A small New Orleans church that was destroyed in Katrina now finds itself grappling with unimaginable loss.
A few minutes before Sunday morning service on March 8, Ebenezer Baptist Church pastor Jermaine Landrum spotted Ronald Rhodes sitting in his usual spot in the pews.
Ebenezer Baptist is a small, 98-year-old church in New Orleans. With only about 75 members, everyone at Ebenezer knows one another, and Landrum knew the 28-year-old Rhodes, one of a handful of young male regulars at the church, as a welcoming and playful guy.
“I would even make jokes with him during the sermon,” Landrum said. “So as I passed by his pew, I was speaking with him, and we just laughed a little bit.”
That morning Landrum spotted something else: Another of the church’s fixtures, 86-year-old Antoinette Franklin, wasn’t there. Landrum couldn’t recall a time when Franklin, a member of Ebenezer for more than 60 years, had skipped a Sunday service, including those months after Hurricane Katrina when the physical church had been reduced to folding chairs on a cement foundation. “She doesn’t miss church,” he told me when we spoke this week.
A few days later, Landrum called off service for the following Sunday, something he hadn’t done since Katrina. There were reports that the novel coronavirus was rapidly spreading around town, and Landrum decided it was best for the members not to gather. He never saw Rhodes or Franklin again.
Antoinette Franklin died of complications from COVID-19 on March 23; Ronald Rhodes did the same on March 29. Several more of Landrum’s congregants ended up in the hospital, and some others who had not yet been tested were running fevers and showing symptoms like the ones associated with the coronavirus. Most tragically, in a span of just nine days, three of Franklin’s sons died from the virus…
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