Crowded house

When we call Michael Tisserand, he’s driving through Texas with his daughter and son, 9 and 6, respectively. He tells us that on a previous drive to their old home of New Orleans, the three of them had a sing-along.

“We play the U2 song about New Orleans, and the Bruce Springsteen songs about the levees breaking up,” he says, laughing. “It is strange, but these are the times we’re living in.”

Tisserand, a former editor for the New Orleans paper Gambit Weekly, and his family moved to Evanston last year, leaving a Hurricane Katrina–stricken and battered New Orleans behind. But before he headed north, Tisserand and his friends made their mark on the Gulf Coast by building a one-room schoolhouse for evacuated children. The school shares its name, Sugarcane Academy, with the title of his new book on the subject.

After the storm struck, Tisserand resettled his family in nearby Carencro, Louisiana. He recruited his daughter’s first-grade teacher from New Orleans, Paul Reynaud. A stoic but impassioned teacher, Reynaud stands out in the story as a sort of sentry, an indefatigable one-man force against the post-Katrina chaos. He’s a perfect mix of practicality and idealism, having the kids make an American flag for the Pledge of Allegiance, and creating a vocabulary list out of newly familiar words like hurricane and evacuate.

“When we walked in on the first day and saw [him] turning this experience into a routine classroom experience, it stunned me more than anything else,” Tisserand says. “I wasn’t able to imagine what that first day would be like, but he was using traditional elements. He started every day with the Pledge of Allegiance, and then had the children work on their evacuation journals.”

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the school was as necessary for the parents as the children. Still unable to return to the city when the school opened in November, they used it as a home base that helped them create a semblance of community.

“It was a structure and routine for us. Getting our kids to school every day ordered our lives,” Tisserand says. “One of the fathers said to me, ‘How the hell are people getting through this if they don’t have kids?’ If you didn’t have a job or kids, you’d just be on the couch all day and process and grieve. I don’t know anybody who wasn’t crying every day, who wasn’t self-medicating in one form or another.”

The book interweaves three stories: his family’s raw experience evacuating their home, the creation of Sugarcane Academy and profiles of several other schools that sprang up in Katrina’s aftermath. Tisserand’s personal journey through the storm and its effects is bereft of the clichés we’ve heard repeated on newscasts. As he tries to talk with his kids about the disaster, and watches them grapple with  the destruction of their city (one of his daughter’s friends e-mails her: “I thout The Hurricane Killed You? [But I Was Wrong]. I am So Glad I Was Wrong.”), the story never wavers from a devastatingly honest portrayal of post-Katrina New Orleans. Though inspirational as a hopeful tale about communal effort in the face of tragedy, any positivity is set in relief against the flooded wetlands and savaged homes.

Tisserand’s family came to Evanston when his wife took a medical job there after the storm. He continues to go back to New Orleans regularly, reporting for The Nation, Utne Reader and various other magazines. Whether he’ll return to live there, however, remains to be seen.

“Everybody we know is taking it hurricane season by hurricane season,” he says. “But I think those of us who left have a responsibility as witnesses to communicate what happened down there. All of the voices about New Orleans need not come out of New Orleans now.”

Sugarcane Academy (Harvest, $13) is out now.