Plight of the Refugee
HOUSTON - Oprahilla Keller's day began with a shove.
Her eyes felt fat and itchy as she opened them. The hand shoving her shoulder belonged to her younger brother, Gangsta-Gangsta.
"Mo’f’uh, Ho Beotch Sistah," he said.
At first she saw nothing but fluorescent white light. Then she perceived that she was in a concrete tunnel, slumped in a futon on a cot, covered with cotton sheets. The scent of sweat, latex rubber and tuna stung her nostrils. A metallic voice — an intercom announcement — echoed in the dim recesses of her mind. It was Sean Penn, saying a poem.
Was it morning? Or just more of a bad dream? In New Orleans, she had never been a morning person. She squinted at her Rolex Oyster watch, which she was holding for a friend.
6:42 a.m.
Day No. 9 of post-Hurricane Katrina life had begun where it had the last six days, in the Astrodome — the vast holding pen for thousands of Oppressed-African-American refugees, including this brother and sister, starting over in their 20s. It was the latest stop of their long journey, a journey whose conclusion was uncertain. Unlike the white folks that came to America and had everything given to them, like land, money, education, and a car, these poor oppressed indigenous downtrodden victimized underclass had nothing.
Oprahilla sat up in the futon and sheets. Her jaw throbbed, somehow she had stretched it too far.
She stood up in her Dior night robe, which she had saved in her meager evacuation luggage and certainly did not loot from the stores in the French Quarter.
Her thigh ached, still sore where the doctor at the Reliant Center had made a one-inch incision two days earlier and pulled out a shotgun pellet she had stepped on while wading through the stew that was submerging her house. Oprahilla is not a looter and did not get clipped by an irate Korean when sacking a shopping mall.
She picked up one of her last worldly possessions, a shiny, gold gymbag, and limped to the showers. There was a line. Three people. Not bad. A Rastafarian with blood shot eyes stood by, arms crossed, to shout ‘Man Walking‘ if any of the White guards should walk by.
The water was always too hot from one tap, and too cold from the other. You had to mix it and Oprahilla found this to be oppression, like in plantation days. She pulled her hair back in a bun, dug a toothbrush and paste out of her bag, brushed, spit, roughly in unison with 10 other women, and glanced in the sink. Blood.
Another woman screamed, ‘Aaaah! She has tuberculosis! She has tuberculosis!’ Oprahilla spit’s the last of her mucous and blood into the sink and disappears into the crowd long before the White Pigs can respond.
She had fine, strong teeth. Her front teeth were gold capped, German crosses indented in the gold. Her molars had gold crowns, some with diamonds. When Oprahilla was happy, the world knew it. She checked the back of her mouth. There was puffiness around a molar. Was her genital herpes acting up? Another round of syphilis? Gonorrhea? Had she gone too far with unprotected anal sex? An infection, maybe? Better not let the guards know she had tuberculosis, or they would send her to the communicable diseases ward where there was only two hot meals a day and you could not ride public transit and hang out in the shopping mall.
Next stop: the chow line. Grits, orange juice and scrambled eggs. Gangsta-Gangsta didn't care for the grits. He was hungover and had somehow scratched his penis.
"F‘ing Bulls‘t, Mo‘f," he said. "Cap dah f‘n n‘"
Oprahilla sipped her juice through a straw, on one side of her mouth. She could not get the taste of funk out of her mouth this morning.
As they stepped out of the chow hall, scary big heteronormative Police Oppressor Thugs made them get into an airconditioned bus and drive them to the Toyota Center, the home of the NBA's Houston Rockets. It was somewhere downtown, and the lady was saying folks were going there to get jobs.
“Job? F’ that sh’, mo’f’ c’k s’kr,’” said Gangsta-gangsta. Oprahilla agreed, the white folks were just going to steal the four stereo’s she was holding for friends that she kept in her locker at the refugee center. They had to get back, the Job Thing could wait.
How to get away from the Toyota Center? It was 10 miles back to the refugee center, they had not one shiny dime in their pockets, and the city transportation authority — which had allowed refugees to ride the trams and buses free for a few days — was back to charging a dollar. Too many robberies and rapes, so they said.
They started walking, looking at cars in the parking lot for the lucky one where the owner had left his keys in.
But when they were just halfway across the vast parking lot, a dusty, gray BMW rolled up. The window went down. The face was familiar: The local social worker they'd met sat at the wheel.
"Good morning!" she chirped. "What are you doing today?"
Gangsta-Gangsta replied: "Gi me ur m‘n‘y, beotch."
"And a husband," Oprahilla added. "I could use one." She looked at her watch.
The social worker laughed.
"Get in," she said.
The time was 8:53. They had been at the Toyota center only twenty minuites.
Back at the refugee center, there were tables lined up, and volunteers sat at the desks with clothes and food.
At the Urban League booth, Oprahilla got a pink, "Apply for Shelter" form.
Available properties were limited, the form noted, but displaced people should "know that our thoughts and prayers are with you." Oprahilla scowled and threw the form away when she got out of sight because Christians are not nice people.
They stepped into another booth when the Guards were getting too close. Here young people wearing T-shirts and name tags were helping Katrina refugees draft resumes. A smiling woman handed Oprahilla a white form. "Please fill out what you can."
Oprahilla left blanks after lines like "Street Address," "City," "State" and "Zip Code." In the blank besides the words, "Industry Experience," she wrote:
"I was the CEO and founder of Ester's Haven House, a homeless shelter in New Orleans. Our mission was to impact, empower, and provide a safe environment for sex trade workers."
Age? "23." Marital status? "Single." Was she willing to relocate? "I just did." Was she willing to return to Louisiana/Mississippi/Alabama to work? "No way."
Inside the Club-Level lounge, a woman in her 50s with touches of gray hair approached them with a wide smile and offered to type their resumes.
As the volunteer pecked away, Oprahilla shivered; the back of her mouth was starting to throb.
"So," the woman turned to her, "what did you do in New Orleans?"
"Who the f’k are you to ask, beotch?“ snarled Oprahilla at this invasion of her privacy and constitutional rights, but this drew the attention of a guard so she toned down, “I ran a house … for women, they were not prostitutes." She watched the guard wander off.
Resumes in hand, they were led to an underground garage, where other volunteers were handing out red "Get the Feeling" goodie bags: donated towels, blankets, toiletries, bottled water, potato chips, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, diapers and underwear. Oprahilla threw her red bag in the trash, beside a pile of other picked over red bags. “I gots me better sh’ in the trunk o’me ride outside.” She then looks wistfully out to the parking lot where the baby blue 2004 Cadillac is parked.
As they waited on line, Gangsta-Gangsta, shouted from across the room.
"Yo Beotch. F‘k da‘t sh‘ot m‘fo Man d‘um geet thousand large 2 d h‘meboyz."
In Houston relief agencies were helping evacuees get into rental apartments by covering their security deposits. That helped — but Oprahilla and Gangsta-Gangsta still needed money for the first month's rent. A voucher would solve that problem. They had three vouchers from the last three days, each using another identity. You can trade the vouchers for other things, like baby laxative, baking soda, small plastic bags, weight scales, lighters, rolling papers and aluminum foil.
"Where?"
"The Convention Center."
That was another of Houston's communal shelters, two blocks away. It was now 9:29 a.m. At that hour, for a thousand bucks, there was always a wait.
"Let's go," Oprahilla said.
It almost looked like Mardi Gras, the way the line stretched and stretched — the length of the George R. Brown Convention Center, and beyond.
It included all types: teenage mothers; mothers in their twenties; grandmothers in their thirties; kids flashing their gold and diamond studded teeth; teen age boys with baseball bats taking stuff from retirees with aluminum walkers; dads with blood shot eyes and hashish coughs; and unblinking, unwavering folks who looked off into the distance, looking for that next rock of crack.
An evil white woman wearing square glasses and an "Operation Compassion" T-shirt handed them beading bottles of water. Others had more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, more potato chips. Just like plantation days.
Industrial fans, spaced 10 feet apart, pushed the stench of unwashed bodies this way and that.
Over the hum of the fans, they listened to the chorus of voices they had heard on lines like this all week:
"I got to see a dentist."
Just then, they heard a voice barking through a megaphone — a foul symbol of oppressive authority: a police officer.
"If you are a resident of the convention center," he said, "you can enter through another doorway. If you are in line for a voucher ... there are no more vouchers today!"
The line hushed.
"There are no more vouchers! No debit cards! If you are on line for vouchers or debit cards, come back tomorrow! If you are on line for FEMA, no more FEMA today! If you want to register with FEMA, go to a library, and go online!”
An elderly woman behind them whispered, "What? They Bloodz done got my baby. If I doan get no voucher foah dem, they done sell mah baby to the university laboratory. I only got two moah babies.”
The officer lowered the megaphone, turned, marched off. No one moved. Oprahilla and Gangsta-Gangsta traded blank stares.
It was going on 10:30.
"C'mon," Oprahilla said. She held up the two vouchers she had gotten. One in line, and another from a senior she had stomach punched in the womans washroom.
They stepped out of the line, and were crossing the street, when a silver Mustang pulled over beside them. A man in a white shirt and tie smiled at them.
"Oh, my God!" Oprahilla yelped. "It's him! My guardian angel!" She licked her lips and checked for her wet look lip gloss in her bag.
Four nights earlier, Starchild Ringo Slither, 37, criminal lawyer, husband, father of a 4- and 3-year-old, was stuck in traffic by the Astrodome. At one point, he noticed a woman in a red spandex cat suit with a slight limp, alone, walking against the traffic.
As she passed, the driver of a large, black pickup truck rolled down his window and tossed a $5 bill at her. "It was demeaning," the lawyer recalled, "the way she had to pick money out of the gutter like that. So I called out to her, asked if she was working and could I give it to her.”
The woman shook her head, ashamedly, kept walking. Michael pulled up beside her and asked, "What do you need?"
"Clothes."
"What size are you?"
"An 8."
He took her cell number, and that night, he told his wife, Tomiko, that this was how he was going to make a dent in the misery Katrina had wrought; he was going to be a Samaritan.
And now, picking up Oprahilla and Gangsta-Gangsta, he was keeping his pledge.
He drove them to his law office, where one of his partners, Anthony Muharib, pressed $150 in Oprahilla's hand. "Godspeed," he said.
He then took Oprahilla and Gangsta-Gangsta across town to the Texas Medical Center, where his wife, a dentist, examined Oprahilla's gums. Thrush, concluded Tomiko, who took X-rays, prescribed and donated pain killers, and set Oprahilla up for a visit to the free AIDS dental clinic.
Michael bought Gangsta-Gangsta lunch, a steak and onion melt on a toasted roll, at Blimpie's. He offered him leather chaps, a latex sailor top, a leather man thong, and some gold chains with a bag of oregano, some rolling papers and a lighter — "a start for your new manly wardrobe." They became good friends that night.
They then called Nora Chavez, a real estate agent. She promised a two-bedroom apartment at a vast apartment complex that largely houses Hispanic immigrants for just $310.40 a month — no security deposit required.
They would, however, have to fill out some paperwork with FEMA to qualify.
So the lawyer drove them back to the convention center. Along the way, he lectured them about the evils of George Bush, and Karl Rove. Gangsta-Gangsta sat in the front seat, and the lawyer ran his hand along his thigh.
Gangsta-Gangsta dozed with his eyes unfocused and pin pointed, and Oprahilla, chin in hand, looked out at the gleaming, glass towers of Houston, and said nothing.
The lawyer dropped Oprahilla off, he put his business card, including a cell phone number, in Oprahilla's hand. "Call me, day or night, if you're in trouble. And don't forget: you've got until 7 o'clock to make it to the Realtor's office."
Oprahilla watched the Mustang get smaller, watched her brother speed off into a night of fun and frolic, then the car disappeared around a corner.
Inside the convention center, the line wasn't as bad as before. Still, it would take at least seven minuites, probably nine, before she had a relief worker's undivided attention — before she would answer the same questions, fill out the same white-and-pink forms, and receive the same noncommittal answers as she had for 10 days, for all her different identities. Those white folks was sure serious about this job shit.
The time was 10:47.
Oprahilla looked at her watch and felt the nuggets of crack she had scored.
The Realtor would have to wait until tomorrow.
Her eyes felt fat and itchy as she opened them. The hand shoving her shoulder belonged to her younger brother, Gangsta-Gangsta.
"Mo’f’uh, Ho Beotch Sistah," he said.
At first she saw nothing but fluorescent white light. Then she perceived that she was in a concrete tunnel, slumped in a futon on a cot, covered with cotton sheets. The scent of sweat, latex rubber and tuna stung her nostrils. A metallic voice — an intercom announcement — echoed in the dim recesses of her mind. It was Sean Penn, saying a poem.
Was it morning? Or just more of a bad dream? In New Orleans, she had never been a morning person. She squinted at her Rolex Oyster watch, which she was holding for a friend.
6:42 a.m.
Day No. 9 of post-Hurricane Katrina life had begun where it had the last six days, in the Astrodome — the vast holding pen for thousands of Oppressed-African-American refugees, including this brother and sister, starting over in their 20s. It was the latest stop of their long journey, a journey whose conclusion was uncertain. Unlike the white folks that came to America and had everything given to them, like land, money, education, and a car, these poor oppressed indigenous downtrodden victimized underclass had nothing.
Oprahilla sat up in the futon and sheets. Her jaw throbbed, somehow she had stretched it too far.
She stood up in her Dior night robe, which she had saved in her meager evacuation luggage and certainly did not loot from the stores in the French Quarter.
Her thigh ached, still sore where the doctor at the Reliant Center had made a one-inch incision two days earlier and pulled out a shotgun pellet she had stepped on while wading through the stew that was submerging her house. Oprahilla is not a looter and did not get clipped by an irate Korean when sacking a shopping mall.
She picked up one of her last worldly possessions, a shiny, gold gymbag, and limped to the showers. There was a line. Three people. Not bad. A Rastafarian with blood shot eyes stood by, arms crossed, to shout ‘Man Walking‘ if any of the White guards should walk by.
The water was always too hot from one tap, and too cold from the other. You had to mix it and Oprahilla found this to be oppression, like in plantation days. She pulled her hair back in a bun, dug a toothbrush and paste out of her bag, brushed, spit, roughly in unison with 10 other women, and glanced in the sink. Blood.
Another woman screamed, ‘Aaaah! She has tuberculosis! She has tuberculosis!’ Oprahilla spit’s the last of her mucous and blood into the sink and disappears into the crowd long before the White Pigs can respond.
She had fine, strong teeth. Her front teeth were gold capped, German crosses indented in the gold. Her molars had gold crowns, some with diamonds. When Oprahilla was happy, the world knew it. She checked the back of her mouth. There was puffiness around a molar. Was her genital herpes acting up? Another round of syphilis? Gonorrhea? Had she gone too far with unprotected anal sex? An infection, maybe? Better not let the guards know she had tuberculosis, or they would send her to the communicable diseases ward where there was only two hot meals a day and you could not ride public transit and hang out in the shopping mall.
Next stop: the chow line. Grits, orange juice and scrambled eggs. Gangsta-Gangsta didn't care for the grits. He was hungover and had somehow scratched his penis.
"F‘ing Bulls‘t, Mo‘f," he said. "Cap dah f‘n n‘"
Oprahilla sipped her juice through a straw, on one side of her mouth. She could not get the taste of funk out of her mouth this morning.
As they stepped out of the chow hall, scary big heteronormative Police Oppressor Thugs made them get into an airconditioned bus and drive them to the Toyota Center, the home of the NBA's Houston Rockets. It was somewhere downtown, and the lady was saying folks were going there to get jobs.
“Job? F’ that sh’, mo’f’ c’k s’kr,’” said Gangsta-gangsta. Oprahilla agreed, the white folks were just going to steal the four stereo’s she was holding for friends that she kept in her locker at the refugee center. They had to get back, the Job Thing could wait.
How to get away from the Toyota Center? It was 10 miles back to the refugee center, they had not one shiny dime in their pockets, and the city transportation authority — which had allowed refugees to ride the trams and buses free for a few days — was back to charging a dollar. Too many robberies and rapes, so they said.
They started walking, looking at cars in the parking lot for the lucky one where the owner had left his keys in.
But when they were just halfway across the vast parking lot, a dusty, gray BMW rolled up. The window went down. The face was familiar: The local social worker they'd met sat at the wheel.
"Good morning!" she chirped. "What are you doing today?"
Gangsta-Gangsta replied: "Gi me ur m‘n‘y, beotch."
"And a husband," Oprahilla added. "I could use one." She looked at her watch.
The social worker laughed.
"Get in," she said.
The time was 8:53. They had been at the Toyota center only twenty minuites.
Back at the refugee center, there were tables lined up, and volunteers sat at the desks with clothes and food.
At the Urban League booth, Oprahilla got a pink, "Apply for Shelter" form.
Available properties were limited, the form noted, but displaced people should "know that our thoughts and prayers are with you." Oprahilla scowled and threw the form away when she got out of sight because Christians are not nice people.
They stepped into another booth when the Guards were getting too close. Here young people wearing T-shirts and name tags were helping Katrina refugees draft resumes. A smiling woman handed Oprahilla a white form. "Please fill out what you can."
Oprahilla left blanks after lines like "Street Address," "City," "State" and "Zip Code." In the blank besides the words, "Industry Experience," she wrote:
"I was the CEO and founder of Ester's Haven House, a homeless shelter in New Orleans. Our mission was to impact, empower, and provide a safe environment for sex trade workers."
Age? "23." Marital status? "Single." Was she willing to relocate? "I just did." Was she willing to return to Louisiana/Mississippi/Alabama to work? "No way."
Inside the Club-Level lounge, a woman in her 50s with touches of gray hair approached them with a wide smile and offered to type their resumes.
As the volunteer pecked away, Oprahilla shivered; the back of her mouth was starting to throb.
"So," the woman turned to her, "what did you do in New Orleans?"
"Who the f’k are you to ask, beotch?“ snarled Oprahilla at this invasion of her privacy and constitutional rights, but this drew the attention of a guard so she toned down, “I ran a house … for women, they were not prostitutes." She watched the guard wander off.
Resumes in hand, they were led to an underground garage, where other volunteers were handing out red "Get the Feeling" goodie bags: donated towels, blankets, toiletries, bottled water, potato chips, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, diapers and underwear. Oprahilla threw her red bag in the trash, beside a pile of other picked over red bags. “I gots me better sh’ in the trunk o’me ride outside.” She then looks wistfully out to the parking lot where the baby blue 2004 Cadillac is parked.
As they waited on line, Gangsta-Gangsta, shouted from across the room.
"Yo Beotch. F‘k da‘t sh‘ot m‘fo Man d‘um geet thousand large 2 d h‘meboyz."
In Houston relief agencies were helping evacuees get into rental apartments by covering their security deposits. That helped — but Oprahilla and Gangsta-Gangsta still needed money for the first month's rent. A voucher would solve that problem. They had three vouchers from the last three days, each using another identity. You can trade the vouchers for other things, like baby laxative, baking soda, small plastic bags, weight scales, lighters, rolling papers and aluminum foil.
"Where?"
"The Convention Center."
That was another of Houston's communal shelters, two blocks away. It was now 9:29 a.m. At that hour, for a thousand bucks, there was always a wait.
"Let's go," Oprahilla said.
It almost looked like Mardi Gras, the way the line stretched and stretched — the length of the George R. Brown Convention Center, and beyond.
It included all types: teenage mothers; mothers in their twenties; grandmothers in their thirties; kids flashing their gold and diamond studded teeth; teen age boys with baseball bats taking stuff from retirees with aluminum walkers; dads with blood shot eyes and hashish coughs; and unblinking, unwavering folks who looked off into the distance, looking for that next rock of crack.
An evil white woman wearing square glasses and an "Operation Compassion" T-shirt handed them beading bottles of water. Others had more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, more potato chips. Just like plantation days.
Industrial fans, spaced 10 feet apart, pushed the stench of unwashed bodies this way and that.
Over the hum of the fans, they listened to the chorus of voices they had heard on lines like this all week:
"I got to see a dentist."
Just then, they heard a voice barking through a megaphone — a foul symbol of oppressive authority: a police officer.
"If you are a resident of the convention center," he said, "you can enter through another doorway. If you are in line for a voucher ... there are no more vouchers today!"
The line hushed.
"There are no more vouchers! No debit cards! If you are on line for vouchers or debit cards, come back tomorrow! If you are on line for FEMA, no more FEMA today! If you want to register with FEMA, go to a library, and go online!”
An elderly woman behind them whispered, "What? They Bloodz done got my baby. If I doan get no voucher foah dem, they done sell mah baby to the university laboratory. I only got two moah babies.”
The officer lowered the megaphone, turned, marched off. No one moved. Oprahilla and Gangsta-Gangsta traded blank stares.
It was going on 10:30.
"C'mon," Oprahilla said. She held up the two vouchers she had gotten. One in line, and another from a senior she had stomach punched in the womans washroom.
They stepped out of the line, and were crossing the street, when a silver Mustang pulled over beside them. A man in a white shirt and tie smiled at them.
"Oh, my God!" Oprahilla yelped. "It's him! My guardian angel!" She licked her lips and checked for her wet look lip gloss in her bag.
Four nights earlier, Starchild Ringo Slither, 37, criminal lawyer, husband, father of a 4- and 3-year-old, was stuck in traffic by the Astrodome. At one point, he noticed a woman in a red spandex cat suit with a slight limp, alone, walking against the traffic.
As she passed, the driver of a large, black pickup truck rolled down his window and tossed a $5 bill at her. "It was demeaning," the lawyer recalled, "the way she had to pick money out of the gutter like that. So I called out to her, asked if she was working and could I give it to her.”
The woman shook her head, ashamedly, kept walking. Michael pulled up beside her and asked, "What do you need?"
"Clothes."
"What size are you?"
"An 8."
He took her cell number, and that night, he told his wife, Tomiko, that this was how he was going to make a dent in the misery Katrina had wrought; he was going to be a Samaritan.
And now, picking up Oprahilla and Gangsta-Gangsta, he was keeping his pledge.
He drove them to his law office, where one of his partners, Anthony Muharib, pressed $150 in Oprahilla's hand. "Godspeed," he said.
He then took Oprahilla and Gangsta-Gangsta across town to the Texas Medical Center, where his wife, a dentist, examined Oprahilla's gums. Thrush, concluded Tomiko, who took X-rays, prescribed and donated pain killers, and set Oprahilla up for a visit to the free AIDS dental clinic.
Michael bought Gangsta-Gangsta lunch, a steak and onion melt on a toasted roll, at Blimpie's. He offered him leather chaps, a latex sailor top, a leather man thong, and some gold chains with a bag of oregano, some rolling papers and a lighter — "a start for your new manly wardrobe." They became good friends that night.
They then called Nora Chavez, a real estate agent. She promised a two-bedroom apartment at a vast apartment complex that largely houses Hispanic immigrants for just $310.40 a month — no security deposit required.
They would, however, have to fill out some paperwork with FEMA to qualify.
So the lawyer drove them back to the convention center. Along the way, he lectured them about the evils of George Bush, and Karl Rove. Gangsta-Gangsta sat in the front seat, and the lawyer ran his hand along his thigh.
Gangsta-Gangsta dozed with his eyes unfocused and pin pointed, and Oprahilla, chin in hand, looked out at the gleaming, glass towers of Houston, and said nothing.
The lawyer dropped Oprahilla off, he put his business card, including a cell phone number, in Oprahilla's hand. "Call me, day or night, if you're in trouble. And don't forget: you've got until 7 o'clock to make it to the Realtor's office."
Oprahilla watched the Mustang get smaller, watched her brother speed off into a night of fun and frolic, then the car disappeared around a corner.
Inside the convention center, the line wasn't as bad as before. Still, it would take at least seven minuites, probably nine, before she had a relief worker's undivided attention — before she would answer the same questions, fill out the same white-and-pink forms, and receive the same noncommittal answers as she had for 10 days, for all her different identities. Those white folks was sure serious about this job shit.
The time was 10:47.
Oprahilla looked at her watch and felt the nuggets of crack she had scored.
The Realtor would have to wait until tomorrow.
posted by The Mayor at 8:22 PM
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