I was sixteen when Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. At that age, I didn’t fully understand the weight of what had happened. I knew my parents were devastated — so many adults around me carried an exhaustion and grief that I couldn’t name at the time. Entire neighborhoods had been flattened, jobs and routines disappeared overnight, and the world I’d always known suddenly felt unrecognizable.
But as teenagers, we processed it differently. Our lives had always revolved around friendships, music, and simply finding ways to be together. So when the walls of our homes were gone, we made new spaces for ourselves on what was left behind: the slabs.
That’s how the “slab party” was born.
It started with a simple call — “Meet me at my slab” — and suddenly a bare concrete foundation became the night’s gathering place. Someone would drag out a cooler, someone else would build a bonfire, and soon there we were, standing where a living room or a kitchen used to be. There were no walls, no roofs, no furniture. Just us, laughter, and the stubborn determination to make something good out of what Katrina had left.
At the time, it didn’t feel profound. It was just what we did. But looking back, I see it as our version of resilience. We didn’t have the same worries as our parents — insurance battles, jobs, rebuilding — but we were living through that same altered landscape. And in our own way, we were coping by turning loss into connection.
Years later, I painted a piece called Meet Me at the Slab. It shows a circle of teens silhouetted against the firelight, their shadows stretching across the foundation beneath a wide Mississippi sky. For me, it holds the dual truth of that time: the emptiness of what was gone, and the warmth we found in spite of it.
The Gulf Coast after Katrina was never the same. That storm changed the shape of our towns and the rhythm of our days. But the spirit that came out of those nights — a spirit of community, of making the best of what little we had — has stayed with me ever since.
I made lifelong friends during those slab parties. We didn’t realize it then, but we were writing our own story of survival, one bonfire at a time. And nearly twenty years later, I still think of the sound of laughter carrying across empty lots, of sparks rising into the dark, of how even in the middle of so much devastation, we found light.
