Back to the New Orleans Saints Newsfeed

Lemon’s bittersweet homecoming

Cyril Lemon is from New Orleans.

He was born here. So was his mother. His dad still lives here.

Lemon spent the first 12 years of his life in New Orleans, raised in a house off St. Ferdinand Drive in the 9th Ward, spending time at his grandmother’s house in Gentilly, going to school at Parkview Elementary.

But New Orleans is not the place Lemon calls home. Hurricane Katrina changed all of that.

The day before Katrina hit, Lemon’s mother, June, called 50 households in their church, Smoking for Jesus Ministry, and organized an evacuation to Texas, intending to ride out the storm and return, the same way they had done when Ivan hit the city the year before.