BILOXI, Miss. — In the afternoon, when it is warm, Valentina and Gary Stilwell can almost forget there are no walls around them. Valentina has hung one of her paintings on a tree, and there is a bowl of hard candies on the coffee table. The concrete slab beneath them is as spotless as linoleum.
But Sunday night a cold wind shuddered through east Biloxi, shaking their tent so badly that Gary had to get up several times to drive the stakes back into the ground. Gary and Valentina slept in half-hour lulls between the gusts of wind, and in the morning the weight of what they had been through bore down hard.
"There's nobody that can do anything for us," said Gary, a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran. Valentina, 44, put it more bluntly.
"I said to the FEMA guy, if you can't bring me my trailer, just bring me a .38 and a bullet," she said.
Nearly two months after Hurricane Katrina passed over the Gulf Coast, stretches of east Biloxi resemble shantytowns.
In the Point Cadet neighborhood, known as "the Point," hundreds of people are sleeping on the ground beside the rubble of their homes, living in tents that poke out from piles of debris.
On some lots, listless residents begin drinking hard in the morning so that by evening they can drop into a drugged sleep. On others -- like the Stilwells' -- families are trying to hold on to remnants of the life they had before the storm. But even the Stilwells began to feel hopeless when the temperature dropped this week.
"What people don't understand is that it is an emergency situation," said Bill Stallworth, city councilman for Biloxi's Ward 2, which includes much of east Biloxi. "You don't have any place to go, and you're sitting there, and you're starting to freeze."
The residents of New Orleans' poorest neighborhoods were evacuated to hotels or temporary shelters until they could face the staggering question of whether to return to a ruined place. But in impoverished east Biloxi, many residents never left or returned to stay beside their modest homes and wait for the delivery of a trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
There is no count of how many people are living in tents, but aid agencies have distributed more than 1,000. Stallworth estimated that 1,000 to 1,500 people were living in tents, even as temperatures began dropping into the low 40s at night.
