by Julia Reed
We buried dead birds together and shook our heads over the frequently broken eggs of the mourning doves, never very smart about the spots they chose to lay them. In the mornings, he brought me coffee and the papers from Matassa’s, and the only things he ever lied to me about are what all addicts lie about—where he’d been and if he was using—but he never stole a thing from me or anybody else and I trusted him with everything I owned, including my car. There were plenty of crack heads in New Orleans who would do anything, steal anything—kill anybody—for a single fix, but Antoine was the equivalent of a social drinker. The problem was that the great majority of his acquaintances, “Spaceman,” say, or “Cowboy,” were derelicts and whenever he ran into them, he was incapable of sharing a beer or two and going on about his business. One beer would lead to ten; one hit on a crack pipe would lead to a serious downward spiral. His shelter of choice, the Ozanam Inn, served as the discipline he knew he needed, which is why he chose to spend his nights there, as opposed to a place of his own, which he easily could have afforded. At the Inn, no one is allowed in after seven P.M. and nobody gets past the door high. One missed night in the shelter usually turned into many nights of carousing, which almost always turned into jail time. The police not only recognized him as a small-time drug offender, they also knew he was an easy, nonviolent arrest. Antoine had never even owned a pocketknife. I am convinced they kept their eyes open for him.
It was a heartbreaking routine but one we all, especially Antoine, became inured to. His thirty-day stretches in lockup were like particularly unpleasant versions of the classic twenty-eight-day rehab model; when he was freshly out, clean, and determined not to end up back in jail, the shelter was his halfway house. There were showers, a hot dinner and breakfast, and a TV on which he watched his favorite shows (he loved Andy Griffith and most everything else on Nick at Night) with the other regulars, some of whom he counted as friends of sorts. It was hardly a life that anyone could adhere to forever, but for Antoine it was how he had worked out staying alive. In the beginning, I used to go over apartment ads with him in the newspaper, offering to set him up, explaining—a bit pompously, I realize now—the kind of life he could have. Embarrassed, or maybe just sick of the spiel, he’d smile and say sure he wanted to get a place, but when it came time to follow through, he always dodged the issue.
His worst enemy, other than himself, was Cassandra, a toothless whore and serious crack head with whom he professed to be deeply in love. She was, thank God, behind bars far more than Antoine, but when she was out they often stayed together with one of her dodgy relatives, a state of affairs that prolonged Antoine’s benders because he was mostly hidden from view of the cops. Cassandra weighed maybe eighty-five pounds soaking wet and looked to be seventy if she were a day, but it emerged that she was still of childbearing age when she gave birth to a son she said was Antoine’s while doing time in the women’s prison for prostitution and crack possession. She was aptly named and a master manipulator, and Antoine, who had the emotional maturity of a fourteen-year-old, was gullible as hell—he never questioned his paternity for a minute. But I was not much smarter. When mother and child got out of jail just before Christmas, I went to Kmart at Antoine’s request and spent a hundred and fifty dollars on a stroller complete with all the latest bells and whistles. He had wanted to convince us both—him and me—of his best intentions, yet a full year later Rose spotted it, still in its box, stashed with the rest of his things at the Quarter Laundrette. When I finally saw the child, he had the tragic wide-set eyes of a crack baby.
On that morning before the storm, I had long since gotten over being mad at Antoine for not showing up. I just wanted to find him and put him in the car with us, or, failing that, to ensconce him on the third floor with plenty of food and water and batteries. While I made turkey sandwiches and cleaned out the refrigerator (a project that took about two minutes since we hadn’t been in the house long enough to accumulate anything besides pickled okra, mustard, and Champagne), John made one last pass by all of Antoine’s usual haunts. I called Rose, but she was long gone, and when I checked on her mother, Roseanna, she had left too. Byron and Cameron called to report that the airport, with mobs of people panicking and begging to get on planes, was a full-blown madhouse—Egan’s 11:30 JetBlue had been the last flight out, and now they were on the road back home to Mississippi.
When John came back, without Antoine, there was nothing left to do but leave. We had a brief back-and-forth about the garbage, which was full of lobster shells: should we put it outside, where it would be another projectile, or inside, where it would surely stink up the place? In the end, we settled on the latter, since we’d already assured ourselves we’d be gone maybe two or three days at the most, the same operating principle that had guided our decidedly casual approach to packing. I had thrown my makeup, a couple of pairs of pants, and some T-shirts into a straw tote bag, left most of my good jewelry in a drawer, and all the things prudent people have at the ready—important household and tax files, treasured letters and photographs—on the floor in the boxes they were still packed in from the move. On the way out the door I grabbed my laptop and a few of bottles of good wine, and John grabbed the cooler with our sandwiches. We left his beloved white Mercedes on the street (after complicated calculations about where branches were most likely to fall), got in my big boat of a Cadillac Deville (a hand-me-down from my father), and pulled out of the drive at one in the afternoon, three hours after the National Weather Service issued a bulletin predicting “catastrophic damage” to the city, and three and a half hours after Mayor Ray Nagin called for the first mandatory evacuation in New Orleans history.
It was in the car that I ceased to be quite so sanguine. Roughly a million people ended up leaving the city before Katrina made landfall and we were traveling with what seemed like half of them. It took us four hours to go thirty-five miles—the evacuation traffic plans from the year before clearly had not been improved much, since inbound traffic lanes were completely devoid of people trying to enter the city, but still not open to those of us trying to get out. In the first hour we split a sandwich and were vastly entertained by the antics of the dogs and cats and birds crammed into people’s cars and trucks along with what looked like a lot more belongings than we had bothered to bring with us. I checked my cell phone messages and found that I’d missed one the day before from the angelic Mr. Dupré. He had gotten hotel rooms in Houston for his family and all his workers—did I want them to come by and help me secure the yard on their way out of town? The call only served to make me twice as mad at Eddie, who was our actual contractor after all—the stuff in the yard didn’t even belong to Mr. Dupré.
When I got done with one of my more inspired Eddie harangues, there remained three more hours of sitting in an essentially immobile car, during which time I discovered all manner of other stuff to freak out about, including an enormous English oil portrait of a young cricket player and a Chinese Chippendale sofa that had belonged to my great-grandmother, as well as the aforementioned Regency benches. Suddenly, irrationally, I was convinced the house was going to flood. “We should have dragged those things upstairs,” I moaned to John, adding that we’d been irresponsible and lazy and that if anything happened to that painting or that sofa, both of which my mother had wrangled from her sister on my behalf, she would kill me. John patiently explained to me what I already knew: that the days of the unfortunate Mr. Livaudais were over and those levees would hold; that like the Quarter and the other parts of the city’s early footprint, the Garden District was on high ground, eight feet above sea level, which is why people had chosen to build there in the first place. Anyway, he said, there is no right answer. If we’d taken the stuff to the second floor, it would surely be destroyed if the roof blew off or even leaked badly.
Next up was our flood insurance. I remembered seeing the renewal notice in the mail but I didn’t remember if I’d given it to John, much less if we’d paid the thing. “You’re sure we renewed it?” I
asked him at least twenty times, and at least twenty times he responded that we absolutely had, before adding what he’d just finished telling me, that the house was not going to flood. Once convinced, I moved on to Antoine. “What if something happens to him?” Antoine is a survivor, John said, nothing is going to happen to him. “Yes,” I said. “But Nagin only announced the Superdome as the ‘shelter of last resort’ this morning. What if he doesn’t know to go there?” He will know, John said, he will hear it on the street. “Okay, but what if he got picked up? The jail is not on high ground. What if he drowns in that place?” He won’t drown, John said, because he’s not in jail. Didn’t Rose just call yesterday? Didn’t they tell her he wasn’t there?
I had to concede that he was right on all points, and I knew I was driving him at least as crazy as I was driving myself. It was, therefore, a great relief to both of us when we arrived at the “secret” shortcut Elizabeth and I had discovered during our Ivan evacuation: a series of two-lane back roads she knew from Katie’s prolific soccer and volleyball playing days, all marked with blue-and-yellow signs saying “alternative hurricane evacuation route,” which no one, apparently, had noticed. All of a sudden, we were practically flying, going fifty and sixty miles an hour through leafy little towns whose gas stations still had gas and whose stores sold beer on Sunday. There is nothing like an unexpected ice-cold Budweiser to lessen life’s anxieties, and nothing like other peoples’ real problems to stem one’s own neurotic tide.
We had switched from Louisiana to Mississippi Public Radio and if John was right about the storm jogging to the east, the people we were listening to would almost certainly be wiped out. When the mayor of Waveland, a Mississippi Gulf Coast town of about 6,700 people, was interviewed, I almost burst into tears. It had already been destroyed once, by Camille in 1969, he said, but unlike his neighbors, who’d been enjoying the considerable economic benefits of thriving casinos, Waveland’s economy was just now beginning to rebound. Only last week they’d broken ground on a Lowe’s building supply store, a big deal that would bring forty-something new jobs to the community. I prayed that man would be all right and started counting my blessings. We were not, for example, in the Superdome, or looking for an available hotel room as far as five or six hundred miles away. We were heading instead toward safe and extremely comfortable harbor with people who loved us.
I turned into my parents’ long gravel driveway in Greenville almost twelve hours after we’d left New Orleans, roughly three times the normal journey. Even though it was well after midnight, my mother and father were waiting for us in the kitchen, where the TV, predictably, was on. We hugged and kissed and carried what little we’d brought with us back to my brother’s old room, and John repeated his belief that New Orleans would be spared the brunt of the thing, an assessment with which my father agreed. “You really think it’s going to jog to the east?” I asked one more time, just before we dropped off to sleep. “Yes, I really do.” Early on in our relationship he had told me a little white lie to make me feel better about something, and when I realized what he’d done I got so mad I threw an orange at the wall behind his head. From that moment on, he’d given up trying to spare me any realities, harsh or otherwise, and it had never been in his nature to shoot from the hip, so I believed him. When the alarm woke us the next morning (we had set it for 6:30, just after the predicted landfall), it turned out he was right.
6
IN WHAT WOULD turn out to be a fairly constant tableau for the next several days, the four of us huddled with our coffee in front of the kitchen TV, which was set, at my father’s insistence, on Fox News. Shep Smith, a good Mississippi boy, was manning the mike from New Orleans, but there wasn’t much to look at beyond still-dark scenes of a soaking-wet Bourbon Street and the blown-out windows of the Hyatt Hotel several blocks away, where the mayor—along with some of our crazier friends—had chosen to ride out the storm. There was relief, of course, but also the inevitable guilt. When you dodge a bullet, it usually means someone else has taken it, and the scenes of destruction from the Mississippi Gulf Coast were increasingly horrific. Before the day was over, we’d learn that not a single structure in Waveland had been left standing.
What we would not learn until the next day is that the levees in New Orleans were already giving way and that the flooding of 80 percent of the city (145 square miles—an area almost seven times the footprint of Manhattan) had begun. At that point, like everybody else in America (except, as it turns out, the FEMA director’s assistant, among others), we were still under the happy impression that the worst thing that might happen was the mayor getting rained on in his otherwise comfortable hotel room. Also, given the fate of our neighbors on the coast, things like the possible ruination of a green silk Chippendale sofa had ceased to be even a remote preoccupation. In any event, there was nothing to do about any of it—our Louisiana cell phones weren’t working and all the long distance circuits were busy. After the overwhelming pressures of the house renovation (and the normal but constant pressures of work), the state of being completely incommunicado, as well as utterly powerless, was an unexpected luxury. I’d spent an entire year obsessing over things like whether the front door mail slot should be unpolished brass or dark bronze and going insane over the improper placement of doorknobs; now there was absolutely nothing I could even try to control. So we took a holiday of sorts, settling in at the kitchen table while my mother turned her attention to people who were actually in need.
My mother has been referred to more than once as the patron saint of Greenville, Mississippi, a description that is only slightly hyperbolic. She tutors in the public schools and mentored for years at the Salvation Army, where she was assigned dozens of “Girl Guards” with whom she still maintains close relationships. She has been president of the Boys and Girls Club, the Junior Auxiliary, and the Garden Club, where she turned her considerable energies toward helping to save a bald cypress grove from extinction. She was the second woman to be elected an elder of the First Presbyterian Church, where she also teaches Sunday School and runs the annual fundraiser that benefits, among others, the Palmer Home, from which we took in an orphan every summer. When I was in grade school, the neglected children of one of her Junior Auxiliary families (their mother was an alcoholic named Mrs. Crumley who traded the family’s J.A.-provided milk for whiskey), always seemed to be in my bathtub, where she sponged them down with pHisoderm to soothe their chronic impetigo; a few years later, when the first wave of post–Vietnam War refugees landed in America, a family of seven named Muon lived in our pool house for a year. Now she had taken on the task of feeding the several hundred evacuees who had bedded down on the floor of the local convention center. At one point during that first day, I left the kitchen and returned to hear her on the phone, working up a menu for the multitudes: fried chicken, baked beans, sliced tomatoes, fruit, and two desserts, “so they can save one for later.” I knew better, but I had to ask: “You are going to peel and slice fresh tomatoes for almost a thousand people?” (She always insists on peeling her tomatoes, an admittedly refined but slightly obsessive extra step that never ceases to blow my mind.) She looked at me like I was the one who was crazy. “Yes,” she said. “You cannot believe how pretty the Arkansas Travelers are right now.”
By nightfall, the storm had knocked out power lines as far north as Greenville, so we decided to try our luck at Doe’s Eat Place, the legendary, if slightly ramshackle, former grocery store and honky tonk that serves the best steaks and fried shrimp I have ever eaten anywhere. The first photograph of me ever taken, when my mother was still pregnant and sitting on the wooden front steps, was there; I celebrated my fortieth birthday in the “side room” (there’s a sign above the entrance designating it as such, just in case anyone is confused), and when John and I got married, friends took over the whole place for a party two days before the wedding. Since Doe’s stove and ancient open broiler are both powered by gas rather than electricity, my mother predicted they would come through for us y
et again, and sure enough, when we pulled up outside, I could see Little Doe at his post just inside the screen door, flipping succulent sirloins and porterhouses over the leaping flames. Inside, it was as packed as always, but the party atmosphere was heightened by groups of similarly relieved Greenville émigrés to New Orleans (many more had made the trek since the Percy brothers first decamped), and by the cheap dimestore taper candles, leaning rather frighteningly at an angle inside empty water glasses, where they temporarily replaced the usual fluorescent bulbs as light sources. Though there has never been a printed menu, we ordered pretty much everything that would have been on it: salad and hot tamales (a Delta tradition, and made here with beef suet and steak trimmings), fried shrimp and broiled shrimp, rare porterhouses, homemade French fries, and toasted garlic bread. Between bites we visited with folks at every table, drinking to our good luck with a handful of the red Burgundies I’d thrown in the car when we left. When we got home, we were stuffed and happy and ready for bed, which we found with the help of a flashlight.