City of Refuge (20 page)

“That’s me. What’s your name?”

“I’m Lucy.” The young man had put out his hand, and Lucy shook it dutifully. “The lady said earlier you might have a cigarette?”

Steve laughed slightly, reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a crumpled pack of Camels. “If that’s all it is, I can help
you out.” He shook one up from the pack for her, which she took. “In fact, why don’t you keep the pack.”

“Then you don’t have none.”

“Yeah, but I can run and get more no problem. Go on and keep it. Actually let me bum one back from you and we can smoke together. I’m about due. We better stay inside or the RC will be all over us.”

They lit up and stood there for a few moments, looking around the trailer, which was dark and smelled of mildew. Cockeyed, dusty blinds on the windows.

“You live here?” Lucy said.

“I live in Caruthersville. It’s about half an hour from here.”

“Where we?”

Steve tried to see in her face if this were a joke, and he saw that it was not. “They didn’t tell you where you are?”

She shook her head. “I know we been in Texas and Arkansas on the bus, and somebody said Missouri, but, you know…”

“I can show you,” he said, standing up and going to a duffel bag on the floor. “What part of New Orleans do you come from.”

“We from the Lower Ninth Ward.”

The man rummaged in the bag, pulled out an atlas. “Did you evacuate before the storm, or…”

“I was in the house when the water came,” she said. “It come just like a tidal wave. SJ and I was on the second floor and it was just like you had a lake in your living room.”

The young man sat on the edge of the table and looked at her, listening intently. He made no exaggerated show of shock or false solicitude; instead his expression deepened into concern and concentration, which confirmed for Lucy that this one was allright.

“They didn’t tell you about none of this?” she said.

“I’ve been watching it on the news,” he said. “But they didn’t give us any information about who was coming here. They just said
evacuees and gave us a head count. They said you made a couple of stops along the way.” This was dry humor.

“We been on the bus three days,” she said. “SJ dropped me off at the Claiborne Bridge and I walked over to the other side and these boys had like a, almost like a bulldozer or something, give me a ride and I walked the rest of the way to the Superdome, stayed there I don’t even know how long. Three days, four. I don’t really know. Then they had the buses and they took us to Houston first and they didn’t have no room, then they took us to Hot Springs, and they didn’t have no room. Now we here.”

Steve listened, took another drag from his cigarette and stubbed it out in the unused sink of the trailer. Lucy liked the fact that he didn’t seem in a hurry to talk at her. He listened. That in itself was unusual. White people, in her experience, either ignored her completely or they were very self-conscious. The more well-intentioned they were, the more self-conscious, usually. This one wasn’t.

“Okay,” he said. “Here; look.”

He opened the atlas on the computer table and showed her the United States map. He moved his finger around the page for a second, found New Orleans and said, “Here’s New Orleans.” She looked over his shoulder, nodded. “Here’s Houston. Here…” searched for a moment…“there it is…Here’s Hot Springs.”

Lucy nodded.

Looking at the map, Steve pointed and said, “Here is where you are now. There’s the Mississippi River. There’s Caruthersville. You’re here, just over where it says Kennett.”

Lucy peered at the map. Somewhere out in that map, she prayed, SJ and Wesley were safe, and until she knew otherwise she would believe it. But looking at the map made her feel a tilt of anxiety in her stomach.

“Is it gonna be phones here sometime we can call to our people?”

Steve didn’t understand the question as it came out, and he asked her what she had said.

“We can make phone calls later?” she repeated.

Straightening up from the atlas and rubbing one of his eyes, Steve said, “Yep, you surely can. That’s what they told us anyway.”

“Y’all can hook us up finding our people,” she said.

He nodded, pulling out the chair by the computer, a signal that he was ready to get back to work. “Once we get these computers wired in they have a bulletin board they established on the Internet to put people in touch with each other. I need to get this hooked up, actually.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lucy said.

“No, no,” the young man said. “If you come back later on, we can get you registered and start the ball rolling. Do you know if your family’s safe?”

“I can’t really say,” she said. “But God make a way. My brother been through the Vietnam and losing his wife and his baby boy and he a survivor. Wesley, my son, he smart, too. I know they all right.”

Once again the young man nodded and looked at her straight on. “Come back in a couple hours and see me. Knock on the door if you don’t see me outside.”

“Allright,” Lucy said. “Thank you, hear?”

“It’s what I’m here for,” he said, kneeling back down behind the computer.

That morning, the first two vans came in with clothes from local churches. They set to work after breakfast putting up a tarpaulin for a tent, and tables, and portable coat racks, an instant thrift store, but free of charge, where people could get themselves a change of clothes. They opened up the old chapel and swept it out, and like
wise the recreation hall, where there was half a basketball court and some couches under bright lights on the high ceiling. The day before had been a blitz of activity, preparing the cottages, sweeping them and getting donated linens in there.

Across the United States, the same scene played out in hundreds, thousands, of permutations. People had watched the events on television and most responded viscerally the way they had been raised to respond: they wanted to help people in trouble. Before any question set in—of responsibility, fatigue, selfishness—the first thing was recognizing another human, like yourself, in trouble. Not just in the big destinations—Houston’s Astrodome, Lafayette’s Cajundome—but across the country. Volunteers, urged by their church, or by their service club at their college, or by the Jaycees or the Knights of Columbus or Temple Emanuel, collected canned food and clothes of every description, boxes of juice in plastic wraps on skids, baby food, cereal, socks in bags of a dozen, blankets, toothbrushes, mouthwash, toothpaste, Band-Aids; they brought them to drop points announced on the radio, or at the church or synagogue or college, or the local bank, where volunteers sorted them and tried to get their signals straight with the people who would staff the shelters, with the Red Cross, with Catholic Charities, with the Salvation Army, with the EMS workers and police and hospital liaisons. City and state officials discussed possible longer-term housing for however many evacuees might be coming; they met with landlords and hotel people at the national level. They talked to FEMA and they figured it out, piece by piece, the best they could, on the fly.

For days and weeks, the evacuees came, spilling out of airplanes and buses; they emerged, blinking and dazed, looking around, into a foreign moonscape in Phoenix, or Harrisburg, or Las Vegas, or Atlanta, or Hot Springs, or Chicago, or Albuquerque, or Cape Girardeau. Wherever there was a municipality with shelter capacity, people were taken there, a hundred thousand of them and more, plucked out of
New Orleans and sent out so that New Orleans could set about the process of stabilizing. They would sort it out later. The evacuees were met by confused-looking people who transported them in minivans and buses and cars to hotels or camps or unused church buildings or gymnasiums, where citizens had been busy working against the clock to set up a miniature city in time for their arrival. Down in the church basement, setting up the kitchen, unrolling the futons the ex-hippie with the futon store had just given them, or the box of cell phones the mother of the rock star who grew up in the town gave them. What is this box—it’s just sitting here? Nobody opened it? Tell Paula we can’t just have all this stuff sitting out here…What’s in there? Hair curlers? Put these up in the rectory. I don’t care—just get them out of here. Does Paula have the sheets and pillows Wal-Mart sent over? Has Bobby got the gas working in that range yet? I don’t care what Eugene says we can’t fit more than twenty people in here. That’s what they told us, right? Twenty? Tell him if more is coming go set up West House; I got my hands full…

At Little River Camp, doors opened, people stepped out into the morning and their new lives, leaving the door open behind them, blinking, looking down at the ground, looking around at the wide horizon beyond the fields, looking at one another. The Red Cross volunteers prowled around greeting those who had awakened, telling them to get to breakfast and also announcing a camp-wide meeting, where they would discuss how the camp would work, and how they were going to work on putting them in touch with family and getting them situated in some more permanent arrangement. Ten o’clock, don’t forget.

Around lunch some people from the Delphi First Baptist Church came and said hello and brought toilet supplies—toothbrushes, toothpastes, and snack packs. Some folks from the local A.M.E. church came by that evening, with a preacher who sold cassette tapes after his little sermon, which the Red Cross quickly put a stop to.
During the sermon, a small handful of ladies and one or two men sat in the chapel pews, waving their hands halfheartedly in the air; others just sat there, still stunned and disoriented, because it was better being around people than not being around them.

Others tended to family in the cottages, and most walked around hoping to run into someone they knew from back home, and many of them did. At a certain point someone asked if there were any chairs; the New Orleans people were used to sitting on their front steps and porches talking, so chairs were brought in. A small handful of people just sat on the edges of their mattresses, immobilized. The younger men tended to prowl around restlessly, trying their useless cell phones constantly, asking to use the EMS cell phones. Finally, after a day, a wealthy local doctor bought fifteen cheap cell phones with one month’s juice in them, which became the property of the camp. Three were attached to thin cables locked to a table outside the trailer, and the evacuees were allowed to make calls under the eye of one of the administrators. That line grew and grew, people calling family in Atlanta, in Houston, in Dallas, in St. Louis.

The Red Cross gradually registered everyone there and put their names on a database available to all the other camps that had sprung up around the country, so that people looking for loved ones would have a better shot at finding one another. The goal was to get people out of the camps as quickly as possible, either into FEMA-subsidized hotels, or apartments, or to relatives or friends’ houses somewhere else.

Lucy noticed the two men unloading boxes of clothes from a van. A tarpaulin sheltered the racks and tables on which all the clothes were going to be set out. Some evacuees had brought suitcases with them; these were usually the ones who had left their houses for shelter at the Superdome on Sunday, when there was still time to pack a bag.
Others had stayed in their houses and been plucked off of porches, or roofs, and had nothing but what was on their back.

She tried to size up the situation as she walked over. Looked like the two men pulling boxes and an overwhelmed-looking white lady trying to figure out what to do. Lucy could tell from her distracted manner that she had little or no experience doing what she was doing. This was a good thing.

“You need help setting up the clothes?” Lucy asked, approaching her, smiling, and stealing covert glances at the boxes.

Startled, the lady looked at Lucy as if she were a dog that had just spoken a sentence in English. “I suppose…” she said, looking back, vaguely alarmed at the boxes as they came off the vans and were set down unceremoniously on the ground. “None of these is sorted; I don’t know how they expect us to put them in order here.”

“That’s easy,” Lucy said, reassuringly. “Just start on ’em one at a time. I can sort them as they come out.” The woman looked at her uncertainly. “I got nothing else to do,” Lucy said, with a disarming smile.

The woman could locate no immediate reason to refuse, and so they set to work pulling the boxes toward one of the tables for sorting.

“Put all the children’s to one side, let people sort through them themselves,” Lucy said, scooping armfuls of clothes out and dumping them on the table. The woman hovered by her side for some moments, until one of the men from the vans called to her and she disappeared.

Lucy worked quickly. Emptying one box, she used it for the children’s clothes, throwing them in as quickly as she could separate them. The others she separated roughly at first into men’s and women’s. She kept one empty box under the table right in front of her for especially nice items, which she would toss in for further inspection later. Eventually she was joined by a thin, anemic woman who was a community volunteer, and who had been told by the harried woman
to help Lucy. Several evacuees began drifting over, and since Lucy was the one apparently in charge, asked her when the clothes were going to be out.

“Come back in about an hour,” Lucy would say. If it was someone who looked slightly prosperous, she would add, “What your size?” The woman would tell her and Lucy would say, “I’m making a special box. I’m-a keep a eye out for you.” The word got around quickly that if you wanted to have your pick of the better clothes, Lucy was the one to talk to. If you had a dollar or two to slip her, it helped greatly. Cigarettes were good, too, as a donation; Lucy stockpiled them and resold them for a quarter apiece.

After lunch Steve got Lucy registered with two of the national bulletin boards for evacuees. They plugged in her address, her social security number, birthday, and the same for SJ and Wesley, minus the social security numbers. He asked if there were any relatives or friends whom she needed to contact, and she did mention Aaron and Dot in Houston. Steve said that they could try and contact them later that day. Outside the trailer a table had been set up under a canopy and other evacuees were lined up to use the cell phones. Others were lined up at a table to talk to a man she hadn’t seen before, who was taking down information.