Who is to say what each of us deserves? My children deserve to be fed, I think, and cared for; our neighbors deserve food, supplies, power, and relief. There are literally thousands of people around Houston who deserve rescue, and the monumental task of coordinating the efforts of getting to all of them nearly boggles the mind. Perhaps you have seen the photo of elderly folks in a nursing home, waist deep in water, waiting for rescue. It’s making the rounds. Boats are on their way from everywhere in the country—some as far away as Minnesota, I’ve seen. They’re using an app to coordinate, and they’ve been criticized for this, because, well, according to the criticism, to assume that people are able to download an app or that seniors have smartphones is completely inexcusable. The perfect has always been the enemy of the good.
I have seen so many crazy things the last few days. People from far afield are so gleeful to criticize how we are feeling and processing and talking about what is going on here. People I’ve never met have mocked me on social media, mocked friends and strangers who show their support. I do not understand this impulse. What makes a person rejoice in the misfortune of another? To find pleasure in another person’s pain?
What must we do to ourselves to make us hate one another beyond reason? I may never find an answer to this question, but I know that whatever structures to hate we have built within ourselves, they can fall away in the moment when someone reaches out a hand—whether asking for help or offering it—and you grab hold.
* * *
My husband returns from a day of rescuing neighbors just as I learn that our own neighbors have lost power. They arrive, soaking wet, and we join together our meager provisions, have dinner, watch movies, play a trivia game. (I win.) Another neighbor crosses the flooded street to join us, and we swap rescue stories over wine and beers. I laugh, really hard, for the first time in days.
My friend—the one who crosses the river to sit at my table—tells us stories about the people he rescued today. The youngest of these, who is twenty-five and relies on a wheelchair for mobility, didn’t want to leave his house. My friend told him about a camp where he volunteers, where young people are often at the end of their lives. “You haven’t been there yet,” my friend told this young man, and somehow, the idea that there might be something else, some as yet unimagined possible future, convinced the young man to let my friend carry him to the boat, to safety, to warm towels, and diligent care. These two men, strangers to one another, held each other in their arms, and both found their own comfort in that. This friend has told me he actually knows no strangers, and this was no exception. Today he met two volunteers from out of town, and the three of them went out on an airboat and pulled around 120 new friends out of the flood and hauled them to dry land, to safety, to tender, loving care.
* * *
It’s been decades since I claimed any manner of religious practice, but as I remember it, a blessing is what we say before a meal, or when a child is born, or has become a particularly zealous way to sign an email in what translates to “have a nice day.” The idea is somewhat synonymous with grace. In Judaism, a blessing is a slightly different idea, often called a mitzvah—a word that also carries the weight of a commandment—and the focus is less on words than it is on deeds. The point being, in both cases, that you’re not supposed to get paid, or to expect to be repaid, even in karma points, for everything you do. You can let some of it be a blessing. And if there is one thing I have learned in my thirty-nine short years on this Earth, it is that anyone who can afford to give a blessing is wealthy beyond measure. My friend isn’t rich, but right now he’s the wealthiest man I know.
He’s wealthier even than the man who came to Texas today, the one who stood on the bumper of a firetruck for a photograph and said, “What a great crowd!” Our neighbors to the south, in Mexico, have offered to send us aid, even as this man demands they pay to put up a wall between them and ourselves, that we close our border to them and all of their needs. Today he placed supplies into the trunks of cars. He met with elected officials in a dry, air-conditioned building, took a few selfies with evacuees, and kissed their babies before he got back on his plane without even getting his shoes wet. Has he ever risked anything to help a stranger in need? I suspect he has not, because there’s an idea he has been circulating for some time now—and every decision he makes is part of it—that America is a small boat and there just aren’t enough seats. He built his campaign on that idea—that we should make the boat smaller, not bigger. But even as he chooses to peddle that cruel vision of the world, everyone at my table in Houston is choosing another. Here, we’ll make room in the boat for everyone, and we’ll row together to shore.
I don’t believe in the god of any organized religion, but I do believe in grace. What kind of blessings can each of us afford to give? No doubt more than we actually do. I fully admit that I am no saint in this regard: I don’t have a deep reservoir of patience for my children couch-diving in my living room, or for fools who peddle lies and division and hate. But probably there are people on my street, or in this neighborhood, or elsewhere in this city, friends I haven’t met yet, who desperately need a little grace. My family may yet lose our house to the water that is still rising all around us, but for now, we have power, and warm water, and clean sheets. That’s far more than we need.
* * *
Elsewhere in Houston, where the water has already receded, a friend helped to gut a house in a subdivision where every house had a water line to the second floor—the soggy, molding guts puked onto the curbs as far as the eye could see. Across the street from where my friend was working, a neighbor said that he had to float his baby out in the cooler. It wasn’t even the first time he’d done this. This is only one neighborhood in a metro area of nearly 7 million, where it is still unclear what percentage of people have lost their homes. I’ve heard a third of the people. I’ve heard more than a hundred thousand homes. Or three hundred thousand homes. It will take time to get a reliable accounting. They’re not entirely sure how many homes are still underwater, and by the time we know, there likely won’t be anything left of them.
There is no way to help them all. So instead, we help who we can. A friend does laundry. Another coordinates teams of volunteers. One of my daughter’s friends from school left her home as the floodwaters rose, left even without shoes. I’ve been calling, sending emails and text messages for days to find a furnished apartment where they can stay. One Realtor I spoke to has been working all week trying to place families that have been displaced. She’s been working day and night, sleeping on an air mattress in her office because she too lost everything. She is still wearing the clothes she wore to evacuate. Some neighbors’ homes are underwater, and a group of us are planning a flotilla recovery mission: all the neighbors will meet, and among the group of us, we’ll bring all our lives back to shore.
At least once a day, I have a good cry. An ugly cry; a shoulder-shaking, whole-body cry. Sometimes it comes while I am standing in the kitchen, as the weight of the water begins to sink in. Sometimes, like tonight, I have a good cry when I finish putting the children to bed on the air mattress, realizing that the ways I need them are so different, though no less acute, from how they need me.
We say our good-byes to the friend who crosses the river back to his own home, and we all settle down to sleep, to the extent that sleep is even possible. We all have our minds on the water. It is underneath us, around us, running past our every thought, every gesture, saturating every word we say. We are all so very weary, but I stay awake all night anyway, checking the gauge levels at various points along the bayou, looking out the window at the water slowly approaching our house, searching for news. Is the water rising or falling? Is the dam leaking or holding strong? Will we live, or will we drown?
* * *
This is the new normal. Today is the sixth day, I think. When the sun came up this morning, I found a wide rushing river outside my home: three feet deep and thirty feet across. My neighbor was standing there, crying
too. She and I shouted softly to each other over the flooded street: “At least it isn’t hot,” I offered. “At least the water is moving,” she returned. Now, hours later, there is blue sky, barely a cloud, neighbors picking their way over dry land to walk their dogs. It could be the first spring weekend, or the first autumn one, with so many people bustling about. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard helicopters pass and pass overhead; airboats can be heard shuttling people to and fro. A giant military convoy plane keeps circling and circling.
While I am drinking my coffee and watching airboats fly up and down the street, a group of rescue officers approach on foot. One tells me about a house that had waist-high water at the door. He knocked, rang the doorbell. Someone answered, also standing in waist-high water. As they were talking, a mother duck and her ducklings jumped from the stairs into the water and floated through the living room out the door. Our favorite neighbors have left a pork shoulder to smoke in the driveway all day while they are out pulling heirlooms from a flooded house. At the end of the day, they’ll have an enormous party. A pontoon boat will cruise around on one of the most flooded streets in our neighborhood: at least six people on board, drinking, smoking maybe more than cigarettes. Who will stop them? Each of us, in our desperation, is following our natural human inclination: toward the future, toward joy.
My husband comes outside to share bad news: the Army Corps of Engineers, in its meticulously calculated wisdom, has decided overnight that it will open the floodgates at the overspilling reservoirs even more. There will be an additional one to three feet of water, it says, but people who have not already flooded likely will still not flood, not unless the water is already close to the house. How close is “close”? we wonder. Inches? Feet? Inside, I watch government officials say murkily reassuring things in press conferences: everything is fine, we have everything under control, all y’all will be okay.
We hear from neighbors that water is rising quickly at the back of the neighborhood, where people have woken to find themselves stranded, water chest-deep rising in their houses; their voices heard outside calling for help. My husband and our neighbors once again drag the canoe from the garage and row toward them.
The National Guard passes with a flatbed full of evacuees; SWAT teams trudge upriver in their giant canoes. One neighbor looks overhead and says, “I think we’re on the news.” I ask one Guardsman passing through to tell me what he knows: “You’re gonna get more water tonight,” he says, “but we don’t know how much. We’re taking people out who want to go; we won’t be here after dark when the water really starts rising.” Another neighbor hears from a state trooper “maybe two more feet.” When my husband returns, we talk it over. He says, “What I’ve been telling people who need to leave their houses is that it’s never a mistake to leave, but it might be a mistake to stay.”
It is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do: to choose what belongings in my house I cannot live without, to figure out which of those things I value enough to carry through waist-high water on my back. And then: how to explain to my children how to place value on their most precious things. To explain that we are leaving, that we don’t know when we will return, that they can bring along only what their tiny bodies can carry.
We pack our things. We trudge through water filthy with sewage up to our knees and very slowly make it to the end of the street, where we leave our flooded neighborhood and enter a military zone: army trucks lined with uniformed soldiers in the back, airboats surrounded by emergency responders lifting people onto stretchers, EMTs, volunteers lining the entire street. The sight of them brings the reality of the situation down in all its force. I admit: it breaks me, even the part of me I’ve worked so long to make solid and hard. A man approaches us as we emerge from the water and offers to walk with us, to carry our bags as far as we need to go.
We walk past fire trucks, ambulances, past volunteers offering us water and something to eat. I feel so visible passing them with tears streaming down my cheeks. One man—I don’t know him—approaches me and holds me in his arms. “We will rebuild it,” he says, “and it will be even better next time. Next time, we can make it even more beautiful.”
We make our way eventually to the parking lot where we are supposed to meet the person my husband has arranged to pick us up, but that person can’t reach us, we learn, because of the water on every street between us and him. Just as my husband dials the phone to call someone else for help, a woman approaches and asks whether we have a ride, where we are going. “Halfway across the city,” I tell her, “as far from the bayou as we can go.” She offers to drive us. It takes nearly an hour to reach our destination, in the care of this stranger. I never even get her last name.
* * *
I have often told my students that I find the theory of the Stranger more useful than the idea of the Other, because the Stranger is a person who is in the group but not of the group, who arrives from elsewhere but never departs, and who embodies that elsewhereness no matter how long she stays. The Stranger is usually treated with contempt and suspicion because she exists in the presence of those who believe they are known to one another and performs the function of consolidating difference in a single body, allowing all other differences among the group to seem to fall away. The Stranger gives the group cohesion, and a language rises up to describe it: good/evil, citizen/immigrant, homesteader/refugee. And yet it is strangers who sometimes arrive with the help they are able to offer, and this simple act confirms our common humanity.
* * *
Cornel West has said that “justice is what love looks like in public.” But love is not the conclusion of a risk assessment. The lesser factor in a calculation. We cannot love our fellow humans in the abstract. Already there is another hurricane forming somewhere in the Gulf or in the ocean; it is heading our way, maybe. Or it is headed elsewhere: to Florida, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico. That storm, like this one, will ravage neighborhoods without regard for inequalities of status. But love will ask us to reckon with those inequalities when the storm reveals them.
Houston is the most diverse city in the country. We’re proud of that fact. If Houston were a country, it would be fourth in terms of the number of refugees it accepts. We are also a sanctuary city, though we mostly keep that to ourselves while our local law enforcement refuses to enforce racist federal laws. I have lived here for nine years total, longer than I’ve lived any other place in my life. This city is beautiful and amazing because of the people who live here, not in spite of it. And if we didn’t know it before, we have learned since the hurricane made landfall six days ago that each of us makes a choice to help another, or not to, every single day. We can bear witness to another person’s need and do nothing, or we can choose to help. Everyone I know has chosen to open their homes to strangers, to feed them, clothe them, raise money for the restoration of their homes. Even people whose own houses were destroyed are helping others in the ways they can. The choice to help is never the wrong one. It is never a mistake to show compassion to our fellow human beings.
* * *
Water destroys what it touches: carves canyons out of deserts, swallows people, ice, whole cities and continents. It also destroys the trivial things we spend our lives worshipping: our houses, our streets, our pride, our temples to bigotry and greed. I have heard now a story of a man who escaped his flooding neighborhood, only to row back in his kayak to save one more person or one more thing and capsized in the current. He was missing all night, and in the morning they found him holding on to a tree. A teenager was swept away in the current of the bayou and caught the grate of a bridge and held on there until rescuers found her in the morning. An infant was taken from her mother by the current and the current offered that brand-new life back to the churning sea.
But water also washes, gives life, makes new. The water has destroyed this city—there are no two ways about it—but the outpouring of love I have witnessed here among neighbors and strangers, arriving from all over the world, is the most beaut
iful thing I have ever seen.
The donations and prayers and well wishes flowing toward us are so welcome, but there’s something else we will need, something that can help us better in the long run: whatever ideas you hold about people from Houston, or Texas, or Sri Lanka or Trinidad or the Bronx or Palestine, or whatever kinds of ideas you have about people who come from wherever you are not from, stop holding on to them. They serve no one. Please surrender them to the current that is lapping at the doorstep of this moment. Leave them behind and just let them go.
MAKE WAY FOR JOY
The alarm rings somewhere in the darkness, and I rise from the bed. I dress in the bathroom in my usual uniform: sneakers, bandanna, a blue belt that holds my water bottles and phone. I wake the dog from the crescent he’s made with his snoring body on the rug. He stretches and yawns while I clasp the pinch collar around his neck. I lock my sleeping family inside the dark house; outside, a yard of sprinklers sputters awake as I walk through the streets. I begin running at the corner. There is no one in the world but me.
It is nearly six o’clock when I reach the entrance to the park and continue running along the trail. The moon illuminates a pale field to my left where, until recently, tall native grasses grew alongside wildflowers: bluebonnets, castillejas, phlox. They’ll grow here again soon. To my right, trees tangle with twisting vines to form a curtain against the bayou: the water ripples, leaves rustle, a squirrel startles awake in its nest.
The Reckonings Page 17
