Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Pilgrim

Pilgrim This page intentionally left blank pilgrim 9 nearing my hometown I turn west onto Interstate 10, the southernmost coast-to-coast highway in the United States. I’ve driven this road thousands of times, and I know each curve and rise of it as it passes through the northern sections of Biloxi and Gulfport—a course roughly parallel to U.S. Route 90, the beach road, also known as the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway. It’s five o’clock when I cross into Mississippi, and it seems that the sky darkens almost instantly. In minutes it’s raining—the vestiges of a storm out in the Gulf—and I can barely see the lights of a few cars out ahead of me. Some are pulled over, parked beneath the underpass. Others slow down but keep going, hazard lights flashing. People have learned to be wary of storms. “It’s different now,” my brother, Joe, says. “Before Katrina so many older people told stories of having ridden out Camille that nobody worried much. That was the biggest storm to hit around here.” Then he recalls the other storm warning, a little while before Katrina hit, and how it turned out to be what he called “a false alarm.” “People prepared with supplies,” he tells me: “there were long lines at the grocery store and the gas station, but then nothing happened.” Emboldened by the “false alarm” and by the fact that her home had withstood Camille thirty-six years before, my grandmother was one of the people who wanted to “ride out the storm” from home. “You remember,” he says. “You had to talk her into letting me take her to a shelter.” When I ask her what she remembers, my grandmother conflates the two storms. Ninety-one, a woman who has spent most of her life in the same place, she knows she lives in Atlanta now, where I do, because she had to evacuate after Katrina, but she thinks she was at home during landfall, not lying on a Gwendolyn Ann Trethewey née Turnbough and Natasha, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1966 pilgrim 11 cot in a classroom at the public school up the road from her house. Examined by a doctor after evacuating Gulfport, she was disoriented. She hadn’t eaten for weeks, even though the shelter provided mres, even though my brother had been able to drive to Mobile for food. The doctor spoke of trauma and depression, prescribed medication. In her room at the nursing home in Atlanta, she recalls how very young I was during Camille and how my parents moved my crib from room to room all night trying to avoid water pouring in through the roof. When I say, “No, Nana—Katrina ,” she looks at me, her eyes glassy with confusion, her lips pressed hard together, her brow deeply furrowed, as she tries to piece together the events of the previous two years. She has layered on the old story of Camille the new story of Katrina. Between the two, there is the suggestion of both a narrative and a metanarrative—the way she both remembers and forgets, the erasures, and how intricately intertwined memory and forgetting always are. This too is a story about a story—how it will be inscribed on the physical landscape as well as on the landscape of our cultural memory. I wonder at the competing narratives: What will be remembered, what forgotten? What dominant narrative is now emerging? Watching the news, my grandmother turns to me when she sees Senator Trent Lott on the screen. “I made draperies for his house,” she says, aware, I think, that theirs is a story intertwined by history: his house gone along with the work of her hands. I spend the first night catching up with Joe. Because his house and our grandmother’s house are still in disrepair, he’s living 12 pilgrim with his girlfriend while doing the work on the properties himself . I’ve booked a room at one of the hotels on the coast—a casino as most of them are—and we sit in the bar for hours watching the Thursday night traffic on the gaming floor. When the casinos were built on the coast nearly fifteen years before, onshore gambling wasn’t permitted. Most casinos then were barges, moored against the beach...