“I just found this in the road,” she said to Joyce Parris, handing her a tiny, glittering brooch, a gesture that seemed as kind as it did absurd amid the vast swath of shredded, twisted material and human ruin that one of the nation’s worst natural disasters left behind. Parris, 67, looked at it a moment.
“No, it’s not ours,” she said. And the two women went on talking like that, about lost jewelry and lost neighbors, about perfect strangers who brought barbecue chicken plates, clothes and shovels — a litany of tangible comfort and support.
It all had nothing and everything to do with Obama’s Friday visit to Tuscaloosa, about 150 miles south of here, meant to herald a federal relief effort that began to materialize here around noon Saturday, as three blue-shirted officials started plugging in computers at the Bevill center.
When asked about Obama’s visit and the federal aid, people in this predominantly Republican area — one of the places hit hardest by Wednesday’s barrage of tornadoes — said some version of, “I did hear something about that.” They’ve had no power, and no TV, for days.
Harold Parris, 69, who was flung out of his trailer into a ditch, said of the president, “I’m glad he did come check on us.” A neighbor, Stephen Wooten, said federal help — “really, any help” — is welcome. “I’m proud Obama came,” he said. “I am.”
But in other ways, Obama’s visit and the promise of federal aid, while appreciated, was somehow abstract in comparison to people like Kyle Jeffreys, of the Southern Baptists, who had organized buzz-saw teams to help cut down fallen trees; or Matt Bell, who was helping a neighbor search for a document in a wide field of splinter-size wood, ripped insulation and shreds of paper.
It wasn’t so much that people here expected more or less than their federal government offered; rather, many said they did not really know what to expect at all, or what to do other than to forge ahead with what they had.
And so as the president told a Tuscaloosa crowd, “We’re going to make sure . . . that we rebuild,” Wooten was lifting a huge chunk of vinyl siding from his son’s yard, saying, “Yes, this was a house.”
Town, county hit hard
At least 33 people — including two of Wooten’s friends, a neighbor of the Parrises and an entire family of four — were confirmed killed in Rainsville, a town of 5,000 people, and surrounding DeKalb County. Much of the area was still without power Saturday and only beginning to pull out of emergency mode. The recovery effort was still being manned predominantly by local residents and volunteers, along with emergency workers from surrounding counties.
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