Robert Willis Jr.

Abstract

Born in 1983, Robert Willis Jr., better known to his acquaintances as BJ, was initially raised in a two-parent home on St. Maurice Street in the Lower Ninth Ward,¹ where he played baseball on his father, Robert Willis Sr.’s, little league team. Shortly after his parents separated, BJ and his mother, Paulette, moved into the Seventh Ward. Robert described his pre-Katrina life as a “ hurricane.” A rapper and an amateur barber, before the storm BJ had lived a life he felt lucky to have survived at the age of twenty-two. He was kicked out of several high schools for possession of marijuana and threatened with incarceration after a serious altercation, but his father’s lawyer was able to keep BJ out of a home for juvenile delinquents. After graduating from John McDonogh Senior High, Robert left New Orleans twice in the fall of 2002, the first time to attend Jackson State University in Mississippi on a basketball scholarship, and then to audition in Manhattan for a film part as a rapper. Failing at both, he returned to New Orleans in December 2002, and lived with his widowed grandmother, a retired school teacher, in Pontchartrain Park. After his father overcame his own drug habit, BJ moved in with his father and they concluded that his only chance to escape the danger of street life was to get a fresh start elsewhere. His second chance began in Memphis four days before Katrina. BJ experienced Katrina vicariously via television and his cell phone.

BJ is short in stature. What he lacks in height, however, he makes up for in muscle tone and swagger. On the day of this interview, September 30, 2005, he was wearing name-brand tennis shoes and a loose, gray sweat suit. Several of his front teeth were gold-capped, and almost every inch of visible skin including his knuckles was tattooed with symbols, artwork, and words. The interview was conducted on the campus of the University of Memphis in the conference room of the Benjamin Hooks Institute. An ornately framed picture of a young Ben Hooks with Martin Luther King Jr. was on the brick wall directly opposite BJ. On the wall behind him was a street map of New Orleans. A blue, yellow, and red kente cloth adorned the otherwise austere conference table where the interview was conducted. Baderinwa Ain was also present.

BJ passionately and vividly describes the experiences, beliefs, and priorities of some of New Orleans’ youngest generation. His narrative articulates the quandary of some New Orleans youth, who before Katrina did not see opportunities beyond the self-destructive third rail of crime, drugs, and violence. Shaken by the storm and the way he saw his fellow New Orleanians treated, he renewed his spiritual faith and vowed once again to give up drugs and violence. BJ’s experience provides a glimpse into the effect of the government’s slow response on a subset of young men who are usually feared and rarely understood.²