Arriving at Milton After Katrina

Fifteen-year-old Jennifer Doherty ’08 found a warm welcome at Milton after Hurricane Katrina forced her out of her familiar surroundings.

I was sweating in my new pullover as I arrived at Robbins House. I landed at Milton in time for move-in weekend with just the small bag I had packed two weeks earlier when my family evacuated New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Katrina, plus the new outfit my southern mama and I thought would be more appropriate for fall in New England. Getting out of the car, I felt my moccasins going soggy as I observed my future classmates sunbathing on the quad.

It was the first of endless bungles that marked my three years at Milton after arriving as cowed and materially unprepared, I would wager, as any new sophomore who has set foot on Centre Street before or since. Had I undergone the same thorough application process as my classmates, I am confident the Admission Office would have quickly weeded out my shaky, artless profile. Instead, the school threw open its doors to me sight unseen and rerouted the rest of my life.

We had charged our cell phones at a church in town, because my uncle’s house in Laurel, Mississippi, where my family had evacuated, was still without power a week after the storm, when I finally got a call through to my childhood friend Olivia. She was already a boarder at Milton. Her mother answered the phone and said simply: “They have a place for you at Milton.”

Days later I was on a flight out of Jackson, seated next to a Kevin Federline lookalike. His readiness to show off his rap talents to the rest of economy class impressed upon me that despite my new status as an internally displaced person, I had not previously known trauma.

So I arrived, perspiring and dressed as a southerner’s off-brand vision of autumn in Boston. I was assigned to Robbins, the best dormitory, and handed a class schedule stuffed with all-star teachers.

“The Milton community wasted no time in rallying around and carried me through the 2005–2006 school year.”

Mr. Banderob helped me appreciate the beauty of math the same way I can enjoy the wonder of space travel, knowing full well that I am not meant to do it. Mr. Lou steered his class through the absurdity and inevitability of world history and cured my habit of mumbling answers by calling me out on it during Parents Day.

Ms. Baker let me write poems about streets flooded with tears, which probably saved me thousands on therapy later on, while Mr. J.C. Smith—well, all I can say is that he taught me to think. He demanded acuity and graded with the incisiveness of RuPaul reading a Drag Race contestant to filth. I wish I had saved my essay on which his only comment was to underline my thesis and ask “Why would anyone write about this?” His refusal to mince words in his critiques—though the humor softened the blow—made his praise indelible.

From the student friend who bought me full-size toiletries while I was still getting blue card permissions set up (Matt Smith, you’re a prince) to the parents’ association that furnished my first snow-appropriate outerwear, the Milton community wasted no time in rallying around and carried me through the 2005–2006 school year, even as I wobbled trying to be a worthy recipient of so much generosity.

With apologies to Mr. Smith, this may be another essay struggling for a thesis 20 years later. But the main lesson I learned about first impressions at Milton was immediate generosity. The school quickly provided me and two other students who arrived after Katrina with safe and stable accommodations when we might otherwise have struggled to find them and gave the benefit of the doubt to a bedraggled, overwhelmed teenager. The other lesson was to check all assumptions and the weather when picking an outfit.

Jennifer Doherty ’08 spent the next three years at Milton, returning to New Orleans after graduation to attend Tulane University. Today, she lives in the New York area with her family and covers international trade policy and litigation news for Law360.