Mardi Gras, 2001

They got up before dawn, put on costumes he can no longer remember, and set out on foot for the parades, several miles from their apartment in a leafy Uptown neighborhood. Helen Hill and Paul Gailiunas had just moved to New Orleans after six long winters in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Paul had completed his medical degree and residency. They had spent a year in New Orleans after graduating from Harvard in 1992, and Helen had fallen hard for the city even before she fell hard for Paul. “Some people romanticize the green, overgrown shabbiness” of New Orleans, Paul says, a trace of sadness in his voice. “Helen loved the city so much, she couldn’t allow herself to see beyond that.”

Helen Hill was making a career creating experimental animated films. She had light-brown hair and a full-jawed smile, and radiated optimism. Paul, slender and quiet with a mop of black hair, was her soul mate, a young doctor with a creative side. He performed cameo roles in several of her film shorts, played guitar in rock bands, and wrote music tracks for her visual stories.

The life they were making together was itself like a movie; a gutsy, romantic, quirky adventure, light years from the expectations and norms of most of their college friends. Paul and Helen were living out their values as radical humanitarians with a contagious joie de vivre, and New Orleans seemed the perfect place in which to do it.

But on that winter day in 2001, they weren’t thinking about the future. Sunlight washed pink across the early sky as they passed through an African-American neighborhood. Helen stopped to inspect a stack of handsewn dresses someone had put out on the sidewalk. Paul watched her sift through the garments, touching the fabric, marveling at the designs. She held up one dress, then another and another—just her size. “This is the best trash-pile find in the world!” she exclaimed.

Paul knew his wife’s habit of scoping out flea markets and curio shops for eclectic items, like the cigar boxes she decorated as gifts for their many far-flung friends. But parade day beckoned. The two walked all the way down to a Central City corner and caught the vintage satire of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club—African-American men, girded in grass skirts, their faces white with grease-paint, riding on elaborately decorated floats, tossing gilded coconuts to fans in the street. Helen was thrilled with hers.

That night, she persuaded Paul to drive her back to the house with the discarded dresses. It was on a street named Adams, the same name as the Harvard house in which they had once lived. Helen put swatches of the dress fabric in the car. The next day she returned once more, toting off about a hundred dresses in all, her mind spinning with questions and possibilities. How had these beautiful garments wound up simply lying on the ground?

She was not the type to let her curiosity fade through inaction. Before long, Helen came to know the pastor of the neighborhood Baptist church, and he told her about Florestine Kinchen, the 90-year-old seamstress whose family had emptied her house just after her death. For Helen, Kinchen’s life was perfect material for a film, one about a search for the identity of the woman with whom she felt a spiritual kinship. In 2004, Helen received a highly coveted Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, worth $35,000, for the work-in-progress. She kidded Paul: “I’m an alternative filmmaker supporting a doctor!”

By then, Paul had helped establish a medical clinic, Little Doctors, that catered to artists and poor folk in a city where 40 percent of the residents were very poor. In off-hours, he sang anarchist lyrics with his band, the Trouble Makers. Paul and Helen bought a house in a racially mixed Mid-City neighborhood and painted it yellow with red trim; they held block parties and welcomed kids curious about one of their pets, Rosie, a potbellied pig. As Helen worked on her films and taught filmmaking, they became part of a circle of artists, activists, and “anti-establishment people who enjoyed life, including friends who weren’t necessarily educated,” as Paul puts it. “Our lives,” he says, “were quite far from Harvard.”

On October 15, 2004, Helen gave birth to their son, Francis Pop Gailiunas, and it seemed that the couple had fashioned the lives of their dreams.

“They were insanely, genuinely, happy people; outgoing and caring,” says René Broussard, who runs Zeitgeist, the city’s alternative media center, where Helen showed her films. “I thought, no one is that happy.”

But Paul and Helen were—until the storm came, and changed everything.

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