When Hurricane Katrina hit, I was 21 years old. I remember having two feelings about it through the drunken haze of being 21, neither of them good:
- Fear – aren’t most of the people down there poor and/or black? This is going to be nightmarish; no one cares about them.
- Confusion – I get that they have nowhere to go and no resources, but I don’t get it. Why not just get up and at least try to walk away?
As an older person, I get the freeze aspect of Fight-Flight-Freeze so much more than I did. Maybe freeze is all that’s left when fight-energy is at a low and you never learned to flee in the first place. I get disbelief, at both the notion that there’s any way to help yourself and that there’s any purpose in trying if it means the abandonment of the results of the efforts you, exhausted, have already made, and if it requires you to get even more exhausted for unpredictable, but probably – you’re suspicious — minor, results.
I can’t fully shake the confusion, though. It’s not that so many people died and so many people suffered in place in the aftermath and shamble of a government response, and that I don’t like to think anyone in my clan would have stayed and died (I can guess I’m probably kidding myself about that.) It’s not that the notion of “this is my home; where I’m from” feels otherworldly to me as I have no such home place. I’m confused that, in the hellscape and media storm that followed, there wasn’t some exposé on a family that said “fuck it; we’re leaving” and walked themselves to New York City to start again.
I don’t personally know anyone who endured Katrina, nor have I been clued into the tale of someone who walked north in that fashion. If they exist, they should be famous. I do, however, know the tale of a woman who tried to do similar. She’s one of my personal heroes, and all her children are dead.
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None of my closest brothers share my DNA, but, nonetheless, these are the people who keep me, who picked up my sobbing carcass after suicide attempts, who continue to show up no matter the celebratory or violent nature of the occasion, who grow such that they are of service no matter the time or need.
Of my brothers who show up, I’ve known Charles the longest. We met through a chain-link fence when I was three years old to his two and we became instant friends, playing with each other by the magical means organically mastered by children, toyless and speaking different languages but unphased by it. His family is all from Ecuador, though he was born in the states, and, like good immigrants, they helped family members legally immigrate whenever they could.
His aunt, Julia, moved to the states when I was twelve, bringing her four sons and abusive husband with her, on the normal promise that America offered a better life. For Charles and his family, this had been partially true – economic growth and well-being were easier to manifest here, labor was less arduous, education and health systems were stronger, but Charles grew up in my hometown next to me and so hasn’t been a child since he, at 8 and under threat of an ass-beating, was told to take the pickup truck full of trash to the dump by himself, and picked me up on the way. America meant there was a truck, and several houses to rent out and care for, but it also meant my hometown and all the street war, drugs, mourning, and hopelessness native to it.
When his cousins arrived, two of them were, more or less, the same age as us. They were, in practice, absolutely not. The eldest, only a year or so younger than Charles, was an actual boy – his eyes held light and hope; he giggled though he was routinely silent and shy; his main priorities were school, his siblings, church, play. His siblings were younger still, born of Andean peace and open skies; they followed their mother around like chicks and a hen. Charles and I found them to be beautiful and talked about – still talk about – them in those terms, especially the youngest – two and, later, three years old – who had a smile worth protecting all its own. Our debate on whether to bring his cousins into our sordid world or not was a short one, minutes maybe. We would not; we’d protect their childhood with everything we had.
The tale of what happened is more complex than the news got ahold of, due, in part to the toughness and stiff upper lips that brown communities hold as a prime directive, due in part also to the domestic abuse underneath it, debates over whether or not to seek revenge, and enduring distrust of the government and media. Roughly, here’s what happened:
- Julia moves to the states with her kids and husband. Enrolls them in school. Lives in half of a duplex that Charles’ family owns, the house right next to mine where Charles lived before moving a few blocks down the street.
- Work is hard to come by, as it always is in New England, but it doesn’t really matter since she can live in that house for free and her family is all over the neighborhood, including me. Work is acquired though it isn’t much.
- The city goes on being what it is, a steadily deteriorating wasteland of feral dogs, equally feral humans, poverty, murder.
- Her husband is abusive and drunk and insane. Half the neighborhood doesn’t know he exists and of the other half, only a couple of us saw the abuse signs. He leaves America and goes back to Ecuador leaving some additional poverty burden on Julia.
- I think she gets involved with the man in the other half of the duplex. I am not the only one who thinks this, but I am also not equipped to call it true. I believe he is also abusive toward her as I saw him abuse other women over the course of my life.
- There are concerns the school is going to send social workers to the house and take her kids away, deport them all, something negative and unfounded and maybe probable depending on the party in political office at the time.
- Eighteen months after she left Ecuador for a new start, Julia quits her job, packs up lightly, gets her kids behind her, and flees, telling no one. First to a homeless shelter, and then, in the night, simply away.
- It ends horrifically.
Nobody really knows where she was going, and, nobody really knows why she left, though I have my theory and nobody but her could convince me otherwise. What we do know is that, in rural Ecuador where the road infrastructure is shit and the terrain is mountainous, train tracks make for efficient foot travel. In New England, on the Metro-North line, this is probably still true, but the trains are much more frequent, and they’re much faster.
She walked a few miles with her tiny ones in tow. A passenger train came. Authorities say evidence shows she tried to save them at the last minute. The local fire chief is quoted as saying “body parts were spread all over the place.” The 6-year-old wasn’t immediately killed but the train hacked off his legs, shattered his pelvis, and left a significant portion of his brain exposed to the air. The hospitals tried to save him, but they failed. Everyone else was shattered by the impact.
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Pretty much everyone who knows this story thinks it’s a grand tragedy. I agree. It’s very hard not to feel that the train-based decimation of a sweet, hardworking woman and her bright-eyed, well-behaved brood is a tragedy. I think, though, my reasons for feeling it’s a tragedy to the degree that I do, the reasons I think about it nearly every day, may be unique to me and, maybe, Charles.
My city was a nightmare. We hid under the kitchen table nightly so as not to catch a stray bullet as the Red Tops and Green Tops – so named for the colored plastic caps on the crack vials they sold – warred for distribution territory, until we were old enough to not give a damn if we died — at seven or eight. We shed our own blood in the streets in endeavors economically adjacent to drugs and the wars they caused, and in daily bouts of self-defense and offense calculated to form defensive reputations, growing up before anyone ought to and accumulating the scars to prove it. I repeat that feral dogs literally roamed our streets and would functionally mug you for your food if you were a little unlucky, and maim you if you were very much so. I was almost kidnapped three times. Nearly every woman or girl I ever met before college has some measure of sexual assault and domestic violence in their background. Similarly, all of our fathers were either gone or, due to their role as torturers of our moms or us, we wished they were.
The police were a corrupt, ultraviolent gang themselves, and my father was a member. We were afraid to cross the street in front of their Crown Victorias. They had reputations that involved bringing willful people to the abandoned factories that dotted the town and beating them until they were mostly dead, and, in many cases, forever unable to walk correctly or articulate full thoughts. My dad and his cop friends proudly told tales of making inmates drink their own feces, and collected tributes from released convicts in exchange for peace. They never seemed to be there to protect anyone when they ought to have been, but were always there to abuse us when we weren’t doing anything wrong at the time.
Our parents were all broken, stuck, and useless. My mom, for example, had been tortured, raped, and abused for years before I was born, and for all the years after, until I became a physical threat to the old man. The one time she called the police on him after he’d beaten her bloody, they came over, recognized him as one of theirs, said “way to keep the little lady in line,” and left. He beat her badly enough again that she nearly died. Her emotions were, in the way that is common of trauma victims, sharded off, unavailable to anyone including her kids, and focused on only her survival. She simply forgot me in the fog.
Her tale is not an isolated one. Scores of women, beaten and raped, roamed our city, surviving in the ways they knew how, watching their shit husbands and lovers murdered, jailed, overdosing, leaving. They raised daughters to be beaten and raped, often by stepdads their mothers were seduced by while seeking new beginnings, or uncles, or their biological dads. They raised sons to fight, die, steal, or rape.
Not all the men in my city were monsters. It’s safe to say they were all touched by monstrosity though. Watching your brother get his brains blown out may not cause you to beat your wife, though it may, but it is very likely to cause you to emotionally distance yourself from the needs of your family such that your son winds up battling for livelihood in the street and you’re ignorant that your wife is being coercion-raped by her boss. You also can’t be a monster if you’re dead, and men died for very dumb reasons in my town.
For example, there was an argument between two neighbors over the dimensions of a fence. One of the neighbors shot the unarmed other in the abdomen. He then went into the house, retrieved a machete, and just about took the already shot and defeated man’s head off with it. A city where that sort of thing is a reality, where all authority and social improvement work has turned away from caring, where you’re under threat of nightly gunfire and your random death, or the suspicion the cops will erase you for a laugh, is the type of place the term “shell shock” would have been used to describe if anybody ever gave a damn about describing the sort of place where we were from in empathetic terms.
The result of this absentee, self-focused, or fully-deceased parenting was droves of kids attempting to raise themselves to adulthood in the worst possible nest. We failed at it more than we succeeded. We buried our brothers, held our sisters after their rapes, and sought revenge for both, perpetuating the cycles. We were born of a loud, dark city, and we made it louder and darker in turn.
We didn’t choose to begin this way and, as a somehow survived adult, I wonder daily if I had a choice but to participate, if I even had the requisite knowledge to live another way, how I could have stopped myself from being used and consumed by adults that had themselves already been used to depletion. If I had not become what I became, would any of us have survived at all?
Survived or not, innocent or not, understood and forgiven, now, or not, we were lambs offered up as sacrifices to the god of purposeless voids.
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It’s my view that this is what Julia was walking away from. She moved from the poor but beautiful and peaceful Andes to America for a better life. She found one of the same ass-kickings in both places, and found here a world of horror, new threats with no guides, and sacrificed children. This revelation must have looked like an elder god – disinterested at best and, at worst, fully willing to first transform your kids into the cancer of its own image, grow them fat enough on the meat of each other’s bodies and, then, when they are fully changed from humanity and tart with mold, devour them unceremoniously.
Julia is my hero because she was the only sane and actual adult in our collective childhood. She did what I believe any adult with any focus on her children, heart, or remaining courage would do when you see that darkness set to consume your children, break your will and ability to see to them, or tear them from you in such an environment.
She found a straight path one could walk and she tried to walk them all away.
She was headed nowhere as she had nowhere to head. She’d have found another shelter to spend a night. It’s unlikely she would have been lucky enough to find someone nice to help her, because the world outside my city is also self-absorbed, and not particularly nice. She would have been preyed upon by someone else, or, if lucky, found work and poverty and, a little starving, some peace and education for her babies. She’d have found those things except for she found what attempted escapees from concentration camps tend to find first – death.
The only adult in the room killed all her kids. It wasn’t her intention. She was right to do it.
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I suppose the way to conclude this is to tell you why I think you ought to give a shit about Katrina’s victims, a bunch of kids, now either dead or adults, whose moral nature even they can’t suss out, or about some immigrant woman and her kids that made a poor choice regarding how to walk away.
I have no interest in that. It’s my sincere hope that you care about that stuff because human suffering is worth caring about, and I’m in no way of the mind that I can get you to care about it if you don’t, and I’m certainly of no mind that I should ask you to care about me as a child, both because that kid died in those streets a long time ago, over and over, and because I’m not even sure how to love him myself.
My interest is in this: daily I see some social media post or bitter news article, overhear some conversation on the street or in a comments section, about who is right about what bit of suffering or horror. We are engaged, as a nation and globe, in the time-honored tradition of being monkeys killing other monkeys and deciding which flags, banners, ideologies under which we ought to do this. We all have our personal reasons, internal trauma and pain like mine and so many others, sincere beliefs about the nature of things and prophecies or hopes for our fates, a desire for fairness that causes us to expect others to endure the suffering we endured since we had to endure it, heavy opinion about our ties to a bit of land, dire need to believe in the value of the things we got exhausted and hurt to acquire or create, hopelessness, distrust…
We are in so many ways the “adults” in my town. We are so mired in our own perceived self-worth or lack thereof, our own pain, our own sharded off and discarded emotions, the medications we use to cope with that decimated self, the ideologies that promise us that if we just stay put and keep this course all will be as it should be in this life or the next that we are ignoring the fates of our children; we are leaving them to the storm. We are watching our world get sick and kill us off. We’re forgetting to nurture whatever honor, vitality, or good intentions any of the systems we built ever had.
I get the freeze aspect of Fight-Flight-Freeze so much. Maybe freeze is all that’s left when fight-energy is at a low and you never learned to flee in the first place. I get disbelief, at both the notion that there’s any way to help yourself and that there’s any purpose in trying if it means the abandonment of the results of the efforts you, exhausted, have already made, and if it requires you to get even more exhausted for unpredictable, but probably – you’re suspicious — minor, results.
I want to propose to you something else altogether.
I want to propose we follow Julia, the prophet.
Let’s pack up our kids and whatever we can carry, find some sign of a clearing or path, and walk away.
Let’s transcend this monkey shit.
We might not make it. Our body parts and schoolbooks may be found in the foxglove in the border. We would have tried to save our children though, and, successful or not, that’s what the adult in the room is supposed to do.
R.I.P Julia, Carlos, Jose, Angel, Pedro, everyone killed by Katrina, and everyone killed by a city like mine. I love you.
The Drowned Rat Gospel Choir 