Chapter Twelve

Mother, Mother

On a cool, crisp mid-March evening, Marsha Colbey stepped out onto the streets of New York
City in an elegant royal blue gown with her husband beside her. She had dreamed of a
moment like this for years. She took in the sights and sounds with great curiosity as they
strolled down the busy sidewalks. Enormous buildings stretched to the sky in the distance
while raucous traffic whizzed through Greenwich Village streets. The clusters of New York
students and artisans paid them no mind as they made their way through Washington Square
Park. She noticed an amateur jazz trio laboring through standards on a park corner. It all
seemed like something out of a movie.
A white woman from a poor rural Alabama town, Marsha had never been to New York, but
she was about to be honored at a dinner with two hundred guests. It was all exciting, but she
was experiencing something unusual as she made her way to the venue. She soon sorted out
what she was feeling. Freedom. She was wandering the streets of the world’s most dazzling
city with her husband, and she was free. It was a glorious feeling. Everything in the last three
months since her release had been magical. It was beyond what she would have imagined
even before she was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole at the Julia Tutwiler
Prison for Women.
When Hurricane Ivan hit coastal Alabama and blew chaos and calamity into Marsha’s life,
she thought things were as bad as they could get. Ivan spawned 119 tornadoes and created
over $ 18 billion dollars in damage. With six children to protect, she had no time to panic
over the loss of their home or the violent destruction of everything around them. It was the
uncertainty that worried Marsha. Where would she or her husband find work? How long
would the kids be out of school? What would they do for money? What would they do for
food? Everyone on the Gulf Coast was feeling vulnerable in the face of such an uncertain
future. The constant wave of tropical storms and hurricanes that menaced coastal Louisiana,
Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida in the summer of 2004 turned their relaxed Southern
coastal life into an apocalyptic struggle for survival.
Marsha and Glen Colbey were living in a crowded trailer with their children, and they
knew they were at risk when the hurricane warnings were announced. They weren’t alone;