Thar She Blew

Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around: A memoir of floods, fires, parades, and plywood

by Cheryl Wagner

At the end of August in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and tore up that town.

Miss Wagner was a native Louisianian who had acheived her childhood dream of living in New Orleans and freelance writing and enjoying herself and her neighborhood. After Katrina, Miss Wagner and her husband Jake, a freelance musician, had to give up the enjoyment and work like dogs to rebuild their home and their lives. Well, not work like dogs exactly, Miss Wagner had two basset hounds, who just lazed around and watched all the work that she and Jake did.

The people who came back after Katrina to rebuild New Orleans, not only had to face raw sewage in the their houses and yards and streets, but they had to deal with human nature in the form of uncaring government and FEMA employees, rip-off construction grifters, drug dealers, copper thieves, and evangelical social workers.

Drugs were dealt and used in the open among the gutted and flood trashed houses without regard for the neighbors or law enforcement. I thought of the TV show, The Wire, where the police designate a certain street in Baltimore to be enforcement free and call it Amsterdam, after the city below the sea in Europe where drugs and prostitution are legal. Miss Wagner and her husband went to Amsterdam for a vacation and a rest from renovating their home and Miss Wagner felt constricted by the Dutch insistence on unvarying order---drugs must only be used in certain places and prostitution was only allowed at certain times and in certain areas. This proves that there really is no city quite like New Orleans, anywhere. What appears to be degenerate license or unlimited freedom elsewhere (Amsterdam and Baltimore) is just constricted restriction for a New Orleanser.

Miss Wagner and Jake were put on the list for FEMA trailers while they rebuilt their home, but after they secured an apartment in an unflooded part of New Orleans to live in while they worked on their Mid-town house, they called FEMA to get themselves off the list. FEMA told them, no problem, that they had been taken off the list a few months before. It was the first that the Wagners had heard of it.

They had to have their roof done twice, the first contractor took a lot of money and did a lousy job. Rain ran down the walls of their kitchen and living room in bad weather. It took them a year to get their electricity back, and they were ripped off by the electrician. The city came by and ripped up the water and sewage pipes every now and again. The Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt the levees with newspaper.

The insurance company dilly dallied for months before it finally paid up for the flood insurance that they had on the house. The insurance company paid it to the mortgage company. And New Orleans sent a home appraiser out to calculate what they could get to restore their house. It came to $0. The appraisal got the address right, but the house that they described was someone else's house. Whose? They never figured it out. The whole neighborhood was trashed by Katrina.

But no matter the discouragement and the irrational dishonesty of the various processes, the Wagners stayed and kept working on their home (and they did most of the work themselves).

The book began with a very detailed description of the evacuation of the Wagners and their dogs, and I thought it too detailed. But I came to appreciate the detail and the digressions rebuilding one's home and life after a catastrophe. If one thinks about it too long, one can go crazy. Scarlett O'Hara had that right.

Southern Musings: So Red the Rose by Stark Young

Southern Musings:

So Red the Rose

by Stark Young

Mr. Young was evidently an Agrarian. Robert Penn Warren was also one as was John Crowe Ransom. I know this because I had to take Tennessee history when I was in high school and the Southern Agrarian Literary School was about all we, Tennesseeans had to grasp on to in the 20^th Century Literary Movements.

The fact was that the Agrarians were 19^th Century, nay 18^th Century, Revisionists of the worst sort---everyone should be a gentleman farmer for the health of their morals and character and the society and national health. This sort of thing totally overlooks the fact that not all of us want to depend on crops and the weather to make our living. And that depending on crops and the weather to make a gentleman’s living is not going to make that gentleman’s living, because all this farm produce has got to go to the commodity market where speculation and fraud is rampant. And if everyone is a gentleman farmer, then who is going to buy the genteelly raised produce? Don’t all the gentlemen have plenty of their own?

And even with combines and tractors, gentlemen farmers have to work in season. The weather and crops wait for no gentleman.

And I have always been convinced that all this gentlemanly farming is dependent upon the grubbing classes, yep, Slaves (women, blacks, Mexicans---tobacco farming ain’t that automated). So there you are, back on the Monticello plantation with Thomas Jefferson being all gentlemanly while His People farm and wash and cook for him, while he invents contraptions and writes long letters and essays and rides to the hounds everyday and diddles His Lady Concubines every night.

As a woman who grows some echinacea and roses and clematis every summer and has to hire some one else to cut my grass, because I am painfully, tears and hacking coughs and hives, allergic to grass and pollen and fungi, I don’t see where I fit in to this gentleman farmer theory. I’m not washing clothes, dishes, and the front porch or diddling the gentleman of leisure when he has the craving and the time.

Sorry Agrarian Guys, I am all for Progress and the Liberation of the Slaves and Women and Science. You boys will have to depend upon the Home Schooled, Indoctrinated Female Types to populate your Gentle Farms.

Mr. Stark was also a well-educated man (all that farm land still had its sharecroppers to provide the money for his education when he was growing up in the early part of the 20^th century). From his biography, I gather that he spoke several languages fluently and was well versed in French and Greek drama.

Mr. Stark was primarily a dramatist, but he decided to write a trilogy about his Southern ancestors ante and midst and post bellum (the bellum being the American Civil War). He had grown up hearing the stories (like me) of his relatives and found them amusing and interesting enough to tell to all.

So Red the Rose is the third part of his trilogy. It was published in 1934 when Mr. Stark had decided to give up the theater and concentrate on teaching and writing narratives. It is apparent that Mr. Stark was a theater dramatist. The book is mainly the parlor or dining room setting of one of two neighboring plantations on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi. As in any sitting room drama, the characters converge to participate in a communal act (dinner or the evening’s entertainment) and we, as the reader and spectator, watch the proceedings and pick up what we need to know from the conversation. We are outside the action, such as it is, and witnesses to said action.

Although Mr. Stark was a successful dramatist, the book really doesn’t become interesting or alive until he enters the action and the minds of a few characters and follows their deeds and thoughts in real time. Then the book becomes memorable.

A ne’er do well cousin and his responsible cousin leave the plantation and go on a trip to Natchez Under the Hill (a dive and sort of Tijuana) on the Mississippi River to visit with the ne’er do well’s octoroon mistress from New Orleans who has come up the river to say her good byes to him before he ships off to the Confederate Army. The scene is compelling in its immediacy and its descriptions of the drunks, con men, grifters, gamblers, and wild men who populate Natchez Under the Hill and drink themselves Under that Hill. The octoroon Mistress is a woman alive and broken hearted (and hidden in a back room of a saloon) under the love that is not wholly reciprocated by the ne’er do well. She demands his attention and love and he looks everywhere around the room but her.

Contrast this with the major love story of the book between Valette, girl orphan adopted by her parents’ best friends, and Duncan, Prince in Waiting, of the plantations. Duncan is spoken of, but never actually in the novel until the last chapter when he returns home from the Confederate army after witnessing Appomattox. Duncan occasionally writes home, but Valette moons among the rose bushes and pines among the Pines until his discharge. This novel was made into a movie in the early thirties with Margaret Sullaven as Valette and Randolph Scott as Duncan. I’d like to see how they handled that hot, long distance romance in the movie. I’m thinking that Duncan got some home leaves in that flick.

The other compelling moments occur when former Slave US troops invade and occupy one of the plantations. All those US Troopers weren’t all that happy on the plantation. They’ve developed attitudes when they have to go back.

And the most touching moments (though a former slave US Trooper does slap the mistress of the plantation, perhaps in memory of his own mistress) in the novel are the most immediate moments that concern the death of the responsible cousin in the battle of Shiloh. His ghost comes back on horseback to his sister Lucy and tells her that he thought of her as she sang one night before he left for war as he lay dying on the battlefield. And then there is his mother, who hears of the battle of Shiloh and gets the wagon and the mules and loads up a coffin and her daughter and her butler and goes to collect the body of her son (she has that motherly feeling that he is dead). The book ends with the description of her memory of the wagon trip to the bloody death field.

“Agnes (the mother) could hear again all of a sudden the groans and cries of the wounded and dying that were left in that section. She could see faintly again their shapes lying together scattered on the field. With the groans and cries coming back to her again like that, her nerves tightened and her arms stiffened, and she felt the boy at her side startle and look at her, catching her hand now in both of his….

Now she was at Shiloh; but now she heard nothing; only the silence; then inside her body, she heard her heart beating. Edward was among them somewhere but the others too were hers. She stood looking out across the darkness and the field where the dead lay, as if they were all sleeping.”

Her butler has to comb the battlefield for her son’s body and he recognizes it by the feel of the young man’s hair.

This book doesn’t romanticize the Southern cause much. Mr. Stark is much more interested in his peoples’ stories. When he chooses to enter into the immediate feeling of those stories, the book is good. The rest of the time, I felt like I was just half listening to some family stories during a long family vacation where I wished that I were somewhere else.