On the shelf: A.D. by Josh Neufeld

by Meg E. Cox

Reading Josh Neufeld's A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is a perfect exercise in values clarification.

The characters in this nonfiction graphic novel are real people. During Hurricane Katrina, they left New Orleans or stayed for their own reasons. Like all of us, they are sometimes kind and sometimes angry—and often both at the same time. They curse too much for this to be a book for young children, but their stories are so important, and presented so powerfully, that adults and children middle-school-age and up should read them as part of their own process of understanding whom they value and why.

Hurricane Katrina, after all, was a real-live lifeboat story for the U.S. When police forcibly blocked one of the few ways out of the city, one journalist asked me, "Can you blame them?" She wouldn't have wanted those dirty and desperate people in her own neighborhood. Never mind that they included small children and elderly people, nursing mothers and, yes, some thugs, all of whom had been without food or water in the sweltering heat for three days.

Would anyone have blocked the bridges out of Manhattan to the dusty masses on 9/11?

A.D. was born when Larry Smith, of the storytelling magazine SMITH, read Neufeld's self-published memoir of his time volunteering on the Gulf Coast after the hurricane. He asked Neufeld to tell Katrina stories in graphic form on his Web site.

Neufeld began talking to potential subjects for his stories. He settled on seven main characters: Denise, a counselor and sixth-generation New Orleanian; Leo, a music-zine publisher and comic-book collector, and his partner, Michelle; Abbas, an Iranian-born store owner, and his friend Darnell; Kwame, a high school student and pastor's son; and Brobson, a doctor who lives in the French Quarter. Neufeld would draw the pictures; they would provide the words.

The online version of A.D. soon attracted the attention of a publisher, and with Pantheon on board, Neufeld expanded it into book form.

Every page in the book is powerful, but none more so than those that depict the scene at the convention center, where Denise's family is stranded. A looter who is distributing water brings some to the elderly Miss Williams, who is sitting in a wheelchair. Denise's grandniece begins to cry miserably, and Miss Williams, seeing her discomfort, offers her the water. The small child's mother refuses: "No, thank you, ma'am. We all right."

Three hours later, men come back with the report that the Gretna police are blocking the only way they can find out of town. The crowd panics. "There ain't gonna be no buses comin'!" they shout. "They gonna open the flood gates and drown us!" "They brought us here to die!"

And then they notice Miss Williams. She is dead.