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This week marks 20 years since Hurricane Katrina blew the doors off a late American summer, and all my memories, still swirling, come down to one man. One anonymous man.

A few days after the levees failed, The New York Times sent the gifted photographer Nicole Bengiveno and me to join its coverage of the catastrophe. One hot evening we were driving through the post-storm stillness of a catatonic New Orleans when something in the middle of a downtown street caught our eye. It couldn’t be. Could it?

It was. A man’s body, rigor-mortis stiff and partially covered by a blue tarp. Two traffic cones served as a bright-orange headstone.

I reported what we’d seen to a state trooper around the corner. He told me that the body, that of a Black man, had been there for days; a murder victim, possibly. In fact, the trooper said, he was the one who put down those traffic cones to prevent the body from being run over.