WARNING! THIS IS A DYSTOPIAN STORY ABOUT UNCOMFORTABLE TOPICS. IT MAY NOT BE APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN YOUNGER THAN HIGH SCHOOL AGE AND CONTAINS DISTURBING SUBJECT MATTER ABOUT TERRIBLE EVENTS DURING HURRICANE KATRINA
What does dystopian mean? Put any vocabulary words you have to look up into the discussion so that everyone can learn them.
Discuss with your classmates the tone and the mood of The Katrina Tree by Alicia Adler. You must write one entry to see the other students’ input. You can always come back and write more. This is a graded discussion. Remember, Mood is what the piece feels like to the reader and Tone is like “tone of voice” of the author. For your convenience, I have put the story in this canvas assignment.
I’ve had a little trouble with the format of the story as I cut and paste it to canvas, but most of the original formatting is still here.
THE KATRINA TREE
Alicia Adler
© Alicia Adler 2019
She hid in the bushes, on one of the few dry spots, around the corner from Mulberry Street, making sure no one could see her in the new dawn light. She could hear the men who had raped her, yelling into the late night air, looking for her.
“Don’t let her get away!”
“Find her!”
“Yell out, if you see her.”
“She can’t be left alive, you hear?”
They were all around her. Wrapped in the arms of an Oleander bush that survived the wind and rain, she fought despair and regret. If only she had known, just a bit earlier, that everything would change that night, that law would break down, that it would be like a bad movie coming to life. Before all those children died and the elderly were left rigid in their wheelchairs and cots, before the roof broke and the storm came in, before it was mostly instinct and hormones, they were all in the Superdome, too poor to escape the city. If only she hadn’t spent so much money for her sister’s birthday gifts, maybe the whole family wouldn’t be gone. If only she had known how bad it would be, maybe she could have done something to stop what happened. If she’d just done something, anything, differently.….
Wrapped around the base of that bush, she strained against her own silent screams.
“They will not make me less than I am. They will not make me less human, less of a lady with their anger and force.”
The bush wasn’t enough to hide her, so she quietly, quickly, crawled under a bit of corrugated roof from a Mardi Gras warehouse that had flown to the ground during the hurricane. She could hear the scuff, scuff, drag of boots as one of them went whooping by her hiding place. She tried to hold her breath, slow it down so it wasn’t so loud, to keep the tin from moving up and down with her heaving chest’s expansions and contractions. As he got closer, her mind stopped thinking and became animal, colors and emotion were all that she could muster. When the boot scuffs got softer and the yelling got farther away, she heard him say.
“Don’t be scared, little girl.”
Those animals had taken turns while the others cheered and surrounded her, keeping the thousands of sheltered souls in the Superdome from knowing what was happening. The roof had just dropped into the middle of the playing field, so the crowd was shocked and looking inside for comfort. That, with the howling of the wind, the screams of the frightened, the noises those rapists were making as they tormented her, sounding like they were just having fun to pass the time, sounding like popular songs, all that, kept onlookers from seeing what was happening, from hearing her screams. Their bodies beat against her like the winds that were tearing apart the Superdome. The sounds of their ecstasy mixed with the violent roaring outside. It was ugly. Smells worse than she had ever imagined, vile, putrid smells surrounded her. She started to hum the words of her favorite tune.
“I’m a little girl lost in a world all alone and I don’t have a family and I don’t have a home but I’m free…free to be who I want to be, free to do what I want to do…”
“Never going to get much better than this, you don’t have to love me, you don’t have to kiss….”
They free-styled a horror song of their own, way into the night, looking like they were just having a party to keep the storm from messing up their evening fun, over and over, singing and chanting, and taking their turns. She had gotten so wet from their sweat that she was able to slip out of the grasp of the monster who was on top of her. She ran. She had seen that there was one gate which wasn’t guarded and, earlier, many people had been able to leave the dome from there. One of the men had a uniform on so she knew she couldn’t trust uniforms in this maniac relay. The cops were killers too. It was like no one was watching out for anyone. The health volunteers were being called away for their own safety in that chaos which was the broken Superdome. Old people were dying in their wheelchairs. Every now and again, you could hear gunshots from somewhere in the dome. Barefoot, she ran from them, ran faster than she ever had run before.
“If you can’t trust anyone, you hide from everyone,” was all she could think as she broke into the outside air. The smell of death was already mixed with the brackish, black stillness in the predawn haze. Sunlight was about to disclose the upturned beast that was New Orleans. In the underbelly of great ruination, the maggots had not yet come to clean up the garbage. The flies had not regained their composure. The world was upside down and cracked.
As she tried to catch her breath, she blamed herself; she blamed circumstance; she blamed the storm.
“If only I had left New Orleans before the deluge, before the flooding, before little children started dying” she thought “If only I had done something, anything, differently during the days leading up to Katrina’s landfall!”.
A bird shrieked. An owl marked its territory, looking for its mate.
“How did they survive out here?” she wondered.
The smell of gas and burning buildings hit her. It was becoming daylight and she could see the smoke over the city.
“What do you do when you can trust no one, when you’ve been gang raped and there’s no one to run to?”
She would not allow herself to cry. They were too close. Her solution, strange even to her at the time, was to make sure that the rips in her clothing were not obvious.
“Someone else might get ideas” she thought, “if it’s obvious that I’m vulnerable, someone else might get ideas.”
She shivered and went into shock. It wasn’t so much that the dragons were coming or that the water was everywhere, sloshing against the holes in the streets as it receded from the storm surge, it was that humanity was lost, that no one was there when she needed help, that her family was dead and gone and all that was left was the shaking and the pain and the bleeding from her ruptured skin.
The night before the carnage, just one day ago, she was wrapping presents for her sister’s fourteenth birthday, thinking about how happy she was going to be when the storm had passed and they could play with the new toys and wear the fake pearl necklace it had taken so long to find. Her sister had died in the storm.
“Thank goodness, if she had to die, that she died before the monsters came out.”
Now, there was no family left, nothing but horror in the early morning light. It had been a long night of grievous adventures in the Superdome and she needed to sleep. Even though she was still bleeding and the dirt was threatening to infect her wounds, she needed sleep. Somewhere in the distance, a bird shrieked and an owl replied. A siren screamed in the heavy wetness the air had become and the smell of burning buildings and death was stuck to her nostrils. Before anyone could see her, before she had the strength to escape, she wanted to get some sleep, had to get some sleep. The police had deserted the city.
“Who could she turn to now?”
Sleep, she needed to sleep. As she hugged the roots of her heart, grabbing the dirt with her fingers, she imagined the green trees and smells of Virginia when she was young enough to dream about being a princess in love with someone so fine and strong that she would never have to be afraid or — she screamed as she felt hands grabbing her ankles and pulling her.
Crash! The tin roof was torn from on top of her. She screamed again. They began to surround her, beating their breasts with their enjoyment at seeing her frightened. They were sweating and spitting in the putrid air. They tormented her and yelled to the others to come and join them. Then, right there in front of her captors, she made up her mind to give them no more pleasure, to give them no more of her fear and weakness. They would get no more tears from her. She looked up to face the closest one of them, but what she saw made her freeze like a statue. In the short distance toward the west was a single tree that had survived the hundred and sixty mile per hour winds. Its leaves were gone and in their place were beads, purple, golden, green and red beads. All her mind could come up with was
“How could that be? How could there be beads in that tree?”
She didn’t hear them taunting her as the others were summoned to join in her execution.
“There must have been a warehouse full of Mardi Gras necklaces blown down, and cartons and cartons of beads must have sailed into the wind.”
Thousands upon thousands were hanging in that tree.
“And there they are now, sparkling at me, catching the red, orange, and pink of sailor’s warnings”.
She was stunned, stopped, even stupefied into awesome peacefulness. She did not see them, those monsters, as they began to smash her. She did not feel the pain of their noisy intrusions. She barely noticed the wounds opening up on her body. She stood. She stood silently, as they became a storm to tear her from her roots. They did not succeed.
Drunken, besotted men allowing evil to take them down with prehistoric fervor, dancing voodoo in the dawn of devilish delight, faded from her focus. Sunlight warmed her body and took away a bit of the cold, sharp edge of a night that had seemed like it would never end, when evil had taken over, while pity and love were all but forgotten. She reached for the fake pearl birthday necklace her sister never received, pulled it from her torn pocket. The men watched her, unsure about what her next move would be. She spun like a discus thrower at a track and field meet. She spun and she spun. She knew she could never reach the tree with the Mardi Gras decorations. It was so far to the west, but she spun and released the fake pearls so they would be closer to that beauty which shone in green, grey light against the colors of the sunrise. And once she released it, they, all of them, watched as it flew toward the west, and then they all saw it too, brilliant in the morning light. She stood still. They were not moved.
I am not a romantic now and I was not one then. In the face of unmitigated evil, romance can not exist. I wish I could tell you that the beauty of that Katrina Tree melted their hearts and they left her alone to be saved and to heal from the horror, but that is not what happened. As the brownish green water subsided and the smell of fresh death filled the air, there were no screams anymore. I saw the fake pearls drop into the gray to become lost, for a while, in the dirt and mud. I saw her transform into a wooden thing, unmoving, unfeeling, resigned, transfixed by the image of the last beautiful thing she would ever see. I saw it all and I did nothing. I made no sound. I watched and trembled and now I’m the only one who knows what happened there: Just another body that went missing in the storm: Just another story.
I try to console myself with the notion that they had trouble moving her. I like to believe that she stood there, rooted and impossible to move. Sure, the leaves that gave her life were blown away. They were able to blow away the leaves. They made her naked, but in the end, they could not move her. Like the Katrina Tree, she stood solid and firm and she remained standing in something deeper than the dirt.
When I feel disappointed in myself or if I’m scared or discouraged, I think of her and try to remember that sometimes in the worst devastation, we witness unimaginable beauty. Those rapists and murderers have no names. They didn’t recognize the beauty that they were seeing. They served only the darkness and the dust. She has a name I can not speak, because I never knew her name, but I name that tree the Katrina Tree for all time and for my own memory. The pearl necklace lives around my neck. I only take it off to shower and bathe and when the world is at its worst and I feel no hope, no love, no reason to smile or laugh or even to go on, I buy a few thousand Mardi Gras beads and I find the barest, ugliest, tallest, loneliest tree and I throw beads up into it’s branches, singing “I’m a little girl lost in a world all alone and I don’t have a family and I don’t have a home but I’m free…free to be who I want to be, free to do what I want to do…” and I think of the one who sang that song, that she would not be moved, that she died in the shadow of a beautiful thought and, now, that thought is in me, as is she. I pray she has forgiven me, every time I remake the glittering Katrina Tree.