When I was five, my father explained to me that our city, New Orleans, could fill up with water like a fishbowl. Not long after receiving this surprising news, I heard the story of Noah’s Ark at Sunday school and understood it to be the most useful tale of all.

I was raised—home, school, and church—in the fancy Garden District, a village of sorts where everyone knew each other. My parents had just renovated a raised cottage, and we’d moved a few blocks from our modest shotgun home. It was the late 1970s, and their friends were Preservationists, white activists for New Orleans’s architectural heritage.