A Shared Uncertainty

While she and her husband insist they are not going home, the family histories of most of New Orleans's black exiles suggest that ties of blood, time and culture will draw many back.

"This is one of the most rooted black populations in the United States," said William H. Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan. Nearly nine out of 10 blacks in New Orleans were born in Louisiana, according to Frey's analysis of census figures. He said that nearly all of them have family ties to the city that reach back several generations.

"I think these people in exile will hold out, hoping to return, longer than residents of any other city might," said Frey, adding, though, that there are limits. "Once they get a year down the road, and they still can't come back, I would say the chances of return fall sharply."

Joseph and Kesa Williams have found higher-paying jobs in Atlanta than they had in New Orleans, and their daughter, Kayla, 8, is in what they say is a better school. Being chased out of town by a hurricane has turned out better than they thought it would. But that doesn't make them any less upset about what they see as the bizarrely inequitable treatment of their ruined neighborhood.

The low-lying section of the Lower Ninth Ward where the Williamses lived was the last neighborhood in the city to be reopened, in part because a second flood, caused by Hurricane Rita in September, inundated the area.

Even after that water was gone, though, authorities did not allow residents to even look at the houses until the first week of December.

"Why did it have to take three months?" Joseph Williams asked on the night after they listened to Nagin's come-on-home speech. "Was it really that much of a hazard in the Ninth Ward, or was it political?"

School Draws Families Back

Before Katrina, nearly all elementary-school-age children on Memphis Street attended St. Dominic School.

Without the Catholic grade school, Ron and Cathy Martinez, along with several other parents who have been forced from Lakeview, feared that the neighborhood would not come back to life. It was social glue for parents, with an endless offering of dinners, holiday parties and after-school meetings.

Now the school is coming back, defiantly so, even as politicians and urban planners bicker about redevelopment mechanisms.

"Our community has a pulse," Ron Martinez said.

After Thanksgiving, he and his wife pulled their children, Evan, 11, and Marcelle, 10, out of a Catholic school in suburban Destrehan -- and began driving them to St. Dominic's temporary location at Holy Rosary Academy, about two miles from the ruins of Lakeview, in a part of New Orleans where flood damage was not severe.

By the first of the year, St. Dominic will have lured back about half of the 625 students it had before Katrina, along with 27 of its 42 teachers. Students and teachers are back in class because the school's principal, Adrianne LeBlanc, decided in the days after the storm that any long-term closing was unacceptable.

"If we had waited for the city and the federal government to do everything for us, we would be waiting for a good long while," she said.

LeBlanc lived in Lakeview, and her one-story house was wrecked by the storm. "It's as ugly as sin and will have to be knocked down," she said.

But she has not had time to deal with it. Five days after Katrina, she began rounding up displaced teachers and parents, finding a temporary school building and lining up contractors to fix the flooded school in Lakeview.

"In the first weeks, I would start answering e-mails and making phone calls at 6 a.m. and turn off the computer at 2 a.m.," she said.

Since the school reopened at its temporary location in late October, she has cut her hours. She now works 6 a.m. to midnight. Her new urgent mission is finding Catholic schools around the country to send desks, books and other supplies.

LeBlanc said it would be wonderful for Lakeview -- and St. Dominic -- if the government could guarantee that by next summer the city won't flood again. Wonderful, she said, but not necessary.

"We are going to be back in that school come August, come hell or high water," she said.

No Plans to Return

St. Dominic is a magnet pulling displaced Lakeview families back into the geographical orbit of New Orleans.

Ron and Cathy Martinez are considering selling their house in Destrehan and buying one in nearby Metairie or in a higher, safer neighborhood of the city. Their three closest Lakeview friends, who also had children at St. Dominic and fled the storm for Texas, Florida and Baton Rouge, La., will also be moving back to the New Orleans area come January.

This clustering around the edges of the city is part of a pattern documented by a recent Los Angeles Times analysis of address changes after the hurricane. It showed that about 60 percent of white middle-class residents of the metropolitan area did not flee for distant parts of the country.

There is a stark difference, though, between suburban life in greater New Orleans and the desolate homestead existence now on offer back on Memphis Street.

On a recent evening in Destrehan, Ron Martinez made it clear he had no immediate intention of hauling his family back there. He said he admires the grit and determination of the Quaintance family, but he will not join them, at least for a while.

"I am not so tied to that piece of property that I cannot live somewhere else," he told his family.

His daughter, Marcelle, heard him and said, "But I love that house."

"You can love another house," her father said.

Database editor Sarah Cohen in Washington contributed to this report.