It was a “magical place,” she says, back in 1992, when her parents bought the big house overlooking the Mississippi Sound in the quaint harbor town of Pass Christian.
Author Margaret McMullan, 55, apologizes immediately for using such a cliche as “magical place,” but, she quickly insists, “it was.”
She married her husband, Pat O’Connor, in that old house, spent all her summers there, invited Chicago friends down to introduce them to the Gulf Coast and her home state. To those out-of-state guests, Margaret told Hurricane Camille stories, once the gold standard of tragic lore.
Later, when couples evolved into couples with children, the magic grew exponentially, and her son, James, took his first steps in the Pass. Pat loved it, too. “It was a party neither one of us wanted to leave.”
Then came Katrina and its hellish aftermath. Her parents were with Margaret’s family in Evansville, Indiana, during the storm. Afterward, they sent their daughter and son-in-law down with a clump of keys to check on things.
“There was no need for keys,” she says with an ironic laugh. “There were no doors.”
There is a rash of new Katrina books coming out in time for its 10th anniversary in August. If you read only one, it should be Margaret McMullan’s “Aftermath Lounge.” A novel told in 10 short stories, it manages to make you laugh and weep, and see what happened to people and places when the reporters and camera crews went away. There were casualties nobody counted.
I asked Margaret why she chose the format. “I kept thinking, ‘This is a big stone that I have to chip away at,'” she says. “If I have to write a big novel, I’ll just go crazy.”
So she told short stories, about people across the socio-economic strata, which somehow illustrates the democracy of disaster. She writes simply, with humor and insight, having waited years after the storm that wiped out the town to gain a deeper understanding. “Jed was a high-school dropout and a lousy shrimper, but since the storm he’d bought a karaoke system with lights and was traveling with it from shack to shack up and down the coast …”
The aftermath had a pioneer feeling, Margaret says, with consultants and builders rushing in with projects that often evaporated and left bigger messes than the storm. And yet the town slowly is rebuilding, and today has, she believes, “a grace hovering over it.”
“There were a lot of house-proud people in this neighborhood. Catch could fit five trailers inside the Zimmers’ house. He didn’t know where all the money that had landed on this street came from, but he figured either out-of-state sugar or oil. Nobody ever made that kind of money in Mississippi; you had to leave, make your money, then bring it back with you …”
The book is written like a good song, with all its verses returning to a rousing chorus. It travels to Chicago and Indiana, even Canada, but then back to the devastated Gulf Coast and its people, with their sundry coping mechanisms.
“People got out of cars to take pictures of giant heaps of rubble. Five years after the storm, and there were still torn bed sheets hanging in the live oaks …”
Margaret teaches literature and creative writing in Indiana. Her husband is in marketing. But the two of them are moving to Pass Christian soon to write full time. And to return to the magic.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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