Together, They’re All Alone

The worst part of waiting for Tracy Kenerson wasn’t the seven days of chaos in the New Orleans Superdome, where he couldn’t sleep without someone to watch his back.

It wasn’t the week he’d spent wondering whether his fiancee and year-old son, who had evacuated their hometown ahead of Hurricane Katrina, were dead or alive. It wasn’t the 17 days they’d spent apart, with little chance to talk and none to touch, no way to take comfort or give solace, no time to plan together what to do next.

All of that was awful, no doubt about it. But the worst part of waiting for Tracy Kenerson -- after weeks when almost everything went wrong -- were the hours before everything began to go right, 240 excruciating minutes that felt longer than any he had endured since the hurricane struck land.

The plan: At 11 a.m. Wednesday, Latoya Lockett and their son, Tyler, would arrive here at the Red Cross shelter outside of Salt Lake City, where Kenerson had spent the previous 10 days.

At noon, the family would pack their scant belongings into a borrowed van and head downtown to the Northgate Apartments to get the keys to their new home. By 1 p.m., they would begin life anew, in a place as different from New Orleans as an American city could possibly be.

Kenerson had spent the previous two weeks working toward this moment, forcing a modicum of order onto a world spun out of control. He had not been able to protect his family from the hurricane; now, he thought, he could protect them from its aftermath.

But at the last minute, his careful plan unraveled. The van never came. The apartment wasn’t ready. The background check required by landlords was bogged down in Baton Rouge.

So Kenerson was forced to wait -- again. “I was very, very angry,” he said, and then words failed him.

In one way or another, waiting has become a central experience of Hurricane Katrina, for the evacuees bunking in Red Cross shelters and the holdouts in waterlogged homes. Rich, poor, young, old -- everyone touched by the storm and the flooding is waiting for something.

For the water to come back on or school to reopen. For word from a missing loved one or a check from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For a new life to begin or an old one to resume. For New Orleans to rise again. Or in Kenerson’s case, for the chance to make things right for his family.

“Waiting when you’re not remotely sure of whether a missing family member survived, or your home will be habitable again ... is the core of what makes psychological stress stressful,” said Robert Sapolsky, professor of neuroscience at Stanford University. “And nothing does us in more than feeling as if things are coming into place and having the rug pulled out from under us.”

In other words, nothing does a person in more than living through the kind of afternoon Tracy Kenerson had Wednesday in a shelter at the end of the broad Salt Lake Valley, where the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains meet.

*

Kenerson is pacing the cavernous community center at the heart of Camp W.G. Williams, a National Guard outpost turned Red Cross shelter 26 miles south of Salt Lake City. He goes past a bank of telephones tying Katrina’s victims to the outside world. Past folding tables in a lengthy horseshoe, piled with books and toys and games to help fill hours that can tick by with unimaginable slowness.

It is Tuesday, and in less than 24 hours, Kenerson hopes, he will be reunited with his family in a bright, clean apartment with bedroom doors that close and bathrooms they won’t have to share with strangers. Lately he’s been sleeping on a bottom bunk in a crowded dorm, and he is grateful. But this is not the life he wants for his son and the woman he calls his wife -- “We been together so long.”

Kenerson is talking about the past and thinking about the future. He is a stocky 38-year-old man with close-cropped hair, a neat mustache and deep lines of fatigue etched beneath his eyes. He has worked since he was 15, his first job boiling shrimp at a New Orleans restaurant. Until the storm hit, he was a butcher at Family Farms Supermarket.

And just this year he had finally attained the life that he had always dreamed of.

“We’d found a house,” Kenerson said. “I’d bought me a car. I’d gotten me a second job cooking at a restaurant on the weekend. A soul food place. Red beans, rice, fried chicken, pork chops. I had my car two months. A 1990 New Yorker made by Chrysler, and now it’s gone.”

Kenerson’s chin rests on his fist, and his eyes are just a little distant. He has lived in New Orleans all of his life, and his words bear the deep imprint of his former home. Ra-id Cross. Uh-pote-ment. Poke chops.

“What I see now is, I’m starting from scratch again, starting from scratch,” he said. “But I guarantee you I’ll make it. I know how to survive. No. 1, I likes to work. I won’t have no problem finding a job. Once I get my wife and son stabilized in an apartment, I’ll get a job, and we’ll live happy -- just me and him and her.”

*

At that very moment, “him and her” are rumbling along on a Greyhound bus somewhere between Amarillo, Texas, and Lamar, Colo. They are halfway through a nearly 48-hour, 1,800-mile journey that began Sept. 12 in Orange, Texas, where a friend of Lockett’s sister had taken them in.

Ten stops in four states, three bus changes, for a woman who had traveled only once before in her life. Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah. Lost sleep, lost luggage, two days lost to a blur of asphalt. For the most part, Lockett recalled later, Tyler was glued to her lap, staring at every man in the bus, calling out, “Da da.” He is a grave child with wide eyes and a close-cropped haircut just like his father’s.

Stocky like him, too, although Lockett isn’t sure how much the squirming child weighs. She’d know if it hadn’t been for the hurricane, which hit Aug. 29, four days before Tyler’s birthday, his one-year checkup, a round of vaccinations. His birthday celebration was “nothing, nothing. I sang happy birthday to him,” Lockett said. “He ain’t going to remember.”

A tall, somber woman with deep-set eyes and a sprinkling of freckles, Lockett doesn’t remember much of that first week, either, as she waited for word that Kenerson was alive.

The last time the couple had spoken was the day before the storm. The nursing home where Lockett was a housekeeper had been evacuated, but Kenerson was still at work. He called her, frantic, as the hurricane bore down, and they agreed that she would take the baby and run.

She fled with her extended family -- her mother, two sisters, two nieces, a nephew and a brother-in-law. Arriving safely across the Texas border well before dawn, Lockett helped unload the car. And then she began to wait.

“It was hard,” she said, not knowing what had happened to her home, her grandmother, the man she loved. “I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t sleeping.... I was worried. It was a week after the storm, and I didn’t know where he was, was he still in the water.”

The good news came Sept. 5, in the convoluted way that these things have happened since Katrina hit, communication lines went down and hundreds of thousands of evacuees were scattered throughout the United States.

Kenerson and Lockett did not have cellphones. But Kenerson remembered the mobile number for the brother-in-law with whom Lockett had fled, so he kept dialing until he reached him. Word finally filtered to Lockett: Kenerson is safe, and he’ll call when he can.

It was days before the two spoke, but at least Lockett knew that her man was alive. She had also found out that her grandmother was safe. And at last, she said, she could sleep.

The next day she turned 29. Her baby might not remember his birthday, but Lockett will definitely remember hers.

*

“I was pretty sure she was OK; I just didn’t know where she was.” Kenerson is talking about his family’s ordeal. He is a man of few words when the subject is painful. “When I was at the Superdome, all I said was, ‘She better be gone with my baby.’ ”

On the Superdome itself: “This is how I protected myself, when all this killing was going on. I slept outside ... not really sleeping. I got one good night’s sleep when I ran into my brother-in-law, my sister’s husband. I watched his back. He watched mine.”

On learning where the airlift from New Orleans would take him: “First they told me Texas, but it was Utah. They waited until we was in the plane and started flying to tell us that.”

Of all the places where Katrina’s victims have landed, few could be more foreign than Salt Lake City. They have left behind a city 67% African American and ended up in one that’s just 1.9% black. The joke circulating here is that the airlift of 500 to 600 evacuees doubled Utah’s minority population.

But the difference is more than skin deep. By coming to Utah, the evacuees have traded in heat, humidity, a coastline, historic homes clustered cheek by jowl, extended families. In return they’re getting wide Western skies and jagged mountains, a landlocked border, September snow and loneliness.

The transition, at best, will not be easy. So why are they staying?

The calculus is simple, even for Lockett, who agreed to relocate here sight unseen. Houston is crowded with tens of thousands of desperate people competing with her family for the same things. Though her sister and mother might stay in Orange, there aren’t enough jobs there to go around, she said.

And New Orleans? She misses New Orleans. But everything she worked so hard for is probably gone. She remembers listening to the radio and hearing the announcer say her intersection was underwater. She turned it off.

“I miss my house, a two-bedroom shotgun,” she said. “I had just got a sofa a few months earlier. I had just got an entertainment center. I got a kitchen set six months before. Oh, it just hurt me to think of it. All that hard work.

“But I won’t worry about all that stuff,” she said. “Materialistic things can be replaced. Our lives can’t. I’m just lucky we got out. Not everyone did.... Once I get situated here, I don’t think I’ll go back.”

*

On Wednesday the Greyhound bus rolled into Salt Lake City on schedule at 10:25 a.m., and a Red Cross truck was waiting at the station to take Lockett and Tyler to Camp Williams.

Lockett walked in the door at 11 a.m. and paused, hesitant. “I didn’t see him,” she recounted. “Then I looked up, and he was walking toward me, and he said my name, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’ I said, ‘Tracy, I miss you.’ And I gave him a hug.”

Noon rolled around, but the promised van didn’t. They stood outside of the community center, in front of a pile of donated goods. A household starter kit with pots and pans, sheets and towels, a clock, a toaster. A new trash can filled with cleaning supplies. A gently used crib, a Winnie the Pooh stroller.

Tyler should be sleeping. Lockett wouldn’t mind a nap either, after two fitful nights on a rolling bus. “Sleep’s the first thing. Then I’m going to cook something real good to eat,” she said. “Then we’re going to spend a day with just us, together.”

She called her mother and smoked a cigarette, and the bad news came half an hour later. They couldn’t move into their apartment.

“They very disappointed us today,” Kenerson said, breaking it to Lockett. A day after he’d landed at Camp Williams, exhausted, he’d begun the long task of filling out paperwork. He’d checked up on it every day. But at the eleventh hour, that vigilance didn’t seem to matter.

“We applied for this apartment. It’s been two weeks. They ran a background check, but it didn’t come back.” He is fuming. “They’ll let us put our stuff in the apartment, but we can’t get in. What sense does that make?”

Kenerson goes off to see whether there is anything he can do to make it work. He comes back, they load Tyler into the stroller and wander over to the base PX. Lockett buys an “I survived Hurricane Katrina” T-shirt. She looks puzzled when asked whether the shirt would remind her of living through such a painful time. She surveys the wind-swept base, the rugged mountains, the broad sky. What doesn’t remind her?

By 3 p.m. Kenerson makes a decision: He’ll take his family to the apartment complex and plead his case. He’ll forfeit the one sure thing his family has -- a temporary home at Camp Williams -- for the only thing he insists his family needs: a permanent home of their own.

They take the first ride offered and head out.

*

Tyler is sprawled across a soft pile of blankets with the loose abandon of a child dead asleep. It is Thursday morning, and he is in the living room of the family’s empty apartment, taking his first nap in his new home.

The apartment wasn’t ready when the family arrived Wednesday, but the manager relented and let them move in after 90 minutes of paperwork and a promise to accept the place “as is.”

The family has already bought a welcome mat. Furniture should arrive any day now, thanks to the Salvation Army and the Mormon Church. Someday, pictures will hang on the walls. Jobs will be found. Mission accomplished? Not really.

The family’s longest wait has just begun -- the wait for Salt Lake City to feel like home.

Wednesday night the family got a taste of what that was going to be like. Walking back to their apartment after dinner, Kenerson, Lockett and Tyler were strolling through a mall. A car stopped. A white couple got out and stared and stared.