City of Refuge Page 19

  Lucy was tough. She had an old-time habit of carrying a straight razor, and once in the middle of some partying that had gotten out of hand, serious freakishness in a house that all she could remember was somewhere around the Brown Derby on Washington Avenue, threesomes, trains, very depraved shit, which she did not go in for, and a guy named Joseph, who was always around on the fringes, came up to her where she was having a good time just being high on a couch. He had his pants off and he walked right up to her and pulled his drawers out over his thing and put it right up to her face. When she told him to get his thing the fuck out of her face he slapped her and grabbed the back of her head and tried to force her to take it in her mouth and she was not so high that she couldn’t slide her razor out of her right pocket, flick it open and draw it, hard, across the back of his thigh just above his left knee. He howled, and with good reason, because she had nicked his femoral artery and blood was squirting out as he jumped backward, zip zip zip, and it sobered her up rather quickly and a friend of hers got her out of there and to the friend’s house where Lucy stayed for a few days. The guy she cut survived, which was very lucky for him since you can bleed to death easily that way. Those were different times; everyone knew that Joseph was brutal and acted crazy and they figured he more or less got what he deserved.

  Long years, making it however you could. Her salvation was that she also had this other world she could walk into. SJ and Rosetta, Camille, family dinners. She loved Rosetta deeply, as everyone did; there was in Rosetta not a trace of condescension toward Lucy, or superiority or judgment. Wesley had a second mother in Rosetta during those times when Lucy was unable to take care of him properly, and an older sister in Camille; they had bought his football uniform for him in high school, and had taken him on vacation with them once to Disney World. There were years when Lucy was healthy and present and they would have great Christmas celebrations at SJ’s, where everyone joined in and Lucy could manage to get something for Wesley that he really wanted, and Uncle SJ and Rosetta would get him something good, too—a football, a bicycle, clothes. Camille was the one who would occasionally get her cousin a book or some music. They would all go to church.

  Then there were other years when Lucy was out somewhere at the end of a long string, when she couldn’t even get it together to buy him anything. One year it was a red plastic truck from the Dollar Store, still in its plastic on a cardboard back, with one corner slightly open, not even wrapped. Wesley always managed, with Rosetta’s help, to get something for his mother. The boy was always so happy when his mother was there for the holidays, a smiling little boy in a short-sleeve white shirt with a red bow tie, his mouth always with that muscle tension as he smiled for the photos.

  They decided to keep the kitchen window at Little River Camp open for an extra hour, since it was, after all, the first day, especially after Steve got there from the EMS and insisted they do so, although the Red Cross woman in charge, Betsy, was against the idea. “It immediately sends the wrong signals.” Steve reminded her that these people had just spent three days on buses with no change of clothes, after being flooded out of their houses and in many cases sleeping on the side of a bridge or at the Convention Center. “We can cut them some slack,” he said, laconically and pointedly.

  Steve, a skinny twenty-three-year-old who looked like a skinny seventeen-year-old, was an unlikely seeming liaison for these hundred and thirty African-Americans from New Orleans. Unlike the others in his family, he had spent a little bit of time outside of the Missouri Bootheel, a tab of land in the southeast corner of the state that extended down into what might otherwise have been Arkansas. He had spent two years at Southeast Missouri State in Cape Girardeau, on the Mississippi River, north of Sikeston, so he had a slightly cosmopolitan aspect that was not immediately discernible to outsiders, nor was it particularly appreciated by the other members of his family.

  He wore a faded EMS T-shirt, shorts frayed along the bottoms and metal-rimmed glasses. His skin was so pale as to appear almost translucent, and the traces of a persistent adolescent acne inspired little faith, initially, in many of the evacuees.

  But Lucy, standing outside, taking stock of things in the hazy morning, noticed the skinny kid walking from the dining hall to the office trailer, because three different Red Cross people approached him, one at a time, to confer about something, and afterward the skinny youngster would walk away, only to be stopped by another Red Cross. He, she assumed, was the man to talk to.

  When he disappeared into the trailer, Lucy gave it about one minute and then walked over and knocked on the door. A voice said, “Come in.”

  Inside, the young man was kneeling on the floor behind a computer, connecting some wires. When he saw Lucy, he put down his screwdriver and stood up, pushing his glasses back up his nose.

  “Hi,” he said, friendly, but looking at her as if taking her measure quickly. “We’re not quite open for business, yet.”

  The first thing she noticed was something fleeting and correct in the young man’s presence. A mix of friendliness and reserve, unlike the kind of unwarranted familiarity she often encountered from people who looked like him.

  “Allright,” Lucy said. “I don’t mean to bother you.”

  “No bother,” he said. “We’re just playing some catch-up ball here pretty fast. How can I help you?”

  “You’re Steve?”

  “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 f
irst 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 likewise 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.