“Being the superficial teenager that I was, I was crying about losing my CD collection for a quick second, and my brother was whining about his PlayStation that he had left on the coffee table,” said Williams, who added that despite a left-knee injury she expects to play tonight against the nation’s No. 1 team, Nebraska, in Horejsi Center.

Williams moved with her parents and younger brother to Atlanta. The family hasn’t moved back to New Orleans yet.

Asked what she most misses about New Orleans, again, Williams laughed at herself.

“The first thing I just thought, and I know it’s terrible to say, is the food,” she said. “I just love the food there.”

Brimming with that refreshing quality of youth – raw honesty – Williams doesn’t say what she thinks she is supposed to say. She says what comes to mind immediately. She’ll grow out of that, and it will be a sad day when she does.

Upon further reflection to both questions, Williams she said her lasting memory about Hurricane Katrina is that she’s grateful she didn’t lose any family members, and that what she really misses most about her hometown is family. That goes without saying, but she thought she had better say it anyway.

“I miss my grandma’s cooking,” she said.

Any dish in particular?

“Red beans and rice,” she said, and this time didn’t apologize for her immaturity, rather for her lack of originality. “People are going to be upset with me for saying that because red beans and rice is such a New Orleans staple, but it’s so good when my grandma cooks it. It’s good when my mom cooks it.”

Brittany cooks it as well, although she has been told by her roommate, Isadora Rangel, that it’s too hot, too spicy. “Does it taste good?” Brittany asks Isadora. Yes, she acknowledges, it tastes good.

KU volleyball coach Ray Bechard envisions a day when Williams will eat authentic red beans and rice with teammates.

“We hope her senior year to go to New Orleans to play a tournament, kind of a way for her to go back home, a way to reconnect, kind of a way to show her teammates where she came from, a way for her to show her teammates the struggles the city has gone through,” Bechard said. “When we travel we always try to have that component. When we took the foreign trip to Brazil, it was more educational for our players than anything else. It’s part of the student-athlete experience.”

The struggles related to Katrina continue for the Williams family, but the student-athlete remains, according to her coach, “pretty bubbly, pretty happy-go-lucky, pretty optimistic.”

Both of her parents were certified teachers in New Orleans, Brittany said, but had to start all over upon moving to Atlanta, where her father had attended Morris Brown College. Her mother found work as a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines, but the closest home base she could land was Baltimore, which is quite a commute. Her father and younger brother live in Atlanta.

“My mother is working hard,” Brittany said. “You know, I’ve never known my parents’ economic status, ever. As kids, we don’t really know what our parents are going through. We get the things we want and we’re like, ‘Yeah, this is the coolest!’ ”

Brittany said she has been back to New Orleans a couple of times. Her father, she said, regularly returns to check on the status of repairs to the home they left behind.

Bechard reflected on Williams’ recruiting trip, which coincided with reports that Hurricane Katrina had New Orleans in its projected path.

“We had to make the decision on Sunday morning, ‘Do we send her back?’ They’re not sure when that thing is going to come inland and whether her flight is going to be on time,” Bechard said. “NCAA rules are a recruit is only supposed to be on campus 48 hours. We talked to compliance people, and they said there would be no way we would compromise her safety and to keep her here as long as we need to. Her dad informed us if the flight’s on time, send her. It was on time.”

Little did she know, as she was in the air, that her home was about to change from New Orleans to Atlanta.

“My father picked me up at the airport and ran me over to the house, and I just picked up some things because it was supposed to be cold in Atlanta,” she said. “I grabbed some long-sleeve shirts and a couple of pairs of jeans and one small photo book. I packed enough for five days. We didn’t think it was going to be that bad.”

Most of the family photos were destroyed, she said.

“My house was higher than my aunt’s house, and my aunt’s house was right around the corner,” she said. “Her whole house was flooded. Mine got only four feet. Then when I thought about it, four feet is a lot. I’m six feet tall.”

She said she refused to let it bring her down.

“I kind feel that I can’t do that,” Williams said. “Even when it started out, I couldn’t cry about it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I didn’t cry. After a while, I actually broke down, but it’s just something I have to take. It’s something I cannot change. God wanted it to happen. It was probably a good thing in a way because it exposed some things that were going on in New Orleans. We’ve always known some things weren’t right. And that levee breaking was not right. Something obviously could have been done about that ahead of time.”

Williams said she had heard about corruption in city government long before the levees broke. She also did not let the federal government off the hook.

“They did not respond quickly enough,” Williams said. “I have no clue who’s to blame. I really don’t. … You hear rumors that the federal government thought it was a state issue and the state thought it was a federal issue and the local government thought it was a state issue. There was so much clouded around it that I don’t really know what the truth is, but I know someone didn’t do their job and a lot of people died for it, and that’s serious.”

New Orleans always will live in Williams’ heart. For now, she’s a Lawrence resident, and for that she expresses nothing but gratitude.

“It just felt right,” she said of her decision to commit to Kansas. “It can be a textbook-perfect college, but not work for you. I had visited a couple like that, just textbook-perfect. It just didn’t fit me. Kansas and Lawrence fit me. I have a little bit of city, a little bit of country. I’m separate form all the hype of night life if I want to be, and I can go out with my friends if I want to go out.

“It’s very cool here. I like it. It’s so diverse. You wouldn’t think that in the middle of Kansas. … I like it. I like it a lot.”