Displaced residents trying to make most of life after Katrina

Pat "Mother Blues" Cohen left New Orleans the day before Hurricane Katrina struck the city and traveled 24 hours on a bumper to bumper road to reach her brother's home in Salisbury. Cohen's second floor apartment survived the flood waters but when she returned home some time later she found out that all of her belongings had been ravaged by looters. After five years Cohen still remains in the Salisbury area. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Bonnie Cleary and Jim Killian Sr. sit with their daughter, Jamie Fuzette, on the porch of their home on U.S. 29 north of China Grove. The family evacuated from their Louisiana Home before Hurricane Katrina hit. For almost five years, they've lived in Rowan County. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

Pat "Mother Blues" Cohen left New Orleans the day before Hurricane Katrina struck the city and traveled 24 hours on a bumper to bumper road to reach her brother's home in Salisbury. Cohen's second floor apartment survived the flood waters but when she returned home some time later she found out that all of her belongings had been ravaged by looters. After five years Cohen still remains in the Salisbury area. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Pat "Mother Blues" Cohen left New Orleans the day before Hurricane Katrina struck the city and traveled 24 hours on a bumper to bumper road to reach her brother's home in Salisbury. Cohen's second floor apartment survived the flood waters but when she returned home some time later she found out that all of her belongings had been ravaged by looters. After five years Cohen still remains in the Salisbury area. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

By Mark Wineka

mwineka@salisburypost.com

Pat “Mother Blues” Cohen says a voice, calling out her name, awakened her around 2 a.m. the day before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

She went from the bedroom into the front room of her second-story, Ninth Ward apartment but couldn’t find anyone.

“I got this crazy feeling all over me that I needed to get out of there,” said Cohen, who had gone to sleep that night thinking she would ride out whatever storm was headed in from the Gulf.

Only a week earlier, she had heeded an evacuation warning for another storm, and it hadn’t rained a drop. Maybe she should go see her brother Roland in Salisbury, N.C., for a couple of days, Cohen thought.

The next morning, Cohen went by friend Merline Kimble’s home and persuaded her to take the trip to North Carolina with her. They loaded Merline’s four young grandchildren into Cohen’s sport-utility vehicle and took off.

The evacuating traffic was bumper-to-bumper, it seemed, all the way into Alabama. They couldn’t find gas or an open place to eat for the longest time.

“It was the craziest trip,” Cohen says.

But it was the right move. After arriving in Salisbury, all the displaced New Orleans residents could do was watch Katrina’s devastation on television.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing — but I was still in denial,” Cohen says.

In the end, Katrina turned Cohen’s life upside down. It wrecked her singing career, led to the looting of her apartment and effectively forced her to seek public assistance — “and I was never the public assistance-type person,” she says.

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Cohen was among several displaced individuals and families from the Gulf who found refuge in Rowan County after Hurricane Katrina hit.

At the time, the American Red Cross chapter here said it had received donations and was trying to help 14 displaced families.

Five years later, a handful of those people still make Rowan County their home.

Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, displaced almost 125,000 people in the greater New Orleans area, according to regional census data.

The storm killed nearly 1,500 people in Louisiana alone.

Every city and county in the United States seemed to be touched somehow by the storm. Salisbury adopted, for example, the city of Pascagoula, Miss., and sent volunteers and supplies for its recovery effort.

A Rockwell company built and filled the fields around its plants with mobile homes that the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered as temporary homes for people in the Gulf.

Throughout Rowan County, churches sent supplies and people to the ravaged Gulf communities.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Gulf residents lost jobs, homes, friends and their way of life.

People such as Cohen, Jim Killian Sr., Bonnie Cleary and Anne Nesbit-White (see separate story on 1A), started their lives over here.

“Everybody was displaced, and I was here and displaced,” Cohen says. “Nobody knew where I was.

“Who would think something that catastrophic would happen in the United States.”

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The whole Katrina experience for her, Cohen says, was like a death.

First, she denied it. “Then, for a long time, I was angry,” she says. Depression set in next.

“I couldn’t pull myself together,” she says. “Different people were saying, ‘Get over it,’ who hadn’t been through it.”

But she was out of money and didn’t want to ask for help. She also had no music connections in North Carolina. No one here knew a writer once called her one of the hardest working people on Bourbon Street.

“Finally, I realized I was out of sorts and not being myself,” she says. “I knew I had a problem.”

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Born in Indian Trail, Cohen moved to New Jersey as a little girl and lived with her grandparents. She often was called on to sing at family gatherings.

She attended Livingstone College for several years but did not graduate and had lived in New Orleans 13 years before Katrina hit.

Cohen had left a casino job in Atlantic City, N.J., to become part of the staff for a new casino opening on the Gulf Coast.

In New Orleans, she also began pursuing a singing career — something she had always wanted to do. She was fortunate, Cohen says, to hook up with many of New Orleans’ top event agencies.

She began singing the blues at clubs, festivals and different corporate events, developing a signature persona. “I’m the only black entertainer who dresses as colorful as I dress and sings the blues,” Cohen says. “... I would draw a big crowd.”

Cohen began singing full-time, finding gigs at the Storyville Lounge and portraying Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith for the House of Blues’ Schoolhouse Blues History Show.

Thanks to her wigs, costuming and singing talent, her shows were quite colorful.

When she evacuated that morning from New Orleans, Cohen packed only a couple of outfits and a pair of flip-flops.

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It would take about two months before Cohen returned to New Orleans. She remembers that everything in her old neighborhood seemed gray, as though there were no trees or birds.

“I couldn’t believe I had lost everything,” she recalls. “I had to go see.”

Floodwaters had filled the downstairs apartments on her block to their ceilings but had not reached the upstairs.

“I was more looted than flooded,” Cohen says.

To keep from being spotted, looters knocked huge holes into the upstairs walls that separated apartments and traveled between the deserted homes through those holes.

Cohen found her jewelry box empty and upside down on her bed. Her costume wigs were lying on the floor, trampled beyond repair. She says thousands of dollars in costumes and sound equipment were stolen.

Only a few pieces of furniture were salvageable. She realized then her life in New Orleans was over, though she returned once more to sing at the opening of a Harrod’s casino.

“I still felt, from time to time, I wanted to go back,” Cohen says, “But then it was, where are you going to stay and how are you going to live?”

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Back in Rowan County, Cohen relied on the generosity of her brother for accommodations at first. Her father gave her enough money to pay cash for a foreclosed- on house in East Spencer, where she still lives.

Merline Kimble and her grandchildren lived in a house donated by the Rev. Reginald Massey and his wife, Susan. Merline and her family have returned to Louisiana, Cohen says.

Cohen, 53, credits motivational tapes and books for getting her life and career started again. She listened to Dr. Wayne W. Dyer and Bishop E. Bernard Jordan.

After Katrina, she traveled to Brazil for a festival that had been booked before the storm. Back in North Carolina, the singing gigs didn’t come quickly, though she began having regular club appearances in Charlotte and High Point and found work in nearby places such as Mooresville and Winston-Salem.

Most recently she has landed bookings through the Music Maker Relief Foundation, which supports many older blues singers — Cohen says she’s one of the younger acts.

This year she has performed at the Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival in Australia and says she has recently returned from a month-and-a-half in Europe.

On Sept. 19, she will sing at Durham Central Park as part of the Warehouse Blues Series.

“It has been a struggle, but every day gets better,” Cohen says.

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The 1984 Nissan truck had close to 300,000 miles on it when they all piled in to evacuate their St. Bernard Parish home near New Orleans.

In the front were Jim Killian Sr.; his longtime companion, Bonnie Cleary; and their 12-year-old daughter, Jamie. In the back part of the pickup were Bonnie’s oldest son, George; Jim’s brother, Marvin; and two dogs.

Needless to say, they weren’t taking much with them — $200, three sets of clothing and two coolers of food and drinks.

“We left the day before it happened,” Bonnie recalls. “We thought we’d be right back.”

The family set sights on Concord, N.C., where Jim’s father lived. Rather than follow the interstate, which was packed with traffic, Jim decided to travel Highway 90 along the coast. It was still bumper-to-bumper much of the way out of Louisiana.

At one point, to avoid backtracking, Jim pushed through a burning car on a bridge to keep going east.

They reached Concord safely and watched with the rest of the television world Hurricane Katrina’s path of destruction — the damage to both lives and property.

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For several days, the family couldn’t reach anyone back in Louisiana. Bonnie’s youngest son, Eric, had stayed behind.

She later learned from Eric that he had retrieved a rowboat from the roof of a drugstore and had begun bringing food and water to remaining residents and ferrying some to a local rescue center.

He had been a hero, among many from those days after Katrina hit. Eric eventually moved his family to Baton Rouge.

Jim and Bonnie knew that floodwaters probably had destroyed their rental house in St. Bernard Parish. They lived in Chalmette, on the east bank of the Mississippi River.

“Once the levee broke, that was it,” Jim says. “I started looking for work up here.”

Within a couple of weeks, Tim and Cindy Nooner at On Track Auto Sales on U.S. 29 south of Salisbury hired Jim as a mechanic.

Through the Red Cross, the family met Marshall and Debbie Smith, who allowed them to live in a brick house on U.S. 29 for six months rent-free.

Previously, the Red Cross had moved the family out of Jim’s father’s place, which had only one bedroom, and into a Concord hotel.

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Delayed by the threat of another storm, Hurricane Rita, the family’s return to St. Bernard Parish came about a month after Katrina.

On Track allowed Jim to borrow a truck for the quick trip, just to determine whether anything was left.

Their old house was full of swamp mud and mold spores, and it smelled horrible. There were dead fish and crabs everywhere. Jamie was able to find only one of her 17 cats. Bonnie lost some 300 plants. They salvaged only a few items, such as a china plate, a ceramic cat, oriental statues and a crucifix.

They were leaving a strong sentimental attachment behind. Bonnie was a New Orleans native. Jim had moved there from Hickory as a boy in 1960.

Back in North Carolina, Jim and Bonnie enrolled in Prosperity Inc. classes for first-time homebuyers and were approved for a government loan to buy the house from the Smiths.

“People accepted us with open arms,” Bonnie says of their new home in Rowan County and the help they received to get their lives started again. Jim says he especially enjoys the work and the people at On Track.

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The five years since Katrina have been good and bad.

The Saints won the Super Bowl.

Jamie, now a senior at Carson High School, has been an honor roll student and is considering a career in criminal justice. Jim’s brother, Marvin, has settled in Kannapolis.

Jim’s father died two years ago at 83 years old. “It kind of worked out,” Jim says. “We got to spend some time with my dad.”

Bonnie’s oldest son, 33-year-old George, took his own life in 2006.

He had suffered through depression for a long time and became more depressed when he lost some friends even before Hurricane Katrina displaced his family. Bonnie has always feared Katrina made things worse.

The family is doing well now, Bonnie says, but she can’t help but think of George and life before the storm.

Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263.