From Katrina’s Flood to Oakland Stages, a Mother’s Purse Safeguarded Survival

Through the mounted speakers inside a multistory warehouse in East Oakland, LaVance “Poo$ie” Warren’s thick New Orleans accent vibrates the room.

Rapping about life and death, the 28-year-old lyricist drops bars informed by generational poverty and the cycle of community violence. He also carries the weight of surviving Hurricane Katrina, the storm of a century, 20 years ago.

“Muderrrrrr she wrote,” he says into the mic, performing his take on Chaka Demus & Pliers’ classic reggae track. Poo$ie’s version has a hymn-like cadence, delivered over an ominous bass line. It’s one of 11 songs off of Poos$ie’s new album, My Friends Like to Kill Each Other.

The mid-July edition of the Office Hours musical showcase is full of MCs and vocalists, dancers and media makers. It’s a who’s who of Bay Area talent: Jamel Griot, Stonï, Ian Kelly and Alien Mac Kitty, to name a few.

Event host Randy McPhly stands on a large rug that serves as a stage, contorting his face as Poo$ie rapidly gasses the track. “The ghetto’s just a graveyard / Lost but he played hard / Born with a bad hand / Brenda’s by the trash can,” he says, throwing bars into the universe with ease.

Despite living in Oakland two decades, his Louisiana accent remains. He’s part of a diaspora of New Orleans kids who came of age in a new land after the federal government treated their families like refugees and fellow citizens stepped in to help.

Twenty years after Katrina forced his family from New Orleans to Oakland, Poo$ie has transformed trauma into art. His music and life as a young father reflect the resilience passed down from his mother, who during Katrina cared for him, his brothers and his grandmother. Poo$ie’s mother did so by relying on her own willpower, a few blessings from benevolent bystanders and the sheer luck concealed inside of a little black purse.

When Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the southern Gulf Coast in August 2005, it was one of the most powerful storms to ever hit the mainland United States, with sustained winds of up to 175 mph.

Torrential rain submerged buildings in more than 20 feet of water. The damage was compounded by aging infrastructure, racist redlining housing policies and mismanagement of relief efforts by local and federal officials.

More than 1,000 people died and an estimated 162,000 New Orleans residents were displaced, many settling in Baton Rouge, Texas, or elsewhere in the South. Poo$ie and his family represent the approximately 16,000 New Orleans residents who relocated to other parts of the country, including California.

Now 20 years removed from the storm, Poo$ie is raising 6-year-old Zavion — about the same age he was when Hurricane Katrina hit, and when, just six months earlier, his own father was killed by gun violence in New Orleans.

“I was supposed to be with him the day he got killed,” Poo$ie tells me days after his performance. “That shit just sent me in a spiral.”

Because of what he experienced as a kid, he says he takes parenting and art more seriously than most. Zavion is often at his side, even at shows. His music is transparent and introspective — “spiritually inclined,” as he puts it.

“Not spiritually like your chakras are aligned,” Poo$ie clarifies with a laugh. “But like Soulja Slim came through my body,” he says, referring to the late rapper still beloved in New Orleans. “I’m channeling a certain energy. I represent a lot of people that ain’t here.”

As a child, Poo$ie lived in New Orleans’ notorious Calliope Projects and the Eighth Ward. At the time of the storm, he lived in Chalmette, an area on the Mississippi River, adjacent to the Lower Ninth Ward.

It’s not lost on him that he wouldn’t be rocking a crowd in East Oakland’s Jingletown neighborhood were it not for the strength of a few angels who looked out for him 20 years ago — and for his mother, her perseverance, and her little black purse.

A birthday present to remember

Days after her birthday, I visit Poo$ie’s mother, Letitia Morris-Ward, at her Hayward apartment. With red micro-braids, a big smile and a heavy Southern accent, she sits at a kitchen table covered in balloons and unopened gifts, reflecting on her celebration with family, including her three sons and four grandchildren.

It’s not too different from how she celebrated in 2005. Her only request back then, besides having her family present, was a small black Guess purse, “just to say it was my birthday,” she says.

Weeks later, when the storm hit, the purse became her saving grace: “It was the only thing I had left.”

At the time, she had just moved her boys — Poo$ie, 8, PaTrick, 11, and RaShad, 13 — out of the projects and into a two-story townhouse. She was working a new minimum-wage job at Shell gas station and driving a used Pontiac she bought for $700. Rent was $425 a month. Things were looking up.

Then the storm came.

Morris-Ward first heard the warnings from relatives, then a call from her brother, an offshore oil worker. By the time she realized its seriousness, it was nearly too late.

She packed the boys into the car and drove to the Eighth Ward to get her mother. On the return trip, guards wouldn’t let them enter Chalmette without ID — and she had left her new purse behind.

When they went back, the purse was still on the porch, untouched. “That’s how many people had started leaving the city,” she says.

When they came to the checkpoint again, guards warned her about returning home. “I dunno why you’re trying to go out there,” she recalls the armed serviceman telling her, “Y’all gonna be under 20 feet of water anyway. You won’t make it.”

Taking offense to the condescending tone, Morris-Ward said she replied, “That’s between me and God.”

Back home, she cooked food as her mother watched TV and the boys played. She figured it would rain and they’d be fine. Then her mother spoke up:

“She said, ‘My feet wet,’” Morris-Ward recalls.

Water was seeping in. It rose so fast that soon they fled upstairs. The wind tore the roof off. They worked with neighbors, breaking through walls to reach safer units.

At one point, Morris-Ward held Poo$ie out a window to flag down passing boats, then pulled him back, afraid he’d be traumatized by the sights.

“He saw a lady pass by with her arms folded tight, dead, floating on her back. With a baby,” Morris-Ward says.

Seeking shelter

Boats passed them by or capsized when overloaded. After 16 hours, they were rescued, but there wasn’t room for RaShad. Morris-Ward made rescuers promise to reunite them. She grabbed her new purse, stuffed with documents, IDs, a photo and a small phone book.

At the jail that doubled as an evacuation center, Morris-Ward’s two other boys slept in a cell. She waited up all night for RaShad, but he never came. “I wanted my child,” she says, choking up. “I stayed there until I couldn’t stand no more.”

The family was moved to a shelter at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There, Morris-Ward did what she could to keep the boys fed and healthy. They even went to church on the Sunday after the storm.

Still, the conditions wore her down: Army food made her sick, her head hurt, an abscess grew under her arm. Her mother’s insulin had been lost in the flood, leaving her foaming at the mouth.

Morris-Ward hit a breaking point and left the shelter on foot without any intention of returning. “I walked so far my feet were just burning on the ground,” Morris-Ward says. But one thought made her turn around.

“The boys need me,” she said to herself. “They need me, they have nothing else. I’m the last option.”

At a Walgreens, she tried to buy insulin without a prescription but was met with resistance. A woman behind her in line stepped in: Jessica Johnson, mother of NBA rookie Tyrus Thomas. Johnson persuaded the pharmacist to sell Morris-Ward insulin.

“It was an angel standing behind me in line,” Morris-Ward says.

Johnson began accompanying Morris-Ward on shopping trips as store employees hovered, suspicious on the wristband identifying Morris-Ward as a Katrina survivor. When Morris-Ward eventually told her about her missing son RaShad, Johnson vowed to help.

She gave Johnson a wallet-sized photo she had in her black purse. It was a picture of RaShad, posing with his cousin at a fancy ball. Johnson posted it online. When she came back days later to talk Morris-Ward figured the worst had happened. “My heart started beating fast,” she recalls.

But Johnson had found RaShad. A woman who saw her post had spotted him in Houston, shirtless and shoeless, outside of a dollar store.

Johnson grabbed Morris-Ward’s hand and said she’d drive to meet the woman halfway between the two cities in order to get RaShad, and then she did just that. After 12 days apart, RaShad and mother were reunited.

With RaShad back, Morris-Ward made plans to leave the shelter. In the phone book she had in her purse was a phone number written in her mother’s handwriting: “My brother. Uncle Leroy. Oakland, California.”

Along the way, strangers kept helping. Firefighters gave the family a ride to the airport. During a layover in Atlanta, an older Black woman asked if they were Katrina survivors and gave Morris-Ward $300.

Turning trauma into art

The arrival in Oakland brought new obstacles: expensive housing and discrimination against Katrina survivors.

But for Poo$ie, Oakland became home. He played Pop Warner, then starred as a running back at McClymonds High School, helping win back-to-back citywide Silver Bowl championships in 2014 and 2015.

Before an interview with football coaches at Oakland’s Laney College, Poo$ie told his mother about a way to process the impacts of the storm and its aftermath.

“I know what can help me,” she recalls him saying. “I’m about to start sitting down, writing rap music about how I feel.”

He’s released nine full-length albums since.

Morris-Ward, too, found peace in telling her story. She wasn’t always so open: “My mama was in the streets,” Poo$ie says, noting she once had a mouth full of gold teeth. “So you know, she just now coming into ‘feelings’ and s—,” he says with air quotes.

Now, when Hurricane Katrina comes up, she’s comfortable talking about her experience,  “because maybe I can help somebody out in their situation, someone that’s going through something and they’re holding it in,” she says.

An employee of AC Transit for the past 19 years, Morris-Ward is now stable and married. She’s been to New Orleans a few times since her life there was upended by Hurricane Katrina. Her mother, who swore to never return to the Big Easy, passed in 2014, just before the first trip back.

Morris-Ward keeps recipes from New Orleans in rotation, including beignets. On her trips back, she picks up special ingredients she can only get there.

“New Orleans is in me, bro,” Poo$ie says. “This is just who we are — we speak a different dialect at home, it’s really a different language.”

In addition to New Orleans culture, Morris-Ward passed along something else to Poo$ie: approaches to parenting. After witnessing his mother’s tenacity, Poo$ie is mindful to teach his son survival skills, from swimming to fighting. “I don’t know when I’m gonna need you,” he says, his young son sitting within earshot.

Today, Morris-Ward sits in her apartment surrounded by candles and walls covered in recent family photos; Katrina washed away so many of her old ones.

She doesn’t play about negative energy, asking people to check themselves before they cross the threshold of her front door. She’s in a good place.

“I’ve literally seen my mom change as a person,” Poo$ie says. “I love to see her tending to herself and discovering new ways to heal whatever happened even before I was here. Before the storm.”