On Thursday, after the devastation back home became achingly clear, the plea went out in e-mails forwarded from one expat Alabamian to the next.
In 36 hours a great, big truck is going to leave Atlanta headed for Tuscaloosa, and we need to fill it up with bottled water, food, clothing, whatever you’ve got.
Friends Marcia Wade and Charles McNair had no idea if they’d get enough to even fill the trunk of her car. When people can donate to relief efforts now with a text or a click of a mouse, the idea of hand-gathering supplies and fighting rush-hour traffic to drop them off at an intown house — on short notice at that — seems laborious. At least that’s what some might think.
But something about it felt true to the steady stream of Alabama natives-turned-Georgians who answered the call.
Wade is originally from Montgomery. McNair, an online magazine editor, is from a smaller town to the south, Dothan. They both went to the University of Alabama back in the 1970s, but they didn’t know each other until Atlanta drew them in, like so many others from small towns in the state.
Their Alabama community here is one where if you don’t know somebody, you know somebody who knows them. At McNair’s annual Alabama Christmas party in his Poncey-Highland home, he usually tells guests that if they talk to each other long enough out on his screened porch they’ll discover that they’re probably kin.
All day Friday that screened porch became another sort of a gathering place. Gerald Lowrey, a realtor from Atlanta, pulled up in an SUV packed with bottled water, diapers, clothing, games and crib toys. He grew up about in Thomaston, a little town 60 miles outside of Tuscaloosa. His brother and sister live in Tuscaloosa now. His sister survived the tornado by hiding in a closet in her house. His brother trembled as he heard it rumble and shiver past Phifer Wire Co., where he works.
Mark Baker brought bags of clothes and placed them on the red tile floor. He’s originally from Birmingham and his parents still live there. They were fine. But his nephew over in Tuscaloosa said he watched it get so close to Bryant-Denny stadium he thought it had hit it.
Thankful though Baker and Lowrey were for their own families being spared, they knew it could have turned out differently.
“The people who traveled East, we have a bond together,” Lowrey said. “We’re an outpost on the Georgia frontier. So we have to come back and help those we left behind.”
For as many Alabamians who showed up at McNair’s, some who donated called themselves Alabamians for a day. Charles Bogle lives in Sandy Springs. More times than he cares to remember he made the 2 1/2 hour drive to Alexander City, Ala., for work at Russell Corp. He and his wife sent their daughter Susan to Auburn.
He didn’t feel kinship quite the way others at McNair’s house did but it seemed the right and neighborly thing to help.
So he brought food he knew they’d appreciate like Brunswick stew, collard greens, hominy, Vienna sausages and sardines. And clothes, plenty of clothes.
“Nothing beautiful, but clean and available,” Bogle said. “And by doing it this way it goes right to the people in need. They’ll have it in their hands tomorrow.”
Come Saturday morning the boxes and bags had spilled out from the porch and out onto the oak floors of McNair’s living room.
More than 90 parcels, and that wasn’t counting the cash donations people brought by. Wade planned to take the load to an Episcopal church she knew of in Tuscaloosa that was serving as a distribution point. She also planned to check on friends once she got to what was left of the town. She wasn’t sure if their houses had survived or not.
About half a dozen people helped pack the 17-foot U-Haul truck that Wade had picked up that morning. When she told the saleswoman at the U-Haul rental center where she was going and what she was doing, the woman gave her the rental half-off.
By 8:45 a.m. the truck was stacked almost floor to ceiling.
“I’ll drive slow,” Wade called out as she hopped into the truck’s cab, about to begin her five-hour journey.
McNair, Baker and the others stood in street and waved goodbye as she sped away.
About the Author
