By Alexis Taylor
AFRO Managing Editor

Chancellor Mason doesn’t need documentaries, pictures or social media posts to remind him of what happened 20 years ago. Though he was a mere 12-year-old boy living in Gulfport, Miss., at 32, he calls up the memories of Hurricane Katrina as if the Category 3 storm slammed into his small town yesterday.

Life for the young aspiring meteorologist and country singer changed forever when the storm waters washed away one of his schoolmates, his home and the family dog.

“If you went down our coast after the storm, there was nothing left…absolutely nothing,” said Mason. “If anybody knows weather, the right front quadrant of a hurricane is always the strongest part. That went right over my town…Mississippi was a part of that storm.”

According to the National Weather Service, “the damage and loss of life inflicted by this massive hurricane in Louisiana and Mississippi was staggering with significant effects extending into Alabama and the western Florida panhandle.”

As images of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation to the City of New Orleans flooded the airwaves, Mason–like many outside of The Big Easy–says what they experienced has historically been left out of mainstream media. 

This year, he has made a point to speak up and be more vocal about what happened in Mississippi.

In the years before Katrina, both of Mason’s parents, who worked at the hospital by his school, would evacuate during major storms. He believes that led to a fatigue in the community, where the act of packing up and leaving town was often deemed an overaction in hindsight.

In August 2005, the family teetered back and forth over whether to leave the city for yet another hurricane. Finally, the day before the storm arrived in Mississippi, Mason’s mother quit her job and the family hit the road. There was only one problem: the roads were packed with other people who also waited until the last minute to evacuate. 

“I think everybody was getting anxious, trying to get out. It was bumper to bumper. The feeder bands of the storm were already coming in, it was raining– it was a lot. So, we turned around.

We hadn’t gone anywhere. So we got off the interstate and turned back around.” 

Mason had already made survival kits for his family, consisting of canned goods, water and batteries. Still, he had a feeling.

“I remember walking to my mom’s room and telling her ‘I don’t think we should stay here.’”

In the end, the family listened to the pre-teen weather enthusiast and sought shelter at his school, at the time known as Central Middle School.

“There were a lot of people there. They had a two-story school, but they had ropes and chains around the doors that go upstairs. Everybody was on the first floor,” Mason recalls. “Cops started walking around warning people, ‘If something goes wrong here, we’re not coming. The ambulance not coming…this is going to be a flood zone. You can stay–but if you stay– we’re not coming.’”

Upon hearing the warning from police, Mason says many people didn’t budge.

“A lot of people didn’t even have cars,” he said. “They walked there, or got dropped off there. It’s just what it was.” 

As the Mason family had a car, they made the trek further north, to a school in North Gulfport. They were lucky. It was there that they would ultimately ride out Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005. By the time the storm hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast, residents in the area were up against sustained winds of 120 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service.

“I remember laying down and going to sleep and then I woke up, it was chaos. It was probably around 4 or 5 a.m. All I hear is babies crying, loud people talking…I could hear the wind,” Mason recalls. “Katrina was coming ashore.” 

By 8 a.m., as daylight tried to break through, the situation became more visible

“I’m still amazed by this to this day, but all I could see was stuff flying around…pieces of other parts of the school,” said Mason. “There was this big gymnasium. I watched it for about an hour get ripped apart by these winds. The roof of the building we were in started coming off.”

“We’re all wet, water’s coming up through the floor,” he told the AFRO, recalling the day as if it were happening in real time, all over again. “People started to freak out. Somebody got on the phone with 911, and they were saying, ‘we can’t do any rescues right now.’” 

The situation became even more stressful when a man began banging on the doors to the school.  

“There was a guy who showed up to the shelter mid-storm. I guess he lived in a mobile home. His small home started being ripped apart. He said, ‘I can’t find my wife. We were in the house together. I ran outside to get the car started to go back in her, and then the storm took our trailer away.’” 

Mason said many people were uneducated about how a hurricane could be.

Before anyone could get the locks off the doors to help the man, a piece of tin debris slammed into his body. 

“All the adults formed a human chain. They locked arms and walked out one by one to grab him and to bring him in. He was all cut up, bruised up and we called 911,” said Mason. Still, the response from 911 remained the same: “‘We cannot come.’” 

Mason remembers the storm getting particularly bad around noon.

“I could feel the building shaking. Mind you, now we’re in water. I think that’s when I really started to worry, because I did have other family members that didn’t evacuate. By the grace of God, they survived.”

Eventually, the storm passed. 

“We went outside to just look. When you stood back from the building we were in, and looked, you could tell it was one strong gust away from being decimated– the whole building. There’s no way that every building around us at that school was demolished and the building we were in was still standing,” said Mason. 

“It still amazes me to this day. I tell people all the time, I was not supposed to be here– at all.”

To find out what happened to the Mason family in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, read Part II of this story, “Mississippi Memories: After the Storm” in next week’s edition of the AFRO.