Darlene Fuqua’s trailer has seen better days.
The white, metal frame is rusting, the kitchen sink is broken and there is a bucket of murky water in the bathroom in case the tub stops draining again.
But she hasn’t complained.
“I don’t want to say anything because I’m afraid they’ll tell me I have to get out and then I’ll have nowhere to go,” she told me a few weeks ago as we sat on the scruffy red couch she keeps in the tiny space that serves as her kitchen, bedroom and den.
Fuqua has lived in a cramped trailer — provided to her by the Federal Emergency Management Agency — for the better part of three years, ever since Hurricane Katrina flooded her house near New Orleans in August 2005.
The trailer is parked just outside that house, which has sat dormant ever since the storm. That is, until June of this year, when it became the target of a reconstruction project by a local nonprofit group. Fast-forward a few months and that is how I ended up in New Orleans, sitting in a FEMA trailer and listening to someone explain to me what it means to lose everything.
I went there because Katrina is an event that will always be formative to me. I was 16 when it happened, and I had never seen anything like it — an entire American city submerged. I didn’t know people could die in droves in a natural disaster in this country in the 21st century. Only being there did I see at last the way the city dips like a bowl, how it is possible in some places to look out and see the waterline at eye level — and to imagine whole neighborhoods being swept suddenly under.
On my first day in the city, an Americorps volunteer drove us around the city. As our van jostled along on a bridge over the Mississippi River, she pointed out one of the infamous levees. My eyes followed the direction of her hand to a long strip of concrete running along the river’s edge. I was stunned — I don’t know what I imagined a levee to look like, but it was something grander than this. In the face of all it has come to signify, the levee itself looked feeble, insignificant, not like a protector or a killer or the root of an American tragedy.
I’m not a policymaker or a disaster relief expert — I don’t even have a college degree. So I don’t pretend to know what the government should have done when Hurricane Katrina hit. But seeing that levee and the destroyed houses that still sit nearby, I knew that something should have been different — for the country, for the city, for Darlene. She should not have spent the last three years living in a trailer the size of my dorm room with broken drains and a perpetually clogged toilet while her house sat fermenting right outside. She should not have broken seven ribs when she tried to clean out the attic herself and fell through the floorboards. And she should not have been afraid to ask for help with any of these things in fear that she would lose it all once again.
On the last day we were in town, I stood with Darlene in her trailer and watched a gray haze of clouds gather in the distance. My classmates and I were getting ready to leave and Darlene said she was sad to see us leave. Every day volunteers come brings her closer to going home, she told me as we listened to the far-off rumble of thunder. When the first drops spattered against the metal shell of the trailer, she stepped back inside.
“Rain still gets to me sometimes,” she said.
Ryan Brown grew up in Colorado and is a sophomore at Duke University in Durham, N.C., where she is a features writer for the student newspaper and co-editor of the undergraduate literary magazine.
