At the moment, New Orleans needs optimism; it needs upbeat stories about the indomitable spirit of decent human beings. Otherwise, the front page news is dire. The city sits half-empty. Local political hijinks and a stagnant federal bureaucracy are delaying crucial recovery funding. District Attorney Eddie Jordan is either feckless or cautious to the point of inertia; Attorney General Charles Foti both cruel and vindictive. An inconceivable murder rate (at least 110 this year) threatens to turn New Orleans into Baghdad Lite. In the two years since Katrina, only one hospital has returned to full operation. And so on. Enter Michael Tisserand and his gratifying book about the perseverance of one community to survive and flourish in the storm’s immediate aftermath. Tisserand is the former editor of New Orleans’ alternative paper Gambit Weekly, and has gained recognition not only for his 1998 book The Kingdom of Zydeco, but also for his “evacuee journal” chronicling his experience after Katrina, published serially by alternative weeklies across the country including Flagpole. His new book, Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember (Harcourt, 2007), culls together some of those dispatches from the New Orleans diaspora to fashion the story of an impromptu school in Cajun country and the tremendous efforts of parents to rescue their children from the storm’s chaotic wreckage.

The book’s hero is Paul Reynaud, a first-grade teacher from Lusher Elementary in Uptown New Orleans, who, along with a group of displaced parents, established a school in an old accounting building in the little town of New Iberia. Sugarcane Academy took its name from the crop fields the children passed on the way to school each morning, and this new, strange environment began to symbolize a improvised kind of pedagogy: active, immediate, participatory, introspective. For the children, a curriculum of field trips, seed-planting, and journal-writing was the only way to cope with the experience of living, in all of its joy and heartlessness, especially as that experience continued, day-to-day, brimming with strident loss and pain. For the parents, the school was a gravitational engine, cohering them when their customary social organization had crumbled. But their sense of confusion was always just as powerful as the kids’ was. What happens now, what happens next - still a vital question - was always anyone’s guess. The adults had more information but no answers.

Tisserand, thankfully, also describes the destruction outside of the national media’s spotlight. Yes, the Lower Ninth Ward was decimated, and, yes, the skin color of its uprooted residents pointed to environmental injustice and systemic class problems, not just in New Orleans, but in every American metropolis. But the plight of St. Bernard Parish, just east of the Lower Ninth Ward, has been largely overlooked. Tisserand is not dallying with hyperbole when he says that “every home and business” there was flooded or that, once the water receded, the parish looked as if it had suffered inundation, drought, bombing and conflagration. One should add a particularly egregious modern plague to that list: a tank from the Murphy Oil plant released 800,000 gallons of oil into the floodwater, masking yards and homes with a black, deathly pall.

Nevertheless, the book’s most necessary accomplishment is publicizing the collateral effects of Hurricane Katrina. This is the truth: Nobody escaped the storm. The story of Sugarcane Academy itself is about the total recalibration of your life. Most North Georgians cannot fathom what that really means. Think about the destruction of your house, your family photographs and heirlooms, your emotional center: the hearth in its most spiritually nurturing terms. Think about the destruction of your church and school. Think about your favorite hardware store, seafood market, Italian restaurant - all of them owned by the same families for generations - suddenly being gone. What if home no longer looked like home? Tisserand outlines the result in the death of Dr. Kent Treadway, his wife’s employer at Treadway Pediatrics. After Katrina, Kent Treadway found himself without a practice, without a building and the patients he adored. And he, like too many others, took his own life, succumbing to the almost insolvable, overwhelming burden of what has to be rebuilt: not just a building’s moldy walls, but your whole existence.

Michael Tisserand is starting all over with his family in Evanston, IL. His book is praiseworthy for its tender portrait of New Orleans, and southern Louisiana, as a unique and intoxicating place, but it lacks the vitality and urgency of someone still in the scorching crucible, still fighting for survival. It’s understandable that Tisserand would move away, for his children’s sake trying to avoid the kind of cataclysmic trauma that New Orleans is wont to produce. But that’s another good person, another dose of intelligence and love, the city has lost.

But not everyone’s lost, yet. A couple weeks ago at a bar on Magazine Street, Dr. Jimmy Treadway, Kent Treadway’s son, swore calmly that one day he’d be back Uptown, practicing pediatrics like his father. Hopefully, he will not be alone.

Donn Cooper