ON SUNDAY MORNING, we drove into downtown Biloxi and met Pastor DeBruce Nelson at the Lighthouse Apostolic Church. His church had made it through Katrina, but he'd moved his pulpit onto Division Street, taking the word of God to the heart of the city.

Nelson is a black preacher in a black church, a man of undetermined age, with perfect relaxed hair and an easy smile. At 11 o'clock, Nelson began to roll. "Tell the devil we outside right now," he shouted, "but we going in!"

My soul will be restored. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

"Yell," he said. "Shadow of death."

SHADOW OF DEATH!

Women sang and yelled "Amen." Gospel music filled the street. The curious slowed their cars as they maneuvered around the folding chairs. Nelson wandered from the podium and jumped in front of moving cars to make sure he was heard. A man handed out paper towels to the sweating women in pink Sunday hats and their best dresses and men in sharp suits and some in NFL jerseys. Nelson's sermon reached into the audience to Sister Carrie Jackson, who had clung to a tree for life and survived because God was good.

Biloxi residents in a destroyed neighborhood. (Larry Towell)

He shouted out to Brother Atlas Brown—a heavyset man wearing a scavenged chef's outfit—who'd found an elderly man drowning and carried him to safety.

God was good. He saved them all. He beat the devil. We are still here.

In the middle of this, a battered Mitsubishi truck stopped cold on Division Street. The driver, a white woman in a John Deere ball cap, and her 18-year-old daughter were both covered in mud, and the pickup was laden with all their possessions. The mother honked and yelled to the congregation, then cried and closed her eyes: "He is the beginning and the end!" she shouted. "Thank you, Jesus!"

A ring of large black women pulled her and her daughter out of the truck. The two women hugged them. Then they yelled and praised God and drove off.