Mississippi Calling

The following is a fictional short story I wrote for "Teacakes and Afternoon Tales: New Stories from Mississippi" by the Gulf Coast Writers Association. I worked in hurricane recovery for two years so much of this is based on my experiences, including avoiding and then visiting the heartbreak of one of my most favorite places on earth.

        It took me a year to drive to Mississippi, and I live two hours away.

        I hadn’t meant to avoid the Coast, considering I work in recovery and all my sisters in suffering were claiming Louisiana was getting the lion’s share of attention. They always looked at me in meetings through narrowed eyes when they made those accusations, as if I, being from New Orleans, meant life was so much easier because CNN and every other news agency had been parked on Canal Street since Aug. 30.

        As if.

        I could have recited the statistics, that Mississippi got more money while Louisiana got more devastation, but who really cared? The truth was, I was guilty.

        “Pam.” My boss calls me to the present. We’re about to cross the Pearl River and I can swear an invisible sorrow is emanating from the Gulf. “Are we going straight to the clinic or do we have time to check out Bay St. Louis. I heard they lost the whole town. Or is that Pass Christian,” she asks, pronouncing the last name as if referring to a person of faith.

        Sally Wentworth is green to the scene, as we like to say, having flown in from Chicago two days before to relieve the director of our program so she can get to gutting and restoring her own home. Sally insisted on touring not only the entire New Orleans city limits, but St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parish as well, providing commentary as if she personally knew everyone’s story. I’m thankful for the country’s outpouring of support and our national organization sending people down, but right now I want to stuff a sock in my boss’s mouth.

       As we near the top of the Pearl River bridge, Sally straightens in her seat, peering out among the treetops looking for more destruction. I can tell she’s disappointed when nothing appears.

       “I vote for going straight to the clinic.”

       Sally studies her map, the one that marks all the casinos and hot hotels with little stars. Like they’re still there. “How about we drive over to the beach at Gulfport and then make our way up to Biloxi?”

        I cringe and shift in my seat, suddenly as nervous as I was the first time I entered Orleans Parish, smelling it long before the military checked my ID at the parish line. I spent my summers in Gulfport as a child, at a hotel with rattling window air conditioners that chilled the strong chlorine water off our bodies when we ran in from the pool. The same pool that turned my mother’s bleached hair green. The sand from the endless beach trailed after us on to the cheap carpet, failing to be removed from the deep recesses of our bodies and we ate cereal out of the box with pet milk and slept with wet hair smelling of seaweed.

        It was heaven.

        And now this woman wanted to visit the beach?

Our beloved motel that was destroyed in Hurricane Camille in 1969.

Our beloved hotel blew away in Hurricane Camille. So did my cousin’s house. After riding out that storm in New Orleans, we waited for the electricity to come back on so my mother could witness the destruction of her hometown on our brand new color TV. I stopped thinking hurricanes were fun then, even though it meant my parents would reunite for one evening and we’d eat Kentucky Fried Chicken in the most secure part of the house and play board games and sleep on the floor. Watching that poor woman on TV walking down the street, looking for her house after Camille and finding it gone was enough to wean me off hurricanes for life.

Nothing could beat Camille.

        But that was before The Storm, when I watched my hometown in living color from my place in exile.

       “I think we should go straight to the clinic.” If we were lucky, we’d be in and out of Biloxi and I could forgo the coast altogether.

       “Don’t you want to see it?” Pam asked, surprised I would suggest such a thing.

       I wanted to see New Orleans, needed to witness my hometown to reassure myself it was okay and coming back. Instead, the episode proved the first 45 years of my life were now gone and would never be the same and started a depression that only drugs would alleviate. I stopped crying at the first anniversary; I was doing good. Did I really want to see the Coast?

       I didn’t say a word and headed south off the Interstate, listening to my new boss rattle on about injustices, a woman who missed the first year “after” without electricity, water and simple items such as toilet paper and food. She talked about a need for racism training—as if four hours with a facilitator would cure what ailed Southerners the most—the insurance companies and the Bush administration. I had heard it all before, most times coming out of my own bitter mouth, but I lived it as well, along with an endless water line around my house and an X mark from hell. She kept talking past the broken churches, the traffic lights that didn’t work and the houses with blue roofs until we saw water.

        “Did I tell you my mom was born here?” I asked, not knowing why. “And my first boyfriend was from Ocean Springs.”

        “Really?” No emotions there. Not exciting enough.

        We turned on to 90 and she began asking questions, but I wasn’t up for talking. They call it heartache for a reason. A shotgun blast to the center of your being would hurt less than what we’ve had to endure. Watching the empty blocks roll by my window, not knowing where I was or what existed before Katrina blew it all away, started me to shaking.

        I had avoided Mississippi for a reason. This was my childhood too. The retreats my father and I took when he picked me up for weekends, wanting to escape the divorce, his work and the apartment with rented furniture. The weekend we sailed into Gulfport and ate jumbo shrimp at the harbor, relishing the taste of fresh water after two days of endless soft drinks on the boat. My aunt teaching me to make oven toast and the gravity house at the oceanarium. The shop merchant who gave me an artist rendering of Biloxi because of my ancestry, the summer season was slow and he just felt like it. The house where my mom was born.

        They call it politics, separating our family at the state line, but we are attached at the hip. What would my life have been without trips to the Gulf Coast, playing with my children in the shallow, overly warm Gulf waters as I did as a child? What would the Coast be without weekends in New Orleans?

       I didn’t want to talk about what the storm was like, how WalMart helped and FEMA didn’t, who was to blame for the slow recovery and if New Orleans was on the news more than Mississippi. I didn’t care about racism training or coalition building—at least not right now. And what was Sally doing here, anyhow? Why were people so fascinated by our suffering but so slow in getting their legislators to dedicate funds?

        The next site undid me. I pulled off the road and stared straight ahead, listening to the Gulf waves hit the man-made beach as the tears rolled down my checks. Sally had lowered her window to feel the breeze on her face and she, too, stared at the image before us.

        It was then I knew she had stopped talking. When I glanced her way, a different woman was sitting in the car next to me.

        There is a moment when you can’t take any more. Perhaps we, as Americans have never known that moment existed until Aug. 29, 2025. When in the course of U.S. history has our nation been so devastated on such a scale by a natural disaster? You can drive the equivalent from Los Angeles to San Francisco to experience what Hurricanes Rita and Katrina did to the Gulf Coast. Miles and miles and miles. In Mississippi, it’s miles and miles of nothing.

        There was a reason it took me a year to drive to the Coast. I just couldn’t take one more heartbreak.

       All that talk was just a shield, I suddenly realized, or an attempt to reason with nature and the inability of a government to protect its people. Sally broke down into heaving sobs as she gazed upon the still standing Biloxi lighthouse.

       Was it knowing we’re not alone, that the country still cared or the fact that one Mississippi Coast landmark was still standing, I’ll never know.  But I took Sally’s hand and said the words people had been saying to me for over a year.

       “It’s going to be OK.”

       Only this time, gazing at that undeafeated lighthouse, I thought that might be true.

Weird, Wacky & WIld South is written by travel writer Cheré Dastugue Coen. Although she was born in New Orleans, she had long ties to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and never drives along Hwy. 90 without admiring the Biloxi Lighthouse and remembering her mother, a Biloxi native. LilyB Staehling Moskal took that photo at right and Cheré has it proudly displayed on her wall.