10 years after Katrina, they are now Hoosiers

Ten years ago, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina sent hundreds of thousands of people from the Gulf Coast scattering across the country seeking refuge.

The state has no official count, but it is believed that thousands of them found their way to Indiana — many of them needing a new start, with few belongings to call their own. And in turn, so many from Indiana made their way south to offer aid.

Although many of the displaced New Orleanians didn’t intend to stay, some now claim “Hoosier” as an adopted identity. Many still miss the taste of Cajun cuisine and seafood, and some still refuse to trade their New Orleans Saints hats for Colts caps. But here, they have been rebuilding.

‘Victor,’ not victim

The Rev. Ernest L. Porter stands at the back door of his small Northeastside church and points to a white van parked under a shade tree.

“That’s the ‘chariot,’ ” he says, “that brought me to Indianapolis.”

That Chevy 3500 van was only days old in late August 2005 when Porter, his wife and two adult daughters climbed in and fled their longtime home in New Orleans. A decade later, and now well settled into a new life in Indiana, Porter picks his words carefully when asked about the life-changing experience.

“A preacher up here started to introduce me one time as a victim,” Porter says, his deep Southern roots still evident in the 78-year-old’s smooth voice and slow cadence. “I told him, ‘I came here with one pair of trousers and a handful of underwear, and look at me now. I’m not a victim. I’m a victor!’ ”

Porter had been through hurricanes before Katrina. In 1965, the homes of two of his brothers were destroyed by Hurricane Betsy, forcing them to move in with Porter and his wife, Pearley. Twenty years later, Hurricane Juan took out the Porters’ home, and he and his wife moved in with a brother.

Porter was a survivor, with a flock to watch over, so he didn’t put much stock in the evacuation warnings as Katrina took aim on New Orleans.

But on Aug. 28, 2005, just hours before the mammoth storm made landfall, Porter relented. He loaded his wife and daughters into the van he had purchased to transport schoolchildren and headed north to Natchez, Miss.

“We didn’t take much because the intention was to go back in a couple of days,” he recalled this week.

What should have been a 21/2-hour drive took the family 10 hours, the highways leading away from New Orleans resembling parking lots, Porter said. And not long after they reached the city the family hoped would provide temporary sanctuary, the power went out in Natchez — leaving Porter with only limited information about the devastation playing out back home.

Accounts of the damage and horror stories spawned by Katrina were relayed to Porter by another daughter, who had moved to Indianapolis in 2003. Two days later, their fate was clear. They could not go back home any time soon, so they would head to Indianapolis and stay with their daughter until they could get back to New Orleans.

But there was a problem. One of Porter’s daughters had recently undergone surgery and wasn’t up to the long van ride to Indiana. So Porter steered the vehicle west toward Dallas — which was about half the distance to Indianapolis — where he put her and his wife on a plane.

Then Porter and his other daughter hit the road for Indiana, winding up the 775-mile trek on Labor Day.

“The only clothes I had was what I was wearing and a few items I’d thrown in a bag,” Porter said. “I didn’t even have a suit.”

Even after arriving in Indianapolis, the family still planned to return to New Orleans.

When they finally made the trip back in mid-October, reality crushed that dream. It was obvious there was nothing left there for them.

The storm had destroyed Shiloh #2 Missionary Baptist Church, where Porter had been the pastor for 41 years, as well as the family’s home next to the church in the Gentilly Area near the Lower Ninth Ward. Nearly all of their possessions and heirlooms, including photographs and papers, were lost. And like their pastor, most of the members of Porter’s small congregation had fled to other parts of the country.

“I decided that to start back there would have been even harder than trying to get started somewhere else,” Porter said, “someplace that wasn’t all torn apart.”

So the family loaded back into the van and returned north, this time resigned to the prospect of rebuilding their lives in a strange, new community. Still, Porter struggled with pangs of guilt for leaving behind what was left of the small congregation he had shepherded for decades, even if it no longer had a church to call home.

Once they had settled into their new home, it didn’t take Porter long to connect with the religious community in Indianapolis. The transition was eased with help from the staff at Second Presbyterian Church and the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis. Despite the open arms of so many Hoosiers, Porter admitted he still felt like a fish out of water in his new home.

But that finally changed after he and his wife and a daughter took a trip to Atlanta with a church group. While his wife and daughter went out shopping, Porter stayed behind in his hotel room, contemplating the upheaval in his life.

“I got that hotel Bible and was reading it,” he recalled, “when a voice came through loud and clear. It was the Lord, and he said to me, ‘I couldn’t lead you out of New Orleans, so I drove you out.’ ”

From that point on, Porter said, he no longer felt guilty about leaving New Orleans. And not long after the group returned to Indianapolis, Porter said, God opened a new door.

About two years after the family resettled in Indianapolis, a fellow pastor told Porter about an opening at Greater Galilee Institutional Missionary Baptist Church at 4375 N. Arlington Ave. Porter knew nothing about the small church but agreed to preach a sermon to see how he fit in with the congregation.

“I’d had about 30 years under my belt and wasn’t ready to hang up my rock ‘n’ roll shoes yet,” Porter said of his career in the pulpit. “So I preached there one time, and that did the trick.”

There was “some getting used to each other,” Porter said, but the new pastor quickly proved to be a good fit for the congregation.

“We’ve struggled together, we’ve cried together, we’ve prayed together, and we’ve shared together,” he said of the 40-member congregation. “I believe God led me here for a reason.”

There are, however, occasional bumps in the road for the Mississippi native as he continues to try to adjust to life in Indiana, such as dealing with the changing seasons.

“He’s still not used to the cold weather or snow,” said associate minister Delores Thornton. “The first cool day, he’ll come in with this big Russian-looking hat and boots on.”

‘Katrina wasn’t the ending’

Chasity Johnson didn’t know anything about Indiana — barely knew the state even existed.

But in the months after the storm, officials representing different states were making rounds at the Louisiana shelter, marketing what each place had to offer.

“Indiana’s coming,” said her boyfriend, Coty. “Do you want to go to Indiana?”

He didn’t know anything about Indiana, either. The young couple had no friends or family there. But he didn’t care.

He was just tired of still living in a shelter, three months after Hurricane Katrina hit. They had no home. They owned nothing. They weren’t even able to access money in the bank.

Their first home together, a one-bedroom apartment, had been crushed. All that was left were a couple of stairs. Coty’s first car, a two-door Thunderbird, ended up upside down in the street. Their hometown was overrun by looting and shooting.

It was like a bad dream that Chasity kept hoping she could wake up from.

New Orleans, she said, “was just not the same. And to me, it would never be the same after.”

With a single bag of clothes, they boarded the bus to Indiana with their infant son and left New Orleans behind.

They were shocked by the snow, the absence of Southern hospitality, the inability of Hoosiers to understand their accents and slang words.

“You know it’s better for you. You know it’s good for you,” said Chasity, now 29. “But it’s not your home.”

It took them a long time to put their lives back together — and to figure out that some of the old puzzle pieces no longer fit. Imagine, Chasity said, that everything you had built up in your life was gone, and there was nobody to show you how to start all over again.

“It gave us that fight,” she said. “The dream comes free, but the hustle is a different price you have to pay.”

They found better opportunities in Indiana, and Chasity said she didn’t want to “go back to old ways, old habits.”

“If you were in an environment — a box — you don’t know what’s outside of it,” she said. “Our mindset changed. There were more things we wanted.”

Her mindset in New Orleans, Chasity said, would have been to get into public housing and work at Wal-Mart.

But even a job at McDonald’s was different in Indiana from what it was in Louisiana, where she said she had once worked for $5 an hour.

In Indiana, she called friends back home excitedly: “They’re paying people $7 an hour here! Did you know that?”

In Indiana, Chasity earned her GED. She married Coty, who is now 30, and they had another son. Alex is now 10, and Cannon is 6.

“We worked hard to get here,” she said.

Both Chasity and Coty are now employed and in school to pursue their career dreams: for her to open her own dance studio — after taking her first ballet class at age 27 — and for him to become a painter.

What began as a few years in Indiana to save money while New Orleans was rebuilt has become 10 years of a new life.

“We never said we were not going back,” Chasity said. “It was just an unspoken rule that we had nothing to go back to. And we knew that Indiana, as far as living and raising kids, was better.”

They became the first in their families to own a house, a starter home on the Northwestside in the kind of neighborhood that they used to think was rich.

And they’ve persuaded members on both sides of their family to move to Indiana, too.

Coming to Indiana, Coty said, was “one of the best decisions we made. I have to tell myself, Katrina wasn’t the ending. It was the beginning.”

Hoosiers lend a hand

Rich Hoerger didn’t leave Louisiana. He went there.

Hoerger, of Speedway, was one of the many Hoosiers who, through local churches, volunteered to help rebuild what Katrina and the flooding had destroyed.

It took about a year, but Hoerger and the other volunteers from Speedway Christian Church, Carmel Christian Church, Allisonville Christian Church and other churches shuttled in and out of Chalmette, La., to rebuild the home of Ronnie and Jane Keller.

The volunteers had heard of the plight of the Kellers at a mission station in Louisiana for the Disciples of Christ church, a denomination whose headquarters is in Indianapolis. The Kellers’ home was just east of New Orleans.

“Financial help was not going to come quickly through FEMA or insurance,” Hoerger said. “The decision was made to see if we could help that family rebuild.”

The volunteers slept on cots in the church sanctuary. They showered in the parking lot, using a makeshift combination of wood frames, tarps and garden hoses.

The church that housed the volunteers could accommodate about 20 people at a time. If the volunteers needed a plumber, they asked around until they found someone who knew about plumbing. But they didn’t need a particular skill to volunteer, just the desire to help.

“We had people who had never been on a roof in their life,” Hoerger said, “never hung drywall.”

The Kellers lived in a FEMA trailer on the curb in front of their home. Ronnie Keller had a disability that limited what he could do to help rebuild. But he found another way to contribute.

“He was a cook and owned a shrimp business,” Hoerger said. “He would go to the dock and pick up shrimp and do a shrimp boil, give people a taste of Louisiana cooking. They were quite anxious to get out of their trailer. It was sparse.”

Ten years later, some of the volunteers who worked on the modest home still stay in touch with the Kellers through Christmas cards.

Hoerger said it was both a rewarding and unforgettable experience.

“I don’t know if it was just the area we were in, but we met a lot of (volunteers) from Indiana, almost everyone we met down there,” Hoerger said. “If it hadn’t been for the faith communities, that (recovery) process would still be way behind.”

Star researcher Cathy Knapp contributed to this story.

Call Star reporter Stephanie Wang at (317) 444-6184. Follow her on Twitter: @stephaniewang.