It does not matter how many photos you’ve seen, how riveting the videotapes have been as they splashed across the television screens, with desperate voices crying out in the background, or listening to the emotional Congressional testimony of displaced residents of New Orleans. None of those experiences – or even all of them combined – can prepare you for the experience of entering the city’s lower 9th Ward, where Hurricanes Katrina and Rita roared.

Almost seven months later, it is still hard to believe your eyes. This is the worse of the worst. Debris is piled high in no particular order – on the streets, next to houses, under fallen trees. Whether made of brick or wood, most of the houses are missing windows, doors and people. Roofs can be found where you’d least expect them: on top of overturned automobiles, crumpled under trees, crushed to the ground. There are signs of life slowly returning, but for most part, the residents have not returned. And it’s uncertain if they ever will.

Based on some of the news accounts, it is not hard for a visitor to come here believing that the entire city is as devastated. It’s not. Less than 10 minutes to the north, in the more affluent neighborhoods, one can tell that Katrina and Rita visited. But it’s also evident that they didn’t stay long. Of course, there is physical damage and power remains out on many streets. Still, most the homes are habitable and, oddly, have increased in value because of the hurricanes.

Take the home of Terry Jones, publisher of the Louisiana Data News Times, for example. Terry took me on a tour of his home and neighborhood. There is damage in the basement, where he had his office, and a stack of damaged computers are parked just steps from his garage. Climb one flight of stairs, ignore the lack of power, and you’d never know his home had withstood two hurricanes. The glistening wooden floors are still buffed, an impressive art collection is untouched and closets are stuffed with clothing ready to wear.

Stop downtown, in the New Orleans that most tourists see, and you’ll notice that there are some stores boarded with wood. The Popeye chicken joint on Canal Street isn’t popping and while not a ghost town, there is not the bevy of people that usually crowd the street. A few people were begging on the streets – some seemed to be living there – perhaps a clear sign that more than the wealthy are returning to the Crescent City. At night, the French Quarter still attracts people in perpetual motion, casually darting in and out of the bars or otherwise making fools of themselves.

Looking at the northern part of the city and downtown together provide enough reassuring signs that New Orleans is down but hardly out. While it may take years to restore its lost luster, residents are hopeful that if the federal government does not abandon them, one of the nation’s greatest cities can be great again.

As marchers assembled at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, where mostly poor and mostly Black residents huddled for three days, and walked up the ramp to I-10 on Sept. 1 toward Gretna, I realized we were retracing the path of those stranded. I tried to imagine what it felt like to be frightened, carrying all of your earthly belongings on your back, not knowing if relatives and friends were alive or dead. I thought about what it must have felt like at the end of the 4-mile walk, to face law enforcement officials in Greta, waiting at the foot of the bridge, telling desperate people that they would not be allowed into the city. How could anyone be so heartless? City officials claim they were overcrowded and couldn’t handle any more people. But those that had marched over the bridge knew that the twin evils and race and economics had never worked in their favor. And that was not about to change now. Instead of being welcomed to dry land, they were being forced at gunpoint to return to the squalor and uncertainty they had fled.

Now, displaced residents still face a future of uncertainty. There is a lot of talk about bringing back New Orleans. Code words, such as “smaller footprints,” are used to disguise a hidden blueprint, a blueprint that excludes poor Black people. Even a Black city councilman spoke of not letting jobless people return to public housing.

But New Orleans will not be New Orleans until it can bring back the people that made the greatest sacrifice on this side of death.