Anthony Kap, his mother, Brenda, and her companion Hong Hean have to walk a plank to reach their shrimp boat in South Plaquemines, La. (Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times)November 3, 2006
By JERÉ LONGMAN
The New York Times (New York, USA)
PORT SULPHUR, La., Nov. 2 — Born in Brooklyn, Anthony Kap now lives in a FEMA trailer park that evokes the Bronx. His family’s mobile home sits in the nearby community of Diamond, which apparently reminded some federal disaster official of a baseball diamond. Thus, gravel streets in the trailer park bear names like DiMaggio, Berra and Ford.
Kap lives on Gehrig Drive, but he is only 16, a high school junior, and when told of Lou Gehrig’s iron-horse durability with the Yankees in the years between world wars, the teenager said, “For real?”
Football, not baseball, is Kap’s game. At 5 feet 5 inches and 140 pounds, he is an undersized but eager linebacker at South Plaquemines High, which was opened after Hurricane Katrina to educate students from the devastated communities of Port Sulphur, Buras and Boothville-Venice. Though he knows little about Gehrig, Kap might find in him a common resilience.
Anthony Kap is a 5-foot-5, 140-pound junior linebacker for South Plaquemines High School. His mother discouraged him from playing football, but changed her mind after Katrina. (Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Former rivals blown together by a storm, the South Plaquemines players have nicknamed themselves the Hurricanes. Friday, they will play the final scheduled game of the team’s inaugural season, seeking a spot in the Class 2A state playoffs. All families returning here have remarkable stories of perseverance, and the Kap family saga is no less touching in its meandering poignancy.
Brenda Kap, Anthony’s mother, survived the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge, which killed 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. She then immigrated to New York and eventually came to the rich fishing waters here in Plaquemines Parish, only to see prices crater in the shrimp industry and to lose her commercial boat in Katrina’s punishing wind and storm surge.
With a loan from the Small Business Administration, Brenda Kap and her companion, Hong Hean, have bought another trawler, a secondhand 35-footer. This time of year, they navigate the bays of lower Plaquemines, fishing at night for white shrimp, too busy for football, somehow hoping to find a thin profit in the harrowing balance between the high price of ice and diesel fuel and the low price of seafood.
“When I was young in Cambodia, I learned a lot,” Brenda Kap, 38, said on a recent afternoon aboard her boat. “When the hurricane came, it was hard, but not hard like I lived before.”
She was only 7 when the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia and began their brutal killing and forced labor. Brenda said she was made to plant cotton and rice for 10 hours a day and was separated from her mother for two or three months at a time. As a 9-year-old, she said, she sneaked away one night to visit her mother in a nearby village, only to be caught and beaten with sticks until she passed out.
In 1979, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and deposed the Khmer Rouge, Brenda said, her father stepped on a land mine. Left without medical attention, he hung himself with the rope from a hammock, she said. The rest of the Kap family — mother, four daughters and two sons — fled toward the border with Thailand, sleeping in mountainous terrain for weeks, living off fish, fruit and water grasses, Brenda said.
In December 1983, she said, her family made its way to New York. “The first time I saw snow,” Brenda said. “I asked my brother if I could eat it. He said no.”
She attended Theodore Roosevelt High in the Bronx, and later operated a photography shop on Church Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. When her marriage failed, Brenda left New York, first for Atlanta in 1998, then for Plaquemines Parish in 2000, when Anthony was 10 years old. Football was a game that she did not understand or approve of, and Anthony was discouraged from playing in middle school in Buras.
“She was afraid I was going to get hurt,” he said.
After Katrina, Brenda changed her mind. She is often away now, fishing daily or nightly when the weather permits from May to December, leaving her four children for days at a time in the care of their grandmother or a family friend.
In her absence, she feels that football provides reassuring order out of chaos, as well as a safe harbor for her son in the hurricane’s uncertain aftermath. There are gunshots and fights in the FEMA trailer park, she and others said. Her eldest daughter, Melissa, 13, is not allowed outside when she returns from school.
“I’m afraid he will get into something bad,” Brenda said of Anthony. “When he gets into sports, I think this is good. He can play with other kids, and he has tutoring at school. He’s doing better and better.”
On Oct. 20, she saw her son play for the first time, during South Plaquemines’ lone home game. Anthony collected a sack and recovered two fumbles as the Hurricanes defeated McMain High of New Orleans by 57-0.
“I have no idea what I’m watching,” Brenda Kap said with a laugh during the game.
She is a small woman who wears her hair in a ponytail and speaks in a soft, forthcoming voice. The intricacies of offense and defense had to be explained to her, but not the satisfaction on Anthony’s face that his mother had finally come to watch him play.
“I didn’t know he was good like that,” Brenda said. “He doesn’t talk much.”
When the season opened, Anthony’s name was not listed on South Plaquemines’ roster. He spent the summer shrimping with his mother and missed most preseason workouts.
“We pump a lot of iron around here, and that scares some kids off,” Cyril Crutchfield, the South Plaquemines coach, said. “I thought maybe he was one of them.”
Anthony was not scared, just busy as his family tried to mend its torn life. Katrina damaged or destroyed 85 percent of the commercial fishing fleet in Plaquemines Parish, according to the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center. Brenda Kap’s boat sank in the storm and had its cabin sheared off by the pounding weight of another trawler.
Only about 200 of the parish’s 1,300 shrimpers have returned to local waters after Katrina, said A. J. Fabre, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association. Many lost their boats, had no insurance, struggled to get loans and were swamped by the high cost of ice and diesel fuel, industry officials said.
Fourteen months after Katrina, several trawlers are still pushed against a bridge in the nearby community of Empire. Others remain abandoned in the marshes. At the marina in Buras, Brenda Kap must walk along boards to reach her trawler because sections of the cement dock are collapsed into the water. Those who do venture into the bays run the risk of snagging or ripping their nets on sunken containers and boats.
“This is as bad as it’s been,” said Acy Cooper, vice president of the state shrimp association. “Unless the federal government intervenes, we’re about to fall flat on our faces.”
A good deal of the shrimp industry’s problems existed long before Katrina ravaged Plaquemines Parish, experts said.
While Louisiana produces 40 percent of the nation’s domestic crop, the vast majority of shrimp in the United States — between 80 and 90 percent — is imported from Asia and South America, industry officials said. Prices at the dock are about half of what they were five years ago, shrimpers said. Jumbo shrimp that once brought $2.50 a pound are now going for about $1.30.
“In real money, these people are trading shrimp for diesel and ice, and getting a loaf of bread and lunchmeat and going back out, hoping things will get better,” said Rusty Gaudé, a fisheries agent in Plaquemines Parish for the L.S.U. Agricultural Center.
Still, most of the 30 or 40 Cambodian shrimpers from Buras have returned after the hurricane, Brenda Kap said. Like Vietnamese fishermen in southeast Louisiana, Cambodians have relied on extended families for emotional and financial support after the hurricane, Gaudé said.
For reasons that are religious or otherwise, he said, “They have a perspective on impermanence and uncertainty and they seem to deal with it a lot healthier than American society.”
Perhaps, but there is not enough time for both shrimping and football. While Brenda fishes, she has all but missed her son becoming a quietly forceful part of South Plaquemines’ defense in his first varsity season. Among other things, Anthony has had to steel himself against the demands of Crutchfield, his coach, who has won a state championship and is well-liked but who can be operatically profane and politically incorrect.
“Hey, you’re from Cambodia!” Crutchfield yelled at Kap last week, switching him from outside linebacker to middle linebacker after a teammate missed practice without permission. The coach then made a reference to the shape of Kap’s eyes and said, “you’re smart.”
When Kap ran the wrong way on a blitz, Crutchfield barked, “We’re not in Japan, where they drive on the wrong side of the road.”
Kap said nothing, which delighted Crutchfield to no end.
“When I first put him in this season, he was totally lost, and I screamed and called him every name in the book,” the coach said. “He stood there and took it. I love him. He’s so humble and coachable.”
In nine games, Kap has recovered five fumbles. It is the contact that entices him, he said, the sense that “when you tackle someone, you feel like you’re better than him.”
Last Friday, South Plaquemines (4-5) blew a chance to guarantee a playoff berth, squandering a 28-14 halftime lead in the league championship and losing, 43-40, to Isidore Newman School of New Orleans. Afterward, Anthony and his teammates were stunned and fought back tears.
The white-shrimp season extends into December, so even if South Plaquemines does reach deep into the postseason, Brenda will not likely see Anthony play again. There are more urgent concerns than blocking and tackling. When shrimp season ends, she will look for an offseason job — painting nails, picking oranges, whatever she can find.
“What I have gone through” in Cambodia, she said, “I can get beyond this hurricane.”
Kap lives on Gehrig Drive, but he is only 16, a high school junior, and when told of Lou Gehrig’s iron-horse durability with the Yankees in the years between world wars, the teenager said, “For real?”
Football, not baseball, is Kap’s game. At 5 feet 5 inches and 140 pounds, he is an undersized but eager linebacker at South Plaquemines High, which was opened after Hurricane Katrina to educate students from the devastated communities of Port Sulphur, Buras and Boothville-Venice. Though he knows little about Gehrig, Kap might find in him a common resilience.
Anthony Kap is a 5-foot-5, 140-pound junior linebacker for South Plaquemines High School. His mother discouraged him from playing football, but changed her mind after Katrina. (Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)Former rivals blown together by a storm, the South Plaquemines players have nicknamed themselves the Hurricanes. Friday, they will play the final scheduled game of the team’s inaugural season, seeking a spot in the Class 2A state playoffs. All families returning here have remarkable stories of perseverance, and the Kap family saga is no less touching in its meandering poignancy.
Brenda Kap, Anthony’s mother, survived the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge, which killed 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. She then immigrated to New York and eventually came to the rich fishing waters here in Plaquemines Parish, only to see prices crater in the shrimp industry and to lose her commercial boat in Katrina’s punishing wind and storm surge.
With a loan from the Small Business Administration, Brenda Kap and her companion, Hong Hean, have bought another trawler, a secondhand 35-footer. This time of year, they navigate the bays of lower Plaquemines, fishing at night for white shrimp, too busy for football, somehow hoping to find a thin profit in the harrowing balance between the high price of ice and diesel fuel and the low price of seafood.
“When I was young in Cambodia, I learned a lot,” Brenda Kap, 38, said on a recent afternoon aboard her boat. “When the hurricane came, it was hard, but not hard like I lived before.”
She was only 7 when the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia and began their brutal killing and forced labor. Brenda said she was made to plant cotton and rice for 10 hours a day and was separated from her mother for two or three months at a time. As a 9-year-old, she said, she sneaked away one night to visit her mother in a nearby village, only to be caught and beaten with sticks until she passed out.
In 1979, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and deposed the Khmer Rouge, Brenda said, her father stepped on a land mine. Left without medical attention, he hung himself with the rope from a hammock, she said. The rest of the Kap family — mother, four daughters and two sons — fled toward the border with Thailand, sleeping in mountainous terrain for weeks, living off fish, fruit and water grasses, Brenda said.
In December 1983, she said, her family made its way to New York. “The first time I saw snow,” Brenda said. “I asked my brother if I could eat it. He said no.”
She attended Theodore Roosevelt High in the Bronx, and later operated a photography shop on Church Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. When her marriage failed, Brenda left New York, first for Atlanta in 1998, then for Plaquemines Parish in 2000, when Anthony was 10 years old. Football was a game that she did not understand or approve of, and Anthony was discouraged from playing in middle school in Buras.
“She was afraid I was going to get hurt,” he said.
After Katrina, Brenda changed her mind. She is often away now, fishing daily or nightly when the weather permits from May to December, leaving her four children for days at a time in the care of their grandmother or a family friend.
In her absence, she feels that football provides reassuring order out of chaos, as well as a safe harbor for her son in the hurricane’s uncertain aftermath. There are gunshots and fights in the FEMA trailer park, she and others said. Her eldest daughter, Melissa, 13, is not allowed outside when she returns from school.
“I’m afraid he will get into something bad,” Brenda said of Anthony. “When he gets into sports, I think this is good. He can play with other kids, and he has tutoring at school. He’s doing better and better.”
On Oct. 20, she saw her son play for the first time, during South Plaquemines’ lone home game. Anthony collected a sack and recovered two fumbles as the Hurricanes defeated McMain High of New Orleans by 57-0.
“I have no idea what I’m watching,” Brenda Kap said with a laugh during the game.
She is a small woman who wears her hair in a ponytail and speaks in a soft, forthcoming voice. The intricacies of offense and defense had to be explained to her, but not the satisfaction on Anthony’s face that his mother had finally come to watch him play.
“I didn’t know he was good like that,” Brenda said. “He doesn’t talk much.”
When the season opened, Anthony’s name was not listed on South Plaquemines’ roster. He spent the summer shrimping with his mother and missed most preseason workouts.
“We pump a lot of iron around here, and that scares some kids off,” Cyril Crutchfield, the South Plaquemines coach, said. “I thought maybe he was one of them.”
Anthony was not scared, just busy as his family tried to mend its torn life. Katrina damaged or destroyed 85 percent of the commercial fishing fleet in Plaquemines Parish, according to the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center. Brenda Kap’s boat sank in the storm and had its cabin sheared off by the pounding weight of another trawler.
Only about 200 of the parish’s 1,300 shrimpers have returned to local waters after Katrina, said A. J. Fabre, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association. Many lost their boats, had no insurance, struggled to get loans and were swamped by the high cost of ice and diesel fuel, industry officials said.
Fourteen months after Katrina, several trawlers are still pushed against a bridge in the nearby community of Empire. Others remain abandoned in the marshes. At the marina in Buras, Brenda Kap must walk along boards to reach her trawler because sections of the cement dock are collapsed into the water. Those who do venture into the bays run the risk of snagging or ripping their nets on sunken containers and boats.
“This is as bad as it’s been,” said Acy Cooper, vice president of the state shrimp association. “Unless the federal government intervenes, we’re about to fall flat on our faces.”
A good deal of the shrimp industry’s problems existed long before Katrina ravaged Plaquemines Parish, experts said.
While Louisiana produces 40 percent of the nation’s domestic crop, the vast majority of shrimp in the United States — between 80 and 90 percent — is imported from Asia and South America, industry officials said. Prices at the dock are about half of what they were five years ago, shrimpers said. Jumbo shrimp that once brought $2.50 a pound are now going for about $1.30.
“In real money, these people are trading shrimp for diesel and ice, and getting a loaf of bread and lunchmeat and going back out, hoping things will get better,” said Rusty Gaudé, a fisheries agent in Plaquemines Parish for the L.S.U. Agricultural Center.
Still, most of the 30 or 40 Cambodian shrimpers from Buras have returned after the hurricane, Brenda Kap said. Like Vietnamese fishermen in southeast Louisiana, Cambodians have relied on extended families for emotional and financial support after the hurricane, Gaudé said.
For reasons that are religious or otherwise, he said, “They have a perspective on impermanence and uncertainty and they seem to deal with it a lot healthier than American society.”
Perhaps, but there is not enough time for both shrimping and football. While Brenda fishes, she has all but missed her son becoming a quietly forceful part of South Plaquemines’ defense in his first varsity season. Among other things, Anthony has had to steel himself against the demands of Crutchfield, his coach, who has won a state championship and is well-liked but who can be operatically profane and politically incorrect.
“Hey, you’re from Cambodia!” Crutchfield yelled at Kap last week, switching him from outside linebacker to middle linebacker after a teammate missed practice without permission. The coach then made a reference to the shape of Kap’s eyes and said, “you’re smart.”
When Kap ran the wrong way on a blitz, Crutchfield barked, “We’re not in Japan, where they drive on the wrong side of the road.”
Kap said nothing, which delighted Crutchfield to no end.
“When I first put him in this season, he was totally lost, and I screamed and called him every name in the book,” the coach said. “He stood there and took it. I love him. He’s so humble and coachable.”
In nine games, Kap has recovered five fumbles. It is the contact that entices him, he said, the sense that “when you tackle someone, you feel like you’re better than him.”
Last Friday, South Plaquemines (4-5) blew a chance to guarantee a playoff berth, squandering a 28-14 halftime lead in the league championship and losing, 43-40, to Isidore Newman School of New Orleans. Afterward, Anthony and his teammates were stunned and fought back tears.
The white-shrimp season extends into December, so even if South Plaquemines does reach deep into the postseason, Brenda will not likely see Anthony play again. There are more urgent concerns than blocking and tackling. When shrimp season ends, she will look for an offseason job — painting nails, picking oranges, whatever she can find.
“What I have gone through” in Cambodia, she said, “I can get beyond this hurricane.”
2 comments:
I like her attitude of standing against the odd and chanllege in life.
I do too! God Bless!
Post a Comment