"What's the Lower Ninth Ward going to be like when they open the city back up?" Scharf asks. "Is it going to be more culturally and economically integrated? Or is it going to become even more racially polarized following Katrina, when you have the perception that the white establishment in New Orleans left its black citizens to die?"

Scharf and Rep. Marchand both agree that much of the Lower Ninth Ward's future lies in the physical reconstruction of the neighborhood. "The whole neighborhood is going to have to be rebuilt," Marchand says. "The houses are all just devastated. Even if they're still standing, they've been soaking in toxins for weeks."

Unlike the Lower Ninth, the upriver section of the Ninth Ward, the Bywater, was relatively untouched by the flooding that inundated the lower section on the other side of the river. In the past decade, according to Scharf and Marchand, Bywater has benefited from investment and integration.

"We had a real hodgepodge of people that was really cool: black and white, musicians, artists, a lot of gay people, the working class and corporate executives," says Bywater resident Robert Nelson, who has been one of the investors renovating and reselling the 19th century houses in the neighborhood, buying his first property in the area four years ago for less than $7,500.

Before Katrina, Nelson was involved in the real estate market in the Lower Ninth Ward, figuring it was a prime area for investment. But now?

"What if I invest in a [new] property, and there's no industry or economy to support people enough to pay rent or buy the house?" Nelson asks from a friend's house in Minneapolis where he took refuge.

Nelson says part of the process he enjoys in renovating the historic neighborhood is the mixing of class and race. "New Orleans has traditionally had the separatist mentality: Separate the rich and poor, the black and white," he says. "In the Bywater the last few years, you saw individuals fighting that old mentality. The divide America saw with Katrina and the Lower Ninth Ward, with poor and black left behind, I think that was a real eye-opener for everybody to that kind of divide we have down here."

Marchand's primary concern now is to make sure the Lower Ninth Ward residents are included in the Federal Emergency Management Agency windfall following Katrina. "The pie is being sliced up now," she says, adding that environmental concerns are likely to require the majority -- perhaps all -- of the houses in the area to be bulldozed. But she wonders who will live in the new properties: her constituents, or those reflecting the profits of developers?

"I just ask that they put my people to work, rebuilding the houses they live in. We are the poorest neighborhood, but we have the highest homeownership rate in the city [62 percent, vs. a 41 percent homeownership rate citywide]. Why is that? Because people were born, raised and want to live here. Give the people here a chance for jobs, to make an income. People in this area have long been sacrificed. Poverty. Crime. Betsy. Katrina. Are they about to be sacrificed again during the rebuilding, in terms of jobs and money? I'm worried about that."

Following his heroism in saving his neighbors, Michael Knight had to beg for gas through Mississippi and Alabama as he and his girlfriend drove to Atlanta, where they now are staying with her extended family. "Neighborhood? What neighborhood?" Knight asks incredulously about the future of the Lower Ninth Ward. "It's gone, man."

"I don't want to be here," he says. "I don't want to make new friends. I don't want to look for a new job. I want to be home. I want to be back in my raggedy-ass house."

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