Thanksgiving on Salt Bayou

November 25, 2005

A Bayou Thanksgiving, With the Queen of Sheba

By JERE LONGMAN

SLIDELL, La., Nov. 24 - There was never going to be a traditional Thanksgiving on Salt Bayou, not after Hurricane Katrina picked up Liz LaBue's house and pushed it across U.S. 11 as if it were a stalled car.

But she has lived a scrapbook life, belly-dancing for Arnold Palmer and riding the concert rails with Janis Joplin, enjoying a career where clothing and permanence were optional. Even her name changes with her mood. LaBue. LoBue. The vowels come and go like the peekaboo veils she once wore as the Queen of Sheba.

Twenty-five miles north of the French Quarter, Ms. LaBue, 60, improvised Thursday as she always does, helping feed the strays - both animal and human - that gathered around her on the highway's edge. Always up for a party, Ms. LaBue orchestrated one on Thanksgiving - a make-do dinner for about 10 of the construction workers who camp out on her property.

Ducks pecked at puddles. A cat and a dog scratched about. And the workers finally got the bird cooked on a barbecue pit after Ms. LaBue worried that she would have to paint the turkey to turn it brown.

"I've been on the road for a year, and she is the nicest person I've met," said Michael McNeal, a roofer from Goose Neck, Ga. "A real Cajun queen. She's always got a smile on her face. As long as it's breathing, she don't turn nothing away."

She does not want to be living like this, sleeping in a van, waiting for a government trailer that has yet to arrive three months after the hurricane, left to fashion a living room out of blue tarp and rattan chairs scavenged from the side of the road. Still, Ms. LaBue said, she found something to be thankful for this year.

"I'm thankful my 87-year-old mother is still alive," she said. "I'm thankful for the people who have helped us. Everybody has embraced our pain."

Mike Vaughan, 37, of Milwaukee, is one of the handful of construction workers who came after the storm and ended up living next door to Ms. LaBue. He sleeps in a van; others have tents nestled between palm trees. A generator provides electricity for a television and a microwave oven. Most of the cooking is done on a pit or a propane stove.

"I'm here to stay," said Mr. Vaughan, owner of Monster Roofing, named after a Frankenstein doll that sits out front in Ms. LaBue's living room, just below the life preserver that says "Home Sweet Home." "I don't see the debris, I see the people. I see the sunset over that bayou."

He pulled out his cellphone and flipped it open.

"I take a picture of every sunset in Louisiana," Mr. Vaughan said. "How do you not enjoy that?"

Little seems to have changed on Salt Bayou since Hurricane Katrina's storm surge punched water from Lake Pontchartrain through the fishing camps and left nothing but pilings. Cars are flipped on top of cars. Plastic from empty sand bags blows in the trees like Tibetan prayer flags. A speedboat named Tsunami sits stranded on dry land. At house after house, a life's possessions wait in piles for the trashman.

Yet there is a strange beauty, Mr. McNeal said, in how the hurricane blew things apart but blew people together. Until Aug. 26, he had never spoken to his half-brother, Mark Milner, whom he tracked down in Ohio through the Internet. They agreed to meet in New Orleans. Then, three days later, the hurricane struck.

The brothers came anyway, Mr. McNeal, 33, to take a roofing job in Slidell, Mr. Milner, 42, to rescue pets in New Orleans. Then a cellphone broke and the brothers lost contact. On a Friday night in September, Mr. Milner spent $70 on a taxi ride to Slidell, looking for his brother but not knowing exactly where he was. He slept on an air mattress outside of a Days Inn, then said he peeked into a maintenance room the next morning and saw another man staring at him.

"I jumped 10 feet in the air," Mr. Milner said.

He turned to leave, but the man called out, "Mark."

Mr. McNeal still does not know why he yelled the name, but somehow he knew it was his brother. They shook hands and talked and went to a bar later in the morning and watched football and drank beer.

"I did all the talking," Mr. McNeal said.

They have been together since.

"God works in mysterious ways," Mr. Milner said.

Robert Loy, 39, came from Chicago, knowing people would need help. He has been struck by their resilience and generosity. The woman whose house he is rebuilding, 87-year-old Virginia Braddy, dropped off a liver for his giblet gravy on Wednesday.

"Drove five miles for a little piece of liver," Mr. Loy said.

Ms. LaBue has only a few rules. No fighting. No arguing. Keep the place clean. Otherwise, her attitude is to go with the flow. To the roofers and welders and Sheetrock men living on her property, she seems to have been everywhere during her belly-dancing career, and met everybody.

Her scrapbook is full of autographs. Ballplayers like Whitey Ford and Enos Slaughter. Golfers like Mr. Palmer and Lee Trevino. Entertainers like Barbra Streisand, whom she met at the Hilton in Las Vegas. Her diary entry from Dec. 15, 1970, says: "Saw Barbra Streisand in lobby. Sent her flowers for her show."

In her scrapbook are programs from 1970, when she and her former husband traveled the rails to state fairs and Canadian rodeos and livestock shows, performing as Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Janis Joplin was traveling on another train across Canada, with the Band and the Grateful Dead. On July 2, 1970, Ms. LaBue's diary says she and her husband planned to make Ms. Joplin a beaded vest for her next album cover.

"Sonny and Cher came up for a weekend," Ms. LaBue said. "We were all hippies. We sat around and chatted and talked about hippie stuff."

A native of Selma, Ala., Ms. LaBue said she learned to belly dance in Washington and New York, and later worked as a go-go dancer and a stripper, loving the art of moving her body, whether clothed or not. It was a different time, with "more costumes and glamour and respect and less money," she said. "Now it's crude and rude and take the cash."

Today, her dark hair has gone white and brown like a root-beer float, and she will not be photographed without makeup. "I must respect my profession," she said. "I'm an artiste."

But six years ago, she gave up the French Quarter life for bayou living, and in late August, was preparing to turn her home into a bed-and-breakfast.

"Where else can you dine with gators?" she said. "The nutria rats come up and let you pet them like cats."

Then Hurricane Katrina hit. Her new friends in the construction business said they owed it to Ms. LaBue's kindness to stay around until they had rebuilt her home and a bar she wants now instead of a bed-and-breakfast.

"Katrina's Gator Pit," Mr. McNeal said. "That's her dream."
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