Years before the storm, Tonie Waltman had been told a premonition of its disastrous aftermath. Around 1997, her dad, a Black man named Hardy Jackson, was hit by an oncoming train . He’d ultimately survive, but not before being induced into a coma, from which doctors predicted he’d never recover. “In ‘98, my dad sat me down on the front porch and said, ‘Prepare yourself,’” recalls Waltman, 35, Hardy’s youngest daughter. “He said, ‘When I was in that coma, the Lord showed me there’s going to be a really bad storm and I’m going to lose your momma.’”

Living in the Gulf town of Biloxi, Mississippi , as storms came and went, Hardy became more protective over his wife, Tonette, a white Creole woman. The day before Katrina, Tonette instructed Waltman and her siblings to leave for higher groun

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