On Sunday evening, in the North End of Beaumont, Texas, Jorden Robinson
stood in ankle-deep water outside his grandmother’s house, at 4460 Swift
Drive, wearing a tank top, sweatpants, and mismatched socks. He had lost
his shoes in the floods, and the ground was littered with debris and
nails. Jorden, his half-brothers Andre and Deonte, his nine-year-old cousin
London, and two of his uncles were gutting the house. Wood, insulation,
and cabinets were piled on the side of the road; a rotting mirror
reflected a house in ruins.

The Robinsons moved about slowly and quietly, as if in a daze. The sun
was setting, and they were covered in sweat. The city of Beaumont had no
running water, and they were desperate for a drink. Uncle Anthony
carried a pistol, in case alligators swam in from the nearby Neches
River, or snakes came from the abandoned lot next door. Uncle Aristle,
who installs car batteries at an auto-parts store, wore a striped shirt
that was torn up to the navel and had a hole over the left nipple; last
week, when Swift Drive flooded, the Robinson family left home at 3 A.M.,
and this was the only shirt he had grabbed.

Across southeastern Texas, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey
is measured not only in feet of floodwater but also by the vulnerability
of its victims. Some homes in Houston have incurred more than half a
million dollars in damage, as water surged to ceilings, forcing affluent
residents in the Memorial area to flee to hotels, friends’ mansions, or
country homes. In the North End of Beaumont, there was little risk of
drowning; inside the Robinsons’ house, the water peaked at about
eighteen inches. But many houses here are small and dilapidated, and the
residents are poor. For them, there is no clear path to recovery.

The worst flooding on Swift Drive began after the rain stopped. When the
Neches River filled beyond capacity, it looked as if the dams might
break. The city opened the floodgates to relieve pressure. That night,
the water crept into Jorden’s bedroom, soaking his mattress and his
clothes. “My aunt woke us up, saying, ‘Y’all gotta leave. The water is
rising in the ditches,’ ” he told me. Jorden’s aunt Nancy Robinson rents a
two-bedroom apartment on higher ground, in a complex called Regent 1
Apartments. Jorden and his relatives piled into their grandmother’s Kia
and went there.

Nancy’s apartment, where she lives with her two young daughters, has a
kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms, two toilets, and one shower. Now
she’s hosting seventeen relatives, who fled four different properties.
On Monday night, six women slept in one bed, seven men and boys in the
other, and seven women and children slept on the downstairs couch and on
the floor. The youngest occupant is four years old; the oldest is
Jorden’s great-grandmother, who is eighty-seven. “We registered with FEMA,” one of the aunts told me. “Some of us got approved for rooms in a
hotel, but you gotta find something. All the hotels are full. So where
you gonna go?”

Others’ claims were deferred. “My house is underwater,” Johnetta Cezar,
one of Jorden’s aunts, said. “My city, Orange, Texas, had a mandatory
evacuation, but FEMA have not approved me for a hotel. They told me
that, in order to help me, they would have to wait and look at how my
home looks. So at this point I have no help.” She sighed. “When I talked
to the FEMA representative, she told me, ‘I’m only the person that
answers the phone.’ ”

Farther down Swift Drive, a middle-aged man named William Quincy
Robinson (no relation to Jorden Robinson) was ripping apart his house.
“I’ve been getting the water out of my side room here since five o’clock
in the morning,” he said, wiping his brow. “I have a five-gallon
Shop-Vac, and so far today I have emptied it a hundred and twenty-nine
times.” He went on, “I’ve been sleeping in my car, ever since the storm
hit. I called FEMA, but I’ve got no response from them.” When I asked
how long it would take him to fix up the property, he said, “Never.
Never. I don’t have savings. I don’t have any money. And I don’t know
how to build. I’m not asking for sympathy or anything—that’s my fault
that I don’t have the skills. Otherwise I’d go out and try to hustle up
enough lumber and roofing, and I’d rebuild. But that whole roof is gone,
for one thing. The walls is full of water. The sheetrock, as you can
see, has to go—it’s full of mold. The carpet, I gotta pull it out. The
floor, it’s bowed up like a dinosaur back, you know? You ask when I’m
gonna rebuild? I won’t. This is gonna split up my family and I. They
gonna have to go live with their relatives, which is elsewhere in
Beaumont and in Jasper. As for me, I’ll just keep sleeping in my truck,
like I’ve been doing.”

Several members of Jorden Robinson’s family are in poor health. Five
women said that they have diabetes, and two said that they have other
life-threatening illnesses. One of them shouted to Jorden’s
great-grandmother, who was sitting on the couch and seemed to have
difficulty hearing what was going on.

“Grandma, what all you have?” she yelled. “Because it’s a lot!”

“What?” she replied.

“What you have, Grandma? Diabetes, heart disease . . .”

“High blood pressure—”

“Swollen legs,” another person shouted.

“Swollen legs. Thyroid.”

“I can’t get the medication I need, because I need my doctor’s
approval,” Johnetta Cezar told me. “But my doctor’s underwater, you
know? Nobody’s answering the phone, so how can I do it?”

Jorden, who is twenty-two, moved into his grandparents’ house in 2004,
after his parents’ house burned down in an electrical fire. After
completing high school, he enrolled in a medical program at Texas
Southern University, and studied respiratory therapy. But, two years
into the degree, Jorden’s grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, and he dropped out of
college to act as a live-in nurse. “Paw-Paw died in 2015,” Jorden told
me. “Last December, I started working as a part-time lab assistant at
St. Elizabeth Hospital, in microbiology.”

Jorden looks after his grandmother and advises his family on medical
issues. Until the storm, he had been earning around eleven hundred
dollars a month at the hospital, and so he also helped his grandmother
buy food and pay the bills. But he had missed the past ten days of work.
“The hospital had closed at one point, when the water systems went
down,” he told me. “I think they’re back and running, but I’ve been
helping out here.”

Jorden showed me his former bedroom. From inside his closet, buried
under sodden clothes, he retrieved a moldy instrument case and pulled
out an old French horn, with a crumpled bell. He brought it toward the
window, to examine it in the light. “The valve’s messed up,” he said.
“You can tell the water must’ve got in it.”

“Thank God I’m not materialistic or anything,” he continued. “I only
need a couple things to keep me comfortable: personal-hygiene stuff,
maybe some socks, you know. I just need one pair of clothes.” When I
asked if he had rescued his hospital scrubs, he said that there was a
pair in storage at the hospital. He looked down at his feet. He was
wearing fuzzy winter slippers. “I work in the lab, so I need tennis
shoes,” he said. (That afternoon, the photographer Philip Montgomery and
I took Jorden to Walmart, and bought him hospital scrubs, socks, and
tennis shoes.)

Suddenly, there was the sound of crashing glass: London, Jorden’s
nine-year-old cousin, had dropped a box of picture frames. Before
cleaning up the mess, Jorden led London out of the house, and advised
him to stay outside, so as to not aggravate his tonsillitis. “Any type
of airborne mold could affect him,” Jorden said. The house reeked. “I’m
pretty sure that if I swabbed one of the vents and took it to the lab,
and ran a routine culture on it, I’d find that some type of toxic mold
was growing in the house.”

The rest of the house was a mess of pre- and post-disaster items:
bleach, an empty beer can, medicine pillboxes, a television stand with
no television, a ruined couch, torn-up baseboards with protruding nails,
a potato on top of a microwave, drywall removed up to the water line,
dirty dishes in the sink. The interior walls could not be salvaged, and
the costs of rebuilding could be prohibitive. Inside a crowded kitchen
at Regent 1 Apartments, Jorden’s aunts told me that their homes are in
no better condition. “I’m at the bottom floor,” Johnetta Cezar said.
“And my neighbor upstairs had to get rescued with a boat. I’m all the
way flooded.” Like everyone else I spoke to in Beaumont’s North End,
Cezar did not have flood insurance. “I’m here until I don’t know when.”

“Under normal conditions, I can take care of my daughters,” Nancy Robinson, who rents the apartment in Regent 1, said. “They’re able to eat, and what I can get them—if they need shoes, or
stuff like that—I’m able to get it. What I’m not able to get, I don’t
stress—you know, Momma just don’t have it. But now it’s seventeen more
people. What do you do?”

Nancy works part time at a Whataburger restaurant in Beaumont. “I don’t
know how long it’s gonna last,” she said. “My girls are five and seven.
I still have to pay my gas bill. My light bill’s gonna be sky-high. The
air-conditioning has to stay on, because of my baby’s skin—she has
eczema real bad. I have to provide food and toiletries for twenty
people! I just don’t know how we’re going to do this. It’s a day-by-day
thing. But I just don’t know.”

In Beaumont, there are staging areas for distributing food, water,
toiletries, blankets, and clothes. But the Robinsons hadn’t heard about
them. “Being with twenty people in the house, we need whatever help we
can get,” Nancy told me. “You know, I was thinking that Red Cross
would’ve been on the scene, because FEMA is basically, you know . . .”
She trailed off. “I can’t support twenty by working part time at
Whataburger.”