirited young woman from South Carolina. For all of her extracurricular activities and A’s at Dreher High School, a public school in Columbia where blacks were a majority of students, Helen had a bohemian streak from a childhood full of self-expression. Her mother, Becky, instilled in her a love of reading, a tradition of hand-making holiday cards, and a love of film. Becky had deep roots in Columbia, but her marriage to a hometown guy had fallen apart by the time Helen and her older brother, Jacob Hill III, were starting school. As the children’s father drifted out of their daily lives, their grandfather, Albert Wingard, assumed a central role. Pop, as Helen and Jake called him, doted on them. Home movies show Pop giving them rides on his tandem bicycle, a two-seater that thrilled the kids.

When Helen was just a girl, her mother met Kevin Lewis, a 1965 Harvard grad and religious studies professor at the University of South Carolina. “Kevin really was a knight who came into my life,” says Becky, who was teaching school at the time. When Becky and Kevin married in 1976, Helen was six and Jake was eight. Becky entered graduate school at the university, earning a Ph.D. in English, eventually landing a position on the faculty. Kevin helped raise the children as if they were his own. He encouraged them to try for Harvard. Jake, who lived in Winthrop House, graduated in 1989.

Helen’s Harvard application showed a young woman who knew herself well enough to predict her long-term interests. “I admit to leaning strongly towards literature,” she wrote. “Also, I would like to learn more about the techniques and opportunities in the film medium, especially animation, as I suspect this will be an increasingly influential medium through which to help society recognize its faults and see solutions to problems.”

Paul was a Jewish boy from Edmonton, Canada, a physician’s son who grew up in a household filled with music: Two of his brothers became professional musicians. Paul played guitar in a high-school rock band and dreamed of serving as a doctor in Africa.

Page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next >>