Hurricane, 2005, August 26: Testimony of Grandmother Ellen

THE HURRICANE HIT NEW ORLEANS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE night. The next day the levees broke and the Gulf of Mexico began to pour into the town. By then my children and grandchildren from New Orleans and the Mississippi coast were all safe in Jackson, Mississippi, and I was on my way there, driving as fast as I dared and stopping every fifty miles to fill up with gasoline as I had heard there was no gasoline in Jackson.

The electric lines were down and the gasoline pumps wouldn’t work and the roads were clogged with trees and debris so the refilling trucks couldn’t get to the cities.

My children’s cellular phones didn’t work. The cell towers had been knocked down by the storm as it made its way up the state of Mississippi. It also knocked down fences and hedge rows and tore up roads and uprooted pine forests and generally turned the state into an emergency zone. Still I kept on driving. I wanted to count heads and fingers and toes. I wanted to give away the hundred-dollar bills I had taken out of the bank in Fayetteville as I had also heard the banks weren’t working. No electricity, no computers, no drive-in cash machines.

I wanted to wade in and see if I could help. I was a seventy-year-old woman on a mission.

I was not, however, willing to stay in my brother’s house with ten other people and three Labrador retrievers, one of which was fourteen years old and belonged to my cousin Bunky. I was going to stay in town with some friends who still had air conditioning.

At least the rains had stopped. The air was crystal clear, the skies cerulean blue, gentle cirrus clouds like sleeping angels. The town of Jackson was very quiet. The only cars that seemed to be moving were emergency vehicles, repair trucks, and an occasional police car. There were long lines at the few filling stations that still had gasoline. I was down to half a tank as the last town that had gas was near the Arkansas line east of the Greenville, Mississippi, bridge.

Jackson, Mississippi, is two hundred miles north of where the hurricane hit but it was almost closed down from tornado damage in the area.

It was late in the afternoon when I got to Jackson. I went to my friends’ house and managed to get a call in to my daughter-in-law and my two oldest granddaughters. They had lost their home and all their stuff and most of their cars. They came over to my friends’ house and we hugged and talked and then I took all three of them out to the mall to get clean underwear and new makeup. I know that sounds stupid but I was trying to keep them busy while we waited to hear about the fate of the small town on the Mississippi coast where they live and I have a summer house. My son was in St. Croix pulling up satellite images and calling to tell us what he could see. It was my son who told his children and ex-wife that their home was gone.

“We’ll fix it,” I said. “We’ll get you an apartment here while we figure out what to do next. We’ll get an apartment and fill it with inexpensive furniture and go from there.”

My oldest grandson, their son and brother, was in Jackson with his wife and child, working at a hospital, waiting to go to medical school. At least they would all be together.

The next problem was to find my youngest son and his two daughters, who had refugeed from New Orleans to my niece’s farm in Madison County, outside of Jackson.

They had spent a night with the crowd at my brother’s house, then gone out to the farm where there were horses and other children.

As soon as I was dressed the next morning I picked up my daughter-in-law and granddaughters at my grandson’s house and we went out to the farm to see the little girls, Abigail and Juliet, ages ten and eight.

Their mother and grandmother had ridden out the storm in a huge old stucco house in New Orleans. My son had the children for the weekend so he brought them to Jackson. His British ex-mother-in-law had refused to leave, so her daughter, the girls’ mother, had stayed with her.

They ended up in a crowded hotel in the French Quarter when the police made them leave the house. From there they went to Baton Rouge for four weeks. We were glad. We didn’t care what a lot of crazy British women did to prove they were British, we had the girls with us.

“No school for a week or two,” I told them. “Can you stand that?”

“No kidding,” the oldest one said. “I guess I’ll just ride horses and play with my cousins.”

They seemed to be in a good mood. My son had no idea what had happened to his small house in New Orleans. He had boarded it up and left with his children. It would be days before anyone was allowed to drive the highways to New Orleans and the coast so we were living on hearsay and television reports. Except for the satellite photos being relayed from my son in St. Croix.

The big stucco house where the little girls lived with their British mother was on high ground and had survived with little damage. A tree had fallen into the swimming pool. We heard that report from somewhere.

On the afternoon of that second day we went out and rented an apartment for my daughter-in-law and the older girls. Both of their colleges were going to be closed indefinitely. The oldest one had been at the University of New Orleans, which she disliked, and the younger one had been in a small college on the coast for two days when the storm came and blew it away.

After we rented the apartment we all, including my son and the younger girls, went out to a huge discount furniture store and bought furniture and arranged to have it delivered. Then we went to Walmart and bought pots and pans and coffee makers and sheets and towels and pillows and everything we could think of to make a home. I was not going to have my oldest granddaughters be homeless.

In the end no one ever lived in the apartment. My son with the two small daughters found a house that was being restored and offered to do some of the work if the contractor would rent it to him quickly. We moved the furniture and stuff from Walmart to that house.

The days were going by quickly from the time I arrived. So many people were having so many ideas and acting on them so quickly, I can’t remember what happened when. Pierre and Abigail and Juliet moved into the house he had rented.

My daughter-in-law, Rita, took her three children and drove to Ocean Springs to inspect the ruins. She found a few pieces of Spode china and the cars upside down in a small lake formed by the tidal wave.

They were driving a Chevrolet my oldest granddaughter had rented while her car was being repaired. They ended up keeping the car for two months and the insurance company kept on paying for it. The car being repaired was a Mitsubishi Gallant I had given Ellen six months before. They had driven the rented Chevrolet to Jackson because it had the largest trunk. I had bought the Mitsubishi with money I made holding a chair in the humanities at Tulane University. I used the money to buy cars for Ellen, Aurora, Marshall, and Pierre, a humane use for money if I ever heard of one.

Since then I have been using my money to pay tuition to various colleges and medical schools and universities. I get money from a university and I give it to other universities. I am an extremely inventive economist and sometimes think I should offer my service to the United States government.

Here is the cast of characters for this Hurricane report.

Grandmother Ellen, me

Ellen Walker, my oldest granddaughter

Aurora Walker, numero dos granddaughter

Rita Walker, my brilliant daughter-in-law

Pierre Walker, my youngest son

Abigail Walker, his oldest daughter, my fourth granddaughter

Juliet Walker, numero dos daughter, my fifth granddaughter

Robert Alford Gilchrist, my younger brother, “Uncle Bob”

Robert Alford Gilchrist, “Little Bob,” age eleven

Whitney Marion Gilchrist, my niece, age fifteen

Julie Brasfield Gilchrist, my wonderful, long-suffering sister-in-law

Treena Gilchrist Klaus, my niece, who lives on a horse farm with her generous and kind husband, Jimmy, and her children

Amy Klaus, twelve at time of the hurricane

Tyler Klaus, thirteen at time of the hurricane

Aunt Roberta Alford Kleinschmidt, my mother’s youngest sister, who shares my sons’ rare blood type and is the most outspoken of all my aunts. I loved her very much. Her home in New Orleans was destroyed so she moved, at age eighty-three, to her house on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and invited members of her Episcopal Church in Metairie to come and live with her if they had lost their homes. Many of them did. I sent her newspaper reports and got many very funny letters from her in return. If I can find any of them I will add them to this essay as an addendum. One she especially liked was a long, unnecessarily nasty article in the New York Times Sunday Living section about people from New Orleans moving to their second homes on the coast. I sent it to Roberta by Federal Express since mail and newspapers were not being delivered for several months after the storm.

George W. Healy, Junior, my beloved oldest first cousin, called by everyone he knows, “Bunky.” He was the president of the United States Maritime Lawyers Association. I met him once in New York City where they were having a meeting and was delighted to find that everyone there called him “Bunky.”

Sharon Healy, Bunky’s wife, who allows him to be exactly who he is without ever trying to change him. She is from Oklahoma and my mother and Bunky’s mother adored her and were so happy when Bunky settled down and made her his wife. Sharon and Bunky are the about-to-be-married couple in my short story “The Famous Poll at Jody’s Bar.”

Assorted Labrador retrievers, Prestidigitation, Dooley, and Maggie II.

My hosts for the weekend, Tom and Rita Royals and their daughter, Kate. While not otherwise occupied during those days I campaigned to get Kate to go to Millsaps College to study English. I won, she went, and had a stellar career there. She became the editor of the Millsaps newspaper and hired my niece, Whitney, when Whitney went to Millsaps two years later. My campaign was based on my love for and belief in Millsaps as a haven for lovers of literature and, also, my newfound idea that we should not send young girls off to school in strange cities where they have no fathers or brothers or cousins to protect them.

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.