Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember

by Michael Tisserand

Overview

This inspiring story of a post-Katrina classroom “reminds us all that heroes hold small hands on field trips, clean paint brushes, and sing morning songs” (Phillip Done, author of 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons from Teaching).
 
As floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina surged at their heels, those fleeing New Orleans had their minds more on safety than on whether their children would be missing school. But when a group of evacuee parents who settled in New Iberia, Louisiana, realized they would not be returning home quickly, they set about reconstructing their families’ lives. And so they turned to beloved New Orleans schoolteacher Paul Reynaud, whose fierce determination and unwavering spirit transformed an abandoned office into a one-room schoolhouse. This is the story of Sugarcane Academy: twenty-five students, their devoted parents, an inspiring teacher, and the boundless power of learning.
 
“This wonderful memoir manages to do what a flood of news-reporting could not: see the tragedy of Katrina through the eyes of children. The story of the Sugarcane Academy, an improvised one-room school in a sugarcane parish in south Louisiana, will be one of the lasting books of our tragedy.” —Andrei Codrescu, author of New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547350714
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	492 KB

About the Author

Michael Tisserand is the author of The Kingdom of Zydeco, which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music writing. He served as editor of Gambit Weekly, the alternative newsweekly of New Orleans. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Read an Excerpt

chapter 1
The neighborhood kept its Sunday date for lunch in Lafayette just as we had the previous year. We sat at a long table in the back and ordered crawfish and crabmeat pizzas, and a few pitchers of beer.
           The kids were ecstatic to be together. They drew on place mats, downed their pizza and plastic cupfuls of lemonade, and hovered over video games. Their parents caught one another up on the events of the past day. I said that Tami had called that morning. There was fear in her voice. She had decided not to spend the storm with our friend at the newspaper office. She told me how he had warned her, “You need to be thinking that if you don’t leave, you might be here for a while.”
           So she completed her hospital rounds and checked in on the newborn babies. She cleaned our house and emptied our refrigerator. Then she put our cats in the back of the car, and at about noon, she drove off toward Carencro.
           I couldn’t call her; she didn’t have her cell phone. She didn’t have her glasses. All I knew was that she was somewhere along Highway 90, a southern route that curved along the Louisiana coastline before bending north toward Lafayette.
           Nobody talked about the possibility that we weren’t going home anytime soon. It was as if we had already started thinking about our lives on a day-to-day basis. Later, this habit would become hard to break.
           “Tami won’t get stranded,” I said, mostly to myself. There was a line of cars out there. Someone would help her if she needed it. Plus, I could always get in my car and head toward New Orleans and meet her.
           The waitress looked over at us. Our kids were running around unchecked. We should rein them in. Nobody made a move.
           “Tami will be fine,” I heard someone say.
           “The Volvo needs work,” I replied.
           Behind the bar, a television displayed a swirl of clouds that had grown monstrously large. A Category Five hurricane. We listened as the National Weather Service reported that New Orleans could be uninhabitable for weeks.
           The news reports infiltrated our conversations. We talked about where we all were staying. We glanced at images of people lining up to enter the Superdome. Cameras panned over their faces. I searched to see if there were any people we knew.                      “Georgia’s mom is still in the hospital in New Orleans, in intensive care,” I heard someone say. I looked at Georgia. She’d been crying.
           All we could do was wait.
 
We left the pizza place and made the half-hour drive back to Scott and Cindy’s. It was about two o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Just the previous evening when we arrived in Carencro, it still felt like a normal family visit, when we might hit a Cajun music club or bring the kids to a local festival. Scott and Cindy Jordan’s neighborhood isn’t far from the old Evangeline Downs racetrack, where races were launched by a Cajun French-speaking announcer who shouted, “Ils Sont Partis!” Nearby is the home of the musician Buckwheat Zydeco, the accordion-playing leader of the Ils Sont Partis zydeco band. Scott and Cindy moved here from New Orleans a few years back and surrounded themselves with this local culture. They told us about how their two young sons, Evan and Quinn, gathered pecans from backyard trees and rode Big Wheels down wide country roads to visit horse farms.
           We pulled out a sofa bed in their living room. Cecilia and Miles climbed in. Along with a coworker from my paper and another family and their baby, we set up kitchen chairs to form a small theater around the television. We started watching. Whether it was cable news, network news, or the Weather Channel, it was all the same show. Wind and water and predictions of landfall.
           I don’t remember if we first saw the lights or heard the engine. At about nine o’clock, Tami pulled into the driveway. She was shaken after nine hours in stop-and-go traffic. We carried our three cats into a back bathroom, past Scott and Cindy’s three dogs. I brought out Styrofoam containers of leftover pizza, and Tami joined us in front of the television.
           We watched repeats of Mayor Ray Nagin’s Sunday-morning declaration of a mandatory evacuation: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a test. This is the real deal.” The swirl of clouds drew closer to the edge of land. In replays, the knot of wind and rain advanced and stopped with a jerk, like a muscle tensing and releasing.
 
After sleeping a few hours on Sunday night, we awoke Monday morning and thought that the worst was over. The eye of the hurricane had missed New Orleans, passing to the east. We’d later learn that the city was hit by a fast-moving Category Three storm. The levee system was supposed to hold against such a force. We thought we might be home by the end of that week.
           A computer sat in the foyer, right in front of a miniature train track where Scott and Cindy’s younger son played. The adults took turns in front of the screen. I checked my e-mails and found dozens of messages from friends and family, and even more from people I hadn’t heard from in years. I clicked on name after name, then got up to allow others on the computer. We relaxed a little, making lunches for the kids and taking long walks around the neighborhood.
           By the next morning, we knew that rising water was filling houses in New Orleans. People woke up in second-floor bedrooms to find the contents of their lives floating on the first floor. They climbed onto rooftops. At night, some neighborhoods lit up in constellations of flashlights.
           Nobody in the house really ate or slept much on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Scott and Cindy’s phone no longer worked; all lines were jammed. Cell phones stopped working, too. Carencro became an island. Cars lined the driveway, but they couldn’t take us home.
           At some point we discovered text messaging on our cell phones. It worked, even when we couldn’t make calls. We sent and received the same message to everyone we knew: “R U OK?”
           We’re okay.
           We tallied the names of those we couldn’t reach. The Saturday we left, Tami had spoken on the phone with a friend who was about to have her first baby. She had called to ask Tami’s advice about evacuating. Tami had assured her that the hospitals were the safest places in the city. “I can’t believe I told her that,” Tami now said. On Wednesday, we learned by e-mail that our friend and her new baby had somehow gotten out of the flooded city. Then a new name rose to the top of the list of unknowns: seven-year-old Yerema Yosipiv and his family. Cecilia had played in their home from the time she was a one-year-old. Yerema and Cecilia grew up like brother and sister. “He’s my first friend,” Cecilia had often said. During evacuations, Yerema’s father, a doctor, routinely took his family to Tulane University Hospital. Tami and I realized they must all still be there. Weeks later, we learned that the Yosipivs were airlifted from the hospital roof, after spending several nights wondering if they would survive the ordeal.
           The news from home was gruesome, and we started keeping the children away from the television. We flipped over the newspapers so they couldn’t see the pictures on the front page. Stories were of mobs of people rushing the hospitals for drugs; of murders and rapes and shootings. It would take months to sort out what was rumor and what was fact. Even though I was a journalist, it took a great effort not to automatically believe the worst. Fear acted like a contagion.
           On Thursday, I finally heard a firsthand account from New Orleans. An e-mail appeared on the computer from Keith Spera, my friend who worked as the music critic at the daily newspaper, the person with whom Tami almost stayed during the storm. He wrote: “It’s the most horrific scene you can imagine. Where is the aid? Where is the military? Thousands of people at the convention center have received nothing—no food, no water, no instructions, no authority—for three days. Bodies lying in the street uncollected—it’s inconceivable that this is happening in the United States. I interviewed so many poor, elderly and frail people trying to make their way from Central City to the convention center. Many simply will not make it.”
           At one point, Scott remarked, it all felt like one long day. It also was permeated by a nightmarish logic; we felt surrounded by danger. One morning, as Scott and I drove into town to get food, we saw a truck collide with a car. An old woman was driving the car. Blood poured down the side of her face. Scott jumped out and ran to her car. He cradled her, talked with her, wiped away the blood. I called 911.
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Tisserand
 
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
 
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

What People are Saying About This

Phillip Done

"A testament to the teachers who supported Katrina's children, Sugarcane Academy reminds us all that heroes hold small hands on field trips, clean paint brushes, and sing morning songs." --(Phillip Done, author of 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny)

Mel Levine

"Every so often a remarkable tale of human resiliency comes our way. It is especially moving when that saga enables vulnerable children to overcome adversity. Sugarcane Academy is a story that needed to be told. The contents of its pages open our eyes to how a disaster in New Orleans can bring forth creativity and empathy that we all need to emulate."--(Mel Levine, M.D. author of A Mind at a Time)

Andrei Codrescu

"This wonderful memoir manages to do what a flood of news-reporting could not: see the tragedy of Katrina through the eyes of children. I was touched by the depth of feeling that wells from these pages, and I was heartened by the resilience and courage of these Children of the Storm. Katrina impressed itself indelibly on a generation of New Orleans children, and Tisserand makes the complexity real through the story of his own children and that of their friends in exile. The story of The Sugarcane Academy, an improvised one-room school in a sugar-cane parish in south Louisiana, will be one of the lasting books of our tragedy." --(Andrei Codrescu, author of New Orleans, Mon Amour)

Kirkus Reviews

"Writing with the same warmth and humanity that distinguished his ASCAP Deems Taylor Award-winning The Kingdom of Zydeco (1998), Tisserand offers tender, revealing profiles of Reynaud, his fellow volunteer teachers and others affected by the evacuation...Inspirational and heartwarming." (Starred Review)

Mike Sager

"With his sharp eye for detail and his abundant heart, Tisserand paints a devastating portrait of the toll exacted by Hurricane Katrina, particularly on the children. Simple, compelling, and quietly dramatic, Sugarcane Academy is both eulogy and commencement -- a tribute to the endurance of the human spirit."--(Mike Sager, Writer-at-Large Esquire)

Editorial Reviews

"Michael Tisserand knows more about life in New Orleans than anybody else I know. Sugarcane Academy is a poignant, well-written and awe-inspiring non-fiction saga of Louisiana citizens coping with Katrina's wrath. Highly recommended."

Douglas Brinkley

"A slender but appealing book...[about] a remarkable teacher named Paul Reynaud, the sort of person who has a gift for understanding children''s wants and needs..."

— Charles McGrath

The New York Times Education Supplement

"The contrast between the hopefulness and ingenuity of the parents,students and teachers who created the school and the despair of downtrodden bureaucrats and volunteers who, in Tisserand''s gentle telling, established policies and protocols that become roadblocks to spiritual and physical regeneration is huge."

— Susan Salter Reynolds

LA Times

Adult/High School
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Tisserand and his family left New Orleans for the town of New Iberia, where they encountered other evacuees, including one of his children's teachers. Sugarcane Academy is the story of the school they established to help normalize life for youngsters who had been displaced. The author, a reporter, also visited with families and listened to their stories. He shows how some individuals stepped up and fought against apathy and seemingly insurmountable problems to make a difference. He reminds readers, however, that there is a continuing lasting effect on those kids and families who have been in the eye of the storm. Teens who have felt the effects of a disaster in their own lives or watched people on television and wondered about them will appreciate this book.-Charlotte Bradshaw, San Mateo County Library, CA

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Now living in Illinois, 20-year New Orleans resident Tisserand recalls a community's effort to make sure their kids got a decent education in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Along with other families living in the district served by the popular public school Lusher Elementary, the author, his wife and two children fled west to the small bayou town of New Iberia. When he heard it might be six months before anyone could return to the city, journalist and editor Tisserand grew concerned for his children, wondering how they would continue getting proper education. He got together with Paul Reynaud, a beloved first-grade teacher who had left a career in the restaurant industry to work at Lusher, and hatched a plan to open an interim school, christened Sugarcane Academy, at an old accounting office in New Iberia. With misery and death all around them, Reynaud focused on the positive in his teaching: The children planted seeds, wrote in personal journals and toured nearby sugarcane fields. Writing with the same warmth and humanity that distinguished his ASCAP Deems Taylor Award-winning The Kingdom of Zydeco (1998), Tisserand offers tender, revealing profiles of Reynaud, his fellow volunteer teachers and others affected by the evacuation. The author also recounts his visit to observe the dire conditions inside Lafayette's massively overcrowded Cajundome, one of the many "sports-facilities-turned-shelters" stretched across Louisiana. By early November, when some families returned to New Orleans, the Sugarcane Academy followed and continued flourishing at Loyola University. Culled from his "evacuee journal" in the Gambit Weekly, an alternative newspaper Tisserand edited, the narrative highlights adisplaced community that refused to be decimated. Inspirational and heartwarming.

Kirkus Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE KINGDOM OF ZYDECO "Exhaustive . . . riveting . . . The Kingdom of Zydeco is a back-road trip well worth making." —LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW "An important book for anyone with an interest in life, American music, Southern culture, dancing, accordions, the recording industry, folklore, old dance clubs in the weeds, fortune tellers, hoodoos or shotguns."—E. ANNIE PROULX —

From the Publisher

"With his sharp eye for detail and his abundant heart, Tisserand paints a devastating portrait of the toll exacted by Hurricane Katrina, particularly on the children. Simple, compelling, and quietly dramatic, Sugarcane Academy is both eulogy and commencement -- a tribute to the endurance of the human spirit."

Writer-at-Large Esquire Mike Sager

"Every so often a remarkable tale of human resiliency comes our way. It is especially moving when that saga enables vulnerable children to overcome adversity. Sugarcane Academy is a story that needed to be told. The contents of its pages open our eyes to how a disaster in New Orleans can bring forth creativity and empathy that we all need to emulate."

M.D. author of A Mind at a Time Mel Levine

"The contrast between the hopefulness and ingenuity of the parents,students and teachers who created the school and the despair of downtrodden bureaucrats and volunteers who, in Tisserand's gentle telling, established policies and protocols that become roadblocks to spiritual and physical regeneration is huge."

LA Times - Susan Salter Reynolds

"[Tisserand's] 'Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember' is that seemingly impossible thing -- a gentle, hopeful tale about the displaced and the small Cajun town where they landed...It's an Oprah-worthy story sure to resonate with young urban parents...Quiet and powerful."

The Oregonian

"Through his personal account, the experiences of his two children and the stories of people he encounters, Tisserand is able to accomplish what the extensive news coverage could not: He puts a human face on the tragedy, allowing readers to better understand the experiences of the victims of Katrina."

Bookpage

"This wonderful memoir manages to do what a flood of news-reporting could not: see the tragedy of Katrina through the eyes of children. I was touched by the depth of feeling that wells from these pages, and I was heartened by the resilience and courage of these Children of the Storm. Katrina impressed itself indelibly on a generation of New Orleans children, and Tisserand makes the complexity real through the story of his own children and that of their friends in exile. The story of The Sugarcane Academy, an improvised one-room school in a sugar-cane parish in south Louisiana, will be one of the lasting books of our tragedy."

Andrei Codrescu

"Heartwarming...The story of Sugarcane Academy is as inspiring as it is moving and sometimes sad, and as much a reflection on the resilience of children and dedicated teachers as it is on the hardships faced by everyone displaced by the storm."

Times Picayne (New Orleans)

"A slender but appealing book...[about] a remarkable teacher named Paul Reynaud, the sort of person who has a gift for understanding children's wants and needs..."

The New York Times Education Supplement - Charles McGrath

"A testament to the teachers who supported Katrina's children, Sugarcane Academy reminds us all that heroes hold small hands on field trips, clean paint brushes, and sing morning songs."

author of 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny Phillip Done

"This book delivers insightful anecdotes on the incredible misfortune Katrina wrought. But it also embodies the spirit of the people who rose from the floodwaters and dared to plant seeds of hope in the sugarcane fields."

Southern Living

"When journalist Michael Tisserand and his family found themselves escaping the maelstrom of Hurricane Katrina, he turned his investigative eye on the aftermath as his family and others helped create a one-room schoolhouse for evacuee children. This true story of how determination, faith, and a sheer force of will allowed learning and hope to blossom in the office space that became the only public school open in New Orleans."

FamilyCircle.com

"This book delivers insightful anecdotes on the incredible misfortune Katrina wrought. But it also embodies the spirit of the people who rose from the floodwaters and dared to plant seeds of hope in the sugarcane fields."

Southern Living Magazine