June 2011. For some, $112 ain’t a lot of money. Not me. Back in the 7th Ward, where I come from, $112 could be the difference between life and death.

Most of us that came back to Empire after Katrina be tied to this town by blood or land. Me, I fell in the ‘nowhere else to go’ category.

I’m an outsider. I married into Plaquemines Parish. My husband Aldus had a river boat service. He’d haul pilots to the freighters, take tourists fishing out Southwest Pass and do deckhand work on the barges every now and then.

He did two dumb things, according to his mamma. One, he married me, a black woman. Two, he got hisself drowned by Hurricane Katrina.

Mamma Kate was upset about Aldus marrying a black woman, but she had no call. Her blood was Isleño. She be almost as dark as me. She never warmed up to me when Aldus was alive and barely tolerated me when I came back. She was happy enough to see her grandbabies, though. She loved them grandkids, color and all.

On my way back to Empire after the storm, I picked up some donated clothes at the fire station up in Belle Chasse. I found enough clothes for Wiley and Maria and put ‘em in a plastic garbage bag. There was an old Navy pea coat on the stack. I don’t know why I picked it up — you don’t need no winter coat down river. It never gets cold enough. Guess I got it ‘cause my daddy had one when he was in the Navy. My mamma had a picture of Daddy dressed up in the pea coat, on the deck of a ship floating out in some icebergs.

I threw the two bags in the trunk of my Caprice. Kids used the clothes; never even brought the coat inside.

There wasn’t much to come back to, only a washed out lot and an acre of satsuma trees. Aldus loved them damn trees; he worked in the grove when he had spare time. I didn’t pay much attention to the trees, but I sure paid attention when the lawyer from the Maritime Association brought me the deed to the property.

“Miss Ruby, this is your land now,” he said. “If you’re not staying, I could handle the sale for you.”

“No, sir,” I said. “That’s my piece of dirt now.”

And it was my dirt. Mine. Didn’t matter it was being squeezed up against the Mississippi River by the Gulf of Mexico. I was determined to hold on to it. I was 29 years old, fifty pounds too heavy, takin’ food stamps, and now the proud owner of ocean front property. My mamma and daddy never owned no land.

FEMA bought me and the kids a trailer. They perched it up on some ten foot stilts and built a deck on the front end. It was right next door to Mamma Kate’s. Don’t know how it happened but Mamma Kate’s house was alright. Somehow or another, a horse was put down on her front porch by Katrina’s waves and the old nag rode out the storm without a scratch. Everybody said it was a miracle the horse survived a week stuck up on the porch without food or water. The government came and got her down from the porch and brought her up to Belle Chasse.

They never found Aldus. He had tied his fishing boat up in a slough off one of the passes —he’d done it before and his daddy done it too. This time, the Lillie Mae got smashed in to a thousand pieces and Aldus was gone.

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