A year after the storms my grandmother died and it was
though this, my own small tragedy, that I began to qualify the
tragedy of Katrina. And I realized that my experience of losing
one person would have to be multiplied immeasurably to begin
to understand how it would be to loose the tangible things
like family, friends, and homes and to loose the intangible
things, like communities and childhood.
Helpless is the one word that I can correlate between my feelings of hair and hurricanes.
Growing up in South Carolina I was often a victim of both the weather and the havoc living in
a place with outrageously high levels of humidity had on my hair.

When I first began to
think of this book, I
thought of the
helplessness of the
individual, of the
community, and of the
country that was caused
by the storms of Katrina
and Rita.
The cover came quickly
to me as I began to
visualize a lone
woman on the pier
whose hair becomes so
entangled in the flood
waters; it is in fact a part
of the problem.
The illustrations were
not come by so easily.


I wanted to make a story of the women
who suffered. I wanted to show their
fear, their sadness, their recovery,
strength and solidarity with that I also
wanted to show the humor that I
know carried many through the dark
days and nights. I sought to show all
of these collective emotions through
the visual tie of the individual
experience of one with their body and
hair. So through a simple tilt of the
head, by covering one’s face, or a
squaring of the shoulders, I told my
story of a woman and her hair.