Koné, with enthusiasm, informed us that Wynton Marsalis has produced a biographical drama tracing the life and influence of Buddy Bolden – soon to appear in a theater near you and me. I checked out the trailer – I’ll be among the first in line.

Then we moved on to the Lower Ninth Ward where in August of 2005, Katrina killed 1,464 people and did $70 billion in property damage. It also put this massive neighborhood underwater. The Lower Ninth Ward is down-river. We stood on the levy that borders the canal. You’ve read and seen images of all the flooding – and the great river is now at its crest. Not far away is the Superdome where former residents here sought refuge.

Just after that storm in New Orleans, Carolyn and I met a woman who became a dear friend back in 2005 in Orange County California; a refugee from the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. When Katrina swept across the lake with impossibly high winds, her home, just a few blocks from the beach, was reduced to a concrete slab. Everything gone. She moved in with her sister in Southern California and settled in to our church at the time. She’s still there.

The surge of Katrina broke through the Lower Ninth Ward in three places: two major breaches on the just west of the Industrial Canal and then one more to the East. It happened so fast that the water not only rose, but it crashed through the neighborhoods with such force that the homes of folks who lived there generation after generation were washed right off their foundations. At one breach, an entire barge floated through on the wave through the dike, flattening houses in its path. Those inside perished.

As we drove through the streets of the neighborhood, most of the debris has been cleared – much of it by volunteers who, at their own expense, came from all over the world. But the population of has been reduced from 25,000 to 7,000. We saw the empty lots, the former slab foundations and the abandoned houses, still vacant. Some homes have been gentrified. But businesses have fled, creating a food desert. Mr. Koné says rumors of the Ninth Ward “comeback” are flat wrong. Much if not most of the aid was woefully inadequate, and unfairly distributed. One sign of life was the 150 homes built by Bad Pitt – but even they are having serious problems fourteen years later. It is now the hollowed-out remnant of a displaced population; many of those displaced now occupy homeless districts, mainly under the elevated highways. We witnessed the tent communities downtown.

Up the river, just outside the French Quarter is Central City. Koné explained that white folks are usually warned to keep away. He teased that us white folks on the bus were now in the danger zone, which, of course, he considers a silly ruse, made up for the purpose of maintaining the Great Racial Divide. But in this sectioned off part of the city, greatness was born. Most notable was the New Zion Baptist Church where a collection of civil rights activists met in 1957 to launch a movement: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). They elected a young 29-year-old pastor to be their first President: Martin Luther King, Jr.

After lunch at the classic Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, run until last month by 95-year-old Leah Chase (memorialized in the picture above), the crowned “Queen of Creole Cuisine.” Her passing is mourned by all of New Orleans, Koné said.

I’ve only begun to report the detail in my notes.

Our bus took us on a three hour drive through the rain to Mississippi and the home of Pastor Albert Tate’s mother, Connie, just outside Jackson. We got an inside look into the heritage that produced this dynamic young preacher, the guy who planted Fellowship Monrovia with a vision to develop a Center for Racial Reconciliation. It was the classic African American version of Southern hospitality – a laughter filled home with a welcoming hug at the door for all twenty-two of us, the smell of warm comfort food filling the rooms, family photos on the wall, places set, and an abundance of tasty entrées, each labelled, lined up on the buffet to fill our plates and then our stomachs and then our hearts in an atmosphere of pure joy.

Once we started, the matriarch of the Tate clan, Connie, took to the piano and along with her cousin, filled the room with Gospel music, in the tradition of the great Mahalia Jackson, and let us know in no uncertain terms that there is a loving God in Heaven watching over us all and that we are simply “Carryin’ On… carryin’ on.”

That love was infectious.

It is carrying us on.