By Erin Wood
As hurricane season arrives in the Gulf Coast amidst a global pandemic, we approach the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It is difficult to reflect on Katrina’s devastation without remembering the horrors of the Superdome.
Taking readers on a journey through the maelstrom is the only known memoir by a native New Orleanian about surviving the Superdome. The Katrina 15th Anniversary Edition of the IPPY-medal-winning Can Everybody Swim? A Survival Story of Katrina’s Superdome by Bruce S. Snow released on August 4, 2020.
Snow’s new epilogue takes us along on his return to the Gentilly neighborhood family home from which he and his “family of four and a half” had once swum, the home purchased with the life savings of his Ecuadorian immigrant grandparents.
“The scene inside was worse than we’d imagined,” he writes. “Prior to this day, I had no idea mold could come in such a variety of colors: black, white, red, green, blue, and yellow; it was like a box of Crayolas growing on every surface and up the walls.”
Outside, he says, “I walked on, through this post-Nagasaki world that somehow looked so familiar. Every chain-link fence had dead, rotting fish wedged in the diamonds. Every lawn had the same yellowish-gray grass. Only the leaves of tall, ancient live oak trees remained recognizably green.”
Regarding the timing of the release, Snow says, “It is truly sad and yet also fitting that the 15th Anniversary Edition would be released into the current tumult. The entire country has gotten a glimpse of what that week in New Orleans felt like.”
Jed Horne, author of Breach of Faith, Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City, says Snow’s book “offsets misery with flashes of gallows humor and the glow of his gratitude for the men and women who bucked the herd and proved capable of tender mercies.”
Can Everybody Swim? is 6 x 9 trade paperback available for $17.95 at etaliapress.com and through local and national booksellers.
A Hot Springs native, Erin Wood is a writer, editor, and publisher in Little Rock. She owns and runs Et Alia Press (etaliapress.com). Wood is author of Women Make Arkansas: Conversations With 50 Creatives (April, 2019) and editor of and a contributor to Scars: An Anthology (2015).
