Gulf Coast Blog
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ON FOUNTAIN LANE, THE PULL OF HOME IS STRONG
To hear Angela Bell of East Biloxi, Mississippi, talk about home makes one long to have a place like hers. Home is not just a house on a street in a town. And it’s certainly not a FEMA trailer, crowded with the belongings and moods of four people packed into a room the size of a few ping pong tables shoved together—though that has been her reality for 10 interminable months.
Home was Fountain Lane, the street that led through her childhood and carried her into her 30s. It was lined with small houses and loaded with friends. It’s where her mother still lives, in a white house with a bit of dark green trim.
“I lived in this house for 35 years, and what did I do?” asked Angela standing in the yard next to the little house finally repaired after the beating Katrina gave it. “I bought a house around the corner. And what does that tell you?”
The answer’s clear: This quiet neighborhood in East Biloxi is home, and Fountain Lane is its core. Barely wide enough for two cars to pass comfortably, the lane’s just the right width for calling out to neighbors. There were times, Angela said, when she would be late returning to the house, snared—happily—by impromptu conversations with Fountain Lane folks perched on their porches or working in their yards.
I looked down the street at those yards now tangled with weeds, the porches deserted, the houses behind them battered and gutted. Not even a third of them had come back to life, and this was nearly a year after the terrible storm.
But the pull of the place is strong—as strong as family ties that won’t let you go no matter how far you roam.
Across the street a man was mowing, shoving his machine with determination through the unruly growth, the bits of debris that it obscured popping like gunfire when the blade hit. He was sweating in the humidity thick enough to choke a northerner like me, but he wasn’t going to stop. He was taking back his yard, his home, his life.
Further down, a fresh coat of paint—as intensely pink as a perfect summer watermelon—dressed the outside of another house, an inspiration for its graying and mold-spotted neighbors. Maybe their owners would be back soon, too?
“We had a cool street,” said Angela, and it will be that way again once the kids come back. They’re the lifeblood of Fountain Lane, she said, thinking of her own 8-year-old daughter.
“My baby cries,” said Angela. “I keep telling her, Lord, I can’t wait ‘til we get some room.”
For the past year, everything in her daughter’s life has been impermanent, from the portable FEMA trailer the family has been camping in to the portable classroom pods in which she spends her school days.
Permanence is the key to home, and Angela is determined not to lose it, no matter how fiercely Mother Nature fights to take it away. She lived through Hurricane Camille, and she’s living through Katrina. Her house is gone. All that’s left is a foundation. But her heart is here.
“I’m going to rebuild a house,” she said. “If you don’t do for yourself, it ain’t going to get done.”
It’s getting done here on Fountain Lane—one room, one roof, one coat of paint at a time.
This is what rebuilding the Gulf Coast has really been all about: the hard work of holding onto home.
