She left her clothes on the back porch. She left her gold, Hunt High School Class of ’56 ring on the dresser. She left her baby, Gloria, in her sister Betsy’s arms. And then, on a hot summer day in 1960, Lyrian Wyvonne Barry boarded a Greyhound bus bound for St. Louis and disappeared behind a cloud of Mississippi dust.
It has become the benchmark by which all storms are measured. It has become the stark demarcation between life before and after, with Hurricane Katrina sitting squarely in the middle of coastal residents’ collective memory — as vivid today as the muddy water lines and red spray-paint which can still be seen on homes uninhabitable, abandoned.
In the 23rd Special Construction Battalion, the officers were white and the seamen and steward’s mates — basically servants — were black. “I’m from Georgia,” an officer told them. “Where I come from, there’s only two kinds of niggers — a good nigger and a dead nigger. We don’t want no dead ones.”
The teenager turned, walked back to the pool, slipped off his shirt and slid beneath the cool waters. Maybe his curiosity had been satisfied. Maybe he knew that Edward Yeates, head of Father’s Child Ministry, takes a no-nonsense approach to mentoring children who lack, and crave, a father’s presence. He gives them freedom, and he reins them in. Mostly, he loves them.
