Displaced, but Not Disheartened
As she walks through the bungalow she now calls home, Dawn Evans casts grateful eyes over the polished dining room table and the simple but stylish drapes hanging at the windows. Her eldest son, Sean, 10, barrels through, bike helmet still strapped to his head. In the backyard, 7-year-old daughter Ashlyn’s pink-and-white two-wheeler sits upside down, one training wheel on, one off. Her youngest, 4-year-old Kannin, wanders by wide-eyed, offering up his juice box so his mother can insert the straw.
When Father Robert Kearns of St. Brigid Catholic Church in South Los Angeles walked her through the house two months ago, he warned her she might not want it. The house needed everything -- paint, carpeting, windows, blinds for the windows.
But Evans, 31, needed everything too -- a place a single mother and three children could call theirs, a place where they could pause an odyssey that began after midnight the day before Hurricane Katrina tore up the Gulf Coast.
Evans packed a few days’ worth of clothes, a few important documents and her children. They piled into a friend’s SUV at 1 a.m. that Sunday in the Gentilly suburb of New Orleans, and headed for Texas.
St. Brigid Catholic Church, with its mostly black and Hispanic congregation, was thick with ties to the Bayou State. The pastor was out of town when the hurricane hit, but he called the rectory right away -- put something in the bulletin asking for suggestions on what the church could do.
By the middle of September, the parish decided to renovate the little bungalow it owned behind the church parking lot on Western Avenue and offer it to a hurricane survivor -- preferably a family with ties to the parish.
St. Brigid parishioners donated goods, money and hours of labor to turn the bungalow into a cozy home. Seven weeks, it took. New appliances and repainted cabinets for the kitchen. Mint green paint and pink rugs in the rear bedroom, for Ashlyn. A bunk bed in the side bedroom, for the boys. A gleaming washer and dryer stand in the small laundry room at the back of the house. And out the back door, there was a tree full of fat lemons.
Parishioners from Our Lady Queen of Angels in Newport Beach took on the bathroom, cleaning and then re-grouting pale yellow and black wall tile that had been unrecognizable under the grime. “When I saw what they had done, I cried. I cried the whole day walking through the house,” Evans says.
“We did a miracle in seven weeks,” says Cheryl Pyles, the parish manager.
Evans moved in Nov. 5. “We had a house blessing and that was the day we gave her the keys to the house.”
“It was really like ‘Extreme Makeover,’ ” Evans says. “When I came in and saw what they did, I was amazed. It was just a blessing.”
A new television set sits in the living room. The TV that came with the house broke several nights ago as she and the children sat watching a movie.
“Three kids and no TV -- I’d go crazy,” she says, laughing. “I called a friend and he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to wire you money for a TV.’ ”
Now there is a flocked Christmas tree, bought by a friend, in the living room, festooned with ornaments Evans purchased at Wal-Mart with a gift card. There are brightly wrapped gifts (many provided by Our Lady Queen of Angels parishioners) clustered by the fireplace, and hanging from the mantel are four stockings bearing names stenciled in glitter glue: Sean, Ashlyn, Kannin and Dawn.
On one wall of the living room are four color prints. They were hanging when Evans got there. “It reminds me so much of home,” she says, walking over to the wall to scrutinize one of the pictures. “Over here, we have jazz musicians.” She examines another one. “And this is the French Quarter.”
Like Louis Armstrong, she knows what it means to miss New Orleans. “I miss the people, I miss the food, I miss the rituals -- like at this time of the year, in City Park, they light the big oak trees.” She smiles at the memory. “You can walk through or drive through. I guess it’s like what they do in Griffith Park.”
It helps that she has history in Los Angeles, an endpoint for another generation of Louisiana migrants. Her mother and her mother’s husband live here. Her mother is a member of St. Brigid Church.
Past Christmases were usually spent with her father, who is divorced from her mother and lived in New Orleans until the hurricane. “We’d be at my Dad’s house and I’d cook. My brother would come over. We’ll miss that. But I didn’t have my Mom the past two years. This year we’ll be with her.”
Sean runs into the living room with news about Ashlyn. “Mom, she did it! She rode on two wheels!”
“I’m surprised he’s helping her,” says Evans as she watches her eldest son run out. “He’s being a good big brother.”
The family has begun to settle into the rhythm of the neighborhood, pierced with the shouts of kids riding their bikes down the quiet street in the late, unseasonably balmy afternoon. A musical ice cream truck lingers on the block. When a latch falls off the back screen door, within a few minutes, the parish’s maintenance supervisor, George Smith, is fixing it.
“You know I’m on overtime, Dawn,” quips Smith, himself a New Orleans native who moved here years ago.
As she chats with Smith, a friend wanders over to the wall that separates Evans’ backyard from the church parking lot. Cassandra Cousin, another displaced New Orleans resident, announces she has finally found an apartment.
“I lost everything I had -- my car, everything,” Cousin says. “Years ago, I used to live here. I said, ‘Well, I’m going to take my chances and go back to California.’ ”
“You’re going to come to midnight Mass?” Evans asks.
“I’ll be there,” Cousin says.
Sometimes lives are broken up even before disasters.
Evans and her children were kind of that way, nomads moving between New Orleans and Los Angeles.
Born and raised in New Orleans, she moved to Los Angeles -- where her mother had resettled -- when she was 20, and the mother of 2-month-old Sean Rhodes. Her second child, Ashlyn Rhodes, was born here three years later. But she and their father, who had followed her to Los Angeles, split up in 2000. A three-year relationship with another man, who fathered Kannin Williams in 2001, did not last either. She and the children went back to New Orleans in 2003, moving in with Evans’ father.
Evans and her children had just secured their own one-bedroom apartment when the storm sent them fleeing.
“I didn’t know where I was going to be,” she says.
She stayed several days at a Hilton hotel in Houston. Then her father’s brother offered to house her and her children in his home in Pearland, Texas. But she had to share the three-bedroom, two-bath house with several of his relatives.
“It was just too much,” she says of their nearly monthlong stay. “You could see it was weighing on them.”
At the end of September, she flew to Los Angeles, moving into her mother’s one-bedroom apartment. They stayed there one night. The next day, Kannin’s father, who had made a harrowing escape through floodwaters and was back in Los Angeles, told her he had gotten a hotel room through the Red Cross, and suggested she do the same. She moved into a hotel room with double beds. “We made it work,” she says.
Kannin, her youngest, runs into the living room. “Mom, Ashlyn broke a car!”
“She broke a car?” Evans says in alarm. She bolts out the door for the church parking lot, where Ashlyn’s shaky bike-riding skills led her to crash into a hub cap of a parked car.
It’s an odd new existence she and her children are navigating -- full of generous, doting parishioners who constantly bestow gifts, whether it’s furniture or extra pizza from the rectory.
“After the storm I didn’t know what I was going to do for Christmas,” Evans says. “I haven’t had to have one worry.”
Their home is bigger than the one they had in New Orleans. But gone are virtually all of their possessions. Evans lost her job at a pharmaceutical company as a phone sales representative and is looking for work here.
No one seems more aware of the strangeness of their new lives than her son, Sean, who spent a month in a Texas school and is enrolled in fifth grade at 74th Street School. “It’s funny,” says Sean, sitting on the floor of his new living room. “You expect to be in New Orleans and it feels so different. You get a lot of attention. The thing I like is you get a lot of presents. This is kind of new to me. Sometimes we just want to be alone.”
His classmates have not been as charitable as the church that gave him his home.
“I try my best but they don’t want to be my friends,” he says. “Say the teacher calls on someone and they don’t answer right, then the teacher calls on me and I give the right answer -- at recess, they’ll say, ‘Why you took my answer?’ and they’ll start pushing me around.”
Evans says she has talked to Sean’s teacher about the situation and if it doesn’t improve she will approach the principal.
As afternoon fades into evening, Evans muses about the children. She wonders how they will feel on Christmas morning. But she feels certain of one thing. She will not be moving her young family back to New Orleans.
“I have uprooted them so much,” she says. “We moved from here back home and now we’re here. I just can’t see uprooting them again. I’m probably going to stay. That’s my plan.”
She sounds optimistic. She’ll get a new job. She’ll save money to buy her own home -- maybe as soon as a year from now when she has to leave this house.
Her short-term plan is more specific. She will host the holiday celebration in her home for her children and her mother. “Christmas is going to be here,” she says, looking just a little proud. “I have the bigger house now.”
