My uncle’s house in eastern New Orleans on Christmas Eve.

Hundreds of miles from the abandoned neighborhoods and shattered spirit of my hometown, I was able to deny the extent of the devastation Hurricane Katrina caused. For months after the storm, I assured everyone that New Orleans would rebuild bigger and better. That is, until I stood among scattered pieces of what had been knickknacks and decorations among the wood and metal splinters of what had been homes. I used to frequent those neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, and eastern New Orleans. They had been populated with my family and friends who now find themselves scattered throughout several states.

The sights stole the iota of holiday cheer I’d managed to muster. It wasn’t the mile after mile of devastation so much as the fascination of tourists treating catastrophe like carnival and the hubris of unaffected New Orleanians protecting their interests instead of welcoming back devastated brothers and sisters. This wasn’t my friendly city. My city —  as I’ve always known it —  died in Hurricane Katrina. My city’s heart broke with the first levee breech. Whatever New Orleans comes back as, it’ll never be the same. The reality of the tragedy will forever cover the city like red beans over rice.

My New Orleans had always been a welcoming place where jazz and cups of café au lait were as common as suntans in South Florida. My New Orleans was a place where you could buy daiquiris at a drive-thru and sip them on the lakefront, as you watch people mingle and blast their cars’ monster sound systems. My New Orleans was a place where you could smell the pralines cooling and the gumbo simmering before you hit ya mama’s front door.

Poverty is ever-present there, but so is a party. Poor or rich, you could have a good time. I miss the plight and the party when I’m away. My heart yearns as much for Mardi Gras parades as it does for the sight of not-too-talented kids out in the French Quarter tap-dancing to earn tourist change.

But on my first post-Katrina trip home, I see no party, hear no jazz. I just see vultures skulking about, picking at others’ sorrows in areas that look like hybrids of a war zone and a ghost town.

My trip home starts strangely. For one thing, flights to New Orleans have been infrequent and expensive. I land in an airport that could have fit inside Louis Armstrong International five or six times over. There are no jazz murals on the walls, no invitations to Harrah’s Casino.

This is Baton Rouge and, although only 90 minutes away from my city, it might as well be another state. Baton Rouge doesn’t sound the same. It doesn’t have the Superdome to welcome me on my way home. It doesn’t have a “We Never Close” restaurant offering me overstuffed shrimp po’ boys. It lacks daiquiri shops on corners or rows of housing projects referenced by native-born rappers.

But then again, New Orleans doesn’t have some of those things either. Not anymore.

My parents’ kitchen in eastern New Orleans on Christmas Eve.

I spend my first night in a hotel, so aware of my distance from New Orleans and what had been my parents’ home that rest seems unthinkable. I lay awake part of the night thinking about what I won’t see. There won’t be poetry readings every night. There won’t be towering Live Oaks decorated with Christmas lights in City Park. There won’t be shark fin soup dinners at restaurants in Little Vietnam.

My first full day features glimpses of what Katrina left and elected officials neglect —  thousands of cars still sit where the lake’s water left them —   in driveways, on lawns, or in the middle of streets, their frames covered with a thick brown haze. Ghost towns feel livelier than this. There’s no Christmas hustle outside stores, no transit buses running people uptown. I went downtown, passing the Superdome and Convention Center, where media covered Katrina’s aftermath. They appear untouched compared to the broken bricks and hollowed-out homes in my neighborhood. I recall those news broadcasts from the days after the storm, and how I searched for a glimpse of my neighborhood. The story and scenes, however, remain unchanged: poor blacks abandoned and suffering.

I cursed everyone who judged and opined but wouldn’t condescend to go there, get dirty, and help. I cussed out Kanye West, the Congressional Black Caucus, and especially FEMA and President Bush, but none of them could hear me. Bloated bodies floated for days in murky water or lay slumped aside Interstate shoulders. I’d thought about driving there to help, but I knew my Corolla couldn’t get me through the damage in Mississippi and Alabama.

And I don’t know what I could have done if I did go. I felt helpless. I felt alone. I didn’t have friends from New Orleans living near me in Florida, so the hugs and assurances of others could only help so much. They couldn’t understand the pain of knowing that almost everything you’ve known as home —  every house, church, school, and store —  was saturated in murky, oily water. The pain hadn’t lessened with time, but I’d hoped my visit for Christmas would find progress and cause for encouragement. But seeing home after home tagged with spray paint helped little. Red paint meant it would be torn down, orange meant it might be salvageable.

I’d always thought of New Orleans as a small town passing for a big city. But driving through abandoned neighborhood after neighborhood, I’m struck at how big it seems, how vast the damage has been. The Catholic Church where I had my first communion is now an empty brick building with only stained glass windows for decoration. Lakefront Arena where I’d attended concerts and basketball games is stripped and shattered.

These three homes in the Carrollton section of New Orleans, as seen the day after Christmas, burned down when water pumps and electricity failed days after Hurricane Katrina struck.

I walk through the shell that had been home since I was 12 and saw water marks on the walls that stood far above my five feet. The turkey platter we usually used at Christmas still sits in a broken cabinet in the kitchen, covered in dirt. My mom refuses to save it. “How could I eat turkey on that and not see all that filthy water it sat in?” she asks. Our family dog, a ceramic Dalmatian we named Albert after my dad, is destroyed. He’d been the closest thing to a pet my dad would allow. “He just started falling apart when we picked him up,” my mom tells me.

Even my family feels different. Our Christmas dinner morphs into a three-day journey to the temporary homes of relatives who’d once lived minutes away. Conversations at these gatherings range from talk about the latest Ray Naginism to recollections of 40-year-old yearbooks that floodwater turned into mashed potato-like mush.

My mom and her sister talk about choir robes they’d saved from churches and gospel music conventions more than 20 years ago. They talk about new appliances and apparel they’d bought — all of which met the same flooded fate. Bibles were lost, they say. Baby toys, school memorabilia, all gone.

“All those things kids gave me over the years,” my mother recalls. After 30 years of teaching in New Orleans, she’d amassed bookshelves full of gifts from former and current students. Katrina claimed them all.

As sad as it is, at least we are able to celebrate somewhere near the city. So many people from my middle class neighborhood, my high school, and the churches I attended, find themselves spread across the country, thinning out the city’s soul across state lines and time zones.

Those who remain in New Orleans, the people lucky enough to have undamaged homes, seem disinterested in the plight of people like my family and friends. They’ve been hesitant to temporarily give up their green space to accommodate trailers for displaced neighbors. Newspaper reports quote their selfish reluctance to bring down their suburbs by accepting returning residents. Their behavior seems strange, since most of the people I know who want to return want to be near their homes and rebuild their hometown.

The mother of a childhood friend summed it up in an email forwarded to me. In it she said, “We’ve found the people who are least supportive, least understanding, least willing to share that part of New Orleans that belongs to all of us, are those who did not lose their homes. We’ve learned that, in New Orleans, charity does not begin at home.” Such messages coupled with the throngs of visitors laughing and snapping photos of fallen homes enrage me.

So, as I stand in the Lower Ninth Ward watching a tour bus roll by after a Lexus SUV, I finally reach my limit of sorrow. At that moment, I find myself no longer a writer or professional, but a grieving child. I am a child of New Orleans, realizing the city that raised me will never be again.

Are you amused?” I start yelling as the tourists snap pictures. “People died here. It’s not fucking Disneyworld!”

I turn to a friend and ask him where I am. He doesn’t really have an answer. We both know then that this isn’t my New Orleans. It never will be again.

Judith Malveaux