Displaced Cajun finds his stride

Some people just won't stay down.

Joseph Mathis, 46, is one of hundreds of thousands of New Orleans natives scattered around the United States since Hurricane Katrina. After losing everything in the storm, he spent 19 months fighting through FEMA's bureaucracy, moving from job to job in Illinois and trying to put his life together.

Twists of fate brought him to Jackson last month penniless and homeless, but Mathis, a Cajun chef, has found a new home cooking at Broussard's and living in a Main Street apartment.

"People think it's easy to rebuild your life. But even to have a semblance of normalcy, it takes a lot of work," he said. To sit down with Mathis is to feel his energy. He laughs often, rattles off dates with a near-photographic memory and speaks in a drawl that's pure N'Awlins. You'd never dream that until recently this was someone reduced to sleeping on park benches.

It all started with the hurricane, the fifth of his life. Mathis was working as a chef in Covington, La. His entire family lived in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. In an instant they were all homeless.

In the days after Katrina, Mathis moved to a shelter in a converted middle school. He desperately wanted to lend a hand and before long was rising at 4 a.m. to prepare three meals a day for 250 people.

"In that situation you've got to step up. I'm an aggressive person, and I knew I had to kick it into gear," he said.

After several months, he decided to move to a Chicago suburb where he has relatives.

Moving from job to job, he grew increasingly frustrated that he couldn't make the same wages a skilled chef made in New Orleans.

He finally settled on work as a line chef at a small cafe and says the owner promised to quickly promote him. But after 97 straight days, according to Mathis, he had already been passed over for promotion three times and was still earning a measly $9 per hour. Around the same time FEMA told Mathis his federal rental assistance was being revoked. The agency accused Mathis of fraudulently taking double rental assistance and asked for $6,000 in back payments.

That was the end of the road. Mathis threw up his hands and scraped together the last of his earnings to buy a bus ticket back to New Orleans. Only one problem: The $98 he had would only get him as far as Jackson, Mo., south along Interstate 55.

On March 3, he turned up at the Revival Center Shelter in Jackson and met Dennis Rigdon. Rigdon saw somebody hungry to work. He helped Mathis update his resume and put him in touch with the offices of Rep. Jo Ann Emerson and Sen. Kit Bond. The feds flexed some muscle and got FEMA to renew Mathis' rental assistance and drop the erroneous accusations of fraud.

Mathis' luck was turning. Rigdon drove him to downtown Cape Girardeau for lunch one day and suggested the two eat at Broussard's. When Mathis walked through the door, smelled the food and heard the bumping blues music, his heart lept.

Resume in hand, he asked for a job and was soon hired by owner Hunter Clark. Mathis has since moved into an apartment across the street, which he says reminds him of the "shotgun apartments of Bourbon St."

Good things, it seems, eventually come to those who never give up hope.

"James Brown said, 'I don't want nobody to give me nothing. Open up the door, and I'll get it myself.' And that's the way I see it," Mathis said.

TJ Greaney is a staff reporter for the Southeast Missourian.