What Was Lost: A dollhouse from a beloved church member

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Amanda Bonam didn’t just lose her childhood diaries in Hurricane Katrina. The flooding from the storm also washed away her first dollhouse. She received the dollhouse as a gift from Harry Baker—Mr. Baker, she calls him—who was a member of her 7th Ward church, now known as Corpus Christi Epiphany Roman Catholic Church. It was a Barbie Dreamhouse, she remembers, that folded in on itself. From time to time, he would give her dolls to add to her collection and play with at her family’s home in New Orleans East.

“He was a true character, all around,” she told Verite News. “I think he was just one of those souls [where] you were like, ‘You’re not going to get this again.’”

Some time after her family returned to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, Bonam got another dollhouse. One made by Fisher Price, for children much younger than she was. Still, from the ages of 12 to 15, Bonam played with the dollhouse.

“Dolls with plastic hair, solid plastic hair,” she remembered.

But the new dollhouse became a place where she made sense of the environment that had been radically changed by Katrina, an environment that was still changing as the city rebuilt in the years after the disaster.

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