Haunted by Katrina

By Dani McClain, WireTap. Posted February 4, 2006.

Vladine Lee Bryan stared in disbelief at the digital photographs on her father's computer screen. Black mold had spread over the walls of her house in New Orleans' Seventh Ward. The high-water marks in her son's room were inches from the ceiling. The refrigerator was overturned in the middle of the living room. The floodwater had rushed through the garage and ripped away plaster to expose weakened wooden beams.

A Harry Potter poster and school-issued plaques celebrating her children's successes had managed to cling to the walls. But there were few other reminders that she was looking at the place where she, her husband and their three young children had built their life together.

"It doesn't look like anybody lived there in years," said Bryan, 31, straining to speak through her tears. "It looks like one of them burnt out buildings."

After contemplating the photos, which her estranged husband took when he returned to assess the flood damage, Bryan reached for a Valium from the one-month supply she had been given at Manhattan's Disaster Assistance Service Center. She had been reluctant to take the drug, but if there was ever a time to borrow peace of mind from a tranquilizer, this was it.

Finding that sense of calm and security has been a constant struggle for Bryan since she and her children arrived in New York on Sept. 4. Unlike the Katrina survivors who have ended up in New York City without a support network, the Bryans are living with Vladine's parents in Jamaica, Queens. Joseph and Solange Roche readily offer shelter, money and emotional support, and say that their daughter and grandchildren are welcome to stay as long as they like. However, there still is stress as Bryan struggles to navigate what she feels is an unresponsive relief system and to assuage the trauma that still afflicts her children.

Over 2,000 households from the battered Gulf Coast have gone through the city's Disaster Assistance Service Center, which is run by the Office of Emergency Management. Over 150 survivors remain in FEMA-funded housing, as they are permitted to do until the Feb. 13 deadline. And judging from turnout at city-sponsored long-term housing fairs, most of these families plan to put down roots in New York City. So, in statistical terms, the Bryan family's story represents a small segment of the Katrina Diaspora. But the story also reflects a wider reality -- how, in countless ways across America, an uprooted multitude is searching for permanence and ways to cope with the emotional and psychological effects of forced migration.

"You're permanently in the world in a new way," said Mindy Fullilove, a psychiatrist and author of "Root Shock," a book about the destruction of city neighborhoods. "You're in the world as an individual, whereas previously you were in the world as part of the place."

The title of Fullilove's book equates displaced people with a plant that is ripped out of the ground.

"If you don't replant it, very quickly it dies," said Fullilove of both the uprooted plant and the uprooted person. "The suffering does not stop. The stress, the anxiety, the disturbance of it last, literally, for decades."

Bryan, a curvaceous woman with model looks whose seldom flashes her bright smile these days, manages her anxiety with the occasional sedative. More frequently, she takes long walks alone in the multiethnic residential neighborhood that she now calls home. She is still adjusting both to her return to New York City, where she moved from Haiti at the age of 2, and to the reality of what happened to her three months ago.

From New Orleans to New York

Though they had access to transportation, the Bryans didn't heed the warnings to evacuate New Orleans. Previous evacuations had proven to be unnecessary.

"They're always saying, 'This is the big one,'" Bryan said. "They just happened to be right this time."

Finally, the couple packed up Joseph, 11; Elaine, 8; and Victoria, 6, and went to the Superdome on Sunday, Aug. 28, the day before the hurricane battled the city's decrepit levee system and easily won.

Once inside the dome, the family was unable to locate a familiar face among the 30,000 people taking shelter there. Bryan scanned the crowds for people they could camp next to, but her search was fruitless. She spent five restless nights worried that her children would be abducted.

Victoria remembers the discomfort of those nights and has since told her grandmother that this is why she doesn't want to return to New Orleans: She worries that she will have to sleep upright in a chair again. Joseph, Bryan's 11-year-old, remembers the rising water and pledged to his grandparents that he'll never again live near the coast.

Bryan remembers the physical strain of those days and the subsequent evacuation -- first via bus to Houston and then, with plane tickets bought by her parents, to New York. She calls the result "the Katrina Diet." In one month's time, she lost 45 pounds, dropping from a size 24 to a size 16.

Bryan's weight loss in unsurprising, said Ma'at Lewis-Coles, a psychologist teaching in the Criminal Justice Counseling Department at John Jay College. She and other members of the New York Association of Black Psychologists have been counseling hurricane survivors staying at the Radisson near Kennedy Airport.

Dani McClain is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY.

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