One Utah

Donna thought she’d be gone three days tops, maybe a week if she decided to go up to Memphis to visit her brother. It would be a little vacation - the hurricanes around Louisiana were always good for that. You crossed your fingers in hopes that the wind wouldn’t blow out too many windows or take your roof off and you’d go. Folks would visit friends in Mississippi or Texas and they’d all watch the weather and drink beer and laugh. No one ever expected to be gone more than three days. It just didn’t happen. You always came back. Everyone always came back.

Photo by Alice McNamara
She watched the news reports while sitting on her brother’s couch in downtown Memphis. Her brother wasn’t much of a cook, so they’d sit with Vietnamese takeout and watch the big red blob move on the weather maps. When the levees broke, Donna found a corner inside of herself and stayed there. She knew that some of her friends were in the Superdome and that her 84 year old neighbor had said she’d stay in her house no matter what. Donna didn’t know what happened to her. She thought about the people she knew and wondered if any of them were the ones camped on the bridge leading to the Lower 9th Ward. When she heard that the Police had fired shots at them and then torn down their blue tarp tents she started eating instead of crying. She ate to fill the emptiness. She tried to plug herself up, to go numb with too much because she felt like she’d lost everything. Even her daughter. She’d had to send her daughter to Texas to continue her schooling and there was no way of knowing when they’d be together again. “Maybe in the spring,” she thought. “Maybe I’ll have a house by then.”

The National Guard didn’t let her into her neighborhood until December. She sat in Memphis watching TV and crying. She bought a trundle bed for her daughter. She went to church. She ate. She tried to think about getting her life together.

Most of the houses on Hickerson Street had flooded. Donna’s was the last one on the block, a pale, one-story brick bungalow that she’d bought all by herself. She’d spent years saving because she wanted a home for her and her daughter. They’d planned on moving soon - to a bigger house on a street with trees and good schools. She’d been packing when the hurricane hit. And the boxes were gone now. They exploded and melted in the house. Exploded. Just like everything else.

When the insurance adjuster came, he wouldn’t even go inside. Not that you could get the door open anyway. The house looked like a landfill, with couches on their sides crusted with mud and mold, sheetrock pulling back from the walls, every piece of her life shaken into the middle of the rooms, splintered and soaked and coated with the fine dew of yellow or brown or grey mold that puffed into the air when you touched it.

The adjuster told her that her house was a complete loss. He said that they’d probably give her a check for 50 thousand. Donn told him that it would pay off her mortgage and leave her with $10 thousand dollars to start her life over. Ten thousand dollars, after she’d spent her life working to provide for herself and her daughters. The adjuster had heard the story. Black and white folks alike were finding themselves left with barely enough to start over. Barely. The adjuster told her ‘good luck’ and left. He said they’d mail the check and Donna laughed. ‘Where you gonna mail it to?’ she shouted after him and they both laughed.

Despite everything, Donna thinks of herself as a survivor. “I’m a Survivor” is her favorite song. She played it all the time during her divorce and has always played it whenever she was feeling down or empty or alone in the world. She plays it at nights now, after work, when she’s sitting in one of the acres and acres of FEMA trailers set up on a muddy expanse of land for the lucky ones in East New Orleans.

She thanks God for this every night, after talking with her daughters on the phone. She thanks God for having her life and a roof over her head and food on the table. She thanks God for her daughters. Most nights Donna prays and then locks the door to her trailer and some nights she sits under the quiet roar of the tiny air conditioner and hums the survivor song to help herself sleep.

This entry was posted Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Missives from New Orleans. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.