Summer in the Cities of the Dead: New Orleans Cemeteries During Hurricane Season

Phoenix Chapital is a Robertson Scholar majoring in English Literature, pursuing the Human Rights Certificate, in the class of 2027. Phoenix is one of our 2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. 

This past fall, I spent a day volunteering at Geer Cemetery in Durham, North Carolina, with the Duke Human Rights Advisory Board. As I shoveled dirt to fill in grave depressions, I was careful not to bury the rusted makeshift nameplates. I became fixated on what this kind of restoration would look like in my city, where what is buried and forgotten often resurfaces. 

I have always been concerned with the dead. I was born in New Orleans in 2005, just before Hurricane Katrina became known as one of the worst natural disasters in American history. My childhood was filled with dilapidated buildings and ghost stories. 

My project examines the concept of dignity in death, an often-overlooked extension of the right to dignity, equality, and cultural recognition. Unequal access to burial space, memorialization, and protection from environmental disasters reflects broader patterns of racial and economic injustice. In New Orleans, these inequalities are intensified by climate vulnerability, where flooding and land instability disproportionately threaten historically Black communities. This summer, I returned home to research current memorialization practices and how they perpetuate inequality in death. 

My first stop was St. Louis No. 3, one of the city’s largest and most visited cemeteries. Of the 45 cemeteries in New Orleans, 13 are Catholic. St. Louis No. 3 is one of them, operated and maintained by the Archdiocese of New Orleans.

Tombs like the ones in No. 3 are expensive, often costing tens of thousands of dollars to construct and thousands more to maintain. Families can pay the Archdiocese to place their tombs under “perpetual care,” which means that the New Orleans Catholic Cemeteries assume responsibility for the maintenance and care of the memorial. Society tombs, such as the one for the Stone Masons, can cost anywhere from $50,000 and $100,000. 

Walking through St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 in the ferocious and heavy heat, I observed history solidified, engraved into stone. Liz, my tour guide, pointed out the icons etched into marble: the upside-down torch, symbolizing eternity, and a lamb, symbolizing a life lost young. But even opulent cemeteries like St. Louis No. 3 are not impervious to New Orleans hurricanes. After Katrina,  a line three to four feet high on the tombs marked how high the waters rose. 

I have come to understand that the infrastructure built around the more popular and fabled cemeteries of New Orleans (St. Louis No. 1, No.2, and No.3, and Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, for example) has made them both more accessible and better maintained. The predominantly Black Holt Cemetery, even though it is one of the 6 cemeteries under the city’s care, has no formal caretaker. There are no marble poppies or weeping willows carved into stone tombs. There are no tombs at all. The bodies rest below ground. Instead, peeking between blades of overgrown yellow grass are more impermanent monuments to memory: a fake pink rose, a laminated photograph. No tourists line up outside of Holt’s iron gates.

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Last week, tropical storm Arthur blew through the Gulf Coast. Knowing it was coming, I stayed at my parents’ house the night before. Just after five in the morning, after the tornado and flood warnings had sounded on our phones, my mother shook us awake and ushered us into the basement bathroom to shelter. 

As the rain beat ceaselessly against the roof of the house, I imagined the streets outside swelling with water, low-lying roads becoming rivers, potholes filling with sludge and muck. Lightning flashed outside, and on the floor of the bathroom, my little brother winced and huddled closer to my mother. I remembered a story that Liz had told me during my tour of St. Louis No. 3. After Hurricane Katrina, a man had spotted his mother’s pink casket floating over the levee, unmoored from its cemetery. I had a sudden vivid image of the levee by Lake Pontchartrain, a wave rising up against it, and at its crest a bright pink casket surfacing briefly before being engulfed once again by the dark waters. 

If caskets were floating down the city streets after Tropical Storm Arthur, I knew they wouldn’t be coming from the sturdy tombs of the St. Louis cemeteries, with their stubborn plaster and marble and iron casings. They would be more likely to have originated in places like Holt, where only a thin barrier separates body from ground and sky. 

I wondered what this roaring storm would do to the dead. 

I was recently connected with a local historian who once ran the nonprofit Save Our Cemeteries. I look forward to her guidance as I continue investigating these inequalities. 

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