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Recalling family taken by Katrina

BY MARTIN C. EVANS | Newsday Staff Correspondent

August 30, 2006

NEW ORLEANS - There is almost no trace of the house that once cradled a young family at 1908 Tennessee St. The concrete foundation has all but disappeared beneath vegetation that has buried a stretch of Ninth Ward neighborhood under a thicket of green.

Until last Aug. 29, a woman and her two children lived there, three blocks from a high levee that held Lake Pontchartrain's unforgiving waters.

This is what happened to them.

The eldest son was preparing to begin first grade. The youngest was enrolled in Head Start. Their mother, Byndra Trueblood, 31, 4-foot-11, plain-spoken and fond of Al Green recordings, worked as a hairdresser, allowing her to schedule around her children. After having lost the father of her youngest son to cancer a year earlier, she had met a man who could make her laugh again - her siblings knew him as "Leon" - and was planning to marry.

They were at the house when Hurricane Katrina pushed through the levee. Trueblood later told a sister that she could hear a bang that shook the house. Water that was ankle deep in her kitchen soon was at her waist. She snatched up her children and waded east, away from the levees.

But the water rose faster. The 200-foot steel barge ING 4727 had surfed through the seawall at the end of North Prieur Street and was roaming the neighborhood like a stumbling giant, smashing houses in its path.

Trueblood was able to scramble atop a roof. She pulled her youngest child, Davonta, 4, inside her shirt, hoping he would be safe there. But her eldest son, Montava, 7, who had gripped her so tightly that months later Trueblood bore scars from his nails, was pulled away by the surging waters.

Leon's daughter had fallen in first, pulling Montava with her. Leon dove into the current to save them. None were seen again.

Trueblood and Davonta were rescued and taken to the Superdome, where she pleaded for information about Montava and the others. Eventually, she and Davonta moved near relatives in Milwaukee.

On Dec. 8, a fire broke out at Trueblood's apartment. Authorities believe she had fallen asleep while smoking. The last residents of 1908 Tennessee were dead.

Last week, Pauline Augustine, one of Trueblood's sisters, visited where the house stood for only the second time since last August. As a passing rain beat snare drum riffs on the roof of her car, she sat reflecting on the young lives lost.

"She was getting along pretty good, she was establishing their education," said Augustine, who had helped arrange an Aug. 17 funeral for Montava, after his body was found a few blocks from the house.

"That's why it is so hard, and cuts so deep," she said. "If those levees didn't break, it would have been just a matter of her sweeping up a little debris."

At 1908 Tennessee, there is not even debris left. No shattered house, no abandoned shoes, no discarded toys bleached by the year of sun since Katrina raged, then blew herself out. All that remains is a field of weeds stretching away toward the levee.