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AFTER THE STORM

MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR

“Granddaddy! GET BACK IN THE HOUSE!”

Of all the things I thought I’d be doing on this visit back to Mississippi, yelling at my grandfather in the middle of a hurricane wasn’t one of them. I was home for what I thought would be a one-week vacation between a summer in New York City and my senior year at Oberlin College.

I never thought I’d yell at my grandfather, ever. He was my grandfather, we are Black, and I like having teeth in my mouth. My grandfather never raised a hand to me, but I just assumed that any sort of backtalk would release a giant rock from the sky to smite me.

On the other hand, I never thought I would see a hurricane in Port Gibson, Mississippi, either. We’re no stranger to thunderstorms, floods, tornadoes. But hurricanes? That’s a coastal problem. The “port” in Port Gibson denotes its position on the Mississippi River. We are about two hundred miles from the Gulf Coast. But Katrina went where she wanted.

Maybe that was why my grandfather thought it was a good idea to recover the feeder for his beloved hummingbirds after the wind knocked it down. It was all so unbelievable, so why believe it?

“Granddaddy.” I tried to soften my voice. “It’s a hurricane. The birds aren’t out right now.”

“What do you know?” he shot back. “You not a bird.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

But I didn’t have to. As soon as he got off the back porch, Katrina declared her dominance and knocked him off balance. A man for whom confidence was everything lost it all to the wind. He came shuffling back toward the house, avoiding the concern in his granddaughter’s eyes.

My grandfather was a very proud man. I don’t think I’d ever seen him lower his head or shrink his shoulders. As a Black man who grew up in Alabama in the 1920s and 1930s, served in the military in the 1940s, integrated the schools in Nashville with his own children in the 1950s—he had a lot to be proud of. He passed a lot of that down to me, almost by osmosis. He didn’t talk about it much, but I could feel it in his presence. Something about being near him made you want to stand straighter and speak clearer. Ever since I could remember, I was terrified of disappointing him, and desperate to impress him. It wasn’t easy.

Now he said nothing. He just stumbled back into the house, where my mother had cable news pundits and meteorologists blaring in every room.

Things hadn’t gotten bad yet. The power was still on. The water was still running. And I was in the middle of an ill-advised experiment of steaming okra. I would never try that again.

We were worried for New Orleans, that beautiful, beautiful city in a soup bowl. Our regional jewel. But we also felt relief because, that morning, it had been announced that Katrina had not hit New Orleans head-on and had instead made landfall at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Of course, we were worried for the people there, but at least, we thought, the loss of life would be contained.

There was a lot I didn’t know about then. But years later, I would see that the eye of this storm was forming the lens through which I still see the climate crisis today: one in which structural racism and inequality collide with fearsome extreme weather to reveal the grotesque unnaturalness of disaster.

Because Katrina’s aftermath was so horrific, we forget how utterly strange she was as a storm. We forget that she made landfall in Florida as a meager Category 1 hurricane before sweeping back out to sea to gather more strength for the Gulf Coast.

We forget that, by the time she made landfall, she had weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 3. But what Katrina sacrificed in strength, she more than made up for in size. At the time, she was the largest hurricane ever to hit the United States, affecting millions of people over approximately ninety thousand square miles. And that was just in the short term. Just before our electricity went out for what would become a week, we saw that Katrina was covering the entire state of Mississippi. From the Coast to the Delta.

We forget the tornado outbreak she spawned as she traveled over land. Fifty-seven tornadoes over the space of eight states—from central Mississippi to Pennsylvania. With eighteen tornadoes across Georgia in a single day, she far exceeded the state’s previous daily tornado record of two.

The other thing often left out of the narrative, but which I can never forget, was that Katrina descended the day after the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till. If you are Black, and especially if you grew up in the South, the name Emmett Till brings immediate, arresting, gruesome images to mind. The name sinks to the bottom of your stomach like a bag of rocks—or like the cotton gin fan that forced his barely pubescent body to surrender to the Tallahatchie River.

The anniversary was the biggest news story in Mississippi in the weeks before the storm. How far had Mississippi come? Had we stood still? What comes next? There, in my three-generational home of Black southerners, I couldn’t not think about the anniversary, even then, with the storm overhead.

I remembered the meteorologists explaining how hurricanes start off the coast of Africa and gather strength as they cross the Atlantic, following almost exactly the route of slave ships.

I wondered if this Category 3 storm was really a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett.

If I remember correctly, there were no casualties in Port Gibson and the property damage was minimal. Almost everyone got roof damage, and lots of yards had fallen trees—but nothing that couldn’t have happened in an exceptionally strong thunderstorm. We were lucky and we knew it. But still, we held our breath for news about the coasts and New Orleans.

Our only source of news was our battery-operated radio. The local NPR segments dripped with such overt racism, it was impossible to trust them. You could hear it in the way they described certain neighborhoods and the people who lived there. “They” were looting. “They” were rowdy. The armed vigilante groups had no choice but to defend themselves, the radio hosts said. But we knew those neighborhoods. We heard those dog whistles. These communities had just been devastated to an unimaginable degree. Who wouldn’t be rowdy? Who wouldn’t take what they needed from a store that would be closed indefinitely? Were they supposed to wait for help from above?

We waited all day, instead, for the national broadcasts. That was the only thing that kept us even halfway informed about the unfolding tragedy. Here we heard people described as, well, people. We heard stories of loss and angst from all over the city, in every neighborhood. We heard about people in need, people waiting for help that wasn’t coming, so, yes, they broke into a store. We heard about rumors of violence, but on these national broadcasts, they were also described as what they were: unconfirmed rumors.

(The woman who did that reporting is now my colleague at NRDC. I’ve thanked her over and over, but I still don’t think she knows what she meant to us.)

We lost water for a little less than a week. That was the hardest part, because of how hot it was right after Katrina. I don’t remember the exact temperature, but that day is seared into my memory as the hottest I’ve ever lived through. I know it was over a hundred degrees because that was as high as our back porch thermometer could go. I tried to curb my water intake, to save it for my grandfather and my mother. We all slept a lot, including the dog.

My mother’s car was in the shop, so we couldn’t even go for a drive to cool down in the car’s air-conditioning. That really became a problem once the groceries started to run low. At one point a neighbor let us tag along on a trip to Vicksburg to go to Kroger. Later, I stubbornly walked to the grocery store in town and was apprehended, scolded, and driven home by another neighbor.

I was supposed to leave to go back to Oberlin a day or two after the storm, but I had to put that off for more than another week. I’d flown into Dallas and taken a bus to Mississippi, and planned to do the same to go back, but the roads to Texas were littered with fallen pine trees. There was literally no path to Dallas.

We went without power for about a week, and without phones (both cell and landline) for two or three days. We were essentially cut off from the rest of the world, but Mississippians are no strangers to blackouts. Blackouts are part of life there. You expect them. They force you to hold still, to be patient. Especially at nighttime, when the fever of day breaks and the crickets and frogs play their symphony. You can close your eyes and find the beauty in being exactly where you are.

We never knew when a tornado or a thunderstorm would knock power out, or when a tree would fall on a power line, or when the grid would simply get overwhelmed. Since we couldn’t predict it, we just stayed ready. Everyone had flashlights and batteries and candles, and most people had battery-operated radios. Years ago, I’d grown tired of calling my mother during bad thunderstorms and tornadoes only to get a dial tone that fed my panic. So I made her buy a battery-operated phone. The town hospital around the corner had generators. That’s where I went to charge my cell phone when it was finally working again. The elderly woman who lived next door also had a generator for her breathing machine.

The landline came back before my cell phone did, but allowed incoming calls only. We fielded call after call from distraught family members. Each one gasped when they finally heard my mother’s voice or mine. They’d been calling for days.

Most of my relatives live in Birmingham or Houston or Atlanta or Washington, D.C., and had never been to Mississippi. They didn’t know if the newscasts were exaggerated. We didn’t know ourselves how bad the damage was until we talked to my brother, who told us the interstate had been broken up like dominoes. That’s when it became real.

When my cell phone came back on, it was full of increasingly distressed voice mails from friends at Oberlin. Apparently, there had been an automatic message that stated, matter-of-factly, “Due to the hurricane in the area you are calling . . .” They didn’t know how close I was to the coast or how much danger I was in. And because these were the days before text messages, they had no recourse other than to leave voicemail on top of panicked voice mail.

When the power came back on, we saw everything with our own eyes. We saw that the towns on the coast had been completely washed away. I can still hear Governor Barbour’s voice: “I don’t mean they were badly damaged. I mean they’re simply not there.”

We saw beautiful, beautiful New Orleans flooded to her brim. We saw pictures of the vigilante groups that patrolled white neighborhoods to keep Black people out. Again, I thought of Emmett and his open casket, as I watched New Orleans and the coasts turn into open graves.

We saw the “looters” and heard one of them shout to the camera in that beautiful, melodious New Orleans accent, “Yes, we stole the shoes ’cause all ours got lost in the storm!”

We saw the overhead footage of all the people stranded on their roofs. It stretched so far it defied any semblance of a border. We heard conflicting reports from channel to channel, segment to segment, about violence in the Superdome, in the Convention Center, on the Danziger Bridge. Reporters described people shooting at police helicopters from their roofs, but also of people so desperate for help that they shot into the sky to signal distress.

I thought about how hot those people must have been. We were suffering with no fans or air-conditioning. They were suffering under the direct glare of the sun. Children, pregnant women, elderly people. The swamp reclaimed the city. Snakes and alligators and fish swam in equal terror through swallowed neighborhoods, only the roofs peeking out from the gray water.

Growing up in the Mississippi River region meant growing up in both the shadow and the embrace of New Orleans. We had Mardi Gras parades, and it was easy enough to find King Cake. It wasn’t unusual to see ATMs with French as a language option. If the day was clear enough, we could point the antenna just right and hear the radio stations from Baton Rouge that played the newest Master P, Hot Boys, and DJ Jubilee before we heard them anywhere else.

It broke my heart to see these people, whom I’d always known to be as generous with their culture as they are with their laughter, suffer so hideously. We’d always known that New Orleans was unlike any other place in the country, or the world, but we never thought we’d see New Orleanians referred to as refugees in their own country. It was as devastating as it was unbelievable.

I never thought that I’d see the Mississippi my grandfather had known when he was my age, or even the one my mother saw. The Mississippi that brutally murdered a fourteen-year old boy for a wolf whistle that we now know never happened. But Katrina revealed fault lines that I could never unsee.

Those images would haunt me forever, and they still frame the way I look at the climate crisis in my work today. Thanks to Katrina, I can’t look at the climate crisis without seeing the grimy fingerprints of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and genocide and patriarchy. It’s what happens when large swaths of people are not only systematically “left out,” but forced to be their own gravediggers and pallbearers. Now I can’t help but see who is saved and who is abandoned. Whose bodies litter the road to the “greater good.” And how none of it is an accident.

After that summer, I never saw my grandfather the same way. He’d already begun to show symptoms of dementia. In the years after the storm, I saw him become less cognizant, less there, with every visit home. We lost him in 2012.

I never saw New Orleans the same way, either. The next time I visited was about ten years later, and the grit of the storm was still there, on every billboard, every building, every face. There was construction everywhere—not to build, but to rebuild. Homes were still boarded up, with giant orange Xs painted on the outside next to marks that tallied how many bodies had been found inside. To this day, everything there is dated as either “before the storm” or “after the storm”—and no one questions which storm.

Like my grandfather, New Orleans became more fragile, more tenuous. I saw the things that made them both—the pressure that made the pearl—in a way that I never had before. They became more beautiful, more precious. And I couldn’t unsee it.