![]() ![]() ![]() Thinking of my mother’s stuff being used by people who needed it somehow made both her death and their suffering very real to me. I remember crying after delivering my last load to that truck a few hours before it left on its journey. It went to churches down there to help people with clean up and re-establishing households. Her house was in the small town of Louisiana, Missouri and a lot of her cleaning and cooking gear that we cleared out of the house that fall ended up on a truck called Louisiana helping Louisiana. Jewell Parker Rhodes has written a powerful novel about family and survival in the face of tragedy and has created in her twelve-year-old narrator Lanesha. My grief for my mother and the people lost in New Orleans all kind of got tied up together. My mother died in July 2005 and I remember while watching the news of Katrina in August and early September that I was oddly glad that she didn’t live to see it. On page 121: “I look around me - the kitchen is clean, quiet, and the refrigerator is filled with food and water.” Lanesha feels pride about getting everything ready for Katrina and that full refrigerator felt to me a symbol for her resilience and independence.Ģ. On page 110, Lanesha doesn’t smell the normal Sunday breakfast smells and we know she never will again in quite the same way - it’s a symbol of the change that is about to happen. ![]()
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