In the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans, back before the waters came, most everyone along Verbena Street knew that good cooking could be found in Ruthie Sanders’ kitchen.
From the little shotgun house not far from Lake Pontchartrain, wondrous smells of seafood gumbo and Patton’s hot sausage – spiced with sauces fiery enough to take a Northerner’s breath away – would rise from her stove on Sundays after church let out.
Her kids, their kids, the cousins, the aunties and the uncles all would have more than enough to eat. Even the folks down the street were welcome at Sanders’ table. It wasn’t a meal unless there was a crowd.
Then Katrina took aim at her city, a city where Sanders, 43, had lived her whole life. So had her mama and her grandmother and her great-grandmother.
Sanders had never been afraid of a storm before. This time was different. She and her husband, Byron Hughes, their 7-year-old son, Little Byron, and her 18-year-old daughter, Arnisha Sanders, took refuge for five days in the third-floor apartment of her sister until National Guardsmen whisked them off to the airport.
Now, nearly three months after the hurricane, they are living a mile above sea level in suburban Aurora, where employees at the neighborhood King Soopers have never heard of pickled meat and the so-called Louisiana hot sauce is not nearly hot enough.
Still, as the months pass they are determined to become Coloradans. On Thursday they will bow their heads in thanksgiving, first for their lives and then for relatives who scattered but have since rejoined them in Denver, and at the family table.
By the latest count there will be 20 for Thanksgiving Day dinner, grabbing a seat where they can find room. There will be turkey certainly, fried, not roasted. And seafood dressing and gumbo. Frozen crabmeat will have to do instead of fresh shrimp and hot Italian sausage instead of the kind they used to buy in New Orleans’ 9th Ward.
Still, as any good cook knows, ability reveals itself in adaptation. Anyone can follow a recipe. What sets true talent apart is whether you can make the substitutions and still have it come out in the end.
Move only temporary
As Katrina grew into a monster in the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of thousands of people fled New Orleans to points north. Many had never strayed beyond the city limits. Still others, those who couldn’t easily leave, were later bused or airlifted out when the levees gave way.
Nearly all figured it would be only a matter of time before they would return to reclaim their city.
But then something extraordinary happened. They didn’t go back.
Instead, in recent months a second migration quietly has occurred as families once divided are now regathering in new cities, re-creating the tight family circles that for more than a century were the fabric of New Orleans.
In September, about 400 evacuees arrived at the Lowry campus. The state total was around 1,000. Since then, Denver aid workers say their caseload of hurricane victims has risen to 2,000, and statewide the number is close to 4,000.
When her plane touched down Sept. 4 at Lowry, Sanders was with her husband, her son and youngest daughter. Her brother and his family arrived then too.
Within weeks her other two daughters and their children had found their way to Denver too. They first evacuated to Houston and Marshall, Texas. Then came Sanders’ sister with her husband. They had also evacuated to Texas. So had Sanders’ two neices and their children. They all plan on staying.
And, with any luck, Sanders’ son, Bobby Sanders, will arrive this week with his son from San Antonio.
“We’ve never been separated,” explains 23-year-old JaShawn Sanders. “We’ve never been more than five minutes apart.”
Hughes says he hopes his family can come too.
Last month the University of Denver was awarded a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study how well Denver’s partnership of public and private social service agencies have coped with the influx. It also will study the psychological impact of forced migration on families.
Especially the children.
Sanders doesn’t like to think too much about those five days she and her family were trapped in her sister’s apartment, surviving on military rations and water drained from a water heater.
She and her husband tried to keep their son distracted and reassured. They didn’t want him to see their own panic or the death all around them. He seemed happy enough. Maybe he wasn’t really paying attention.
Yet later when the little boy was asked to draw a picture for a counselor, he drew a building almost underwater with people’s faces peering from third-floor windows. There were helicopters overhead and bodies floating in the water.
He had seen it all.
These days the little boy stands outside his house in the chill of 7 a.m., his breath hanging in the air in tiny puffs. A bus takes him on the long journey into Denver to second grade at a private school housed in the headquarters of the Urban League of Metropolitan Denver. He won’t return home again until 5 p.m.
The school for minority children, age 4 to 14, has seen its enrollment grow by nearly a fifth with the influx of the so-
called Katrina Kids. Seventeen children of evacuated families now attend there on grants from the government.
“Academically they are far behind,” says administrator Vivian Wilson “some don’t even know how to hold their pencils.”
But she has been astonished by the progress some have made already. Byron Jr. came home the other day with an “A” on his spelling test. When he started in the fall he couldn’t read.
The children seem to find comfort from being around others who also had lost their old lives. “School,” Wilson says, is “their haven.”
Odd cache of goods
Sanders and Hughes have been back twice. Once after Katrina, and then again after Rita. Their house flooded both times. Mold had begun to creep up the walls and the wood floors were buckled and bleached white from the standing water. The ceiling had given way.
It’s funny what you take when you walk away for good.
They salvaged two TVs, a stereo system, Arnisha’s high school diploma, the Spiderman cut-outs that hung in their son’s bedroom, a New Orleans Saints pillow and a yellow and purple comforter ensemble complete with window treatments and 12 matching throw pillows so new that were still wrapped in plastic.
On the way out of town they stocked up on some jars of pickled pig’s lips, a jar of Crystal extra hot sauce, and real red beans.
Recently she allowed herself a first taste of Mexican food. The burrito, she says, wasn’t bad at all.
The family groceries are bought with food stamps, their rent is paid by a FEMA voucher. They are still without jobs and still without a car, relying on volunteers to drive them. The nearest bus stop is 15 blocks away.
“We had a car,” says Hughes a former $9-an-hour warehouse worker, his mouth twitching, “it’s now a submarine.”
As the family adjusts to life in Colorado, Hughes has become both a fan of the Broncos and Nuggets – that is unless they play the Saints or the Hornets. Adaptation only goes so far.
Twenty-one months ago, Sanders’ 19-year-old son was shot to death on the streets of New Orleans. Weeks after the storm her brother died of a heart attack she is sure was brought on by the stress of the disaster.
She loved her city but now she’s done.
“I lost a lot in New Orleans. First my son and then my home. There is nothing left for me there,” she says.
“I never wanted to live anywhere else,” agrees her husband, “but maybe it was just time for us to leave.”
Staff writer Jenny Deam can be reached at 303-820-1261 orjdeam@denverpost.com.
