Houston – The two women had never met before, not until the line waiting to get into the Main Stop Food Mart.
Hurricane Katrina had already scattered their lives, forcing Connie Smart and Chante Tobias to leave their jobs in health care.
Both had fled the destruction and death and torment of New Orleans by car, driving to Houston. And both soon found themselves in the bull’s-eye of yet another hurricane, another storm threatening to cause so much devastation and sadness.
Before the two struck up a conversation Friday while waiting in line at one of the last places to buy food in all of Houston before Hurricane Rita hit, their only bond was as sisters in misery.
But both were trying to keep their heads high.
“I’ve got health, and I’ve got strength, baby,” Smart, the elder of the two women at 48, said. “As long as I can wake up and smell the air and touch somebody else, I’m fine. … I never question the Lord’s work.”
But both acknowledged things were getting hard. When Tobias, her husband and her god- daughter first came to Houston, they stayed at a Holiday Inn. Soon after, they rented an apartment. The landlord made them sign a long-term lease, Tobias said, even though her family hopes to return to New Orleans when they can.
Both women said they haven’t received relief funds.
“I told my husband, ‘If we didn’t have the little savings that we had, we would be out on the street,”‘ Tobias, 34, said.
She would weather the hurricane at her apartment, she said.
Smart planned to leave Houston, to get into her green Ford Escort and escape, just as she had in getting out of New Orleans the day after Katrina. But she got caught in the massive traffic backups that arose with so many trying to leave all at once, and she decided to turn around.
“You want to know why I’m staying?” she said, angrily. “Because I sat on that … bridge 22 hours last night. It was ridiculous. It was hot. You had people passing out, cars on fire.”
Their conversation drifted from the difficulties of being an orphan in a new town to thoughts of home, where Tobias told Smart that some levies had again failed to hold back flooding when Hurricane Rita dropped rain on the city.
At one point, they wondered whether their lives could ever be what they once were.
“Yeah, it will be,” Tobias said.
“Too much has changed,” Smart countered. “Too much.”
But maybe, they said, maybe this is a chance to make a better life.
“We can’t go down anymore,” Smart said. “All we can do is pull ourselves up.”
Staff writer John Ingold can be reached at 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com.
