A Stark Landscape of Ruin, Misery : Survivors: A largely poor and working-class neighborhood was among the hardest hit. Residents escaped with their lives and little else.

“Lord Jesus, please save me.” That prayer and some incredible luck helped Mary Marshall when Hurricane Andrew ripped up her street.

The roof of her four-room frame house was gone and so was the aluminum siding. So were the windows and nearly everything else that defines a home. What at first glance seemed to be a porch was the structure’s cement foundation. The house itself had been blown four feet off its footings. And it took an act of faith to accept that the rags and piles of splinters inside once had been furniture.

For the 65-year-old widow, the prayer and luck came at the height of the hurricane. The winds tore off her roof and blew open the refrigerator door in the kitchen where she was trying to hide from the storm. In the split second after the refrigerator door swung open, a large wooden cabinet behind her fell. It stopped four inches short of crushing her when it landed on the refrigerator door top.

“I’m lucky I’m alive,” Marshall said, “but there ain’t nothing left.”

In one way or the other that was how Monday night went at Homestead Court, a two-block-long street in Perrine about 15 miles south of downtown Miami. The people here all lived through five horrifying hours of Hurricane Andrew, but none of them have much left.

It makes no difference which way you look while standing in the middle of the street among fallen power lines, shards of glass and heavy steel pipe that was hurled 300 yards. There is ruin, disaster and human misery.

Perrine is essentially an area of working-class homes, shacks and tiny cement-block structures that would be called huts in the Third World. It stretches on either side of a mile-long stretch of U.S. 1, noted chiefly for dozens of car lots and small strip shopping centers.

Just a block from the highway, Homestead Court and other nearby streets make up one of the poorest sections of the Miami area--a section that was one of the hardest hit by the storm when it blasted directly into the neighborhood Monday night.

Around the corner from Mary Marshall’s shattered home is the site of the United House of God Church Inc. But a placard lying in the street was the only way to tell that a church once stood there. The building was nowhere to be seen, only a two-feet deep heap of water soaked boards, broken glass and waterlogged prayer books remaining.

Across the street is the Morton Elementary School. Its torn roof and broken windows overlook twisted remnants of playground equipment and the remains of modular buildings used as day-care centers for the children of working parents in off-school hours.

“We want it back,” said Jimmy Magee, a 27-year-old construction worker, as he looked at the wreckage. “That (the school) is all we had. It’s as simple as that. What are they going to do with the kids? Leave them at home to be dumb?”

All up and down the street, the people were drying out clothes, sometimes hanging them on collapsed high-tension electric lines, sweeping up glass and trying to make order out of chaos.

To Johnny Fletcher, a two-time all-state high school football star and now a youth center worker, there is little choice but to make do. “I’m fine. I’m alive,” he said, as he pulled shattered glass from the door of his car.

“I remember 1945 (when Miami was hit by a major storm) and this was far worse,” he said. He described how he had cowered first in the bathroom of his 900-square-foot block home and then in a back bedroom.

“I don’t scare easily,” he said, “you can ask anyone around here. But I was frightened, really scared.”

As with nearly all the people on the street, Fletcher “never really thought about going to a shelter. But I’d never go through this again.”

Someone else who admitted fright was 49-year-old Ruthie Barrett, who tried to ride out the storm with her daughter and four grandchildren in her house but ended up during the worst hours of the night in the back of a car.

“We were in a hallway and I was really scared but I thought we’d be OK. The house was only four years old.

“But you know what? The roof just blew off and the walls collapsed. We had to get out. There was nowhere else to go but the car. Thank God we lived through it.”

Barrett was laughing as she told the story, particularly when she described her daughter, “who, you know, weighs 160 pounds, waving in the wind like laundry” as she clung to the car’s door handle.

One of her granddaughters shyly interrupted: “Granma, I was really afraid. I thought we were going to die.” Barrett’s eyes hardened. “She’s right. We almost died. I shouldn’t laugh.”

Isaih King can’t find much joy in Andrew’s aftermath, not even in the fact that he is alive.

“I’m 75 years old,” he said, as he sat in the door-less entrance of what had been a two-story apartment house and liquor store. “Now what am I supposed to do? I don’t think I can rebuild and how can I keep going?”

When it was suggested that possessions could be replaced but that he has his life, King looked askance. “Yes? Well, what’s life worth if you have nothing. Answer me that.”

King, one of only two businessmen at Homestead Court, is not optimistic about receiving any meaningful aid from government agencies.

“Do you think I can get emergency help? I’ve tried to get small business loans, loans from banks. It’s never worked. I couldn’t even get business insurance. I think that for us, black and poor, this won’t even be an emergency.

“People who live in (upscale) Coral Gables will get (downed) trees pulled out of their streets and someone will give them money to fix their roofs. We’re not going to get nothing.”

But that kind of despair was the exception at Homestead Court, even among those who, besides losing their homes, lost their jobs.

“I’ve got nothing, I have to sleep in my truck,” said Edward Ferguson, 51, while pulling rubble away from the buckled door of his hut.