Bedtime Story
On September 22, during preparations to evacuate the Cajun Dome in Lafayette, I had given my car keys to a young woman who told me privately that she wasn't up to the trip. I volunteered to go on her bus in her place, and gave her my car keys and told her I'd meet her in Shreveport.
After spending most of the afternoon preparing for the bus trip,we were finally on our way at 6:30 in the evening. The bus was well worn, but it had storage underneath for the mesh laundry bags of belongings that the people had, and a bathroom in the back. The driver was Hispanic, and spoke an almost unintelligible gumbo of English, Louisiana drawl and Spanish.
In addition to the driver and me, there were 28 people on the bus, half a dozen of them small children. All were black, from New Orleans. None of them had ever been out of the city until Katrina hit. Many of them didn't get out until after the levees broke. One woman on the bus had her left leg all bandaged, and she said she needed to keep it elevated. I had brought a lot of survival supplies on the bus for the trip, so I stacked up two cases of bottled water, duct taped a bunch of diapers together to make a pad, and put her leg on the diapers on top of the cases of water.
Soon it was dark, and I sat in the front right seat, resting my head on my arms on the steel pipe dividing my seat and the steps to the door of the bus. I watched the seemingly endless line of tail lights ahead of us slowly driving north on I-49. There were about twenty buses in the convoy, and hundreds of trucks, cars, military vehicles and police cars with their lights flashing. The rumble of the bus was occasionally interrupted by someone on the radio saying something like "Convoy leader to number three, close up with number four".
Several hours after it got dark, the bus got cold, and there were no blankets. Many of the people were complaining that they were cold, so I asked the bus driver if he could turn up the heat, but he said it was broken. I took paper towels and stuffed them into the air vents in the panels above the seats, and that helped.
The light in the bathroom didn't work, so when someone needed to use the bathroom, they called out to me and I brought them a small flashlight. I occassionally went up and down the isle, checking on people, and handing out snack crackers and water to the grownups, and jelly beans to the kids. Several moms needed diapers for their babies, and I would dig through the plastic bag I had of supplies and find one and bring it to them.
About 10 o'clock I asked the children if they would like a bedtime story, and they all nodded and said "yes!" Now I was on the spot. I had planned on taking childrens books on the trip with me, but left them at home to make more room for clothes and supplies. I figured I could tell a favorite story, and make up the parts I didn't know as I went along. I gave them the choice of the Three Little Pigs or Rapunzel. The children, urged on by a six year old girl, chose Rapunzel. I figured, "How hard can this be, how many of these kids have ever heard of Rapunzel?" So I sat down between the seats and began telling them about a beatiful girl named Rapunzel that lived in a castle long ago. They listened intently, punctuating my storytelling with requests for more jelly beans.
Just before the handsome prince called out to Rapunzel to let down her hair, the six year old interrupted me and asked, "Where are we going?" I replied that we were going to a place called Shreveport. When she asked what direction it was I said, "North". Her eyes got big, and she asked, "Are we going to be in the snow?" In the dark I grinned and said "Honey, there won't be any snow. It will be just like the Cajun Dome, except we will be safe from Rita". The little girl was satisfied with the answer. Then she said, "Now tell us about how Rapunzel let down her long hair". I finished telling the story, and I choked up a little when I got to the part where everyone lived happily ever after. I sat between the children for a long time as they settled in to sleep.
The hours passed, and we slowly rumbled north through the Louisiana night, past places named Opelousas, Alexandria, Natchitochos and Stonewall. The long night seemed so improbably; a white network engineer from the Northwest telling bedtime stories to black children on a bus running from a hurricane in Louisiana. But I knew that I had made the right decision to give the woman at the Cajun Dome the keys to my car, and ride the bus to Shreveport instead.