Phoenix Rising

I am thankful that no one has actually harassed me yet about this post (nice try, Steve.) I suppose, however, that the time has come (and gone . . . and come again.) I really have to tell you about the Phoenix house.

Carol Phoenix, and her husband, Truck (or "Mouth of the South," depending on whom you ask,) own half a duplex on Daniel Drive in Violet, LA. They lived there, as renters, for about 13 years before Katrina. After the storm, they were the first to return to their block. They gutted and cleaned their home by day, and they endured the darkness of the near-empty parish in their FEMA trailer at night. They told their landlord that they had every intention of moving back into their home. Miss Carol grew up in St. Bernard Parish. Most of her dozen brothers and sisters live here too. Her parents are buried in the cemetery a few miles from Daniel Drive. With several properties to rebuild, Carol's landlord wasn't sure what he was going to do with each home, and he still isn't. The right decision for Carol's place, however, eventually became clear: in 2007 he gave her the home.

Carol had been taking friends and family members to and from the St. Bernard Project office for months before she officially took ownership of her half of the duplex. Finally, with a home of her own, she took herself. 2814 Daniel Drive became an SBP house and the first house on which I would work as the site supervisor from start to finish.

Carol and Truck are very much at the center of their community. People gather in their yard most evenings, and they used to host spontaneous crab boils two or three times a week. Since the storm, the boils have been a little less frequent, but I can personally assure you that they still happen. Often. And I really can't imagine that anyone does a boil better than Truck. When we were working on the house, he would arrive home with his friends from a successful crabbing trip, pull a table into the unfinished living room, spread it with an old tablecloth and boil the crab with potatoes, celery, spices and whatever else Carol might have in the fridge or friends might bring to the yard. When the boiled feast was ready, Truck lifted the food out of the pot in a basket and literally tossed it all across the table. No silverware required. Actually, no silverware allowed.


One of my volunteers got a lesson from Mr. Simon - a Phoenix House regular - on the fine art of recovering the good stuff from a crab. The volunteers hung the drywall in the background before they sat down to feast.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before there were volunteers seated at tables spread with crab, there were studs. Lost of bare studs. On my first day at the Phoenix house, this was the view from the front door:




After nine weeks of volunteer labor (broken up by a Very Elvis Christmas and a brief stint at another house where Steve and I actually trained AmeriCorps site supervisors (!!!)) Carol owned a real, finished home for the first time in her life. This video tour starts at roughly the same spot from which I took that picture on the first day.




The preceding paragraph, of course, is a ridiculous truncation. In those nine weeks I worked with more than fifty different people from all over the country. There were college groups from Iowa and Minnesota (not Carleton, but they were cool anyway.) A church group from New Jersey did most of the mudding and sanding. A mother and daughter from Maine installed the baseboards and trimmed the windows. A professional electrician from Seattle led two guys from his church group to complete all the finish electric work (and he taught me how to wire the cord to an electric dryer! (-:) What was most amazing, however, was that Carol worked with me every single day.

We will be celebrating with a house warming soon. St. Bernard Project usually hosts these "ribbon cutting ceremonies" at lunch time. Carol and Truck are going to host this party themselves. They want to have the ribbon cutting in the evening so that people will stick around to mingle with their friends and listen to Truck's stories. It will, of course, be a boil.