LEARN NC

North Carolina History Digital Textbook Project

A survivor's story: How does it really feel?

By Kristin Post

1.2 Using the interview “What was the shelter like?”

By Kristin Post

Provided by UNC Libraries / Documenting the American South

Introductory script

Elberta Hudson and her husband Thomas were sharing a small house with their five children in White Stocking, North Carolina (Pender County) when Hurricane Floyd hit the coast of North Carolina. Many eastern North Carolina counties experienced massive floods just days after the hurricane passed through. Elberta and her family were among the thousands that had to flee their flooded homes and live in shelters.

Preliminary questions

  1. Where is Pender County, North Carolina?
  2. What do you think it would feel like to have to leave everything you own and live in a shelter?
  3. If you were to walk into a shelter the morning after the floods and take a photograph, what kind of expressions would you expect to see? How do they relate to the photos you looked at?

The recording

Play the flood shelter oral history excerpt. Running time: 29 seconds.

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Transcript

Charles Thompson
Describe it. How many people were in there and the types of people who were there?
Elberta Hudson
Oh, Lord, it was so many people. It was so many people. It was the Mexican people, black people, white people. And it was a lot of people, you know, young, old, middle age.
Thomas Hudson
They had the whole middle school jammed up with people who started coming.
Elberta Hudson
And it was packed. It was cots side-to-side.
Thomas Hudson
And they didn’t have enough room to house them all, so they opened up another, bigger school down at Penderlea.

Follow-up questions

  1. What details are you given about the shelter from Elberta’s and Thomas’s answers? Does this give you a better mental picture of what it was like for them?
  2. What does this tell you about the community in which they lived? Is it like your community?