Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

  The heroine of the entire week was my granddaughter Aurora. No cars were allowed to drive the highways going to New Orleans or the Mississippi or Louisiana coasts. Aurora had been in college for two days when her college was blown away by the hurricane and its attendant tornadoes. She was eighteen years old. Her home and all her possessions were lost and swept out to sea. Her automobile was in a ditch filled with water and would never run again. Her mother was holding up, but was seriously distressed. Her sister, Ellen, at least had a car. It had been in the shop having body work and the shop was above the floodplain.

  Aurora had brought both her cats to Jackson, her golden male cat named Ramses and her smaller, smarter female cat named Raszia. As soon as they got to the horse farm, where they spent six nights with my niece and her family, Ramses ran away and has never returned, although he is spotted in the barns by my family. He lives on barn rats, has left civilization and is as large as a wildcat. Aurora had refused to have him spayed so he is living as God and nature intended him to live. Raszia went to Thibodaux, Louisiana, in Aurora’s lap.

  One week to the day after the hurricane came on land Aurora climbed into the cab of a lime green fourteen wheeler driven by one of her boyfriend’s, Raymond Foret’s, host of Roman Catholic uncles from the bayou country and was taken down to Thibodaux, Louisiana, where she enrolled in college under the new state doctrine which allowed hurricane victims to enroll in any of the state colleges. She moved into an apartment with two of Raymond’s female cousins and started her career as a student at Nicholls State University. She stayed there a year and then transferred to Mississippi State to get a degree in art and business. It is a brilliant degree that teaches artists how to make a business out of their artistic skills.

  All of this Aurora arranged on my cellular telephone in two days. While the rest of us were still running around Jackson renting apartments and trying to decide what to do next and waiting to be allowed to go to New Orleans and Ocean Springs to see what remained of everyone’s homes, Aurora took herself to Thibodaux, Louisiana, and started college. Credit also belongs to Raymond’s large Cajun family, who were kind and generous and took care of her as she made the transition. The uncle who came to get her in the lime green fourteen wheeler is Uncle Joey Carbonell.

  There are many stories of young and old people picking up the pieces as quickly as they could and creating new lives out of the debris.

  But among my family members eighteen-year-old Aurora Alford Walker was a true leader. I am still awed when I think of how she did all that and convinced us to let her do it.

  Testimony of Grandmother Ellen

  WHILE EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD AURORA WAS TAKING HERSELF DOWN to Thibodaux, Louisiana, to enroll in Nicholls State University, her twenty-year-old sister, Ellen, was packing to go to a farm in southern Denmark to stay with her father and his wife, Catherine, and their three children, William, Camille, and Victoria. Her father has a land surveying company in St. Croix, American Virgin Islands, but lives half the time in Denmark. The farm is in a part of Denmark called Jutland. There are horses to ride and long days to spend getting to know her half-brother and half-sisters.

  She stayed two and a half months and made trips to Copenhagen and Paris. In Paris she was met by her mother’s college roommate who has sons Ellen’s age.

  Her mother, Rita, went back to Ocean Springs to finish a job she had running a retail store. She slept several days on a cot in a Red Cross shelter, using a treasured quilt of mine she found in my water-ruined condominium and rescued for me.

  The store’s owner begged Rita to go down there and salvage what could be saved and clean out the safe. All of that turned out to be difficult to do. There were still shortages of gasoline and bottled water and the highways were torn up everywhere. A close friend of Rita’s returned to her unharmed house and Rita went there to stay when she left the Red Cross shelter.

  All of this is why no one ever moved into the apartment we had rented. I think I got my money back. I can’t remember the details of anything. I had to return to Fayetteville as I am a professor at the University of Arkansas. Besides our regular students we had a steady influx of students from the devastated areas of Mississippi and Louisiana.

  December 29, 2009, Ocean Springs, Mississippi

  BEAUTIFUL CLEAR DAY, 45 DEGREES AND SUNNY. CLEAR SKIES, no wind, warming slowly to 61.

  A friend called last night frantic to get some exercise and not have to drive back to Jackson so I took her to the health club and did abdominal exercises while she played in the swimming pool. I love people who are trying to lose weight and become healthy. They have so far to go. They won’t give up the foods they think make them happy. The foods don’t make them happy. The foods give them momentary pleasure, then they are miserable, thinking, correctly, that they are unattractive, I will teach the ones who really want to learn whatever I can teach them. Setting an example is the only true lesson. Which is why, especially this time of year, I am besieged by members of my family who want to know how to lose weight or how to exercise regularly. Leave your family, I should tell them. Go off and live in a house with no sugar or butter or cookies or sugary drinks.

  My friend is only about ten pounds overweight. If she lost the weight she would be happier, more energetic, clearer headed and maybe even mean enough to keep people from using her. If she lost the weight, she might be able to make her children appreciate her sacrifices and sobriety and hard work. I’m pulling for her. She has the idea in her head. Now to put it into practice. I would like to be alone for the next ten days to begin work on a book so I will be in the chips again. So I will have enough money again to never have to count it and to be generous. I love to be generous. My father was generous. I’m in the habit of being generous.

  Also I long to understand how to deal with my children and with people I love. I have great love for all my progeny and my brothers and their progeny but I cannot tolerate undisciplined people who drink, take drugs, lie, blame things on other people or allow themselves to be fat and unhealthy. I’d rather have one conversation with the woman emergency room doctor who swims by me at the (embarrassingly silly named) E Fitness and Wellness Center in their seventy-five-foot-long saltwater pool, than spend a day trying to talk to people who are self-destructive. They read books, they talk a good game but they can’t put it into play. It takes too long. The game lasts too long. The diet goes on forever, the vigilance is unending.

  My friend spent the night. I took her to the health club late in the evening and then insisted she spend the night. I can’t let people do that to me when I’m working, but I made an exception for her in honor of the love she cherished on my parents in the last years of their lives.

  I went to see my old psychiatrist, Gunther Perdigao, yesterday and said nothing about the death of my parents or the fact that I’m not writing, wasn’t writing. I’m writing now. I have to make coffee. If it causes a headache I’ll treat it fast and strong. I need to write notes to all the physicians who have treated me in the last few years. Where are my manners that I don’t write thank you notes to people who make my life possible?

  Gone with the wind like the rest of the beautiful, sensible, Christian culture in which I was fortunate to be raised. My daddy was rich and my momma was good-looking. Even when we weren’t rich we lived as though we were. My parents’ standards were as unchanging as Greenwich Mean Time.

  My father taught us every skill and sport. We learned to use a compass, we built fires without matches. We built lean-tos. We built tents out of blankets. We learned football, basketball, skating, ice skating, walking on stilts he had his men build for us. We had swings in the backyard so high you could swing to heaven if you had the courage. We had it and we didn’t call it balls. I’m cleaning up my language. I’m setting standards. My grandfather Gilchrist said he would rather a son of his be dead than be a drunk. Anyone who drinks or gets really fat is dead to me. No more compromising.

  I was in a fabulous mood when I left Gunther yesterday. I don�
�t understand why I felt so good. Perhaps it is the good, loving care he nourished on me when I really needed it, trapped in a sexless marriage with a darling man who was too short for me to love.

  I married the father of my children to make love to him. I married James Nelson Bloodworth for his books and newspapers and because he was a judge. He couldn’t make me come. He was embarrassed by sex. Then I married Freddy Kullman for his money and his wealthy and powerful Jewish family and to get my children out of the terrible Rankin County school Daddy had built for them. Marshall and Garth both wish they had stayed there with my brilliant, interesting, charismatic, alpha alpha male father and brothers.

  Marshall has built a farm in Denmark, in Jutland, that is a replica of the one I made him leave in Rankin County. Also, my father was right about the people who teach in public schools and colleges. Now that I am a professor I see all around me every day the taxpayers’ money being squandered on ridiculous politically correct hires and classes.

  I will see Gunther again on Thursday. Perhaps I will have an epiphany. Perhaps not. It is worth a try. Worrying about the lives of my grown children is a waste of energy. Worrying over my teaching job is equally useless.

  I am a writer. People love to read what I write. Now to make it something I can publish without cheating on what I really think.

  Ode to New Orleans

  THIS IS A PERSONAL ESSAY. I DO NOT PRETEND TO SPEAK FOR ALL the people of New Orleans, many of whom live lives that are very different from mine. I have visited New Orleans for long periods of time ever since I was a child, and I lived there from 1967 to 1977. Since I moved away I have come back to visit many times each year and own a condominium ninety miles away in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which was flooded by the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina. Many people I love live in New Orleans. My youngest son lives there, as does my oldest grandson and five of my granddaughters. The fate of the city is part of my fate.

  Most of my family left before the storm came, but they left at the last minute, taking nothing with them but a few clothes, although a farsighted daughter-in-law did spend an hour collecting portraits of her parents and grandparents. She is an only child and cherishes such things more than most of us do. Or else she was just more prescient.

  For as long as I have been visiting or living in New Orleans the natives, black and white, rich and poor, highly educated and barely educated, have refused to leave the city when there were hurricane warnings. They have drunken parties and fill their bathtubs with water and meet at crowded grocery stores to buy flashlight batteries and canned food and talk about hurricanes they have “weathered” and where the mayor is “riding it out” and how much they hope the pumping stations will keep working, although no one I knew had ever been to see a pumping station or understood how they worked. Let the good times roll.

  Cities are like families, the inhabitants have common ways of being. In New Orleans riding out hurricanes is how you tell the natives from the arrivistes from less cosmopolitan places like Alabama and Mississippi.

  I am from Mississippi so I always heeded the hurricane warnings. I would throw my children into my old Rambler station wagon and drive up to Jackson to visit my father and mother. “Tornadoes will follow you to Jackson,” everyone always yelled after me. “Nothing’s going to happen here. It never does.”

  No one—except climatologists and weather forecasters, who New Orleanians are practiced at ignoring—ever dreamed a category five hurricane would actually come ashore and bring a flood in its wake. No one believed the canal levees would break and take back land New Orleanians jokingly brag about as being below sea level, as if they are above the laws of gravity and motion and such concerns as sea levels.

  New Orleanians are Roman Catholics and Orthodox and Reform Jews, they are French and Spanish and have exotic names like Rafael and Gunther and Thibodaux and Rosaleigh. They are African and voodoo and have built protestant churches with choirs that rival the Mormon Tabernacle. They have survived yellow fever and malaria in the 1800s and found ways to kill the mosquitoes and control the Mississippi River with levees so high and wide you can drive cars on top of them.

  “There are the levees and the pumping stations to protect us,” they used to tell me. “Hurricanes never hit New Orleans. (Well, there was Betsy.) They always turn back to the east before they make landfall. The city will be all right. Besides, we can’t leave. We have to stay and take care of the house, the pets, the store. Momma doesn’t want to leave.”

  So when large numbers of men and women, most of whom were educated and could read and had working vehicles and telephones and could call someone to take them out of town, elected not to leave New Orleans after their mayor gave them a mandatory evacuation order, I was not surprised.

  I know the place and the people.

  What happened next was both dazzling and embarrassing. The dazzling part was the way thousands of men and women risked their own health and safety to come to the aid of the people who were stranded when the levees failed—the doctors and nurses of Tulane Medical Center and Charity Hospital who worked without electricity, food, or sleep to save patients; courageous individuals who brought in boats and launched personal rescue operations in fetid water; and my favorite student in Fayetteville, Arkansas, who took a three-week leave of absence to go to New Orleans with her helicopter rescue unit.

  The embarrassing part was when people started blaming the disaster on hard-working people like Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco. Hurricanes are caused by weather patterns on the oceans. They might as well have blamed the oceans, or the coast of Africa where the storms begin, or the islands in the Caribbean that didn’t take the blow before it swept into the Gulf of Mexico.

  New Orleanians suffered a great loss, and there is much remorse and guilt for not being prescient. But that is how it always is with the human race in times of disaster. The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. We aren’t yet smart enough to heed warnings and stop blaming other people when we really are mad at ourselves.

  I hope the next time there is a mandatory evacuation order more people will leave the city, but if there are several false alarms, this laudable behavior will wear thin. The climate in New Orleans is not good for sustained logical thinking. The early mornings are tropical and fragrant, full of promise, the best coffee in the world, and beautiful people wearing soft white clothing and sandals. No wonder everyone wants to return.

  Late in May of 2006, I visited the city for five days and found myself caught up in the fun and beauty of the place. Only nine months after that terrible disaster and already people are starting to bloom like the azaleas and cape jasmine and honeysuckle that perfume the air. There is much talk everywhere about Katrina cottages and lawsuits against insurance companies and being in limbo about whether to rebuild.

  The tools needed to build a new New Orleans are patience, discipline, gratefulness, concentration, dedication, and imagination. The same tools we learn in yoga. Anger, fear, and greed are the enemies of getting anything done. Of course all the good will and work in the world won’t help if another huge storm hits the city before the levees are strengthened and rebuilt. A stalled front after a storm would cause worse flooding than Katrina did. So much depends on the weather, but this is life on planet earth. We have always been subject to the will of the heavens although some of us have been lucky to live in a time and place where we could forget that for a while.

  I’ve decided that the best thing to do about New Orleans with its hurricanes and floods and improbability is to sit in zazen and be glad the place is there and that I have been privileged to know it. I’m going to hang new prayer flags in my cherry trees in honor of the city of New Orleans and the courage and beauty of its many-colored people.

  If I go back to worrying about the always uncertain future and the precariousness of human life, I will read The Storm by Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. Van Heerden says if we don’t get to work
and construct state-of-the-art levees and wetlands protection, water will eventually take back all the land to Interstate 10, which would be the end of New Orleans as we know it.

  When I get through meditating and putting up prayer flags, I’d better start writing and calling my congressmen and remind them they have work to do.

  Casting a Cold Eye

  I HAVE A MIDWESTERN HEART AND THE COLD EYE OF AN INVEStigative reporter. A lot of the mystery and romance of New Orleans is about alcohol. Let’s say fifty percent is about drinking and the rest is about beautiful restaurants and cocktail parties and white-coated waiters and wonderful, exotic, French food and wines. It is about the huge, beautiful mansions built by slaves or people who were little better than slaves. Irish stonemasons, Italian carpenters, and lately, British painters, Mexican roofers. The roofers swoop in in the early morning. There will be a driver who speaks English and a pickup truck full of sweet-hearted, hardworking men playing wonderful music on cheap radios. Not a green card among them; the owners of the houses being painted know and laugh about it. Cast a blind eye is the mantra when keeping the mansions in shape with Hondurans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, and African Americans who have not agreed to learn to speak the sort of English that will get them a desk job.

  The sweet smell of marijuana floats among the toxic fumes of paint and mold-killing Kilz and the chemicals being sprayed on the lice and rodents and roaches that live in those old mansions no matter how much poison you use to make them go next door and propagate. Not to even mention Formosan termites and regular old Louisiana termites.

  All will be well. The Mardi Gras costumes are safe in chemically sealed plastic bags. The queens and kings and ladies-in-waiting and pages take off their costumes when the balls are over and they are whisked away to be sealed up for posterity in special cedar closets no roach dare enter.