Who the Hell is Katrina??
The week before Hurricane Katrina arrived; I was in New York City for a business conference. We were staying at a hotel on 51st and Lexington in Manhattan. I had been wandering around the city visiting some of my favorite haunts all that week after I was finished with my work. I was worried about money and upset because my husband had been fussing at me about it. I wasn’t happy with my job at the time because my salary had been cut and I needed to make some changes in my life. I just didn’t know I was about to do it immediately. I had no real idea just how much my life was going to change in the next few days.
One night, my husband called me from New Orleans to tell me about a hurricane that had formed and he didn’t like it. It was erratic and nobody really knew where it was going. It hit Miami and instead of losing power, it went across Florida, jumped into the Gulf of Mexico and continued to build strength. It got bigger and stronger and everyone was nervous. I didn’t think much about it because I wasn’t home. But I remember him saying he didn’t like the looks of this storm. I got home late Thursday night and decided not to go to work that Friday because I was tired. And that’s when I saw what Katrina was doing. She was heading right for us!
And Why Is She Trying to Kill Us All?
Saturday, August 27...
We had originally planned to stay at home and stick it out. We were listening to the news reports and the weather reports almost all day long, so we knew what they were saying. It didn’t look good. If Katrina kept going in the path she was in, she was going to hit New Orleans head on. It would be bad.
But all the other storms had all veered to the east, sparing us, so we really thought this one would do the same thing. The year before, Hurricane Ivan was supposed to be heading towards us. Most people evacuated and ended up spending up to 12 hours on the interstate trying to get to Baton Rouge which is only an hour away. We didn’t leave that night and I remember being very nervous and wondering what was going to happen.
Ivan was due to make land fall about 3 a.m., so I went out on the porch and looked around. It was dead silent, no wind, no rain, no noise and no people. Most in our neighborhood had left, so there was no one around. It was actually quite eerie but I was glad nothing happened. Unfortunately, it lulled us all into a false sense of security and most who should have left when Katrina was approaching didn’t because of Ivan.
We were worried, but not really that afraid. Our double was pretty secure, it was on a platform up about 4 or 5 feet above ground and we had gotten some food to hold us a short while. My husband is a native Miamian, and he thought we could stand to stick it out at home and he had always been right before. We had boards, so we decided to board up the windows and batten down the hatches, as it were. The landlord had left New Orleans after Ivan, so there were tenants in the other side of the double. They were two young kids who hadn’t thought about boarding up and they were going home to their parents in Mandeville. We had boarded up the entire house before, so we did it again.
While we were boarding, we noticed our neighbors in the apartment behind us sitting leisurely on the porch, not boarding or packing. I knew they had 3 or 4 little kids, so I didn’t understand their attitude.
"
Aren’t you boarding up your apartment?” I asked.
The man looked at me smiling and spoke to me in that familiar New Orleans drawl, “Naw, baby. I ain’t worried.”
“You should be,” I responded, “this storm is coming right at us.”
“They said that about Ivan too and he didn’t get us.”
“So you’re not leaving? You’re staying here?”
“Yeah, dawlin’. Ain’t nothin’ gonna happen to us. God is gonna make sure. We gonna be safe in His love.”
I shook my head as I walked away and wondered if I would ever see him again. Later I noticed he put one board over one window and went in the house.
My brother Eddie had just moved in with us a few weeks ago and was at work. The news people said the bridge was going to close over on the West Bank and he worked in Gretna at a mall. He’d just gotten this job and was getting back on his feet after a nasty breakup in a relationship that had lasted over 25 years. I felt bad that this was happening now, but I had no reason to think he wouldn’t be back at work in a few days.
I got in the van and went to get him, telling him that the storm was headed our way and we needed to go home and get ready for it. His co-workers all looked nervously at me as I told him we had to go home. Some of them had to drive a while to go home and they were waiting for the supervisor to tell them to go home. No one was shopping. Everyone was at home getting ready or many people had already evacuated the city. We went to bed that night hoping for the best. By then, I was really afraid. I had been watching television all the time and most of my friends had already left town. If this one was THE one, we had to go too. We agreed to wait until the next day and see what the weather was like before we made a decision.
August 28, Evacuation Day!
We woke up to dire warnings. A twenty-foot wall of water, no power for God knows how long. Damage from tree limbs. High winds. No electricity for no one knew how long. No water. Animals coming up from the swamps. Mosquitoes. Sewage and oil and no telling what else in the water….oh, yes, and dead people floating in the street, for God’s sake! It could be catastrophic. So far, it was still headed directly for us. By now, I was scared to death. The local weatherman said it bluntly: if you can get out leave NOW. We agreed it was time to go. But where?
My mother-in-law had lived in a little town in north Florida called Blountstown. It was literally a 2-stop light town with very little going on, but there was a house there that we owned now, so we had a place to stay while we waited out whatever Katrina was ready to throw at us. It was a 7-hour drive away from New Orleans and we’d been doing some work on the house since his mother had died so we felt all right about leaving. At the moment, it seemed the perfect place to run to. So we decided we would head out on I-10 East. The Governor had said that I-10 East was relatively empty. Yeah. Right.
We figured we would only be gone a few days. If it hit, we could wait till they started cleaning things up and then come back home. I didn’t pack much because Blountstown is a pretty informal place and I didn’t think I would need much of anything to wear. I took shorts, tee shirts and stuff like that. There isn’t much of anywhere to go or do there anyway. We decided to empty out the refrigerator and take the food with us. We had lots to drink, so we took that too. We packed all the cat food and a litter box for them and on a last thought, grabbed one of our computers and shoved it all in the van.
We had not eaten breakfast or lunch. Everything was closed. All we were thinking about was getting away before that storm hit us. We always left the cats as the last thing to put in the van. None of them really liked to ride and they were nervous – undoubtedly picking up on our stress. Four of them went in the van with no problem. The last one, Max, our Psycho-Cat, ran and hid. We searched all over before we realized he had crawled up into the bedspring and was cowering there in fear.
He had recently been to the vet and had had several teeth removed. He had been in pain and unable to eat for a while, so I imagine to him, going for a ride meant going to the vet again. We ended up tearing the bedroom apart to catch him and we rushed him out to the car so we could leave. When we caught him, we were getting ready to go and I opened the door to the van to climb in and he and our other tabby Moe, shot out.
After much cursing and recriminations, we tried to catch them, but they ran under the house, determined NOT to go with us. We knew we had to leave and like most others, we assumed we would only be gone a few days, and we left them, hoping for the best. The wind was picking up and the rain was beginning to fall, so we knew we had to go. The roads were packed with people and we knew if we were getting out, we couldn’t wait around. The storm was due to hit land early the next morning. We made jokes about how the cats would be angrily waiting on the front porch for us to return.
We had headed out to a short cut I had found that would have gotten us to I-10 at the last exit before the Irish Bayou, right at the foot of the bridge, but when we got to St. Bernard Parish, they turned us back with rifles in hand. I guess they thought we were looters, not people just trying to get to I-10. We drove back and ended up sitting on in traffic for hours. We sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic, just to get out of town and across the bridge. All the traffic was going east and there was no choice. We moved maybe a few feet every few minutes and we all crawled along going to God-knows where.
My family and friends started calling me after seeing the dire warnings on the news. While I was in the van, I got calls asking if I was all right. I was so scared I was shaking, but I managed to assure them that we were leaving and that we would be all right. I wasn’t so sure of that myself, as we were driving through rain bands of driving rain, but we kept going. We didn’t talk much as we inched our way out of New Orleans.
When we got to the I-59 and I-10 split in Mississippi, we found we were herded up north into Mississippi and not east into Florida as we had planned. We were furious. We had to drive almost 50 miles north into Mississippi before we found a two-lane highway that would take us back to Mobile, Alabama. We couldn’t get gas because no stations were open.
We had a full tank when we left home and we passed many people who had to abandon their cars or stayed on the side of the highway with their cars. What would happen to them if the storm hit? They were right in the path! If we didn’t keep going, we could get caught too. We worried, but we kept going.
No bathrooms. We were hot, tired, hungry and had to use the bathroom but we couldn’t stop. Everything on the interstate was closed and the state troopers were pushing us along. We ended up using a bucket we’d brought because there was nowhere to stop. The rest areas were closed too.
We finally found a gas station open late in a very small town and we got some snacks and drinks – the first thing we had had to eat that day. We also went to the bathroom and got gas and drove on to Mobile. And that was scary. We were the only vehicle on the road. THE ONLY ONE on both sides of the interstate. It was eerie. A sign told us that we couldn’t take I-10 in Florida and we called the State Police to ask what we should do. He said there would be signs and hung up.
We stopped in Daphne to go to a cash machine to get cash so we could stop at a Waffle House and eat. We turned into the wrong drive and a policeman pulled up and demanded that my husband get out of the car. He accused him of drinking and we told him we had been driving from New Orleans for hours and that we were hot, tired, hungry and thirsty. He let us go. We drove on to Pensacola where we found a Waffle House and we had some food and some rest. We just sat there for a while, grateful to be out of the van.
August 29, Katrina hits and Exile begins….
It took us nearly 24 hours to take a trip that normally takes 7 hours. When we got into Florida, we stopped at the rest areas to find they were all packed. People were sleeping on the benches, on the concrete, everywhere they could find a place to lay down. They were on the ground and everywhere. All the cars had sleeping people in them. They were even sleeping on the floor in the restrooms. We were just amazed and stunned.
We arrived in Blountstown the next morning just as Katrina was making landfall. At first, I thought we had dodged the bullet. Katrina hadn’t hit us directly and maybe we would be able to go home in a few days. I went to bed Monday night feeling pretty good. Our house sits up high and I thought we would not get much water. If anything, our power would be out, but it would be all right.
But later the next day, we heard the awful news. The levees had broken in several places and the city was filling with water. We watched in horror and we began to feel the worry and fear that has haunted us for months.
We wondered about our friends. I work at a housing project on the West Bank, and I began to worry about "my" residents and how they would fare. We couldn't call anyone and all we could do was watch on television just as everyone else was. I felt my heart sinking as I watched.
All that week, I looked at the people going into the Superdome and the Convention Center, praying that no one I knew was there as the stories were on the news about the conditions there. I saw the people on the roofs being rescued. The streets were full of water. You couldn’t even see the houses – just the roofs! I knew lots of people who lived in the 9th Ward and in New Orleans East. Had they all lost their homes? How far had the water gone?
And the looting? I was stunned and angry to see the people actually robbing the stores – smiling like they were proud of what they were doing. And I was very ashamed. Very. I could see their getting food, water, clothes and maybe shoes that they needed. But looting the Beauty Connection? Why??
The Walmart that we shopped at in our neighborhood was looted and the police were using it as a sanctuary. We even saw cops walking out of there with DVDs and CDs! Were people shooting at helicopters? Babies being raped? Murders in the Convention Center? This was getting to be more than what anyone had expected it to be. It was a nightmare.
And there wasn’t much here to take my mind off what was going on back at home. Blountstown is no place for a Chicago-born girl. There is no theatre, no entertainment; no Walgreens, for Christ's sake, (my measure of civilization) and you have to drive 23 miles to get to the Walmart! Many residents here proudly display their Confederate flags and we get many strange looks as we move about town.
Well, there is me, African-American, my Jewish husband and my brother who rides motorcycles, so he has a scarf tied on his head under his ever-present hat and his colorful Chuck Taylors. Oh, we are quite a sight here!
There is no Trolley Stop, or La Madeleine for breakfast. No Houston's or La Peniche for dinner. There is the Apalachee, the Huddle House (it closed shortly after we arrived) and Parramore’s and their sign for "good eat'n cats"(!!!).
The house is dark and dank with mold. The halls have dark brown paneling and it is foreboding. The rooms are small and dark. My late Mother-in-law is still in the house in spirit and she impishly hides things from us. We don't have a phone, cable tv or internet. We go to the library every day to check our e-mail. We have breakfast at the Huddle House and try to pretend we don't notice the stares. We wonder why my husband's parents ever bought a house up here! But if I show them my driver’s license, as I am the only one of the three of us who has a Louisiana license, we get a discount on our meals.
As time passes, we realize in horror that we will not be going home for quite a while. My thoughts turn to our cats. I go to every website I can find and leave a message that they are under the house and need to be fed or rescued. I send their pictures out on several lists.
We try to reach FEMA to get emergency assistance. I try 8 times online only to get knocked offline or frozen out just as I am completing my application. I try to call for 6 days before I finally complete an online application. We find the Red Cross center in Panama City and apply for emergency aid and they offer us food and advice. We see all the frightened and worried people there - most of them from Mississippi and not from New Orleans like us. Most of them are white.
We get a check and when we ask about FEMA, they give us instructions to go to Ft. Walton Beach. We drive there, and though we get information, we don’t leave with money in hand. One check has been deposited in our account, but my brother still doesn’t have his assistance. I don’t qualify because my husband already applied.
To ease the boredom, and to get things we need, we drive to Panama City and to Tallahassee. The traffic in Tallahassee freaks us out, so we don't go there as much. We go to the local thrift shop because we need clothes. They let us have whatever we want free of charge. My brother worked for Sears and the store in Panama City gives us a huge discount so I begin to pick up some more clothes as I left home with a few pairs of shorts, some tops, a pair of jeans, flip flops and some skirts. My brother and I are still getting paid by our jobs, so that much is good. That gives us a little less to worry about.
Meanwhile, the tension mounts for us. We argue about nearly everything. We are uncomfortable and uneasy and worried sick. My brother is still reeling emotionally from the break-up of his marriage. He’d been with that woman off and on for 25 years and he had never expected things to end the way they did. He sits in his room and stares at the walls in confusion, rage and pain.
My birthday is September 12. I’m not feeling much like a celebration, but my husband asks me what I want for dinner and I say steak. So we drive to Panama City to a steak house we saw advertised on television. We get lost on the way there, but get directions and find our way there. The hostess talks to us briefly and we tell her we are from New Orleans. She has been there and we tell her about leaving there.
I notice while we are eating that the man in the booth in front of us keeps looking at us. I can’t figure out what he wants, but he makes his intentions clear when he is leaving. He says he overheard us talking about New Orleans and asks if that is where we are from. We say it is. He says he would like to buy our dinner for us, seeing as it is my birthday. We are stunned and don’t know what to say. He says it would be his way of helping and we reluctantly agree. Both of us have tears in our eyes as his wife and he wish us well and leave, paying our check. The unexpected kindness amazes us.
Another evening prior to this, we had gone to a restaurant in nearby Bristol and my brother noted that the group in the booth behind us was also from New Orleans. We talk to them and when we leave, the server tells us our bill has been “taken care of.”
This is one aspect of this we had not expected! People tell us they want to do something to help and a small act of buying lunch or dinner for a family is their way of contributing. We wonder if we have done enough to help others and determine that one day, when we are better off, we will make sure we help people that need it.
One day, I realized I needed some more hair supplies. Where can I go to buy the things I need to care for my hair here in Blountstown? We ask a waitress who tells us we need to go to Quincy, a town about 30 miles away. We can also get a vet to give us a prescription for my 17- year-old cat who has glaucoma.
We set out for Quincy. It is a nice drive and we arrive and to our surprise, it seems the town is mostly minorities. We see many Mexican restaurants, Chinese restaurants, and shops and stores that sell things with a decidedly "soul" flava. I breathe a sigh of relief, as does my beleaguered brother. He has been looking for a lady to get his mind off his ex-wife and has seen no likely candidates in Blountstown.
We find the hair supply store on the town square! My husband goes outside to observe the town and he meets deputies who are taking up a collection for Katrina victims. He tells them we are from New Orleans and they invite us to the Justice Center for coffee. I buy the supplies I need and we go to meet them.
They are having lunch and graciously invite us to join them. They call the reporter for the local paper who interviews us and takes our picture. We are overwhelmed. They take us back to their collection trailer and insist we take some things home with us. We look at the baby items and blankets and food and we realize we don't need any of it. We don't want to take anything that someone else in worse shape than us might need. They INSIST and put two large boxes in the back of our van. They then drive us to a vet's office who gives me the medicine I need for my cat instead of the prescription. My brother even meets a young female deputy! We love this place!
I start planning a support group meeting for other Katrina survivors who might be in the area. I need to do something before I go insane. The director of the library gives me carte blanche to do what I need to do. I fax out copies of the flyer and an information sheet to all the local media and business owners and government leaders.
Our friends in Quincy have donated lots of snack food in the boxes they gave us, so we bring a lot of it to the library to use for our meeting and for any other events they may have. We are unsure of how many people will show up as we only know of about 15-20 evacuees in the area. We prepare emergency information packets for them, but only one very nervous and worn out couple shows up. We are disappointed, but we all try to help them get what they need. One couple is better than no one!
We don't know what we want to do.
Part of me wants to go back to New Orleans and help rebuild the place I have called home for the past 13 years. But part of me wants nothing else to do with New Orleans as career-wise; it has been a bust for me. I have been laid off from the same company twice, had my salary cut from the one I had when I left and had been just barely squeaking by. What will happen if there is another storm? We find out soon enough when Rita appears two weeks later. The levee breaks again! And there are still 2 months of hurricane season left – this year.
My husband says he despises New Orleans and does not ever want to return. I know I don't want to live here, but this IS cheaper for us as we were paying an insane amount for rent in New Orleans. My brother fears he will die without ever meeting Ms. Right if we stay here. He may be right.
I miss New Orleans. I miss reading the weekly alternative newspaper, Gambit. I miss walking down St. Charles, going to Rue de la Course for coffee, or the Fair Grinds. I miss meeting my friends in the "dog park" on Camp Street. I want to listen to a brass band and Second Line. I miss going to the store and having the cashier call me “dawlin” or “boo”. There were things I hated about New Orleans, but there is really no place like it.
Would it be the same once they dried it out? Would the people come back? Are they all like me, confused and worried and indecisive? Or all they being given money and treated better in hopes that they will never want to go back again? Will New Orleans be “gentrified by natural disaster?” Will I be able to make money there or will it be business as usual? So many questions to answer. I can’t think. My head hurt when I try.
And what am I going to do, exiled here in the Bible Belt? Without cable tv, one is forced to listen to ministers railing about hell and homosexuals ad nauseum on Sunday mornings and late at night. I am used to A&E and the History Channel. We have 3 televisions at home. We have one small one here. We had digital cable in New Orleans. We have rabbit ears here. We rent a lot of dvds and videos. We try to keep it light or fun so that we don't get too depressed. We don't need movies to do that. Just thinking about our lives right now is depressing enough.
On Saturdays, I go into a chat room with fellow European soul music aficionados and we listen to music and chat for a few hours. I can’t do that here because I can’t download anything on the computer in the library. When I turn on the radio here, I hear mostly country music. A friend sends me a cd player/radio and it takes a while before my brother and I discover some Old School music stations nearby.
I find out later that a friend of mine died on her roof waiting to be rescued. They think she had a heart attack. She was barely 50 years old. This hits me hard and hurts so badly, I can’t sleep for a few nights. She was a young, wonderful, loving, caring and fun woman. I grieve for her. Another friend was packing her car to go and two guys came up and put their gun up to her breast and demanded her car. One of them recognized her and let her go. Another young man I knew wasn’t so lucky. They killed him and his brother and took the car with all the family belongings in it.
Yes, we should be thankful. We didn't have to go to the Convention Center or the Superdome. We got out all right. We weren't rich, but we had a place we could go to. I cried at the sight of dead bodies outside the Convention Center. I thought about the Zulu Balls and the jewelry shows I had been to there. I remembered watching Orpheus and Bacchus right outside the Convention Center where the parades roll inside for the balls.
I thought of all the Essence Festivals I had worked as a volunteer and attended and how I had always had a good time there. I had been to Saints games and to Sugar Bowls and sales and other events at the Superdome. It would now always be haunted with those poor souls who lived there in that purgatory before FEMA "realized" they were there suffering.
At first they said they were going to tear it down, but now they say they can fix it. But for this year, no Bayou Classic, no Sugar Bowl and maybe even no Mardi Gras? My heart aches at the thought. I have no more romantic notions about New Orleans. Those had been wiped clean years ago. But for all its problems - it was still HOME. And for now, I don't have a home. There doesn’t appear to be much to go “home” to.
And now, there are millions of us, scattered all over the country like a huge litter of unwanted mutt puppies who feel the same way. What are we all going to do? What will happen to us all when we are no long the big news story? Our friends begin to call us and we call them. For a while, we couldn’t reach anyone in the 504 area code. It took a while before we were able to get through to each other. My cell phone doesn’t work here in Blountstown, so I have to get another one that will work here.
All the time, I worry about my two cats. Are they dead or alive? Have they been foraging around our apartment, or were they picked up and taken to a shelter? Did someone bring them food? There is so much I don’t know.
One day, in October, I was looking at my e-mail when I got one from a girl with a picture of a cat. She wondered if he was one of my missing cats. I looked at the picture and felt the first joy I had felt in weeks. It was my Moe! After several e-mails and phone calls, we arranged for him to come home.
We decided to go home and get our things out of our apartment. We started trying to get a rental truck and found we couldn’t get one from anywhere near New Orleans. We got one in Panama City and we set out to go get our possessions. When we came back, we would go to Vero Beach to get my brother’s stuff and we would pick up Moe at the airport in Orlando as they were going to fly him home to us.
As we got to Mississippi, we could see the footprints of Katrina. All the road signs had been blown to smithereens. Lots of places on the highway were gone. We knew the I-10 bridge over Lake Pontchartrain was gone, so we would have to take the Highway 11 bridge through Slidell to get to New Orleans.
It was dark when we got there and there was lots of traffic. We got mixed up because there were no signs to tell you how to go and we stared in amazement at the destruction we saw all along the lake front in Slidell. The houses had been slammed, cars were overturned, it was dark as there was no electricity and the silence was deafening. The road was narrow and we drove over it nervously looking around.
The worst thing was driving into the city. It was dark and silent. We drove along, silent and amazed at what we saw. I had never seen anything like that in my life.
We didn’t see any lights till we got to downtown New Orleans and we didn’t really see many then. When we got to our exit, we were thrilled because it all pretty much looked like it always had. But most of the businesses were closed and some were still boarded up. We almost jumped for joy when we turned off St. Charles to our street and saw no flooding or debris.
There were some trees down, but it looked all right. And when we went into the apartment, the lights were on! And we had running water! But the chimney had been destroyed and water had gotten in from above and our ceiling had fallen in the bedroom. Sheet rock and insulation was all over the floor and the bed.
We pulled out blankets and pillows and we slept on the floor. A couple of friends came over and helped us pack up. I went to my job the next day and packed things up. We needed more boxes, so we drove out to Jefferson to get them. I had a dental appointment out there too, so as we drove on Claiborne Avenue, I saw destruction I hadn’t imagined.
Some of the buildings had water lines that were 7 or 8 feet up the side of the building. I didn’t want to think about what those places looked like or smelled like on the inside. I didn’t know what to think about what I was seeing. There were no traffic lights, and abandoned cars were everywhere. And almost no people.
When we finished packing, we were hungry. We went looking for a restaurant. We found two on Magazine Street, so we drove the truck there and walked over to the restaurant. We had to wait in line, but so were hundreds of others and nobody minded. That night, we went to sleep, with a radio on, listening to New Orleans music. I cried the rest of my tears that night.
After we loaded the truck, we rested a day, and then got back in the van and drove to Vero Beach. I had hurt my ankle when we first went inside our apartment in New Orleans and it hadn’t gotten better. I went to an emergency clinic and got it x-rayed and found out I had only suffered a severe bruise.
We loaded up my brother’s things and visited some of my relatives and headed out for Blountstown, stopping on the way to pick up our cat. He was skinny and drugged and had a couple of spots where he’d suffered some contusions, but he was home again and we were happy. We looked for Max but we never found him.
When I look around and everyone else’s life seems to be going on, it just doesn’t seem fair. I have bad dreams and I toss and turn at night. My face hurts and I have headaches. My stomach pitches at the sight of food. At times, I just want to curl up and sit in the dark and listen to music. I don’t want to think or remember. But I can’t turn the thoughts off. Or the tears.
My brother and I both began to look for work. I had 4 or 5 interviews before I found a job in Tallahassee. I bought a car so I could get back and forth the 50 miles each way to work. Me, who had always taken the streetcar or bus to work each day! I got to work in less than 20 minutes in New Orleans. I have to drive for an hour each way now. My husband worked on the house and started making money selling stock options.
My oldest cat, Mouse, who I had had for 18 years died in October. It hurt me worse than anything. I had thought about the day he would die for years because his health had been getting worse for a while, but I kept hoping I could keep him near me. I had promised myself, though, that I wouldn’t prolong his suffering in my own selfish need to keep him with me. He’d been getting sicker since we came to Blountstown and nothing I did helped him. When I saw he was suffering so badly, I had to make the decision and I did, but I cried till I was sick. Losing him was the worst blow of all.
In December, I got a call that one of the places I had interviewed with wanted me to start with them. I was thrilled. I went back to work happily and the people I work with treat me much better than where I had been working in New Orleans. I also make more money. But it was too soon. I wasn’t ready to go to work. I was too deeply wounded and I should have waited.
I miss my friends in New Orleans. I feel guilty because I am here and I think I should be there helping rebuild. I also feel guilty because I didn’t lose as much as most people in New Orleans did. I wish I could turn back the hands of time.
I haven’t made any real friends here. I talk to my friends at home on the phone and my heart hurts when they tell me how difficult things are for them back in New Orleans. I wish I could go back just to see how things are, but I don’t know that my heart can take what I know I will see. The New Orleans I miss isn’t what is there now and I know that. The crime is sky high and it’s not safe there for a lot of people. Race has become a big issue because most of the people there are white.
I also hate the fact that everyone seems to be forgetting us. They think that we have all either found jobs or gone back to New Orleans. People who have never been there say it shouldn’t be repaired. That makes me so mad I could scream. They also read all the negative press about Mayor Ray Nagin and comment on him and Gov. Blanco. None of them were there and don’t really know what has happened. I didn’t vote for Nagin and wouldn’t have voted for him the second time, but it raises my hackles when outsiders criticize him. They have no right because they don’t know what they are talking about. He didn’t do a lot of things right, but he didn’t do as much wrong as the media says. New Orleans WAS a chocolate city – it was at least 70% black and if that’s not chocolate, I don’t know what is.
He knows his base is the black people who either live there or want to come home. But I don’t think anyone who was mayor then could have done any better than he did. Katrina was bigger than anyone ever expected. I blame the federal government for not coming to our aid sooner. FEMA is a joke. We were lucky we were able to help ourselves, but everyone didn’t have that option. What about them?
I read everything about Katrina and New Orleans that I see. I write letters to the editor and I speak out in our defense. I won’t let anyone forget us and what we have been through.
The black people in Blountstown treat me like an alien. They stare at me, but make no attempt to talk to me. We stopped one young man one night to ask him for directions. He took off like we were ghosts. We laughed about it, but it was very strange. We have not tried to make friends since. Most of the white people aren’t much better and I’m an outsider and I know it. It hurt at first, but I don’t let it get me down.
Each day gets better. I don’t worry as much. Life will go on and it may be better than it was. There has to be a silver lining in this and though I haven’t found it yet, I know it is there. My life will be better. Things are going to change and I am going to make it better. I know if I can survive this – there is nothing I can’t do.
I am a work in progress.
January 1, 2006
