Local News

Across town, Charlene Chapman is shopping around for furniture after moving into a new house just north of Jacksonville.

In Oxford, Cheryl Catalano is celebrating her birthday.

In Munford, Ivy East is playing with her new baby and sending her daughter off to kindergarten.

One year after having their lives changed by Hurricane Katrina, this is as normal as life has felt in a while for these four people.

They are not alone. United Way officials say that there are about 220 families or 600 people who have evacuated the Gulf Coast and are trying to find “normal” in Calhoun, Cleburne and Talladega counties.

For these four, the memories of what they’ve been through are never far away.

Shows’ ears still are infected from the contaminated water he swam through in his kitchen. Chapman has a blank space on her wall where the portraits she painted of her children should hang.

Catalano is selling the Mississippi house she and her husband saved for 25 years to buy. She travels back every few weeks to do yard work on her dream home, in hopes that someone else will buy it.

“For the first few months, you feel like you’re in a snow globe and somebody just turned it upside down,” Chapman said. “It’s tough to get your gravity. It’s tough to know where you belong.”

Job opportunities are a big reason many of the evacuees came to this area, and a huge reason many are deciding to stay.

Chapman is a psychometrist who evaluates special education students for the Calhoun County school system.

She said she deals mostly with young students who don’t think much about the storm and evacuation. Her co-workers rarely bring it up.

“It doesn’t really come up in conversation,” she said. “I never really felt the need to announce it.”

She said that getting the job and the house in Jacksonville was a huge step for her.

“Now that I have a house again I feel normal,” she said. “I’m no longer in the limbo.”

Catalano, who teaches at Gadsden State Community College, doesn’t bring her story up with her students either, partly because she didn’t want to be pitied.

“They’ve accepted me for who I am,” said Catalano, who also works at Dillard’s and Starbucks. “You don’t want them to treat you differently.”

Catalano said that she and her husband had been fortunate to find jobs. Her husband works for British Aeronautical Engineering.

“The storm blew us into Alabama and we’re better off for it,” she said. “You really feel like you’re beginning again and that’s a good thing.”

While they do miss life on the coast, Catalano said she and her husband, Guy, have enjoyed regional treats such as Cheaha State Park, the Birmingham Barons and the Sunny King Golf Tournament.

“I never thought we’d leave Mississippi, but Alabama has been very good to us,” she said.

The Catalanos’ town, Pass Christian, Miss., went from 2,700 houses before the storm to 300 afterward. The bridge that Guy used to commute to New Orleans no longer exists.

The dream home the couple had built now is for sale, but no one has the money to buy it, said Catalano.

The house is in good shape, relatively speaking. Only eight of the 71 trees that fell on their property hit the house.

Catalano said she would rather live in an apartment in Oxford near Hillyer-Robinson Industrial Parkway than in the Mississippi house where she had to use swimming pool water to flush the toilets and went without power, phone service or mail for months.

Chapman also left Pass Christian, but evacuated to Jacksonville instead of Oxford. She said the costal condominium complex she’d lived in was destroyed.

Chapman and her husband lived in a friend’s mobile home for about 10 months until they moved into a house on Pine Island Road near Jacksonville.

“We were suddenly homeless,” she said. “Everything we possessed was gone.”

Their evacuation was not quite as dramatic as Stanley Shows.

Shows left Violet, La., for Texas and spent some time in Arkansas before coming to Jacksonville.

Living within sight of the Mississippi River, his house was flooded up to the second story. Once the water began rising he went upstairs to wait it out. When the water only continued to rise, he swam through his kitchen to grab some canned food and retreated to his attic.

“I’ve been a boxer since I was 9 years old so I’m tough, but I’ve never been scared like that before,” he said. “What I mainly feared was my housing being blown into the Mississippi.”

After two days in the attic, when the water finally went down, he walked five miles to a police station and went with a friend to Texas.

His sister lives in Jacksonville, and she suggested he move to Calhoun County because of the job opportunities.

“I just plan on staying,” he said. “There’s nothing left down there.”

Though Ivy East and her family lived farther inland than Shows, their community also was devastated.

East rode out the storm in Laurel, Miss., about two and a half hours inland. Her family went to her grandmother’s house before the storm, and she said that the wind and rain were unbelievable.

Her daughter still gets scared whenever she hears a big rain storm, East said.

Two days after the storm, when they were still without water, East, her husband and her daughter, who was 4 at the time, decided to drive three and a half hours to Munford, where her husband’s family lived.

East said that her daughter’s father lived on the coast and if it had been his weekend to have her, she would have been on the Mississippi shore when the hurricane hit.

Two weeks after the storm, East and her husband went back to their home. Strong winds had torn a porch from a neighbor’s house and thrown it into the East’s back yard. Devastation was everywhere, she said.

“It was like you were seeing a whole different town,” East said.

Seeing their homes and sometimes entire towns destroyed is what many evacuees still are dealing with.

“People feel sorry because you’ve lost all of your stuff,” Chapman said. “It’s more than just stuff; we lost our communities, our friends our ways of life.”

Chapman said that it’s some of the small things that drive the loss home.

“You need tweezers and realize you don’t own tweezers anymore,” she said. “Or someone wears a jacket similar to one you had, but yours is in the Gulf of Mexico!”

“Our neighborhood looked like a bomb had gone off,” said Lisa Hammett in a letter to The Star. “The day we found our home destroyed, I lost a little sanity.”

Hammett and her family now live in Ohatchee but plan to one day move back to their “Cajun land” near Belle Chasse, La.

The Hammetts share a sentiment common among some evacuees: many want to return to their homes someday.

Others seem content to stay. United Way of East Central Alabama’s Executive Director Curtis Simpson said there are 220 families here who aren’t going back.

The Catalanos count themselves in that number.

“We’re never going back,” she said. “I didn’t think we’d ever say that.”

East agreed.

“We have been treated like this is our home,” East said. “(Laurel) will always be my home but I would never dream of going back to Mississippi.”

Part of the reason East is staying is her husband’s job at Honda. She works at the Munford water authority.

While conversations about the hurricane are rare at work, East said, she has been surprised at where they can pop up.

While checking out at a Wal-Mart in Talladega County, the cashier noticed East’s Mississippi driver’s license and asked if she was there as an evacuee.

After striking up a conversation, East learned that the cashier had lived even closer to the coast and also was an evacuee.

“It kind of felt good to know someone who had gone through what we went through,” East said.

With the birth of her daughter Nadia in August, East said she wouldn’t be surprised to see two more people leave Mississippi and move to Munford.

“I think my mom and dad will wind up moving here,” she said. “They have two granddaughters here now.”

Employment is helping Shows get a fresh start as well.

Shows was hired on a temporary basis at Federal Mogul in Jacksonville, but was told that after 90 days the plant would hire him full-time if he didn’t miss work.

“My job is that best thing that could have happened to me,” Shows said.

Shows said he’s hoping for the full-time position. He’s tired of uncertainty; he wants something to be normal again.