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Monday, March 13, 2006
Candymaker finds blessing after Katrina
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
She was mixing up a batch of pralines when the telephone rang. It was a friend in Chicago who’d been watching coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She was calling Daisy Angelety to tell her to get out of New Orleans.
“I didn’t even have the television on,” Angelety said. “We’d grown so complacent.”
Fortunately, she took her friend’s advice. She packed up shorts, jeans, sandals and T-shirts. She called her son and daughter, both of whom live outside New Orleans, and told them about her plans. She finished making the candy, dropped some by her son’s barbershop and headed for Centreville, Miss., her hometown.
“I thought I’d stay till Sunday and come on back home,” Angelety, a retired schoolteacher, told me. “Under no circumstances did I think that I’d be homeless.”
She had lived in a house on Iroquois Street, in the upper Ninth Ward. Flood waters rendered it uninhabitable. Angelety lost valuable keepsakes. The only possessions she salvaged were the clothes she’d packed to leave town.
Before Katrina, Hurricane Ivan had been the only other storm that had compelled Angelety to evacuate. She rode that one out in Centreville, too. It was on that trip that she met Jeffery Wayne of Gwinnett County. They became friends and have stayed in touch through the years.
In New Orleans, Angelety’s life had centered around her church, New Life Ministry, and her pralines project. She made the candy at home and sold it to clients in the city. Her minister had been her taste-tester.
“My pastor told me that I was going to go far with this candy because it is anointed,” she told me. “But it didn’t happen until Katrina.”
Days after the storm, Wayne called to check on his friend. She told him the news — that her house was unlivable and that she’d lost everything.
“Usually after a storm, they could go back home,” said Wayne, a loan officer. “This time, they couldn’t. I told her she should come on down.”
Angelety, a native of New Orleans, definitely did not want to live in small-town Mississippi. So she moved to Atlanta and eventually settled in Lawrenceville.
One day, she felt like making candy. She didn’t even have a set of pots.
“I went to a thrift store and bought a pot,” she said. “I’m still making candy in this pot.”
What started out as a hobby in New Orleans has blossomed into a full-fledged business. Last month, Angelety started selling pralines from a kiosk on the first floor of Gwinnett Place mall. Bags of chocolate and coconut-covered ones go for $2.50.
She gets her pecans and candy bags shipped in from New Orleans. If you’ve never had a praline, she’ll give you a free sample. She’ll tell you hers are made from scratch and that she perfected her recipe in the Crescent City.
And if talk turns to hurricanes, she might tell you Katrina was a blessing.
“It got me out of my complacency,” she told me. “There are times you might catch me when I am down, and I’ll shed a tear or two about some of the stuff I lost. But I’m not sad. I didn’t lose my family. I’m safe.”
And for that, she’s grateful.
