New Accents in the Halls of Area Schools

The day after Marcus joined the Flowers football team, Mayo referred to the Katrina disaster in a locker room pep talk before a game at Bowie High School. He told his players they were lucky to have a team. "There are kids now who can't play football," Mayo recalled telling the team. "Look at the opportunity you have. Enjoy it."

Flowers Principal Helena Nobles-Jones, a sharecropper's daughter, said the Katrina disaster reminded her of a strong 1954 hurricane her family endured in rural North Carolina. A half-century later, she still can envision that storm's fury: the destroyed cotton and tobacco crops, the coffins unearthed from graveyards, the downed power lines and wrecked roofs.

"I know what it's like not to have," Nobles-Jones said.

Stories of Survival

Nobles-Jones hovers protectively over her Katrina kids. There are 12 so far. That's a tiny fraction of the 2,700 students at the school in Springdale, a community outside the Capital Beltway in Prince George's County's northeastern sector. They began arriving a little more than a week after Katrina's Aug. 29 landfall.

Flowers, a five-year-old school, was built for 2,200 students. Portable classrooms handle the overflow that existed before the hurricane. But Nobles-Jones said she would take many more evacuees if given enough resources.

She ushered five of them into her office recently for interviews with The Washington Post.

Marcus, a wiry 16-year-old with a bit of chin fuzz, addresses adults with a reflexive "ma'am" or "sir." He rode out the storm with his family in New Orleans because they had no way to evacuate beforehand. They camped without cots or blankets outside the Superdome for days. They caught a bus bound for Dallas, but it was shunted to a military camp in Oklahoma. His father, who lives in New Carrollton, finally picked up the family members in an SUV and brought them to resettle in Prince George's.

Marcus said he has told few other students about his Katrina experience. "Now that I'm up here, I try to put it in the past," he said. "And I keep my head up. If they bring up the subject, I might tell them about it."

Jasmyne Palmer, 16, another 11th-grader, fled Slidell, La., the day before the storm. She rode in a Mercedes diesel sedan with her grandmother, two dogs and two cats. They made their way to Atlanta before running out of money. "One night we slept in the car. The dogs were whining, the cats meowing. It was miserable." A relative wired them some money, and they reached a cousin's house in Upper Marlboro.

Like Marcus, Jasmyne came from a school much smaller than Flowers High. She said she is still adjusting to the rhythms of A/B block schedules -- four classes one day, four more the next. Then there are the large lunch crowds and mildly seasoned food. She appears eager to return to Slidell, hoping to do so as early as next month. But Dana Tutt-Alfred, a relative who enrolled her at Flowers and who is an assistant principal in a Prince George's elementary school, said it is unclear when Jasmyne will be able to go home with her dogs, Cinnamon and Meilei, and cats, Snowflake and Skittles.

Brothers Eddie and Joshua Bloodwirt, 16 and 15 respectively, and their cousin James Sansone, 17, fled New Orleans and landed at a great uncle's house in Mitchellville after tortuous journeys, including a plane flight. James escaped before the storm, Eddie and Joshua days later, having slept on an elevated interstate highway and waded through miles of grimy floodwater.

The lanky trio hope to try out for the Flowers basketball team. They said they've been treated somewhat like celebrities. Students will stop them, remark on their accents and ask whether they're from New Orleans. One girl cried upon hearing their story and offered unsolicited hugs.