NEW ORLEANS — Willie Marsalis remembers the night he and his parents spent camping on a crowded bridge, surrounded by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, listening to gunfire in the distance.
“I remember it vividly. I remember everything,” said Willie, who was 13 at the time. “I remember being trapped inside of a church building. I remember getting rescued by helicopters, sleeping on the bridge.”
Children wave pool noodles and chase each other around the auditorium of the Hollygrove Church of Christ during the first day of Camp Water Tower Academy.
Two decades later, Marsalis is camping again, but the circumstances are less severe. On a recent Monday morning, his biggest concern was coping with about a dozen cases of the wiggles — some of them severe.
Waving pool noodles and balloons, children yelled and raced around the auditorium of the Hollygrove Church of Christ. It was the first day of Camp Water Tower Academy, a summer program for neighborhood kids — some in diapers, some approaching their preteen years.
Marsalis, now 34 and armed with a megaphone, circled the room and chanted the lyrics to the song playing over the sound system. “Let everything … that has breath … praise the Lord!” After the song, he tried another treatment for the wiggles — jumping jacks and kid-friendly calisthenics.
Willie Marsalis leads children through the auditorium during Camp Water Tower Academy.
The exercises did the trick, mostly, and the kids calmed down enough to go through the camp’s rules: Be kind and respectful to one another. Listen and follow directions. Use encouraging words. Keep hands, feet and objects to yourself.
Then Marsalis’ mother, Angela, told the campers what she wanted them to learn during the next eight weeks.
“Know that you are loved,” she said. “Know that you are amazing. Most importantly, know that Jesus loves you. Jesus loves the little children.”
Welcome to ‘The Grove’
For the Marsalis family, Camp Water Tower Academy is more than two months of summertime daycare. The program is part of the family’s commitment to “The Grove,” as Angela Marsalis calls it, a neighborhood in New Orleans’ historic 17th Ward where she and her husband, Charles, grew up. Located about 4 miles west of the Superdome, where the Saints of football play, Hollygrove had a reputation for high rates of poverty and crime and low rates of hope.
Then came Hurricane Katrina.
People sit on a New Orleans roof waiting to be rescued after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The Category 5 storm made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, and flooded more than 80 percent of New Orleans. Too cash-strapped to leave town, the Marsalises — Charles, Angela, Willie and two other sons, Charles Jr., 17 and August, 15 — took refuge in the Carrollton Avenue Church of Christ’s building, where they worshiped.
As the floodwaters rose, the family fled to the balcony. A pirogue — a small, decorative canoe that had been a decoration for a retirement party — floated into the auditorium. The Marsalises used it to forage for supplies. Eventually, rescue workers transported the family to one bridge, then another, before helicopters airlifted them to New Orleans’ airport, from where they evacuated via plane to Austin, Texas.
Read The Christian Chronicle’s day-by-day account of the Marsalises’ survival story.
On the bridge, the Marsalises saw crowds of desperate people, some carrying drugs, stolen shoes and even televisions.
“We need to get busy for God,” Charles told his family. As darkness fell, they lit candles and sang hymns. Some of the evacuees grumbled, but others joined in.
“Oh, baby,” one elderly woman shouted, “we are having church tonight!”
Morgan Freeman interviews Charles and Angela Marsalis at the Carrollton Avenue Church of Christ in 2016. Freeman, an Academy Award-winning actor, spoke with the Marsalises for a National Geographic Channel series titled “The Story of God.”
Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and caused $108 billion in damage, especially in low-lying communities like Hollygrove. Months after the storm, many homes remained boarded up and overgrown, deepening the sense of despair in the community. The situation was “raggedy,” Angela Marsalis recalled. As the family returned from Austin and began to rebuild their lives, they felt a profound sense of burden for Hollygrove
So, once again, they got busy for God.
Angela’s mother, Verna Wallace, was living in a FEMA trailer as her flooded home in Hollygrove awaited repairs. The Marsalises conducted Bible studies on the porch at Wallace’s house, and the Hollygrove Church of Christ was born.
In 2008, Ishmel Wiltz, right, and other boys pray during a Saturday morning Bible study on a flood-damaged home’s porch in New Orleans.
The Carrollton Avenue Church of Christ, a middle-class, multiracial congregation that meets 10 minutes away from Hollygrove, spent $160,000 to buy a red-brick, storm-ravaged building that was abandoned after Katrina. After months of clean-up and renovation, the Hollygrove church began meeting there in January 2009.
In the 17 years since, the small congregation has experienced baptisms and blessings, but also heartbreak. On Oct. 29, 2017, just hours after serving communion at the Hollygrove church, Gregory Hawkins was shot just blocks away from the church building. Hawkins, 19, was one of the first kids to attend Bible study on Wallace’s porch after Katrina. He became the 511th person in New Orleans to suffer a gunshot wound that year, and the 113th to die from it, The New Orleans The Times-Picayune reported.
For the Marsalises, the loss was devastating, but they remained steadfast in their long-term commitment to bring Jesus to the people of Hollygrove.
Angela Marsalis, left, holds up two fingers as the Hollygrove Church of Christ sings the hymn “Two Wings” during Sunday worship.
On a recent Sunday, Charles Marselis introduced The Christian Chronicle to another member of that front-porch Bible study, who continues to worship with the church.
A day later, yet another member of that group brought his two young daughters to the first day of Camp Water Tower Academy.
Vision beyond the inner city
Campers visit the three chickens who live at the Hollygrove Church of Christ.
With the cases of wiggles mostly contained, Willie Marsalis sent the campers outside to play on the swing sets and visit with the Hollygrove church’s three chickens — who share names with three of the children, Yasiin, Love and Nahj.
The program will culminate in late July with a trip to Camp Water Tower, a 6.5-acre property near Summit, Miss., about 90 minutes north of New Orleans. The land has been in Charles Marsalis’ family for nearly a century, and he planned to use it as a place where people could evacuate during future hurricanes.
After Katrina, horrifying stories emerged from those who sought refuge in the Superdome. But even after less-damaging storms, including Hurricane Ida in 2021, New Orleans residents often must live in hotels or high-priced rental properties as their homes are repaired, Charles said. He envisioned the campsite as a place of refuge — financial and emotional.
Willie Marsalis had a similar vision, but one that would use the property year-round. Willie studied ministry and served as an intern for the Contact Mission Church of Christ in Tulsa, Okla. He learned the value of taking inner-city kids, who often are unable to experience life outside of their communities, to rural settings where they can focus on God’s creation.
Willie shared the vision with his father, who owned a house on the west side of New Orleans. Charles had intended to sell the house someday to pay for his retirement. Instead, he went ahead and sold it and gifted Willie the funds, which his son used to build bunk houses, a pool and sports areas at the camp. Willie, who incorporated Camp Water Tower as a nonprofit, has developed about 2 acres of the property, he said. Since 2023, the camp has hosted multiple youth retreats, church gatherings and shrimp boils.
Members of the Hollygrove Church of Christ and neighbors share a laugh during a cookout at Camp Water Tower in Mississippi.
Willie launched Camp Water Tower Academy “to give children a safe, positive environment where they can learn, grow, build confidence and see their potential,” he said.
New generations of church members — many of whom were born after Katrina — help out at the camp and assist with the academy. On Monday, after the young campers colored pictures at tables in the church’s kitchen, Chloe Marsalis, age 12, cleared away the crayons and distributed chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese. Chloe is one of Charles and Angela’s six grandchildren.
Charles Marsalis serves burgers during a Father’s Day celebration at Camp Water Tower Academy.
When asked if she liked working with children or if her family arm-twisted her into helping out, she replied, honestly, “it’s a little bit of both.”
“It’s nice,” she said of the program. “I like how they add God to the camp stuff.”
One of the cooks, Kim King, started worshiping with the Hollygrove church shortly after it moved into the neighborhood. “I was just riding around and parked outside,” she said. The church has been her family ever since.
She got a shout-out from 3-year-old Nahj, one of the namesakes of the chickens. When asked to bless the food, Nahj gave a modified version of the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6.
Nahj, age 3, leads a prayer before lunch at Camp Water Tower Academy.
“Give us this day our daily bread,” he prayed. “And bless the cook. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
Should the day come when Nahj or any of his fellow campers find themselves in peril — in the eye of a hurricane or on the streets of Hollygrove — Willie Marsalis hopes that they’ll rely on the Lord and lift his name in praise, just like his parents did on that bridge 21 years ago.
“I hope the academy becomes more than just a summer program,” he said. “I hope it becomes a place where children feel supported, families feel connected and young people begin to see themselves as future leaders.”
ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.
