Some Evacuees Relish Chance to Start Anew

As Donald Henry clung to the side of his New Orleans house and watched as his brother and niece were plucked from his side and drowned by Hurricane Katrina, he had no way of knowing that his own life was about to change dramatically -- for the better.

A few blocks away, Cash Smith floated his two children on laundry hampers and plunged into chest-high waters. It was a journey that would begin in heartbreak but end in tears of joy, as Cash and his family found themselves delivered from a neighborhood under sea level into a new life a mile high, in Denver.

For Henry, Smith and a third evacuee, Vylandrus Dupree, who is now being housed at a resort in Arkansas, the unimaginable disaster has led to an unimaginable gift. Through a series of chance encounters and random decisions made by relief workers, these young African American men find themselves in parts of the country they had never seen before, and each believes there is no going back.

Their stories illustrate the game of chance that the resettlement effort is for so many victims of Katrina. Evacuees enter the relief roulette wheel with little idea whether they will emerge in a dreary shelter or in the cool air of the Ozark Mountains.

"It was just a blessing for me," said Henry, 28, who stepped off a rescue plane and found himself in Michigan for the first time in his life. "I am going to make Michigan my home. I know I ain't going back to New Orleans."

These men know better than most that their stories are exceptional, that thousands of other survivors, including some of their own family members, are still in crowded shelters with few options. Each remains keenly aware of all he has lost. Henry's voice chokes as he describes his drowned family. Dupree's house in Orleans Parish is "totaled." But while Katrina destroyed nearly everything each man owned, it also gave each the kind of options and opportunities that just did not exist for a poor black man in New Orleans: Strangers in strange places are behaving like family.

"I am going to start all over here in Denver," Smith said, speaking from a Marriott TownePlace Suites that has given his family free lodging for two months. Volunteers are helping to set him up with a job.

Dupree, 20, has enrolled at the University of Arkansas, where his tuition, books and supplies are free for the first semester. A clergyman has helped him find work.

"Everyone's friendly, and everyone's willing to help," he marveled. "I am going to try to stay in Arkansas forever."

'A New Beginning'

Donald Henry remembers the last thing his brother Clifford told him before they leaped into Katrina's raging floodwaters in the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans: "If I don't make it, make sure my kids do."

The two brothers and Clifford's girlfriend tethered three children with straps and stepped outside. A neighbor refused to let them in, so the group hung to the side of their own house.

Clifford was the first to go under, after he lost his grip on his brother's ankle. When Henry turned his attention back to the children, pulling on the strap that held them, he found his niece, Serena, had drowned, he said in an interview.