Can We Ever Go Home Again?
Early Monday morning at work, at Lamar’s Creole Style Buffalo Wings in New Orleans, La., the day seems normal. I’ve just set up my steam tables, washed the dishes, finished up counting the money in the cash register, and I’m ready to roll.
Staring out of a cardboard box-sized window after a customer leaves… suddenly rain drops taps on the window seal. Oh my God I thought to myself. It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced the good ole New Orleans rain. Then Boom, and Ka-bang… thunder and lighting hit. I did not know what to do, the rain continued to pour, and pour.
Being used to customers coming every five minutes—all I saw was people going the other way.
Ka-bang… lightning strikes again. I’d better turn off the lights, and turn on the radio, I thought to myself.
Where I come from in New Orleans La., when it rains it pours cats and dogs that way.
That sounds like a lovely rain story doesn’t it?
Well, Hurricane Katrina was no love story. I just left my hometown New Orleans last June. The storm and rain was scary enough-but can you imagine rain killing your loved ones, literally striking your mother out of her home, being helpless with no one in left your own home town that you know?
My name is Sis. Delphine Manning. The folks at STREET SHEET asked me to write about losing my home.
I was born and raised in New Orleans La. I am the youngest child of my mother’s fourteen children. We lived in the Desire Projects. Right after I was born there was another hurricane that hit New Orleans called Hurricane Betsy. I have heard lots of stories about Hurricane Betsy.
I can still remember my sister Dee-Dee (Delores) teasing me about how they left me and the twins behind in the bed asleep, while they climbed through the roof to escape Hurricane Betsy in the Desire Projects.
Surely she was trying to bring me to tears, and it worked. Hurricane Betsy is an icon of a story in my family-we talk about it every time we all get together. Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans the same month that I was born-Aug. 1965.
Now a hurricane that outdid Hurricane Betsy has truly changed the face New Orleans.
Where I come from, people just don’t leave. They go to church, they come home, and that’s the way it’s been for forty years for me.
My daughter’s grandmother on her father’s side never considered so much as visiting relatives across the river because she says it’s too far. But now she is no longer in New Orleans.
“My refrigerator was laying on the floor… mud was all through the house… clothes were thrown everywhere. Oh girl, it doesn’t look the same,” she stated.
“Wow, Miss Dorothy. Are you going to sell your house?” I asked.
“Well child, I don’t know who would want a house like that!” she replied.
Nyress, my niece Iola’s only daughter, who I’ve spent last summer with when I was working at Lamar’s, sneaked off the job and went to Chicago. Now she lives there. I wonder if she prefers the snow to the rain.
My mother is no longer in New Orleans. She left her home and moved to Memphis, Tenn. because the city has totally condemned her place.
“I’ve lost all my belongings,” she told me. All I can do is keep my head to the table and cry.
The levee breaks—and Lamar’s Creole Style Buffalo Wings is no longer there.
Ray Magin, the mayor of New Orleans, says, “I want the people of New Orleans to come back to New Orleans!” They have triumphantly rebuilt the levee, and now begin to reconstruct the face of our wonderful city.
FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Association) gave out $300 gas vouchers for everyone who had to travel to a different town by car, rather than to Houston, Memphis, or Chicago. FEMA also gave out Section 8 vouchers for 18 mos. to everyone whom suffered shipwreck by Hurricane Katrina last year.
Lake Forest Blvd.—the storm moves in and the floods are in the streets. People have no idea that their lives are about to change forever. I picked up a newspaper. I see my loved ones are crowded in the Superdome. “It was a Hurricane in New Orleans,” someone told me.
Oh God, the children… will they ever get to laugh at this someday, the way my family has laughed over the years at Hurricane Betsy?
NOTE: Sister Delphine is on a mission to raise money for the survivors of Katrina and Rita, and she has some pretty novel ideas for fundraising. If interested, please contact Sister Delphine Manning through STREET SHEET.
Delphine