Denise Roubion-Johnson

Abstract

In 1972, Denise Roubion-Johnson was a debutante and the homecoming queen of Joseph S. Clark High School. She rose from meager economic circumstances to direct a cancer-screening program in the outpatient clinic of the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans (Charity Hospital). A wife, mother of four, and a grandmother, Denise led a busy life of family, work, and education before the storm. Denise, her husband, Ronald Johnson Sr., who suffers from sickle-cell anemia, and her sixteen-year-old son, Ronald Johnson Jr., rode out the storm at University Hospital, where she spent the remainder of the week giving emergency care to newborn infants, mothers, and ICU patients.

On a hot, muggy Saturday in late August 20007,¹ the fifty-three-year-old health care provider was wearing a vertically striped, button-down cotton shirt with white pants. Even on her day off Denise fielded phone calls from colleagues and patients. The interview took place at her custom-built Eastover home, a gated community of executive homes located at the far edge of New Orleans East. One entire wall of windows looks out over the gated community’s pond and golf course. Downstairs her console is adorned with pictures of her with Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Ray Nagin, and other politicians. Upstairs, prints by Alfred Gockel line the walls.

Denise’s relationship to her family, patients, and community afforded her a unique perspective on the acts of race-based discrimination she witnessed. By October 2005, she had resettled her family in Houston, reconnected with some of her missing cancer patients, and returned to New Orleans, where she worked as a nurse practitioner to help the large number of women who lost their health insurance after Katrina. Her narrative describes the situation of women survivors who are unemployed, uninsured, and diagnosed with cancer. The insistence of these women to return to New Orleans despite the lack of adequate medical care is an example of the draw of the city.