Zane and the Hurricane: A Story of Katrina

  “He’s a cool dude.”

  “He’s a kind and lovely man, is what he is. But you’re right, he also happens to be a cool dude. Always was.”

  There’s something about Belinda that makes it easy to ask stuff, because the question pops out of my mouth before I have a chance to think about it.

  “You said something about knowing my father?”

  She shrugs and says, “I knew him slightly. We lived in the same neighborhood and went to the same schools, but Gerald was a year older than me. The Dupree in my class was the young man who would have been your uncle James, had he lived. That was a terrible tragedy, what happened.”

  For my whole life I’ve been telling myself it doesn’t matter who my father was, or why he did the things he did, because he was gone before I was born. But it does matter, and I guess I always knew that, way down deep.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  She looks surprised. “You don’t know?”

  “My dad never told my mother. She thought he was from Biloxi. And Grammy was going to tell me but didn’t have the chance.”

  Belinda thinks about it. “Maybe we should wait on Miss Trissy. Gerald was her grandson, raised like her own son.”

  “He was my father.”

  “Good point,” she says. “Everybody in the neighborhood knows the story. Why should you be the only one who doesn’t? It’s not right to keep you in the dark, after what you’ve been through. Trudell told me as much. So. Are you ready? Here are the facts as I know them.”

  Belinda explains that it was an accident. An awful accident. My uncle James found a paper bag on the playground and inside the paper bag was a gun. Stashed there by a drug dealer, that’s what everybody assumed. Belinda doesn’t know all the details, but James and Gerald shared everything, and James showed off the gun to his big brother, fooling around.

  Gerald tried to take it away and the gun went off.

  “Those two loved each other,” she says, “so everybody understood it was an accident, a terrible accident. There was never any question of Gerald being guilty of a crime.”

  “If it was an accident why did my father run away?”

  Belinda sighs. “I don’t know exactly, but it had to do with Miss Trissy. She was broke up bad, you understand, having worked so hard to raise those boys, and I expect Gerald thought she blamed him for what happened. For sure he blamed himself. Must be he felt he had to go somewhere and start over. Which apparently he did, because here you are, with the same eyes and the same smile, and tall for your age like he was.”

  “So my father accidently killed his brother and then an accident killed him? That stinks.”

  She nods. “Yes it does. But tragic accidents do happen in this world, all the time. We prefer to think they happen to someone else, but sometimes they happen to us, or to someone we love.”

  “I hate accidents.”

  “Understood. You have reason to, more than most. I’m only speculating about your father’s motivations, but I do know one thing. You, young man, are no accident. You’re exactly who he would have wanted you to be. Now get some sleep. Tomorrow is a brand new day.”

  There’s no way I can sleep, not with so much to think about, but I must have passed out from sheer exhaustion, or maybe relief, because the next thing I know Bandy the Wonder Dog is licking me awake and my mother is coming through the door with a cry of joy. She’s driven night and day all the way from New Hampshire to find her foolish son that lost himself in a hurricane, and take him home.

  When I look back on it, the only thing I’d change about what happened is this: I wouldn’t call the place Smellyville. That was childish, and insulting to all the people who live in New Orleans. Or used to live in New Orleans. So much was washed away in the flood, so many homes and lives, that a hundred thousand people haven’t been able to return. One of them is my great-grandmother, Beatrice Jackson, Miss Trissy. She lives with us now, up here in New Hampshire, and has joined a church and sings in the choir. They wrote about her in the paper, about her amazing voice, and the amazing story of her life and like that. There aren’t many black people living in this area but Grammy seems to have found them all, and me and Mom are getting to know them, too, which is really great.

  As for Malvina, she came to visit this past summer, and that was cool once she got used to it. I talk to her almost every day on the phone and she’s doing pretty good, all things considered, and still cracking jokes. The jokes are getting better, too. She lives with Belinda, who has been appointed her legal guardian because her mother came out of rehab and then had to go back, which is sad. Malvina says she doesn’t hate her mom, just the opposite, she feels sorry for her and hopes she’ll someday get free of the drugs. There’s always hope, and in the meantime Malvina is really serious about wanting to have a career in comedy. You wouldn’t think that tragedy can be turned into comedy but it can. That’s the whole point. Like Malvina says, she has a lot of material. Dead father, druggy mother, what a hoot.

  A lot of people wouldn’t get it, but I do.

  Mr. Tru has been staying with Belinda, too, until his new place is built, in a block of new homes reserved for local musicians, but a lot of the time he’s on the road with one band or another, some of them famous like Kermit Ruffins and Harry Connick, Jr., and like that. His friends sponsored this fundraiser in the French Quarter to help him get some new brass and so much got donated that he gave away instruments to all kinds of other musicians, which was a beautiful thing. He and Malvina are still tight. I’m sure they always will be, because he saved her life by risking his, and she saved his by risking hers.

  You can’t get tighter than that.

  In case you’re wondering, Bandit made a full recovery. We got him this prosthetic paw that slips over his wounded leg and he can run full blast on all four legs and do everything he could do from before, like chase squirrels. Not that he’s ever caught one. Mom says if he ever does he’ll make friends with it, and that’s probably true.

  Oh yeah. Dylan Toomey. This is sad, I guess, but about a month after the storm he was killed by one of the underage kids who worked for him selling drugs. It’s awful and all, but Grammy said it best when she heard the news. She said, “The wages of sin is when people do unta you what ya did unta them.”

  Amen to that.

  To be honest there’s a lot I don’t understand about what happened after the storm, and why some people were so good and full of love and others so mean and hateful. But this much I do know: That day on the bridge I was a proud African American. I was a white kid from New Hampshire. I was my mother’s baby. I was my father’s son.

  I was the one and only Zane Dupree.

  Tuesday, August 23

  Meteorologists note that a tropical depression has formed over the Bahamas, 230 miles east of Miami.

  Wednesday, August 24

  Overnight the tropical depression strengthens into Tropical Storm Katrina.

  Thursday, August 25

  Katrina makes landfall in Florida as a Category 1 hurricane, with winds of 75 miles per hour.

  Friday, August 26

  Hurricane Katrina crosses Florida into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Saturday, August 27

  Katrina strengthens into a Category 3 hurricane, with winds of 125 miles per hour. Forecasters warn that it has a 45 percent chance of striking New Orleans directly. Voluntary evacuation of the city is ordered.

  Sunday, August 28

  7:00 a.m.

  Overnight, Katrina strengthens to a Category 5 hurricane, with winds of 175 miles per hour.

  9:30 a.m.

  A mandatory evacuation of New Orleans is ordered. Those who can, leave.

  Monday, August 29

  5:10 a.m.

  Katrina makes landfall fifty miles south of New Orleans, with winds of 125 miles per hour.

  6:50 a.m.

  The system of levees that protect New Orleans from storm surges are breached, swept away like sand castles at the beach. The pump
s fail. The Great Flood begins.

  New Orleans was colonized first by French trappers and traders, who made encampments among the villages of Native Americans in the area. It was then occupied by the Spanish and later reoccupied by the French before being sold to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Over the centuries it has absorbed waves of immigrants of almost every language and ethnicity, including French, Spanish, African, Native American, Haitian, Latin American, Cuban, Italian, German, Jewish, and Asian.

  The word Creole originally referred to descendants of the French and Spanish settlers. It can also refer to people of mixed race whose ancestors were raised in the complex, racially divided culture of New Orleans.

  The people referred to as Cajun are descendants of French Canadians who were exiled from Canada beginning in 1755. They speak their own distinct form of the French language.

  Natives of New Orleans have a variety of ways of pronouncing the city’s name, among them: New OR-luns, New AW-luns, New AW-lee-uns.

  The greater New Orleans region is divided into ten parishes. Parishes are the equivalent of counties.

  New Orleans is surrounded by water, with Lake Pontchartrain to the north, Lake Borgne to the east, and the Mississippi River lapping around it from the west and south and east.

  The word hurricane derives from Hurican, the god of evil of the Carib tribe.

  A levee is a deep-sloping embankment of earth and rocks intended to protect an area from floods and storm surges. In the Netherlands similar structures are called dykes. There are sometimes walkways or paths along the top of earthen levees. There are levee systems in many areas along the lower length of the Mississippi River.

  Scientists and engineers had warned for years that the system of levees and floodwalls protecting New Orleans suffered from flawed designs and lack of maintenance, and would likely fail if the city were struck by a major hurricane.

  The flood that resulted from the levee and floodwall failure during Hurricane Katrina destroyed or damaged more than one hundred thousand homes.

  Damage from the storm and flood was in excess of eighty billion dollars.

  Nearly two thousand people were killed, many of them trapped in their homes as the floodwaters surged. At least a thousand others may have died from aftereffects of the storm. An unknown number remain missing. Some bodies have not yet been identified.

  The Superdome was designated as a “shelter of last resort.” City officials were quoted as saying they “didn’t want to make it too comfortable” because that would encourage people to stay behind rather than evacuate, which was safer. As a result there was not enough food, water, supplies, or emergency medical care for those who sought refuge during and after the storm.

  The American Red Cross opened and staffed more than a thousand shelters throughout the affected regions of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. However, no shelters were opened in the city of New Orleans in the days immediately following Katrina because the agency did not want to put its workers in harm’s way, according to a Red Cross spokesperson. There was also a concern by local officials that a Red Cross presence would encourage newly homeless residents to stay in the area and complicate the recovery efforts.

  In contrast, it is the stated business of the United States Coast Guard to go in harm’s way. In the hours and days following the flood the USCG saved 24,135 people from imminent danger by helicopter rescue and by boat, and evacuated 9,409 patients from inundated hospitals. It is indisputable that, were it not for their skill and courage, the death toll would have been much, much higher.

  Before Katrina, 453,728 people lived in the city of New Orleans. A year later the population had declined by more than two hundred thousand, most of whom left the city because homes or jobs (or both) had been destroyed. According to the Times-Picayune it was the biggest mass migration in modern American history.

  At one point eighty percent of New Orleans was underwater. The depth exceeded twenty feet in some places. In Biloxi, Mississippi, the tidal surge exceeded thirty feet, killing more than two hundred people and sweeping away thousands of homes.

  More than a million Gulf Coast residents were displaced by Katrina. About half were able to return home within a week or two. The other half remained in shelters or temporary housing (motel or hotel rooms) for months.

  New Orleans is the busiest port in the United States, with more than six thousand ships and barges passing in and out of the Mississippi River every year. Ships enter the river ninety-five miles south of the city.

  As a hurricane, Katrina existed for only 168 hours, start to finish, but a year later more than one hundred thousand displaced people were still living in toxic trailers supplied by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

  Deputies Confront Evacuees at Crescent City Connection Bridge

  When pedestrians fleeing floodwaters and the chaos of the Superdome attempted to cross the river out of New Orleans, they were stopped from entering the West Bank town of Gretna, and nearby Algiers, by a blockade of police who repeatedly fired shotguns over their heads. Most of those stopped at the bridge were people of color; most of the police were white. The Gretna police chief was quoted as saying, “If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged.”

  Incident at Danziger Bridge

  Six days after Katrina, New Orleans police opened fire on a group of unarmed residents attempting to cross Danziger Bridge to seek food and shelter. Four were wounded. Two others were killed: James Brissette, seventeen, and Ronald Madison, forty, a developmentally disabled man who was shot in the back.

  Rumors of Chaos

  After Katrina, wildly exaggerated rumors of gangs of young black men looting and murdering swept through New Orleans, sometimes repeated by city officials, police, and the media. Armed white militias patrolled white neighborhoods, posting signs that warned We Shoot Looters. The New York Times quotes John Penny, professor of Criminal Justice at Southern University, as saying, “The environment that was produced by the storm brought out what was dormant in people here — the anger and the contempt they felt against African Americans in the community. We might not ever know how many people were shot, killed, or whose bodies will never be found.”

  Although this is a fictional account, everything that happens to the characters in Zane and the Hurricane reflects real events and situations that affected real people in the days during and after Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. It is one small story, seen through one young man’s eyes, and therefore limited to what he directly experienced. It is not the whole story of Katrina — not by a long shot.

  I wish to thank all the survivors who took the trouble to record their experiences in many formats and made the information freely available to anyone with Internet access. Those who wish to know more about Katrina are urged to read The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley and Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne. Their vivid depictions of events helped me get the facts straight, as did many articles in the Times-Picayune, the city’s fabulously well-written newspaper. And if my facts aren’t straight, the fault is entirely my own.

  Worthy documentaries include Spike Lee’s intriguing When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and Trouble the Water by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin. Both films contain astonishing footage of the actual storm.

  * * *

  Those who wish to know more about incidents like those that took place at the Danziger and Crescent City Connection Bridges are encouraged to enter the phrase “rumors of looters New Orleans Katrina” into a search engine and see what pops up.

  My late wife, Lynn Harnett, read early drafts of Zane and the Hurricane and her insights and enthusiasm for the idea were critical to the completion of the story. The comments and suggestions of Bonnie Verburg, my longtime editor, and Dominick Abel, my longtime literary agent, were invaluable. Again, a
ny errors, omissions, or failures are my bad, not theirs.

  New Orleans residents Bambi R. Hall and CDR Raymond C. Brown, USCG (Ret.) helped introduce an old New Hampshire boy to the city and generously shared stories about the flood and the aftermath. Thank you.

  Zane and the Hurricane focuses on one young man’s experience in New Orleans, but Katrina’s damage was not restricted to that city. Much of the Gulf Coast was devastated. Whole towns and villages were swept into the sea. No doubt there are many astonishing stories of loss and survival yet to be told, by someone other than me.

  Possibly you.

  — Rodman Philbrick

  RODMAN PHILBRICK is the award-winning author of The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg, a 2010 Newbery Honor Book, an ALA Notable Book, and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, among its many citations. His first novel for young readers, Freak the Mighty, has become an inter-national classic with close to three million copies in print. A Twentieth Anniversary edition was published in 2013, which includes letters from readers, essays about writing, and comments about bullies and bullying.

  A native of the New Hampshire coast, Philbrick wrote his first novel when he was sixteen, and he wrote eight more books before he received his first publishing contract at the age of twenty-eight. During his early years as a writer, he supported himself as a boat builder, a roofer, and a longshoreman. His popular, highly acclaimed children’s novels include The Young Man and the Sea; The Last Book in the Universe; The Fire Pony; REM World; and a sequel to Freak the Mighty entitled Max the Mighty.

  Philbrick divides his time between Kittery, Maine, and the Florida Keys. You can visit him on his website: www.RodmanPhilbrick.com.

  THE BLUE SKY PRESS