RSSA Day To Remember: Historian shares stories collected after Hurricane Katrina
Apr 01
One of the most interesting interviews I’ve done this year!
Oral historian Stephen Sloan will remember “The Stories of Hurricane Katrina” when he visits the University of Arkansas in Fort Smith next week.
By Becca Bacon Martin
bmartin@nwaonline.com
When Hurricane Katrina hit Hattiesburg, Miss., Stephen Sloan became a historian trapped in the middle of a major historical event.
For him, living history meant no electricity, trees falling on the house he shared with his wife and children and getting to know the neighbors as they used his propane grill to cook food that would otherwise have spoiled.
But Katrina wasn’t just Sloan’s story. It devastated 11 communities along the Mississippi coastline, and all of its survivors had tales to tell. As a collector of oral histories at the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi, Sloan felt compelled to listen. Now director of the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University, he still feels compelled to share what he heard, and he will do so as a visiting scholar next week at the University of Arkansas in Fort Smith.
Sloan’s public lecture, “The Stories of Hurricane Katrina,” is set for 11 a.m. Wednesday in the Gardner Building lecture hall on campus. It will also include memories of Hurricane Camille, which damaged the Gulf Coast in 1969.
“People wanted to tell their stories,” Sloan says. “It’s one way to cope, to normalize a completely abnormal situation. But anyone who had been on the coast for any length of time wanted to first tell me a story about Hurricane Camille. That was a way to remind themselves of what they had endured in the past — and a way to begin to understand their Katrina experience.”
Sloan, from northeastern Texas, had no way to know what to expect when Katrina roared on to the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005. He and his family just went to the leeward side of the house, he says, and were eating cereal (because his wife knew the milk would be the first to go bad without refrigeration) when a huge pine tree fell across the roof. The top broke off and swung through a window next to the family.
Sloan’s children were 7 and 4, and both have very vivid memories of that morning, he says.
“We were without power for six days,” he goes on. “It’s funny how you continue to switch the lights on as you go from room to room!”
But Sloan knew immediately how lucky his family was. His wife was able to get the children to their grandparents’ home and stock up on “water, peanut butter and batteries.” His father, who was involved in a Texas Baptist association that provided disaster relief, came to Hattiesburg and helped provide several thousand meals a day to those in need. Their home was close to a hospital, so restoring power to the neighborhood was a priority for the electric company. And Sloan was able to pursue the stories that weren’t being told by mainstream media.
“We were doing interviews on slabs, in hospitals, in temporary shelters, at Red Cross centers,” he says. He was surprised to see that wherever survivors gathered, new communities were formed.
“That’s one of the things I really wanted to document. I’m fascinated by the way the things we think of as ‘history’ play out on the individual and family level.”
Some of the stories were tragic, some funny, some both. By way of example, Sloan remembers a man who had been paid to guard an office complex. As the water rose and he and a companion climbed up on filing cabinets, he felt sure his death was imminent. He wanted to use his companion’s cellphone, but the other man said no, explaining he was short on minutes. That man died. The first man survived, clinging to a tree, without his clothes or even his dentures.
“He said at that point he was negotiating with God, ‘please don’t let me die in this tree naked and toothless,’” Sloan says. “Then he said he realized that was how he’d come into this world.”
Sloan says he was amazed at what people told him, “but we all have a desire to be known. The best favor you can do for someone is to let them tell you their story.”
And so it became a struggle to choose which stories to preserve.
“I had to choose not to do thousands,” he says. “Those were difficult choices.”
In the end, Sloan says, the “worst and best parts of us are revealed by events like this. We think we know the story of Katrina, but it was a different story for everybody.”
FAQ
‘The Stories of Hurricane Katrina’
With Historian Stephen Sloan
WHEN — 11 a.m. Wednesday
WHERE — Gardner Building lecture hall at the University of Arkansas in Fort Smith
COST — Free
INFO — 788-7570 or e-mail mmcoy@uafortsmith.edu