They've stopped here on the first football Saturday of the year, along a patch of Texas highway, not far from the Cotton Bowl. Some left their homes early, some just in time. Some arrived in cars, some on buses. Some want a smoke, some want a soda, some just want to get the trip over with. Many are on their way to a stadium. No one is here for a game.
Hurricane Katrina busted the levees severals days ago, flooding New Orleans residents out of their homes and sending them all over the South. They are part of the biggest exodus since the 1930s Dust Bowl migration and no one knows what awaits them. A Louisiana deputy sheriff named Jason Chelette recalls one comment he heard as he loaded a bus at the Superdome: "We don't even get to watch the Saints. Guess we lost everything."
HORACE STRONG doesn't remember anyone saying much on his bus. He's supposed to be home in Huntsville, Ala., idling in a Books-a-Million parking lot, waiting for Tigers fans to climb onto his charter for the ride to Auburn's home opener against Georgia Tech. But he's here instead, off the Market Center Boulevard exit in Dallas, in front of the Ramada Inn where he stayed last night after dropping people off at Reunion Arena. He is one of the faceless millions who are as much a part of the sports fabric as any superstar athlete. Now he's part of something much bigger.
Strong is 66, old enough to say no to this, but FEMA called him on Tuesday and he said yes before the person on the other end even asked. He drove through the night and pulled into a line of buses outside the Superdome. He saw water everywhere. He tried not to look at the bodies piled like sandbags. Hours passed before he pushed open his door and the people with hollow eyes and vacant stares collapsed into his seats. He drove, dawn to dusk, to Houston. Then he went back for a second trip.
He'd like a hot meal, and Denny's is right next door. But there's no time. He walks through the aisles of his bus, sweeping dirty diapers and used insulin syringes from under the seats. Then he apologizes and says he must go. People are still down there, waiting to get out.
Horace pulls a lever and his door swings shut. He drives away.
ON HIS way to Interstate 35, Strong passes a Marriott parking lot where a 27-year-old father rummages through his white Oldsmobile. Louis Barnes drove here with family from the West Bank of New Orleans. It will be days before he hears from his girlfriend, Shakhalila, who stayed with her parents in Lafayette with their baby daughter, Alicia, born two weeks ago. But his 7-year-old son, also named Louis, is with him.
Barnes' life has been shaken up before. He says his mom was murdered when he was 13, and his biological father is in prison somewhere in Mississippi for burglary. Barnes was an athletic kid, but he spent all his time working and trying to stay out of trouble. It wasn't easy. He got out of prison last November after serving three years for possession of a firearm. He has never played a single game on an organized team. "Closest I got," he says, "was a scrimmage."
But now he has little Louis, and little Louis is fast. So fast that when a rec football coach saw him running around the neighborhood last year, he asked big Louis if the boy could join his team. But big Louis had just landed a job as a welder and he couldn't afford to buy a car to drive his son across town.
During their first day in Texas, Barnes bought his boy a football, and now they're playing in the Marriott parking lot. Little Louis winds up and chucks it 20 yards. "I can see the potential in him," his daddy says, "so I want to do what I can."
First, he has to do what he can for 13 relatives packed into Rooms 521 and 518. One of them is his great-grandmother, who has cancer. Little Louis runs around the lobby as his dad goes upstairs.
NEXT DOOR, at the Sheraton, 19-year-old Jonathan Smith sits alone in the 11th-floor lounge watching football. He wears fuzzy slippers and socks with drawings of kittens. He didn't think he'd be out in public, in a hotel in Dallas. His mom, Janice, told him they needed to leave New Orleans, so he jumped into her Nissan Armada without shoes. It was 4 a.m. on Sunday. "I thought we'd be gone one day," he says, "then we'd go right back." Back to football practice at John Ehret High, where Jonathan is a cornerback for one of Louisiana's larger schools. Back to his West Bank neighborhood, where light poles once doubled as end zones and curbs were out of bounds. But after he and his mom stayed the night in Shreveport, they heard the news: "New Orleans is messed up."
When they got to Dallas the next day, Jonathan headed straight for the cramped hotel fitness room to start training for a game he knew would never happen. Then the door swung open and another teen walked in. Jonathan stared at him. The other boy stared back. They knew each other. Jeremy Newman is a 15-yearold wideout for John Ehret.
Here's Jeremy now, getting off the elevator. The teammates sit in the lounge and quietly watch the TCUOklahoma game. Jonathan asks a question: "Is football one of the main sports out here?" He pauses. "I'm going to get into a school and get on a team. Hope they put me at corner." Jeremy looks out the window. "I don't feel right playing football here," he says. "It isn't gonna be the same."
The game ends, Oklahoma loses, and Jonathan starts talking about the future. Can he even make a high school team in a big city like this? Maybe he'll get a job, become an architect. Maybe he can help rebuild New Orleans. "What is minimum wage here?" he asks. "How much for a ticket to New York? They got jobs there?" He's ready to leave this hotel, to start over. Except for one thing: he left his ID at home. "I'll go to any state," he says, "as long as I have my ID."
DOWN THE highway, off the Kiest Boulevard exit, sits a church surrounded by shabby gas stations, loan offices and pawn shops. The grass outside is parched and stiff. Inside, the lights are off, the pews empty. A young man wanders near the altar. He wears a T-shirt and jean shorts and a pink paper bracelet. He's an evacuee.
His name is Sean Patterson and he's 19. He grew up in East New Orleans playing "park ball," the city's version of Pop Warner. He played linebacker for Carver, where Marshall Faulk went to school. He loves the Falcons and the Eagles and the Saints. Loves TO. "I'm a football freak," he says.
Last Monday, the day Katrina hit, Sean woke up early at his uncle's (his parents were in Chicago for a funeral) and took a bus to the Iberville Projects, close to I-10. He got to the park before the wind really picked up. He knew he'd never forget this day-the day he played football in a hurricane. Fifty kids from the projects gathered on the softening grass. The gale blew the ball everywhere and every play ended in a muddy splat. Sean ran around for hours, until he could barely move. As Katrina raged north that night, he slept soundly at a friend's Iberville apartment.
The next day, the water rose. Sean's heart thumped. He had to get out-now-even if it meant leaving his buddies behind. He waded and swam until he got to the interstate, then made his way to the Superdome. He walked inside. It was so hot, so loud. People yelled and groaned. He needed a bathroom. He lined up and waited, shuffled and waited some more. He smelled the urine and sweat and death, and he swallowed back his nausea. Then he got inside the men's room and he saw a naked girl on the wet floor, cradling an older woman. The girl had been raped, someone said. The woman, her mother, had been killed right next to her.
Sean stops his story. He looks up at the church ceiling, tilts his head forward. He breathes deep and his eyes go empty for a moment. Then he continues.
He stayed inside the Superdome for days-he can't remember how many-and then lined up on the interstate for more days, until the buses came. He made it to Dallas and got some food and sleep at the Convention Center. A local businessman and loyal churchgoer named Tederal Jefferson met him there and brought him to his house. Sean sat on the soft couch and burst into tears. He didn't yet know that his twin sister, Shana, had made it out.
Before the tears can overwhelm him again here in the church, Sean forces a smile. "Check this out," he says. He rolls up his shirt sleeves. There are scrapes and scars everywhere. He pulls down his socks to reveal red and pink welts. These, he says, are from diving at opponents and landing on glass fragments and debris during the hurricane. Sean puffs out his chest and says, "It was the best football of my entire life."
DOWNTOWN, OFF the Commerce Street exit, inside Reunion Arena, 10-year-old Troy Morgan darts through the concourse in socks, searching for a basketball. His grandmother, Gwendolen, is lying on a cot on the arena floor. His mom and sister were visiting friends when Katrina hit, and he hasn't seen them since. His dad died years ago.
Gwendolen dragged Troy out of her second-floor apartment in the Ninth Ward as the water rose. Then they waded, along with some relatives, toward high ground. "I saw a gator!" Troy says. Someone asked a police officer for help. The cop told them, "Save y'all self. Ain't nobody comin' to help you."
The officer motioned toward a lot full of 18-wheelers. Troy's uncle, who used to drive a truck, jumped into the cab, reached down and grabbed two wires. The engine rolled over. Troy, Gwendolen and the others-19 people in all, some of them strangers-jumped into the back and swung the huge metal doors shut. Troy's uncle drove all the way to Dallas. Now he's fast asleep on his cot while Troy looks for a ball. Men in military fatigues patrol the concourse.
Troy waves to them. He starts to talk, but he's too nervous. "Um … this … him … said … go … basketball … " The men let Troy pass. And then he sees it, outside by the huge parking structure: four hoops and a makeshift court.
Troy runs back to his grandmother to get his shoes. By the time he returns, a volunteer has already dumped out a bag of basketballs and the older kids have swept them up. So Troy grabs a soccer ball and dribbles over to a six-foot hoop. A 12-year-old boy, a volunteer's son named Michael, walks over with him. They don't ask each other's names or even speak. They just start playing, one-on-one. As darkness falls, Michael says he has to go home. Troy stays, dribbling and shooting, until the only light left comes from the neon arena sign flashing overhead.
Finally, he walks back into the arena, arms filled with donated clothes. He pulls a worn-out Michael Finley jersey over his head. He pauses at a computer, where volunteers stand ready to help find missing loved ones. Troy asks one of them to type in his mother's name: Christy Morgan. No matches. Troy silently walks downstairs to the arena floor.
EVERYTHING WILL change again tomorrow. Troy and his grandmother will leave Reunion Arena. The Red Cross volunteers won't say where they went.
Sean will wait for his parents to come down from Chicago. He and his host, Tederal, will spend the day at the Convention Center, looking for others to bring home; Sean will have three new housemates by nightfall. Jonathan's family will drive back east in search of their belongings and their IDs. They'll make it across the Louisiana border without any traffic, before being turned away a few miles from their neighborhood. Big Louis and little Louis will wake up early and head to the shelter to talk with FEMA. Big Louis will ask if anything can be done for his great-grandmother.
The fields and courts and streets where they once juked and scored and cheered will be drained and likely abandoned. Even the Superdome may vanish.
But none of the displaced will forget. In the months and years ahead, when kids like Troy and Louis impress with a move or a shot, they'll turn to their new neighbors and say: "I learned that in New Orleans."