Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [54]
Growing up in New York, we were always aware of my mother’s family’s history. It was hard not to be. We lived for a time not far from Vanderbilt Avenue, and Grand Central Station, where there is an imposing statue of my great-great-great-grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of the New York Central Railroad. After seeing it for the first time when I was six, I became convinced that everyone’s grandparents turned into statues when they died.
My father’s family may have been poor, but they had branches of aristocracy as well. Men who weren’t rich, but who carried themselves regally. My great-granduncle Jim Bull fought at Chickamauga, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. It was said he never got over the habit of killing, and once shot a man for cussing in front of a group of women. According to my grandfather, “he never killed nobody that didn’t deserve it.” He died trapped under an overturned train. According to family legend, when the steam began to scald him, he attempted to cut off his legs with a pocket-knife.
My great-grandfather William Preston Cooper also lived by his own set of rules. He had a number of illegitimate children, and on his deathbed, at the age of eighty-four, he shouted to horrified family members that if they’d just “bring a woman to my bed, I’d have no need of dying.”
After my father’s death, our trips to Mississippi all but stopped. For a few summers my brother and I went for weekend visits to stay with family friends. We’d see our relatives for just a few hours—strained meetings that always made me sad.
For years after he died, I used to imagine that my father would somehow give me a sign, sometimes I still search for it, his approval, his advice. Friends of his tell me, “Your father would have been so proud of you,” but it’s not the same as hearing it from him, seeing it in his face. I like to think of him watching my show each night. I like to imagine he’s seeing it all.
“GOD BLESS YOU. You have no idea how happy we are to have you here,” a man says to me Friday morning, shaking my hand in a rubble-strewn lot in Waveland. His name is Charles Kearney, and he and his wife, Germaine, have come to visit what’s left of their home.
“Where are the people?” Charles shouts. “Why are people dying? I’ll tell you why! Because there aren’t enough National Guard troops to come here! They’re all already dispersed! I mean, I hate to go there, but why else can it be? They’re in Iraq and everywhere else.”
“Foreign countries are getting better care than we get,” Germaine says.
Charles and Germaine lost their house on Honey Ridge Road. So have their parents, who lived a few blocks away.
They evacuated on Sunday to Mobile. They’ve been coming back each day, ferrying food and water to friends from their hotel.
“I’m speechless. What the hell is going on and why are people still on the freaking interstate in New Orleans?” Charles says, his face turning red with anger. “I don’t care whose fault it is, but fix it now. And these people who are saying, ‘You know, well we tried! We warned them. They could get out!’ Well people don’t have the resources to get out. They have nowhere to go.”
Charles and Germaine take me to where Charles’s parents’ house used to stand. His mother and father, Myrtle and Bill Kearney, are picking up plates from their yard.
“Oh goodness, Anderson, I don’t want to look like transient trash,” Myrtle says, laughing when she sees me. “This house was so pretty. My father-in-law built it painstakingly. He would come to the lot, he would study the best views to put the windows.”
“Look, our whole kitchen counter’s over there,” Germaine says, pointing.
Myrtle is holding a cracked plate