‘Sometimes … I’m in a total state of despair’

Anne Nesbit-White wipes her glasses before sitting down on the bed in her basement apartment in Salisbury. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

Anne Nesbit-White has not returned to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina displaced her five years ago. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

Anne Nesbit-White lost her apartment, car, clothing and other possessions when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans five years ago. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

By Mark Wineka

mwineka@salisburypost.com

Anne Nesbit-White sits on the bed of her basement apartment, furnished with odds and ends collected over her three years in Salisbury.

The walls are cement block. The floor is concrete, softened a bit by her throw rugs. She runs a dehumidifier to cut down the mildew.

For entertainment, she watches her large-screen television or reads and studies the Bible. Sometimes she will walk to the nearby Blockbuster and rent a movie, or splurge and treat herself to a dinner at Applebee’s.

Outside of church friends, the woman upstairs and her few in-home care patients, Nesbit-White doesn’t know many people in Salisbury.

“I am quite the loner since I moved back to North Carolina,” she says. “Sometimes I wake up, and I’m in a total state of despair.”

When Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans five years ago, Nesbit-White was on an extended visit to her native Charlotte, staying with one of her seven sisters.

But most of her life and possessions were back in Louisiana — her car; apartment; most of her clothing; even her estranged husband, children and stepchildren.

A helpless feeling enveloped her as the storm battered the homes and lives of her family and all the friends she had made over 30 years of living in New Orleans’ Seventh and Ninth wards and nearby Gretna.

“I watched TV for three days,” she recalls. “All I could do was cry. My sister came in and took the TV out of my room.

“It was devastating.”

Nesbit-White realized she wasn’t going back to New Orleans — it wasn’t a liveable situation. Everyone she knew was scattered. Anne learned that trees had fallen on her apartment in Gretna, and it had been flooded.

She didn’t know what had happened to her car until a year later when authorities contacted her and said it was found abandoned on a highway.

They would destroy it if it were not claimed within so many days.

Nesbit-White told them to take it, knowing it wouldn’t run again.

Her grown stepchildren found Federal Emergency Management Agency accommodations in Arkansas. Her own children were OK, and her husband secured a teaching job in Jacksonville, N.C.

But he didn’t want to move to Charlotte and, within a year, he divorced Anne. Today he’s back in New Orleans, along with her stepchildren.

Meanwhile, Anne landed a job as case manager for a foster care agency in Charlotte. But her background — at 50, she had earned bachelor’s degrees in counseling and sociology from Southern University at New Orleans — was in substance abuse counseling, and she moved to Salisbury for a position with Rowan Treatment Associates.

She soon lost that job, which paid her more than $35,000 a year, and a tough year of drawing unemployment followed. Anne worried that her age — she is now 64 — was hurting her in finding a new job.

One day at her Seventh Day Adventist Church, Nesbit-White stood up and told fellow church members about her struggles.

The testimony connected her with an elderly couple who needed live-in help. She could reside in their basement in exchange for assisting them.

Nesbit-White calls her home “a sweet deal.” She pays no rent and nothing for utilities, except $10 a month for a cable television box. In exchange for the accommodations, she cooks meals and cleans house for the 88-year-old woman owner upstairs, whose husband has since died.

Anne also drives the woman to her doctor appointments.

“I think it’s an even exchange,” she says.

Nesbit enrolled at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College to receive her nurse’s aide training. She now draws Social Security and supplements those monthly checks by working 17 to 22 hours a week as an in-home care provider for Personal Touch Home Health Care.

It’s physical work that involves bathing, feeding and changing the clothes of her clients.

It pays her $7.25 an hour.

The good news is, Nesbit-White says, that her Ford Taurus will be paid off by next June.

“You make do with what you have,” she says. “Thank God I have a roof over my head.”

Nesbit-White’s first encounter with New Orleans came in the early 1970s when she visited a friend during Mardi Gras. “Love at first sight,” she says of her emotional attachment to the city. Soon she was living and working there.

New Orleans became the place she would meet her second husband, who drove a horse-and-buggy tour in the French Quarter.

Together they raised her two sons and three of his children from another marriage. It was where they both enrolled at Southern University and earned their degrees.

New Orleans was the place, Nesbit-White says, where she had friends to talk with and go out to dinner. After Katrina, many of them scattered to states such as Georgia, Texas, Alabama and Mississippi. She doesn’t know where other friends are.

“They just got lost in the storm,” she says.

Nesbit-White says she might go back to New Orleans some day — just to visit.

She’s thinking Mardi Gras would be a good time.

Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263.