The refugees freshly deposited at the center were numb and silent, suspended in the limbo between desperation and depression. Women flipped through piles of used bibs and picture books. Men sat in circles and vowed to return to the city of their birth, before scattering to cities beyond the Louisiana state line, the furthest many had ever traveled. One woman, offered the chance to relocate to Corpus Christi, Tex. by a delegation of local leaders, raised her hand: Where was Corpus Christi, anyway?
In the shade of an athletic center turned medical complex, Earl Brown, 56, waited for his brother who was looking a buy a house. Brown listened to a radio, the only thing he had snatched from a community center in New Orleans before being airlifted to the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport by helicopter. He tuned it to oldtime classics, to a man crooning “When I’m down and feeling sad, you always comfort me.”
“I gonna go back,” he said, his face blank, like all the others.
‘UNCERTAIN FUTURE’
After scanning storefronts along Magazine Street for what little canned food or water remained, Farmer walked by his ravaged high school, Isidore Newman, in the neighborhood of Uptown. The trees that had shaded the city’s humid streets had keened over onto roofs and roads, covering some streets, he said.
At the time, Harvard students who had also graduated from Isidore Newman were trying to track him down, but overloaded cell phone lines were nearly impossible to use in the week after the storm.
Farmer brought his laundry basket full of coffee and canned milk back to his Napoleon Avenue home, which had no form of communication except a land telephone. The line would determine his family’s survival when his aunt called, telling them that floodwaters were fast rising on the northern side of the city. Farmer drove out at 1 a.m. Wednesday morning.
He stopped at a house in Baton Rouge where 20 others and their dogs were also taking refuge. For the first time, Farmer saw the footage of his city, the place where he had hoped to someday raise children.
He felt numb, then outraged, then nothing at all as he contemplated the problems that would baffle other students: where he would receive mail, how he would pay for school, how he could obtain prescription drugs.
Farmer and his family soon left to fulfill a planned vacation in Destin, Fl., a mecca for New Orleans natives. The trip turned into a brief chance for them to replan their lives. Farmer called the financial aid office, wondering if his plan might be changed. His mother, a realtor, was indefinitely without work. His father, a process engineer, would temporarily relocate with his company to Austin.
Yesterday, Farmer folded laundry, readying the few items he had scooped up at home or bought at an outlet mall—featuring a 20 percent discount for refugees—to bring today to Leverett House.
He contemplated returning to his hometown, but didn’t want to guess what would remain and what would be erased forever, like homes closer to the coast that been all but wiped from their bare foundations.
Instead, Farmer likes to focus on this semester’s studies, trying to ignore what he described as “an uncertain future.”
—Joshua P. Rogers contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer April H. N. Yee can be reached at aprilyee@fas.harvard.edu.