Children of the Storm
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Erica Alphonse escaped with her kids to Houston, where fate delivered them into the hands of a guardian angel named Rhonda Tavey. For three years the young evacuees lived with Rhonda while their mother struggled to get back on her feet in Louisiana. Rhonda fed them, clothed them, and grew to love them as her own—and they loved her. Then Erica came to take them home.
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She did, however, respond to calls from the constable’s office and the district attorney’s office and told them that the children were safe. Among law enforcement officials, there was some confusion about whether they had the legal right to file kidnapping charges; technically, Rhonda had permission to take care of the children. Assistant DA Jane Waters in particular wanted to keep the story out of the media, knowing the dispute would be much harder to resolve if news of it leaked. But Rhonda ignored all requests to turn herself in. She stuck to her story: that she had had the children since 2005 with little help, financial or emotional, from either Erica or her partner. Erica wanted them back only because her FEMA money was running out and, without the children, she couldn’t get enough food stamps to resell for cash. Furthermore, Rhonda said, Lauren had witnessed the sale of drugs while at the house in New Orleans. Rhonda did not feel safe returning to Houston or turning over the kids.
Three weeks into the standoff, Rhonda gave an interview to a Dallas TV reporter, repeating all the allegations while she cuddled the children. Waters, fed up—“Rhonda wanted to call the shots regarding her surrender,” she told me—filed kidnapping charges, and the Texas Center for the Missing issued an Amber Alert. Rhonda was on her way home to turn herself in when the FBI arrested her at her grandmother’s house in Houston on August 8. Rod’Keesa asked if they were all going to jail. “Do me a favor,” Rhonda asked an agent in an FBI jacket. “Take that jacket off so you don’t scare my kids.”
Predictably, both women became media stars and, not coincidentally, symbols of different views of motherhood. At her first televised press conference after her arrest, in the famous law offices of DeGuerin and Dickson, Rhonda presented herself as the good mother who had been driven to the brink by the neglectful, unfit Erica. While a cameraman focused on Rhonda’s ankle bracelet, she made the somber promise, “If I had it to do again, I would do it again. I would lie down and die for these kids. . . . I miss them desperately. I miss them every day. But they know God; they know how to pray.” Her attorney, Todd Ward, a young protégé of Dick DeGuerin’s, summarized Rhonda’s actions more simply: “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Erica, in turn, made a case for herself as the struggling but hardworking mother who had been betrayed by a friend who “went bananas.” In a story titled “Mom pleads for kids’ return” on a KHOU TV news broadcast, Erica appeared worried but resolute, flatly denying that she used drugs or that she wanted her kids back for nothing more than a government handout. “I work,” she pointed out, while conceding unapologetically that she relied on food stamps to feed her children. She also refused to go on the offensive: “I don’t have anything bad to say about Rhonda, because she’s been good to me,” Erica said. “Rhonda, you’ve been my family for three years. I know you grew accustomed to loving my children. I grew accustomed to loving you. I never thought you would do this to me. You said yourself you would never take my children away from me.”
To a large extent, Rhonda won the media war. When the kidnapping became the subject of Rush Limbaugh’s Question of the Day—“Who should have the kids, the caretaker or the mother?”—it was Rhonda, not surprisingly, who got the radio host’s support. In cyberspace, the story that had once served as an allegory for racial harmony quickly became a means for bloggers to vent their prejudices. Though Erica was not without her share of supporters—“Ok, what if the BLACK mother had kidnapped Tavey’s 5 WHITE kids because she ‘cared’ about them! Every government agency from the FBI to the CIA to the IRS to HPD etc. would’ve flocked to Houston,” wrote one on KHOU’s Web site—many others aired their post-Katrina resentments, unable to believe that a poor woman actually loved her kids. “This is the thanks someone gets for trying to help a Katrician,” posted another. “I hope for [Rhonda’s] sake that the children are returned to their mother in New Orleans. Even raised properly, they would only stab her in the back at the end.” Erica’s attorney, Shelley Ross, was particularly disappointed that the local churches and charities that had been so supportive in the wake of Katrina were now keeping their distance, a sure sign that Houston had wearied of its caretaker role. “People want to say without saying that Erica is a typical poverty-stricken mom,” he said. “Her values aren’t what they should be, and this justifies Rhonda’s position.”
Thanks to the law, however, Erica got her children back. Rhonda’s allegations of child abuse and family violence had all surfaced after Erica had arrived in Houston to reclaim her family, which made Rhonda suspect in Waters’s eyes. The truth of these accusations may never be known; the infamously overstressed CPS carefully investigated Erica’s life in New Orleans and gave her a drug test (she passed) but never called the six people that Rhonda said had witnessed abuse in Houston. Estella Olguin, a CPS spokesperson, noted that when the kids were reunited with their mother, they were joyful. “It wasn’t children who didn’t know her,” she said. Added Waters: “It is a question of whether Rhonda had a legal right to do what she did. She had none. Maybe Rhonda could provide a better home, but we’d have chaos if everyone took the law into their own hands this way.”
In October a Houston grand jury decided not to indict Rhonda on the kidnapping charges, due largely to a convincing packet assembled by Ward that included Skip’s criminal record and the agreement signed by Skip, Erica, and Rhonda. At the same time, Rhonda withdrew her suit for custody of the children, though she was noncommittal about future plans. She told the local news that her home was always open to Erica and her children. When Erica, who had left for New Orleans with the kids, learned of the offer, she said, “She must think I’m crazy.”
One hurricane began this story, and another ends it. I saw Rhonda for the last time after she was set free, and after Hurricane Ike had cut its murderous path through Houston. Her house had not been spared. An aluminum awning lay mangled in the backyard, and most of the roof was torn off. Another sudden storm had sent water flooding into the house through her damaged roof, and no amount of pots, pans, and towels could stop it. “FEMA said my house was livable,” she told me. Pictures of Erica’s children still filled the walls, and a small shrine with Rod’Keesa’s track medals hung near the girls’ bedroom, where many of their toys were still crammed into their bunk beds. The boy’s twin beds, in the shape of fire trucks, sat in one corner of Lauren’s room. “It’s so quiet,” Rhonda told me. Not entirely: A slim, pretty teenager—a friend of her daughters’—came by and dropped off her baby for Rhonda to care for. Rhonda cooed to the child, trying to get him to sleep while we talked.
In New Orleans, Erica’s life had almost returned to normal. I got to her house at six-thirty one October morning, having offered to help her get the kids to school. The small house was clean, and Rod’Keesa was already up and dressed when I arrived. For her lunch, Erica rolled up a half-eaten bag of chips and put it in her backpack. In Houston, Rhonda had worked hard to clear up the children’s asthma; now most of them had runny noses, maybe because of the cigarette butts filling the ashtray by Erica’s bed. Neither Rod’Keesa nor Alaysa was wearing her glasses, though Erica said she intended to get them new ones. Erin and Eric, who had been almost toilet trained by Rhonda, were back in pull-up pants. Skip was in jail again on a robbery charge; Erica had taken in one of his daughters by another woman. Despite the obvious difficulties, Erica’s children were the same charming, loving, inquisitive kids they had been in Houston. (“I want to go to your house,” Eric told me.) How much of that was Erica’s doing and how much was Rhonda’s was impossible to know. It was clear, however, how much these children loved their mother and how much she loved them. She ironed their shirts and combed their hair and found their shoes under beds, and all the while, their eyes followed her every move.
Erica seemed worn, and sometimes she batted at the children impatiently; every once in a while her voice took on a sharp edge. She was working, intermittently, as a housekeeper at Tulane University, but, she told me, “Mexicans” were now taking all the good jobs. Hopefulness was not a quality she put much stock in; nothing in her history suggested it should be. Rhonda’s betrayal, in her eyes, would become just another in a long line, another grim and preposterous tale that could be used to prove a larger point.
I offered to walk Rod’Keesa to her bus stop. The sun wasn’t up, and the streets of the Mid-City neighborhood were faintly menacing, the porches of the small frame houses still dark. A sharp, cool breeze scattered leaves and signaled the first signs of autumn. Erica, wrapped in a blanket, stood on her porch and watched us walk a few blocks to a busy intersection.
Rod’Keesa was, even at this hour, ebullient and preternaturally self-assured. No, she didn’t like school. Her teachers were mean, she chirped. The ponytail pulled high atop her head bounced in agreement when she talked. At the bus stop, cars whizzed by at high speeds, but very few people were out and about. Under the predawn sky, Rod’Keesa, despite her confidence, seemed tiny and insignificant, more alone than she knew. A middle-aged white woman, I thought, wasn’t much of a guardian angel here.
Rod’Keesa spied a friend who was waiting safely in a warm car with her mother, the windows rolled up and the doors locked. Rod’Keesa, waving, went to the window to say hello. I looked up and down the street for the bus, which was nowhere in sight. Then I looked at the woman behind the wheel. “Can you keep her?” I asked.
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