When the Last Tent Comes Down

In 2005, Biloxi, Mississippi, was a landscape of ruin. Hurricane Katrina had flattened neighborhoods down to their concrete slabs. Families lived in FEMA trailers for months, then years. Mary Carter, a seventy-two-year-old grandmother, spent three years in a cramped trailer with her daughter and two grandchildren, cooking meals on a hot plate, hanging laundry between aluminum walls. She kept a photograph of her old kitchen taped above the tiny sink — not out of nostalgia, but as a promise.…