A Wrong Number, Whoadies and Whispers in the Night

Sixteen years ago, L. Kasimu Harris opened his one-bedroom apartment in Oxford, Mississippi, to his parents, sister, niece, and nephew, who had fled New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina. One day, he got a text from a number he didn’t recognize, “Where r u?” And, for a few tender weeks, a stranger’s voice kept him afloat.

Essay and photo by L. Kasimu Harris

Sometimes my dad left the eggs on the kitchen counter overnight, unrefrigerated. He said they’d keep. A few times, he’d have that gray 24-count egg tray. My sister, Rahsaana, and her two small children slept in the dining area that connected to the kitchen. There was no dining room table. Rahsaana, who was selectively mute, would’ve said something if those eggs had spoiled. She went silent after spotting her best friend and her family on TV a few days after Hurricane Katrina. They were in long evacuation lines of folk, dingy from the floodwaters, who hauled their lives in a bag and their loved ones on their backs. Rahsaana also ceased watching the endless news coverage of New Orleans, our hometown, perishing more each day. My parents were transfixed till their eyes got too heavy. I looked a few times to see if our house remained. We were all in a mental state thin as eggshells — even the babies.

Living in Oxford, Mississippi, was my fresh start. I left Murfreesboro, Tennessee, with a college degree, a year of assistant managerial experience at Walgreens, and a broken heart. My girlfriend of five years called me on New Year’s Day, during my 15-minute break, and dumped me. I wanted, needed, to be out of Tennessee badly. Months later, I held my BlackBerry in one hand, and wiped tears with the other, as I read my letter of acceptance to graduate school. I was in Walmart, somewhere between sporting goods and the fabrics section. I looked around for anyone. I wanted to touch them, show my phone: “Look, I did it.” I started packing my apartment that night. In June, I booked out of Tennessee, returned to my parents’ home in New Orleans, and traversed America until my Walgreens money ran short. I moved to Oxford on August 18, 2005. I was still partying away the pain of a failed relationship. I walked through the Grove, on Saturday, August 27, drinking something cheap, when my sister called.

“Where’s Oxford?” she asked.

“About five hours from New Orleans,” I replied. “Why?”

“Boy, Hurricane Katrina is coming. You ain’t heard?”

“Nah, I don’t have a TV.”

Before the rising sun had warmed the rolling hills, pine trees, and red dirt of north Mississippi, my mother, Rahsaana and her two children pulled into a dark parking lot at Ole Miss. My father arrived a day later, perhaps just as the levees broke. They packed light. 

My two-story apartment was barely maintained, with its dim light, chipped paint, and old brown carpet. Upstairs was my bedroom, a full bathroom, and my only place of solitude. I told my 60-year-old parents to sleep in my room. My dad refused and said I needed proper rest for those grad school journalism classes. I felt bad that my parents slept on an air mattress in the front room with the radio, donated lawn chairs, and unpacked boxes. We listened to Katrina coverage on the radio. A week or so later, the cable man arrived. Now, our new normal was a house full of people looking at 24-hour news coverage of New Orleans. Reality set in; my parents took the upstairs bedroom. The children enrolled in schools in Oxford, my mother resumed dialysis, and my father started a new job there, too. Seasons changed. 

My parents had each other, my sister had her two children, and I had the phone to cope. My family was my support, but I often needed an escape from them. I kept thinking about Louisiana. 

One Sunday, in the upstairs bathroom, I maneuvered two mirrors and cut my hair. As the clippers buzzed, I reflected: New Orleans had fallen and was cast away like the black hairs that fell into the sink.

My phone rang. 

“Who is this?!” a female demanded. No greetings, just an angry voice that punched through the phone. Then, two quick questions:

“Do you know who the hell you been texting? How old are you?” 

“I’m 27,” I replied with confusion.

“My sister is 12! Why are you texting my lil sister?”

A week earlier, texts had started coming from an unfamiliar number. But after Katrina, strange things happened with phones. Days after, you could not reach people with the 504 area code — usually just a busy signal. Sometimes, you’d dial a number and, without ringing, the voice of a random person was already on the other end of the cellphone call. Almost always, the other caller was from New Orleans.

“Y’all all right?” faceless strangers asked. The next questions were consistent:

“Where you at? Found out about your house yet?” 

“Oxford. We’re all right. But don’t know about the house yet,” was my standard response.

All of these one-off interactions seemed to end the same: “Well, take care and God bless.”

Most times you couldn’t make calls, but text messages were easier to send and receive. We learned they didn’t require as strong a signal as calls. The mysterious texts I got started naturally enough. The short messages from this unknown number read like ones from a friend sitting at home and bored:

“Where r u?”

“Wht r u doin?”

I responded blindly: “In Oxford and watching TV.”

The person never asked anything personal or out of line, nor did I. With all unknown numbers, I asked who it was. She never revealed being an underage girl playing on the phone.

I surmise that Big Sister saw an unfamiliar number, or numbers, and investigated. And I guess she thought I was a grown man, trying to seduce Little Sister. I knew from the sound of her voice that she wanted to fuck me up.

“She’s a 12-year-old girl. That’s my lil sister!” Big Sister repeated.

This woman screamed a lot and cursed more, holding the “v” and “e” in her screams: “Twelvveeee!”

The possibility of guilt seeped into my consciousness. 

“Check the records,” I pleaded. “I never told her anything. I didn’t know who it was,” I said firmly. 

“Where are you?”

“Oxford,” I said.

“Who are you?”

“Just a guy.”

“How did you get my little sister’s number?”

“She texted me,” I said.

Slowly her stern tone softened — she may even have apologized. We said our goodbyes. I cleaned my hair out of the sink. I went downstairs into the kitchen, rubbed my hands across my mother’s back and through her soft, curly, black and silver hair. My dad was nearby. Felt like he was always there, in the kitchen cooking and being hopeful.

“How are you feeling, Momma?” I asked, still stroking her hair.

“Bored,” she responded bluntly. “I want to go home.”

“Momma, we don’t know if home is still there.”

“Son, it’s all in God’s plan,” my dad chimed in. 

“His plan, how?” I wondered to myself.

Later that night, Big Sister called back. There were no screams. We exchanged proper introductions, but I don’t remember her name. Big Sister told me she and her family evacuated New Orleans and landed in FEMA-funded hotels outside Los Angeles. At first, Big Sister shared the news on the street, some rumors and some truth, but all of it was worse than the news reported.

“They ordered 100,000 body bags,” she said.

“What?”

“Yeah, and everyone who stayed in Sarah T. Reed [High School] gym dead, too.” 

We later learned that this was untrue, but it was believable in the moment. She seemed to have inside information about everything — except her brother.

He was an inmate at Orleans Parish Prison, but his whereabouts were unknown. She told me she’d heard all the prisoners were taken to the yard and remained in handcuffs as the water rose. Big Sister was unsettled because her brother couldn’t swim. And when she evacuated, her daughter’s father didn’t stay with them and took refuge, instead, in Mississippi. “How could he leave his own child?” she asked rhetorically.

But soon, we stopped talking about Katrina. Did we know the same people? We wanted to know more about each other, how we looked and what schools we attended and if our musical leanings were more No Limit or Cash Money records. Our conversations felt good, almost making me feel like New Orleans was still there. I was surrounded by people, but always lonely. Movement with new ladies on campus was slower than the governmental response in New Orleans. Big Sister’s voice was my intimacy.

We exchanged pictures. My desire for visuals of Big Sister was about even with finding out if my parents’ home had survived. Her curves would be welcomed to my hands and eyes.

I went from meandering around campus to brisk walks home to converse all night with her. We talked about our daily adventures: She struggled for clarity about housing, returning to New Orleans, and FEMA funding; I grappled with penning 20-page essays on vague topics in a week’s span. I’d tell her about the deer that dashed across the forest trail on my way home and the cacophony my sister and her two children made nightly. Yet I had stability. I knew Big Sister felt uneasy about the longevity of the FEMA housing vouchers. “Where are we gon’ go?” she wondered out loud. “They trying to put us out of these hotels.”

She changed hotels like one does socks. Big Sister told me how some of the guys from New Orleans banged on her door at night in search of sex.

“Bitch, I just lost my fucking house — I’m not trying to fuck!” she screamed in my ear, but not at me. I imagined an angry mob of whoadies, with sagging pants, wife beaters, and g-nikes pounding on her hotel room door; the same kind of dudes alleged to have terrorized folk in the Louisiana Superdome. Again, she asked: “How can they want to have sex at a time like this?” expecting no answers.

In my apartment, most of the family didn’t have a door to beat on. I told her how my own family moved into a nearby hotel and then apartments. Big Sister knew my joy in providing shelter to my family and my selfish aggravation after Katrina forced them to remain in that same one-bedroom apartment, for weeks that turned into months. I knew so many people had it far worse. But I was still happy to get my bed back. It was more than just a tool for sleep — it was an upstairs bedroom boundary, a refuge away from the clutter of my life in trash bags. We disclosed more, and I allowed her inside my thoughts, desires, and doubts. 

“Let me talk Black to you,” Dr. D. Michael Cheers said, with his chin lowered, as he glared at me over his spectacles that rested below the bridge of his nose. I was his TA. He taught photography, after a 20-year career that included Ebony and Jet magazines. About a day after Hurricane Katrina, he popped up at my apartment with sleeping bags, tailgating chairs, and cash. Cheers wasn’t a stutterer, per se, but had delays in speech at the start of most sentences — save for that one and “Mississippi still had two things: tall trees and rope.” Cheers was also blunt when he told me what other faculty members said about me: “He isn’t ready” and “How did he ever get into the graduate program?” and “He’s a nice guy, but he can’t write.” 

I wanted to tell them: “Bitch, I just lost my fucking house.”

I wanted some slack. I needed them to understand why I nodded off in class and how a marriage of mental hurricane residue with exams caused so much stress — I needed steroid lotion to relieve itching. Big Sister listened and gave me a release.

We spent late nights miles apart, on the phone, tucked in the sheets and curled up with the pillows. Although I was about four or five years older than Big Sister, we wondered how we could live in the same city, drive the same streets, eat at the same places, and go to many of the same parties, but never meet — until this wrong phone call. We weren’t strangers anymore. Our calls held more and more anticipation, deep breaths, and long pauses. “What are you thinking about?” I asked, throwing out a proverbial fishing line. Her warmth seemed to seep through the phone. A face-to-face meeting was at hand. “I want to be touched,” she said, “touched on the inside.” I turned on my side, bent my knees, curled up, and squeezed a pillow. Blood rushed. The door that dudes beat on, she would leave unlocked for me.

In October, I finally traveled to the airport to pick up a passenger from California — but not Big Sister; it was another woman, one I’d dated in college. She came for a visit; we called it Hurricane Relief Efforts.

Days later, Cheers approached me about traveling to New Orleans, a place I’d vowed never to return to. Hurt and confused with the plight of my city, I used a litany of excuses to avoid the journey: My company was still in town; I had to get my braces adjusted in Tennessee; and I just did not see the point. The city is lost, I thought, especially since it appeared the New Orleans Saints were relocating. I stood my ground. He assured me that I’d fail the class without making the road trip. It was 45 days after Katrina, and all the way down Interstate 55 south from Oxford, I sat in a self-imposed solitude on the middle seat of Cheers’ white, Japanese-made minivan that was full of student journalists, and my visitor from California, who came along for the ride. Reaching Interstate 10 and facing Katrina’s destruction calmed me. I felt an obligation to report from the front lines, and I found strength from folks sorting through the wreckage of their homes and urging us to “tell our story.”

When the levees broke, homes were swept from their foundations and decimated. Roofs were blown off, walls were missing, and others were infested with mold. The city stank. My family’s home was damaged, but not destroyed. 

I explored the city with a reporter’s notebook, a camcorder, and a camera. I wasn’t very familiar with video or photography; I was a writer. But being behind the camera and telling other folks’ stories helped me to navigate my feelings. It lessened the pain. Initially, while composing a photograph, I’d timidly approach abandoned boats on porches, cars submerged in mud, and people. And Cheers, channeling a drill sergeant, would yell: “Closer, closer.” It was a reference to the legendary war photographer Robert Capa’s adage, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” We spent long days trudging around a New Orleans that looked bombed out. My nights were spent with Miss California. She wrapped me in her tenderness. Her intimacy and care helped to assuage my emotions. I needed closeness for more than photographs. 

When I returned to Oxford, I had less time for chatting with this woman I never saw. Her voice was not enough anymore. I wanted someone I could touch and see — not just hope to touch and see. Big Sister was finding her normalcy, too, and moved into an apartment. One slow, reflective, or bored or lonely night, I sat on the edge of my bed and called. Someone else answered: “She not here and her number changed,” the voice said, without any further information. Eventually, my number changed, too. Big Sister drifted back into the same obscurity she’d emerged from months earlier. For a period, that wrong number was perfect.

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