More Than A Decade After the Storm, HOPE Remains in Pass Christian, MS

Two days after Hurricane Katrina showed her might when she hit land, Mae Beth Marshall and her husband, Caesar, found themselves separated. She sat, anxiously or patiently, depending on the time of day, waiting for her son to come pick her up and take her to reunite with her beloved. At the shelter they’d escaped to, Caesar had suffered a heart attack and had to be transported to Mobile, Ala. They say when it rains, it pours.

“I couldn’t go with him,” she says. “I had to wait until my son and his friend came down to get me to take me to where my husband was.”

After about a week with her husband, Marshall returned to her home in Pass Christian on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to assess the damage. She’d grown up on the coast before moving to New York City to work as a computer operator. In the ‘80s, she and her husband moved back to care for her ailing mother-in-law.

Coming back to her house in Pass Christian after the storm, wasn’t like any memory of home she had.

“[I] found some pictures and a scrapbook … the water hadn’t damaged” in the rubbish, she says. “Had papers from my mother-in law and my momma from the1800s; they were all wet. I kept them, even though you can’t read them.”

She settled in a Federal Emergency Management Agency-issued mobile home for two years but wanted to get back home—whatever that meant. For a long while, it seemed like there was nothing that could be done about that, until Marshall decided to look for other options.

One person among a gulf of people standing in line to talk with only a handful of assistance workers about the rebuilding process was enormously frustrating. When she finally reached the front of the line, Marshall was turned away. “She told me there was nothing she could do and to try again later,” she says of the woman with whom she spoke. So she left, dejected.

“I was walking out, she ran after me, caught up with me, and told me to come back. And she said she was going to see what she could do.”

“She” was HOPE’s Senior Program Officer Jesse Lawson McReedy.

Marshall asked the reasons McReedy had changed her mind. “She said, I don’t know. There was something about your face, like you were at the end of your rope, and I was just going to try to do something. … She worked with me and then she hooked up with my friend across the street, Rose.” HOPE’s Home Again program helped Marshall get back in a home in the same place her original house stood. The program also equipped her new house with a lift for Caesar, who was confined to a wheelchair after his heart attack.

Ten years later, Marshall has her own stories to tell about her experiences during Hurricane Katrina. She also has something immeasurably valuable: a place of her own. “This home means God means God meant for me to get through all this and end back here. I’m back. I’m here.”