Harvey: Disasters by the Cupful

A little more than two weeks after Harvey decimated Houston, I read an article in the New York Times entitled “What They Saved.” The feature story detailed what eight people had managed to rescue from the floodwaters that had engulfed their homes. As Manny Fernandez, the author of the article, put it: “The towers of debris cluttering the curbs of Houston are a deceptive measure of the storm’s devastation. Some things—small things, personal things—survived.” The article goes on to name some of those things: family photos, coffee cups, a rug, a Father’s Day card, a lamp, and an urn containing the ashes of three family dogs. It also names the people who saved—or tried to save—each item; each person (or pair of people) in the story are irretrievably linked to their objects, which in each story are linked in turn to family memories. Although I would argue that the curbside mounds of trash were notin fact “deceptive” about the devastation Houstonians experienced, the article moved me to tears—probably the first I had shed in the two weeks of sorting through my own stuff and my own memories. As you may have guessed if you have read other posts in this blog, there is something about things that get me: how they embody memories and create new ones as they are used, lost, rediscovered, repurposed and treasured.  Each vignette in Fernandez’s article, each binding of people to their objects, invited the reader-- at least this reader--to speculate: to trace the objects and the people back and forward in time. Two examples have haunted me to this day.

The Turkish rug that Michele and John Watson saved was, it seems, one for the few costly things they had bought after they lost a houseful of “very expensive things” in Gulfport, Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina. They purchased the rug on a cruise to Turkey with their son and daughter-in-law. For Michele Walton “the rug is great memories and the rug is hope.” Perhaps these are memories of the cruise itself, of their son and daughter-in-law, of recovering from Katrina. The rug might also, of course, remind them through a twist in time of Katrina itself-- an event which took place before the rug was purchased. As the only expensive object in their new home, I think it must have reminded them, between hurricanes, of other beautiful things lost in 2005. John Walton spoke in the article about how the couple’s daughter-in-law washed and restored the rug, working on it “for eight hours” with a Rug Doctor, a machine of which John Walton was plainly in awe. (“Have you ever seen that machine,” he asked.) We do not know from the story whether the daughter-in-law who accompanied the Waltons on the trip when they bought the rug is the same daughter-in-law who restored it for them--and to them. She emerges, to this literary reader, as a composite character, part of a cycle, a recycling of objects and memories. Her labor of love has likely itself become a memory for Michele and John: the rug will stand for events at which it was not present, for the event that almost destroyed it, and for the series of people whose stories accrue around both its destruction and survival.

Other forms of survival are woven into the rug. In the article, John remembered the words of his brother, a twelve-year cancer survivor at the time of Harvey: “John,” Walton remembered his brother asking, “do you have cancer?” When John replied “no,” his brother told him firmly, “Then you are going to be fine.” I do not know whether John’s brother—or indeed any of the people in this story—are still “fine” or still alive, but the rug, at the moment of its saving speaks to survival as it embodies hope. 

The individual story from “What They Saved” with, as far as I can tell, the richest afterlife, was the vignette about Shirley Hines and her Fitz and Floyd coffee cups.  Hines owned a set of gilded cups that had belonged to her mother, all of which were damaged when her home flooded. Since her mother’s death, Hines had turned to the cups in bad times: “When I was really feeling down, I’d get one and drink me some coffee.” Broken to varying degrees, the cups could no longer provide the same kind of comfort, even if perhaps some of them could still hold coffee. It seems that Hines had decided to throw all of her cups away, to add them to the “mounds of trash” of which Fernandez speaks earlier in the article. This all changed when Fernandez revisited Hines’s home carrying a gift from a “stranger in Baltimore” named Ann Dahms: three cups in the exact same pattern. Dahms had read the original story and had contacted the makers, who no longer manufacture china in this pattern but provided a link to used items on Ebay.  She had then bought the cups and had mailed them to Fernandez so he could present them to Hines.  As the names of well-wishers pile up, a chain of transmission gives way to a cross-country network that includes both geography and virtual space. All of these converged on a particular day at Hines’s decimated house, in the shape of three perfect replicas of what she had lost. 

Fernandez reported in an article about this second visit feeling “ bringing her these three little gifts amid so much devastation.” The cups, the “little gifts,” could not intervene at the scale of what Harvey had left behind. He reminds me of stories of Victorian charitable visitors, bringing small gifts of blankets and broth across the threshold of a house and into a world where blankets and broth could do little to change the fundamental devastation of poverty. Hines quickly put Fernandez at his ease, assuring him of her appreciation: the reaction he reports starts small and grows I intensity as the surprise registers. “No, No . . . This has really made my day, really made my day. It’s unbelievable, the identical cups. It’s very touching. Oh, my God.” What is most touching to me about this scene is Hines’s politeness; standing in her devasted kitchen, surrounded by trash bags, she assumes the role of hostess, attending to the comfort of her guests and assuring them of their welcome. 

For me the most important element of Fernandez’s second visit was how it produced another kind of revisitation—of the distinction between trash and household object. According to Fernandez, after opening her gift, Hines  reached into her trash bag and took out the three least damaged cups, joining them with the unbroken cups to make a new set of six. The gift arrested the movement from house to trash pile, made Hines reevaluate and revalue what she had lost. And all of this might not have been possible in this case and in others across the city and the region if the world had not stood still and trash collection ground to a halt. I saw many people revisiting their piles, digging through the mounds they had just made, for an object that suddenly called out to them. Like Hines’s broken cups, objects in the piles froze for a moment in time, until heat and exhaustion made revisitation impossible. 

Rereading the group of stories three years out that I had printed and put away at the time they were published, I am surprised by a few details I overlooked the first time. A month after the gift of the cups, a story from Town Talknoted the following: “When eBay employees heard about Dahms' kind deed, they arranged for Dahms and Hines to meet in person. The company also bought a new car for Hines.” The first detail is, of course, the meeting, described in a now-defunct video as a “reunion” as if Hines and Dahms had really known each other all along. Reunion, with its resonant prefix “re,” signals repetition, the kind of revisiting that, for me, this story is all about. 

The second detail, both more astounding and more predictable, is the gift of the car.  Redolent of the largesse of the Oprah Winfrey show, the car swamps the initial gift of the cups that Fernandez carried in a small box through the streets of the unnamed Houston neighborhood. To me, the initial gift is fragile in many ways; it is hard not to think of the car obliterating them, running over them, reducing them once again to shards. This is not to say that the gift was not generous and helpful; Hines lost her car to the flood. The car would have been a lifeline in a city like Houston, particularly if Hines did not have insurance. Even in the Town Talk article, however, the car seems like an add-on to the real gift of the cups: eBay, they explain “also bought a new car for Hines.” When and under what conditions might a car be an “also” to three cups?

And therein lies the magic of the cups and their special relation to family, time, and memory. Surely cars produce memories—of childhood trips, of family systems, of places and conversations. But cars are not magical objects in the way in the way that the photographs, lamps and rugs of “What they Saved” clearly are. No one, in my wide circle of acquaintances with Harvey stories, has talked excitedly about saving a car. (I wish I had saved mine, but that is another story). I would doubt that eBay went out of their way to supply a car that looked exactly the same as the one Hines lost. It is not merely that for some people, cars are insured, and therefore replaceable. Indeed, it may be the monetary value of cars that make them less valuable in the way that cups are. As we look up Redbook values, fill out insurance forms, deal with car dealers, price is always at issue, nudging out other concerns.

I do not know how much Hines’s cups cost initially, or how expensive the purchase felt to her mother, if she were indeed the one to buy them. Cups by the same manufacturer on eBay now sell for between $4 and $15, though they are not as pretty or as gilded as the ones in the photo that accompanied Fernandez’s article. Perhaps had Hines had the leisure and the internet access to replace them herself, Hines could have afforded to replace them herself. Perhaps not. 

When I think about Hines cups, I think also of my own. If, after Harvey, Hines had too few cups, I had too many. This is the story of ecological disaster under capitalism. Mine are made by the British china maker Shelley, and my husband and I collected them starting in graduate school. My now deceased uncle gave me my first Shelley cup in a random assortment he had picked up at a flea market; larger than all the others, too large for coffee or tea, it stuck out as both awkward and beautiful. At the time, we could, even as graduate students, afford to buy Shelley cups, saucers and plates. The teapots were a different story—the same uncle gave us two over a period of years. I cannot here write the number of individual pieces we owned before Harvey, although I know it because we documented our purchases.

Over the years we bought fewer and fewer piece of china, in part because there was no place to put the collection, and in part because even as we got jobs and started earning good salaries, Shelley became increasingly unaffordable. At some point, our collection became, vaguely and briefly, an “investment.” Like many investments, this one has cratered. Well before Harvey the market for antiques shrunk dramatically, and the china lost almost all of its economic value.  The cups are back to being cups, the teapots are once again for tea, although I use them less and less. All our china survived Harvey, in part because we had put it up high, out of the way—out of my reach as well as that of the flood waters. By the time of the disaster, they had not only no financial value, but also no use value: I kept on hand a set of (I hope) artfully mismatched cups and cake plates for when my students came once a semester to my house for tea, but the rest were pretty things barely in sight and often out of mind.  

But once the floods came, each piece of china, each of the hundreds of pieces, assumed a new and frightening form of unintended value. Each piece involved labor to find it, fetch it down, wrap, and pack it.  Most of that burden of work fell on our friends, who wrapped each piece individually and put them into boxes to be stored until some fantasized moment of recovery, when they would be used and valued again. Seeing my friends wrapping, going out to purchase more supplies as the collection sucked them up, I felt a tremendous guilt and desperation. I had learned to accept help of all kinds—pulling out wallboard, carrying furniture, even cleaning various surfaces. But this work was beyond what was necessary—and yet we kept finding more pieces of china, more to wrap and save. I imagined taking boxes of it to the Salvation Army—but what would they do with it in these days when what people really needed were t-shirts, underwear, and socks? I thought often of throwing the china into Braes Bayou, letting it float like an armada of indulgences downstream, perhaps to the Hines house, perhaps, since Hines now had her set, past it into the Gulf of Mexico.

In the end I kept most of the china. Our new house has a lot of shelves, almost all of them out of reach even of a kitchen ladder. My friend Robyn and my younger son (the tallest of us all) helped to place the stuff on open shelves where it can be seen. I made a map of where everything was, just in case I wanted to use them. The map is beautiful, and makes me feel in control, but I have only referred to once or twice. I did spend a few happy days making up china-sets for my graduate students who were departing for jobs. Careful not to overwhelm, I gave them what I hoped were just enough china for a few friends and intimate celebrations. I don’t know whether they use them, but I assume they remind them of me and of Harvey and of the help they gave me then. These—and the plates I still use for student teas—are the only ones I am easy with, the only ones that have found their place. Oh, and the one that matches nothing else, that my mother used when she came to my house for her coffee and tiny sandwiches. That one is always within reach, although it is getting a little frail.