In Miss., Time Now Stands Still

The mayor of Gulfport, Mississippi's second largest city, recently removed a tent city of contract workers from a golf course. And under pressure from developers, he balked at signing off on emergency trailer parks, even though the inhabitants would be displaced city residents. "It creates an environment people don't want to live around," Gulfport developer Don Hall told the Harrison County Board of Supervisors recently, according to news reports.

Katrina left behind a great swell of land speculation. Signs reading "Cash for Homes" and "We Pay Top $ for Waterfront Property" are ubiquitous, as are developers hanging around city planning offices. It's urban renewal by hurricane, clearing land for a new Mississippi of upscale condominium towers and parks and many casinos. The many working-class residents who live within view of the coast could be outward bound.

"It's possible you're going to see a demographic shift because a lot of people are going to like the opportunities," Robert Latham, executive director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, said on a recent tour of Gulfport. "We're going to clear a lot of land. . . . You're going to see such a great economic boom down here, you won't believe it."

Keith Burton is a longtime Biloxian, a certified dice dealer and editor of the much-read Gulf Coast News online service. With local officials concerned there are still bodies buried in homes and casino ships lying like beached whales along the highway, he advised slowing down a bit.

"Maybe this is a future boomtown -- it's super-prime land," he said of Biloxi. "But if that kind of rebirth happens, it will be on the backs of the lives of a lot of Biloxians. It's like talking bad about somebody at their funeral."

A Little Kingdom

There are twin devastations in Mississippi, and it would take Solomon to pick the worse of the two. There are the coastal cities and there are such places as tiny Pearlington, deep in the woods and marshlands along the Louisiana border. Here a 35-foot-high storm surge roared up the Pearl River.

The Rev. James O'Bryan fled hours before the storm, and afterward he asked a neighbor: How far can you get into town?

Until you get to St. Joseph's church, the neighbor replied.

"My heart danced," O'Bryan recalled. "I said, 'Well, that's far enough for me.' "

The neighbor shook his head. Father, he said, your church is sitting on top of three cars in the middle of the road.

Almost three months later, O'Bryan, 79, sits in a shaft of sunlight on the site of his former church, in a white wicker chair atop a four-foot-wide swatch of orange carpet. This is a self-reliant corner of the state, and his neighbors sawed and hauled debris -- one even shot a 12-foot alligator lolling in a living room. But the local school remains shredded, its roof a spaghetti of metal beams. Everyone lost cars and trucks, and there's no money for replacements. Many people sleep in tents or shacks that have been roughly thrown together.

The county's only supermarket is gone. Six shrimp boats still sit on the river bottom. There's a good bit of drug smuggling, but that isn't really a sustaining industry.