Last Sunday morning about 1:30 a.m., in the dim glow of one lamp, the ghosts finally overtook me. The corner of my apartment dedicated to New Orleans briefly came alive.

I never noticed until that moment that the Mardi Gras dolls atop our piano, despite their carnival attire and regal bearing, looked forlorn, their expressions filled with the sad wistfulness that precedes tears. The tiny porcelain figure of a costumed Mardi Gras reveler raising her hand for beads actually looked like she was waving goodbye.

My black-framed print of a rainy afternoon on Royal Street never looked so eerie. The indistinct, blurred images of people and a horse-drawn carriage could have been a scene two weeks earlier or 200 years ago. Something about the dark, cloudy skies in that print always seemed ominous, and distinctly at odds with the mysterious, faint golden glow that filled the street but radiated from no visible source. Last year I hung a simple gold mask from a long-ago Mardi Gras on a corner of the frame. It seemed to make the glow a bit brighter.

If you believe that New Orleans is more of a state of mind than a city, you can carry that glow with you. Hold on to your memories of a special vacation or that masterpiece of a meal you could find nowhere else in America. Relive the beat of the street with your CDs and be proud of the fact that you had a date with the most exciting, seductive woman in America. She had a way of hooking you. One night in her arms and you lost all rational control. I hope you knew her before the ravages of natural causes and human ignorance ruined her looks and left her very soul lying helpless on the ground.

The politicians, civic boosters and Chambers of Commerce say New Orleans will be back someday. It’s their job to say that. But many of us who have her blood in our veins admit that there is a darker side to the story.

Generations of my family were born and raised in New Orleans, including my late father. He never identified himself as a southerner. He was a proud New Orleanian, a kid from the Irish Channel, and like my grandfather, inherited that odd combination of toughness and tenderness that seems to persist in working-class New Orleans.

Three of my aunts and uncles and two cousins had to escape the path of Katrina. My 104-year-old great aunt was transferred from a group home on Magazine Street to a nursing home in Baton Rouge. For the first time in their lives, they were all absent from the city at the same time. Strangest of all, they went in different directions.

One aunt and uncle evacuated to Missouri. My two cousins are with an aunt and uncle in Florida. Days after Katrina hit, no one in the family had heard from my aunt and uncle in Metairie. They finally contacted family, and when I last talked to them, they were in a state of shock in a motel room in Little Rock, spending their days vacantly staring at the television.

Significantly, none of them remained in Louisiana.

The last time I was in the Ernest Morial Convention Center in New Orleans was last December. I participated in the first Cultural Economy Initiative Conference, the brainchild of Louisiana Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu. It seemed like a great idea at the time. The goal was to combine tourism, Louisiana culture and history with the intention of showing the world, intelligently and accurately, the best that Louisiana had to offer.

Four things struck me about that conference. One, the Hilton Riverside had an awesome view of the river. Two, New Orleans knew how to throw a conference. The buffet line of some of the finest restaurants in the city definitely had my attention. Three, I met some exceptionally talented people with a sincere desire to put their love of Louisiana to good use.

Finally, people were excited about it because they knew Louisiana had absolutely no other options.

The last time I saw the Ernest Morial Convention Center was on television. Corpses filled the sidewalk and armed thugs terrorized the living. It’s a safe bet that the people dying there had not attended the Cultural Economy Initiative Conference. The restaurant across the street, Mulate’s, where my Aunt Faith and Uncle Blake spent many a night Cajun dancing, became a haven for a huddled mass of disheveled and bewildered humanity.

Tourists are in love with the New Orleans myth. But Katrina blew the veneer off the city to expose the reality of life lived hard and close to the bone, a gritty, grimy existence plagued with grinding poverty, unemployment, wretched public schools and horrendous violence. Anybody from New Orleans can tell you the neighborhoods to stay away from, but easier said than done. New Orleans is basically a big small town with a population of 1.3 million crammed into a trap with few escape routes. Unlike most major American cities, where a person can live an entire life without venturing into “those areas,” routes in New Orleans rarely give a resident that option. Getting from Point A to Point B is a lesson in the realities of the socioeconomic ladder.

The race question in the rescue efforts will not go away anytime soon. But the glacial pace of relief ignored race. The people of New Orleans, whether black, white, brown, yellow, red, or pink with green polka dots, deserved far better than this. People watch the appalling tragedy in disbelief and say, “This is not America.” Yes, people, this is America, and until you wake up from your years of slumber, it will get worse.

While the finger-pointing has just begun, another ominous question looms large and unanswered. The answers to this question holds the key to the future of the Gulf Coast and what priority we really place on human life.

I can’t speak to the economics of rebuilding, but I do know this: it’s a chilling experience to zoom in on aerial images of coastal Louisiana where land is supposed to be and see nothing but open water. Scientists have estimated that after Katrina, we have fast-forwarded to the year 2050 in terms of wetlands depletion. We are running out of natural barriers to hurricanes and it’s going to take one hell of a public relations job to get more industry to move into a doomed landscape.

I heard a conservative talk show host on some AM station in Louisiana announce that environmentalists are happy because Katrina killed so many people. Rush Limbaugh proclaimed in his twisted logic that environmentalists can shut up about banning SUVs because without SUVs, how could you have a rescue effort? Many Americans actually buy into all of it.

We have dug and built and blasted and bullied the wetlands of south Louisiana until we have endangered the very thing we are trying to protect. Katrina’s sisters and brothers will continue to pay us visits. They mean us no harm, but we have put ourselves in harm’s way. How we deal with that fact will tell us much about ourselves and our priorities. We’ve lost a city and thousands of great people. We owe them and their surviving relatives an explanation.

New Orleans, I’m going to miss you, baby. From the legendary marathon meals at my grandmother’s tiny kitchen table to my honeymoon in the French Quarter, through the family’s triumphs and tears, I loved you more than I can explain. I’m sorry you’re gone. Forgive us. You deserved so much better than what we gave you.

(Karl Rohr lived in Western North Carolina for many years while he was a student and teacher at WCU and a writer for two local newspapers. He now teaches history at the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts in Natchitoches. He can be reached at krohr@lsmsa.edu.)