The Nation is At War
Long Beach, Mississippi
April 2007
I look up from the wallboard compound at the sound of yet another train.
Long Beach is one long series of level grade crossings,
too blue collar,
too unimportant,
for overpasses anywhere
across this old L&N main line,
and so freight after freight train rumbles east or west through town with
what seems a continuous series of warning blasts on the air horn,
two longs, a short, a long.
We are never far from the tracks,
at work
or eating, resting, and sleeping — between trains — at the Presbyterian church
that puts up Katrina recovery volunteers.
I count four engines:
that is unusual, and so I continue to watch.
After the locomotives,
instead of automobile carriers
or coal cars
or box cars
or tank cars,
there are tanks,
squat, menacing,
turrets traversed to the rear,
two to a heavy flat car.
It is an equipment train,
and old habits from another place and time take over.
I identify and count the equipment,
note the absence of personnel cars or guards,
register the paint scheme, unit markings,
do the math to figure what type unit,
what echelon,
what likely origin and destination.
The last cars with HUMMVs
bringing up the ash and trash logistics tail of the mechanized unit
roll off into silence.
I return to find a joint compound tool in my hand,
standing in a house in Mississippi
devastated a year and a half ago by a hurricane,
a house, whose owner,
we learn from Betty next door
and the owner’s father from Jackson, who visited to admire our work,
was left by her husband before the storm,
who teaches special ed kids in Gulfport
who has two boys
and no hope of restoring the only house
her older boy knows as home —
no hope at all
with her limited, single-mom means.
The nation is at war,
we are told constantly.
But it isn’t, of course.
We see no sign of the war on terrorism or the war in Iraq
here in the flag-flying, God-fearing, trusting, and believing deep South.
As near as we can tell, except for the Seabees in desert camouflage
we meet in the airport waiting lounge,
Gulfport and Biloxi, like America, are at the mall,
or at the new casinos on the coast,
or going about their mostly friendly daily life,
just at work or play,
but not at war.
The unit that has those Abrams and Bradleys on the equipment train, however,
it is at war,
though now its equipment in desert tan rolls peacefully and unchallenged
on flat cars through Katrina’s battleground.
That unit belongs to our all-volunteer Army, part of
our all-volunteer military locked in a war half a world away
that costs two billion dollars and a dozen or so American lives
a week.
On Katrina’s battleground, where everything between the railroad tracks and the Gulf
a few short blocks from here
was devastated by water and wind
(each house with a family, each family with a story),
here another army of volunteers cooks free meals, houses workers, and tries
to match often modest skills to the enormity of the task of rebuilding.
Here America is also at war, though few notice.
The enemies are the same ones that have always been there,
social injustice,
greed,
unfaithfulness,
the lingering stain of the Peculiar Institution,
ignorance,
intolerance,
and all the other names of just plain Sin.
These enemies hide like those in Iraq and Afghanistan,
blending with the local population.
But unlike those places,
here they also hide along
the invisible demarcation line
within the human heart.
America is at war.
Its volunteer army is easily recognizable here in southern Mississippi.
It is revealed in tapping sounds from inside a house
that most outsiders wouldn’t see
as worth the effort to rebuild (but it has a family and stories!).
It gives itself away in ragged formations of matching T-shirts and
unmatched ages,
seen everywhere along the coast.
America is at war
with despair and hopelessness
from all the decades of injustice
as well as hours of a giant storm.
Its budget is miniscule,
its forces tiny.
But Betty the neighbor captured the essence of this war.
She told us, resting for a moment, and eager after
all the discouraging effort to correct mistakes
(as others will correct ours, no doubt),
eager as we were for being with a person and not just
a house that belonged to a person we never met …
Betty told us her story, repeated so often that the words slid over each other,
smooth as creek water over well-worn pebbles.
Only once did her voice catch.
She talked about volunteers who came to rebuild her and her mother’s ruined houses,
sturdy Amish who worked hard and skillfully,
and (with a twinkle) of one young woman,
nearing Amish spinsterhood,
who found in the mission field an Amish husband.
They shared the joy of their engagement by letter.
There were others. She sees them all the time.
Mostly church folks.
Like us.
“They came to help us,” she said
(and here her voice quavered just once, with wonder and amazement at it all)
“and they keep coming. They just keep coming.”
O God, it is so little that we each accomplish, and
the battle is so large.
Please grant that we shall keep coming.
Hope
Long Beach, Mississippi
April 2007
“Hope is the thing with feathers”
wrote Emily Dickinson from cold, northern Amherst, Massachusetts.
But she would have recognized in southern Mississippi that same hope
“That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all….”
It was a mockingbird, of course,
that most southern of birds,
and it sang in the ravaged hickory tree and the battered oak,
in the magnolia with spotted leaves
that still was pushing forth its blossoms to meet this new year;
it sang flying among them,
in the back yard of the house we were working on,
and across the street where no one was working.
It sang for no reason at all, just for the joy of the song.
And it brought joy to us who heard it,
pausing in the placing of siding,
in the middle of mudding wallboard,
stopping to hear such hope in a place
where there should be precious little of it
by the world’s usual calculation.
All around us in the neighborhood between the railroad tracks
that mostly stopped the storm surge
and the Gulf out of which destruction came,
all around us nature soundlessly cried out a song of hope.
The spiderwort bloomed bluely
along every twisted fence line
and in our house’s ruined back yard with its debris of storm and mucking out.
In every lot, vacant, or doomed to be,
were pink oxalis, blue flag, red and yellow blanketflower,
blooming for all they were worth.
By houses abandoned or reclaimed
(about in equal number in the blue collar neighborhood where we were working)
azaleas and camellias were at their peak, or shedding bright petals
as if strewing a path for brides to process.
Like the mockingbird’s song,
admission to this theater of hope was free.
All it took was a willing ear or eye.
Miz Francis delivered such a message.
We had worked on her house exactly a year ago,
worked hard for most of the week and then had left, discouraged
that so much still needed to be done.
We had added only a few lines to what looked like a very long essay.
But when we walked three blocks down 9th Street
from where we were even more discouraged this year,
there was her house
with no FEMA trailer parked outside, looking neat and finished.
And so it was.
Dirty and tired, we knocked and she answered, glad to see us again,
the same indomitable octogenarian
who had gone to work in the Pascagoula shipyards
when her husband went off to World War II,
and who went to Lowe’s for us and brought us coffee and donuts,
and was not about to let a little thing
like her house being washed off its foundation and flooded
stop her.
Francis showed us through her house, finished, furnished, and now right well lived-in.
Showed us with pride, and hope fulfilled.
It can be done.
One volunteer group after another added their bit.
“I planted, Apollos watered, but God made it grow.”
The thing with feathers should have tipped me off.
It sang as we should work.
It did not debate the merit of rebuilding in a flood zone,
or of the morality of asking others to help pay for one’s own improvidence
or hard luck,
or anything else at all.
It sang because that was what it was made to do,
to the glory of God, and in the enjoyment of God forever.
So should we work and serve.
Miss Leona
Long Beach, Mississippi
April 2007
It really was a beautiful house, you could tell from the pictures.
But there was no fortuitous beachward house
or bamboo thicket
or whatever stemmed the flood
to save other houses,
and so it took Katrina head on and was washed off its foundation,
the welcoming porch ruined,
the Victorian trim and solid members not even attractive for salvage
because there was so much wreckage around
no one was thinking about saving pieces of houses.
And so she commended the house to God.
God had given it to her sixty-one years earlier,
by the kindness of small town people
and the generosity of a sister
when her and her husband’s modest means would not have been able to buy it.
She had raised her children in that house
where she could watch them play in the school yard across the street,
and from which she could walk to church a block towards the Gulf.
She survived the hurricane of ’47, and Camille in ’69 in that house.
And now it was gone.
There is a picture of her in several national magazines,
sitting in a chair in the ruins of that house.
She said that when you sit down, your head goes down,
and that was what the photographer wanted,
her head down, as if discouraged.
But she wanted to be remembered with her head up.
And, although she didn’t say it, smiling. Which she did a lot.
Like Job, she honored and trusted God
in the taking away as well as in the giving.
And she could hold her head up for that.
And smile.
She lives comfortably in the small FEMA trailer,
expecting to move to a house a little further inland
because she is not sure she can build in the same place.
Something about the city wanting high rises, or casinos.
Besides, her church moved.
(Its steeple lies on its side, four legs like a dead animal stuck in sand and sky.)
“I lost my husband (of sixty-plus years) in 04,
my house (of 61 years) in 05,
and my church (of a lifetime) in 06,
and that was the hardest.”
She says it without bitterness.
And twinkles the next minute
when reminded that Baptists of all people should not move away from the beach
in fear of total immersion.
She is warm, and welcoming, and alive,
holding on to friends and family
and the legions who have met her during Katrina relief work
and who write.
“God knows when I need encouragement.
One day I was feeling down because of something
and I got three letters from people who never met each other
and couldn’t have gotten together to write me.
The Lord knew I needed those letters, and I got through that day.”
She makes connections.
She remembers the name of the cabins
where I stayed with my best friend’s family
every summer in the 40’s and early 50’s —
Mitchell’s Court, gone with Camille in ’69.
Next day she found out that three of the buildings
still existed, carted off to be rentals on other property
— away from the beach.
She is amazing, more alive than people half her age and twice as safe and secure.
Outside her FEMA trailer in the gathering dark
the heavy limbs of live oaks
that could not break the storm surge and save the house,
these great sinews reach towards one another
over the vacant house site
where the bulldozers and front loaders had come.
The oak limbs strain towards one another, almost touching,
and I thought about
the Ark of the Covenant,
the wings of the golden seraphim touching over the mercy seat
where Almighty God was enthroned on the praises of Israel.
Here in Long Beach, Mississippi,
after life and death and Katrina have done their worst,
here underneath the almost touching oak limbs,
Almighty God sits enthroned on the faith of Miss Leona.
