How's it different?
[Laughter]
I don't know if you have that much time.
Everything's different. Every aspect of our lives are
different. We kind of have a makeshift life. We're just
trying to find our way to make a new life, but I mean, our just daily
routine of stopping and get gas in the
Page 2morning and
see people in stores, and the stores are not there, the people are not
there. I mean nothing. We were living in a three-story house in
[unclear] , and it's totally
destroyed. Actually, though, we were fortunate that being close to the
river on Saint Bernard Highway was the furthest point in which the water
came. It was like the last of where—you know, the direction
of the storm. But most people had water over their rooftops into second
stories and what have you. We had probably about four and a half feet of
water, but it's just enough where you have to gut the whole
house to the ceilings. Of course, no matter what kind of house you have,
the bottom floor is your main living area. The upstairs, we had
bedrooms, but everyday living is in your downstairs, so it'd
probably take a whole lot of money and a whole lot of time to even try
to get that back. We're going to attempt it, but
it's so unfathomable that we just say we're going
to try it. That's all you can really say.
I remember when we originally evacuated to
[unclear] , Louisiana, which was right on the border by
Texas, and we were staying in hotels. Well, we couldn't hear
anything. They would never say anything about Saint Bernard Parish, so
we didn't even know what we were facing. We didn't
even know what anything looked like. Finally, we kind of
started—. Actually, they rounded up a bunch of people from
Saint Bernard Parish were there. A lot of people just headed west, and
just kind of
Page 3meeting at McDonald's or
whatever. Everybody's living in hotels, so kind of walking
your dogs outside and started seeing people, and we heard of the
devastation. We never got to see anything. It was probably at least two
weeks before we actually saw a picture on the news. They kept [saying],
"New Orleans, New Orleans." Well, of course, I mean
New Orleans is a famous city, so the focus was on that. I kind of in a
way resented it, because they actually left Saint Bernard Parish to fend
for themselves. After the fact, we learned that it was pretty much
citizens rescuing other citizens. I mean, guys in yachts from Lake
[unclear] on the lakefront took their boats
to Saint Bernard and were rescuing people in boats.
The first time we came, we come down the main road that comes from the
interstate, [unclear] Road. They must have
had two thousand boats, just people trying to get as far as they could
get in their boats. When they'd hit a car or whatever, it
would just stop. But we were in the hotels out there, and we started
figuring we can't just keep staying in a hotel.
It's going to get expensive. So a whole bunch of us was
there. It was probably fifteen of us—my husband, my son,
myself, my mother, my sister, her chil—. It was a bunch of
us, and we started calling around trying to make plans. We figured,
okay, we've got to make a move. We've got to try
to do something, so we calling relatives or whatever to see where we
could go.
Well, it came to the point where we had to split up because there was too
many of us to go to one house. I remember sitting in that parking lot
[unclear] start crying. But I
didn't want to leave them. Like we had spent all our time
together, and it kind of seemed like if we left them at the time, we
might never see them again, you know? But we tried to keep in touch. Our
cell phones weren't working. We all of us had to get new cell
phones. We were trying to keep in touch as best we could, because for a
few days there, maybe a week, we just kind of—.
We're a close family. Just like where I was telling you our
houses at, we had three houses on a big piece of land, and
it's kind of like a family compound.
Page 4
Now it's just so different. Now the ones that wanted to sell
sell, and they got like these strangers moving in. You don't
even feel like you want to go back because it's just so
different, but we just tried to do whatever we could do. So we moved in
with some relatives of ours that were actually my in-laws from my first
marriage, and my sister and my mother, they rented a little place on a
lake up in [unclear] , Louisiana. We were
in Prairieville, which is right outside of
[unclear] , and we stayed a couple of weeks. You feel like
after a certain amount of time, you've got to move on again,
so we wound up moving again.
It wasn't no problem really. It was just an emotional thing,
but we didn't really have—. We all left home with
three sets of clothes, everybody that I know, because we figured, I
mean, we leave a couple of days, we're going to come back,
and everything's going to be fine. We wound up having to find
a Wal-Mart, and we had to just go buy underwear and t-shirts. It was
like ninety-five degrees, and your brain feels like it's just
spinning out your head. I mean, things that most people take for
granted—just like, you know, every morning when you wake up,
you go in your drawer and you get new clothes. Well, we were washing
clothes in a hotel room in the sink and hanging them on the side of the
truck and stuff.
We went to the—trying to find a bank, trying to get whatever
money we could have. We had to apply for food stamps, which
we've never done in our life, but it was like a disaster
assistance program that they were telling everybody, "Well, do
this." But living in a hotel, you can't get
groceries to cook, so that's when we had to wound up trying
to find alternative things. But all of these months, it's
just, you know, every week it's learning a new way of living.
Still you can see, being here, there's no grocery stores. I
mean, there's like a little corner food store if you run out
of bread or something like that. If you got to go to the grocery, you
got to go miles, go either across the lake or whatever, and most people
lost their vehicles. I mean, we did. We had one vehicle that we had with
us. Well, we had to wound up going to get—. Most everybody we
know lost at least one vehicle. There's not a person I know
that didn't lose their house, everybody's
photographs.
Page 5
It's like I have one child, and I've taken pictures
since the day he was born. I had photo albums full of him. When we went
to go look, I found the photo albums, but when you turn the pages, the
pictures are blank. I wish I would have saved some I could show you.
There's just a rim of the picture had a little color on it,
and my son's father—. Our wedding
pictures—. His father died when he was six years old. I got
the album, but it's blank. It's empty. My mother
was lucky enough—she had a little mother's album,
you know, when you get married and the mother gets a photo album. So she
had one for each one of us kids. It's not big ones like you
would have, but that's probably the most precious commodity
of the whole thing.
It's like I was telling you. You could build another house.
It's not that it's going to be your home, but
it'll be a house. It'll be a shelter, but I
don't know. It's almost indescribable. You just
don't have anything left. It's just like as blank
as those photographs that we went back and looked is what your life
feels like. To me, it felt like a death in my family, just coming back
and seeing your whole community, everything that you know, everything
that you do daily—. Go to the cleaners, there's no
cleaners. No groceries. We just started getting a couple of little
banks. It's a daily struggle every day when you have to do
anything.
Just like I was cutting [unclear] inside,
but I was cutting hair just trying to make some money on a picnic table
outside in ninety-something degree weather. You wouldn't even
have to wet the person hair. He's just sweating to death. And
I had just renovated my beauty shop after the thirty years we had the
same beauty shop. Peach color walls and a little flowery border paper.
We had just fixed it up, and I had it open probably four months when the
hurricane came. While I was cutting hair outside on the picnic table, we
had studs and cement. I don't know if you ever saw what a
gutted house—. I mean, it's just nothing. You
could look through one end of the building and see clean through the
other end.
Like anything that fell on the floor, you couldn't even hardly
salvage. It depended. If it was like, say, dishes, something
that's cleanable—. Other than that, because they
had so much mud that came in with the water—. And a lot of
people got oil. We didn't get oil from the oil spill from the
oil
Page 6refinery, but we literally had to shovel mud out
of the house, out of the doorway to make like a pathway, just to get in.
It makes you sick that when you're looking, you're
trying to just salvage, you would be amazed at the mode that your brain
automatically goes into, trying to just save anything.
When you're just picking up this stuff and all
this—. We got boots and gloves and suits and masks, and
we're going through this stuff and it smells so bad and
everything's just dripping with this muck. And every thing
that you pick up has a memory attached to it, no matter what it is.
It's a memory, and every thing that you pick up and you think
you're going to salvage, it's like mentally you go
through it all again. Every little thing you touch, it just breaks your
heart, because you know—. It's almost like people
say—. We heard when we evacuated people were saying,
"Well, those people just need to get over it and get on with
it." Well, it's easier said than done.
You're not going to just—. You actually got to
make a new life. It's just day by day, you're just
trying to go through it all over again. Things as simple as, okay,
we've been staying here, we've been collecting
trash, we've got to put the garbage out. Well, we
don't have a garbage can [Laughter]
. Whatever, paper towels, you don't have a holder. We
had to go buy toothbrushes and hairbrushes, anything that you can
imagine.
It's things that people just don't think of. I
think that they don't really know until they come. They need
to come here and see it. When you see it and you drive through some of
these neighborhoods and you see like where my brother lived, you go down
his street, you can't even drive down his street now.
There's a house in the middle of the street, with the slab
still attached to it. There's an American flag sticking in
the front yard, and the weird thing about that—. I mean,
it's weird, okay. There's a house in the middle of
the street, but on both sides of the street, there's no
houses missing. So this house actually came from probably three or four
blocks from where the house landed.
The whole house, it just picked up, floated, because that's
how deep the water was. It passed over houses; it passed over cars,
trucks. They even have little figurines in the windows. Curtains are
still there, everything. I could take you and show you the house.
You'd freak out. I mean, some houses kind of moved a little
bit. This house in particular came from three or four blocks away and
literally
Page 7floated over everything. I guess when the
water started subsiding, that's where it ended up. It kind of
looks like—if you didn't know better, you would
think it was like the Wizard of Oz movie, how the house just falls out
of the sky. That's exactly what it looks like. You go down
the street, you've got to turn around and go back out to the
main street, go around the back, because you can't even pass.
And that's just my brother's street.
There's subdivisions on top of subdivisions all the way
through New Orleans. I went through Mississippi, and everything was the
same way. Most of those people got a lot of wind damage. We had somewhat
wind damage, but when our levees broke, that was it. The newspaper said
it; a couple of weeks ago they had, "Within six hours, our fate
was sealed." I'm forty-eight years old. Everything I
knew my whole life, in a matter of six hours it's totally
gone. You feel angry; you feel like you're just so mad you
want to do something. I mean, you can't do anything. You
can't be mad at anybody. Who are you going to be mad at?
Mother Nature? It's hard to talk about, because you
can't hardly find the words to even express, you know. And
still, sometimes I'll talk about it, and it feels like it was
yesterday. You just start crying. Some days you feel like you
don't even want to wake up. I mean, you'll see the
trash. It's stacked up a story high almost ten months later,
and nothing's changed.
We was able to get sheet rock and floors back, but there's
people I know that are living in tents, just tents in their yards or
FEMA trailers. I saw this one lady one morning. We were driving in [unclear] , and this woman's
coming out of the tent. She's got a toothbrush in her mouth,
she's trying to brush her hair, and I'm thinking
it had rained that night before. Even me, and I'm directly
affected by it, but I'm not in a tent. I was like riding in
my car and I'm just crying because I said these people
probably slept on the ground. They're probably soaking wet,
funky, probably even hotter than it is outside right now. When I tell
you nobody came and helped us, you could stop anywhere in Saint Bernard
Parish and ask, and everybody fended for themselves. There was nobody.
Weeks later, a couple of people showed up to help, but this time
everybody's hot, aggravated, filthy dirty, I mean people
dying.
Page 8
They had a man that was rescuing people. As soon as he got his mother in
a boat, because the people stole boats—. I mean, they had to.
They were trying to save their lives. He got a boat; he got his mother
in the boat. It was him and his neighbor, and right after they got his
mother in the boat, his mother had a massive heart attack, and she died.
But the guy, he continued rescuing people, and every house he went up to
in the boat, they had people hanging in trees, on light fixtures in
their houses. I mean, you name it. I personally know the guy, and he was
telling the people who he was rescuing, "I feel like you need
to know this before you get in the boat that I got my dead mother with
me, and I cannot leave her behind. So if you want to be rescued, you
have to get in the boat."
This is a true story. They went to the high school, and he tried to leave
his mother there. But you've got to understand at the time,
they had probably twelve feet of water where the high
school's at, and they wouldn't let him leave his
dead mother there. So he kept leaving the people out that he was
rescuing and left his dead mother in the boat with him for days. It was
like three or four days he did this. And they broke in a grocery store;
they was stealing food just to go bring to the high school so people
would have food. This was people who actually stayed, didn't
have the means or whatever to evacuate.
Like I told you, we don't never evacuate. We usually stay.
Well, we just so happened at the very last minute when we woke up that
Sunday morning before the storm and this thing is like a
monster—. It's like Category Five, and my
husband's like, "Oh, we got to go." And
that's what we did. We ran around the house, and I got my son
[unclear] because my mom and my sister
and them, they had already evacuated. Actually, that's the
only way we got a hotel room, because they had left the day before. My
son's like, "Mom, you've got to get out
of there!" So we just threw a couple of things—like
I said, probably two, three sets of clothes in our truck, packed up our
dogs, and we headed out.
But a lot of people stayed. They probably had twelve hundred people in
Saint Bernard Parish that drowned, died, from some hurricane-related
thing. I had a ninety-year-old aunt that got rescued out of her attic of
her house, and by the time they decided to leave, it was too late. They
were trapped;
Page 9they couldn't leave. So
we're on the phone with them and we're in a hotel,
and we're telling my cousin, "Put an ax in the
attic." For Hurricane Betsy, so many people died in the attics
because nobody knew the water was going to get like that, and nobody had
axes in the attic. Well, that's one thing most people,
everybody that stayed, put an ax in their attic and actually needed it.
So many people were on their rooftops for days, and they were baking. It
was so hot, but no food, no water. You figure some of them was like ten
days they don't have nothing at all.
A friend of mine had their little grandbabies, like two-month-old babies.
Finally when the helicopters started coming, they're on the
roof and they're holding the babies up to the helicopter and
they're making motions to their mouth, like bring food and
drink, and the helicopters just left. They never brought them anything.
It can get you so mad, because to me, they send all this
money—. Like Iraq and Afghanistan, they go bomb these places,
they have full-out war, they send all this money, they're
rebuilding, and here we are. This is American people that work every day
for a living, and they're leaving them to die in a situation
that's totally beyond any of our control. It ain't
because we did anything wrong. It's just a hurricane came;
that's what happened. You would think that they'd
have people right outside maybe the state lines ready to come in, but it
was weeks before anybody came to help any of these people.
When we finally got to come back, nothing was green. Everything looked
red, black. You could see from the pictures I showed you. The weirdest
thing was by our house, we had all kind of birds and squirrels and you
name it. When we came back, you didn't even hear any type of
anything. You didn't hear no birds; you didn't see
no squirrels. This is my husband Jeff, by the way
[Laughter] . This is Elizabeth. To hear no wildlife, no kind
of nature, after we've just been devastated by Mother Nature,
and it was kind of ironic that you don't even hear a bird.
You don't even think about that, but when it's
total silence, you start thinking something's not right. And
you start realizing we're probably never going to even have
grass anymore, much less birds and squirrels. They had dogs living in
our house when we got back. Skin and bones. Their ribs were sticking
out, and we're going in the house
Page 10and
they start barking at us. I guess they were starving, so we going in the
car and we're getting stuff and trying to give them. I guess
they didn't know where to go. They were trying to save their
selves, and for whatever reason, the animals were just left behind.
It felt like you was in a movie. It kind of felt like it
wasn't even real. It's like when we drove back
from Baton Rouge, it's a long ride because the interstates
were jammed. People were just trying to get back to see their properties
or whatever, and we had a bunch of us in our truck and we were talking.
You know, a truck full of people, everybody's talking. When
we went back, not one person spoke a word to each other the whole way
back. I believe it's true that your brain can't
even absorb everything. It's like what you saw, you
can't even believe that you just saw it. It's like
everything in your life, and that was just the first time. Every time we
would come back to gut the houses, then you'd start finding
stuff, what you thought was to be good stuff. Like I said,
you'd be amazed how your brain just kind of shifts modes to
where now the littlest thing means so much. We were bringing back stuff
full of mud and probably mold and everything. We sitting outside with
buckets of bleach and soap and water with toothbrushes, just trying to
scrub little angel figurines and anything that we could find. Probably
all we could find, out of a whole lifetime of stuff, probably would fit
in one little grocery sack, like the little plastic sacks that you get
at the grocery. Probably everything that you could find out of your
whole entire house, you could put in one of them little sacks, and
you've got to feel fortunate that you was able even to find
anything.
Some people I knew went back to find just a slab of their house and
actually scoured the neighborhood looking for whatever, anything that
looked familiar to them that was out of their house, and never was able
to find anything. Yeah? Those houses were like, even kind of like in the
back of where I told you my brother [lived], which they were closer to
the lake, but actually not even probably five, ten minutes from where we
sitting right now. But it's so widespread that you got to
really see it. I wish you had more time. I could take you around and
show you things that would blow your mind. You'd think
you'd never see nothing like that in your whole life. Like I
didn't never think I'd live to see
Page 11anything like this, but the only thing I could compare it to
that kind of would be equal, maybe, and I was never in a war, but when
you see, say, pictures of like Bosnia or like the tsumani, when you see
things that it just don't even look like—. Some
people, you could be standing in front of their house. I was standing in
front of one of my friend's houses, by their slab, and did
not recognize a thing of any—. I didn't even know
that I was in front of my friend's house, because the house
wasn't there, but neither was anything else that was in that
whole nearby area was not there. It looked like an atomic bomb went off.
It just looked like totally destroyed. If you'd never known
what it looked like before, when you came back, you—.
It's hard to recognize stuff when it happens like that. We
never ever would have thought that we would [have] had the kind of water
that we had. I mean, people had mortgages on their houses and like with
the banks, and banks and stuff, mortgage companies even told these
people they didn't need flood insurance, because it had never
ever in the history ever flooded before. Probably more than half the
people that lived down here literally didn't have no flood
insurance because they never ever needed it. But if you go buy a house
and the mortgage company and the bank is telling you you
don't need it, chances are you're not going to get
it. Some people will, but this is not a rich community. It's
all working class people, and I know it probably sounds weird to a lot
of people, but they didn't even have flood insurance? But if
you never ever needed it before—I mean there's
places probably still that have never flooded before—people
might not have known that you could get flood insurance.
I bet now down in
[unclear] most
people's got maxed-out insurance if they could afford it, but
most everybody done lost their jobs. When your community goes away, our
jobs go with it. Like us, we filed for emergency unemployment, food
stamps. I remember the first time we used our food stamps, they give us
like a debit card or a credit card thing, I didn't even know
how to work the thing. I didn't know what to do with it, but
it was kind of funny. You feel like you're delirious, so
you're kind of like laughing while you're doing
it. And then you're crying because it's so tore up
that you know you really need it, but when you're used to
working, you've kind of got a pride that you don't
want to live off the
Page 12government. But you feel like
all these years you've been working and paying taxes, and the
first time the government's actually going to try to help
you? That's kind of an oxymoron in itself, because ten months
later, look at the way everything still looks. If we wouldn't
have took it upon ourselves to gut our houses and re-sheetrock and
everything, we'd probably still be living with relatives. It
gets old, and it's not that we don't appreciate
it. I mean, it's hurricane season again
[Laughter] . We might wound up needing them again.
It's such a grand scale. Everything that you could think of in
your own life, or anybody for that matter, anything—just
every day when you come home from work, you put your keys in the same
place or you know where your shoes are at. Think about first of all you
don't have a home to go to. Second of all, there's
no table to put your keys on. You're lucky if
you've got a floor or a wall, and everything that you own
could fit in one little bitty bag. Your priorities just change. All of a
sudden, material things don't seem important, but then at the
same time, you're digging through mud and sludge and
everything else to try to find anything that you can keep.
That's what I think it is, just because they got a memory
attached to every single thing. But the pictures, that's the
worst thing because most things you can replace. Pictures is one thing
that you absolutely can't replace. I got some of my
baby's pictures back. I say "my
baby"—he's twenty-six, but from giving my
sister-in-law and them pictures when all these years while he was
growing up, when we left, moved out of their house to come back, they
were digging through pictures and they gave us a Ziploc bag with all the
pictures back. So that's the only way I have any of my
baby's pictures anymore.
It's almost like as if you've got to live through
it to know. It's so hard to try to describe. It looks like a
third world country; sometimes it feels like a third world country just
being here. But at the same time, it's probably the most at
home I've felt since the day the hurricane hit, because
it's just familiar. It's your home.
That's where you live; that's where
you've lived most of your life, but it's
different. I mean, hardly any of the people here—. We
probably had eighty, ninety thousand people living in Saint Bernard
Parish pre-Katrina, they call it now. Pre-Katrina, post-Katrina,
that's the way people measure
Page 13things by
now. When we first came back, there was no traffic. We felt like we was
the only ones here. Then a few weeks later, they got a paper that we had
ten thousand residents back, which seemed like that was a whole lot of
people. But when you think about you had eighty or ninety thousand,
that's really nothing, and everybody knows—.
It's a small community.
We got this highway and [unclear]
's the other highway. It's our only two
main highways, and then the one highway that goes to the interstate. I
mean, it's a small, tight-knit community. Everybody knows
everybody. Like if something happens to one person, oh, by the end of
the day, everybody in the parish knows about it. That's how
it is, and when you don't see any of these
people—. And everybody's so scattered out around,
you don't know, first of all, where
anybody—because everybody was evacuating all over the place.
Really, you don't know if you're ever going to see
them again, I mean unless they come back. Like I said, most people had
to get new cell phones. You don't know where they stand; they
don't know that you back. This is like everybody you went to
school with, everything, anything you could think of, and you just
don't know. When you run across somebody—.
I remember the first time we was in Gonzales and we went to a Wal-Mart,
and the first girl I saw was at this meat market that I used to go to
almost every day. She used to just make the chicken salad. I knew her by
name; she knew me. Well, I turned my basket in Wal-Mart, and
she's turning on the same row, and both of us make this face
like "it's you, oh, it's you!"
And both of us busted out crying and we're hugging each
other. It wasn't even that we was real great friends or close
friends. It was just—. She says, "You the first
person I saw," and I said, "You're the
first person I saw!" Everybody's like hugging and
crying and "Where you at? Where you staying?" Exchange
phone numbers, but who would ever think that you would get that
emotional about just somebody that you seen in a store. It's
just because it was the first familiar thing that I saw after, and that
was probably five weeks after the storm. I freaked out when I saw that
girl, and I'll never forget it because she was the first one
I saw.
Page 14
But like on the news, everything's New Orleans, New Orleans.
Well, New Orleans is like five minutes from here. Ten minutes tops,
you're in New Orleans, but they probably get the most help
because it's a famous city. Nobody ever hears of [unclear] or Saint Bernard Parish.
It's just a little small place, but absolutely almost
everybody that lives here was born in New Orleans and over the years,
kind of tired of—. This was kind of considered like the
country, get-out-of-the-city country kind of thing. Well, now
it's not much [Laughter] , but
hopefully maybe ten years or—. It probably would be at least
ten years, I would think, before anything remotely kind of gets back to
the way it was before the hurricane. It's definitely
different. They always said one day the big one's going to
come. They always talk about how New Orleans is a bowl, you know.
Everybody talked about it. I'm talking about over years and
years, maybe fifty or a hundred years, people said it. But when
it's not immediately happening to you, it just goes to the
back of your head, and today's today. And then, bam! You get
hit with this major hurricane that you never ever would
have—. I mean, the only thing I can compare it, like the
tsunami or something, because nobody's ever seen anything
like that.
We sure did find out that it was like a bowl. Like down in [unclear] , and that's a little
fishing community we got down there, first word we heard, we was in a
hotel in [unclear] . We heard they had a
thirty-five foot storm surge and took it out. Took the whole fishing
community out. After we came back, we drove down. That's
where I told you my friend, they found him down—. I mean to
tell you, it was like fishing camps, guys that trawled for shrimp, crab
fishermen, oyster fisherman. All seafood everybody loves and enjoys,
they're the people that catch it, and there was absolutely
nothing there. There was pilings. There's three areas.
There's [unclear] . I think in
[unclear] Island, they might have had
six structures left. In [unclear] , I think
they had four. [unclear] was nothing, and
this is like generations of fishermen. That's all they know.
That's what they do. Their grandchildren do it.
That's just their lineage; like, that's what they
do. They're fishermen, and they absolutely have nothing
there.
If you think it's bad here, ten minutes further down, and
that's kind of like open to the Gulf, there's no
sign of life at all. At least here they got a little traffic. Down
there, there's absolutely
Page 15nothing.
Nothing. It's unbelievable. I couldn't even
believe it. I was just like—. My husband says,
"We're standing in front of their house."
And I'm looking around and not a thing looks familiar, and
I'm thinking—. All of a sudden, I spy this cactus.
Now my friend had this huge cactus, probably stood taller than me.
It's a little short thing like this, and I saw it, this
little cactus, and I'm thinking that was that big gigantic
cactus that was right on the side their stairs where you used to go up.
I'm thinking I'll be damned. This is where we are,
but it just was so totally out of proportion that you just
couldn't—. It goes back to like I said. You brain
can't even absorb. Your eyes just—it's
telling you that it saw, and it's just like the weirdest
thing. You never ever in your wildest [dreams] would have thought you
would see anything like that. You probably saw a lot of stuff when you
was coming form the airport this way, but when you're home
and you see it on TV, you have no clue. I mean, nobody in the whole
nation would even know.
That's why a lot of times when they talking to Congress or
whatever, they tell the people, "Come down here and
see." It's the only [way] you really can get it is
if you see it. I don't [know] any other way to tell you. I
could show you pictures, what it looked like before, what it looked like
after, but—. And then again, it's a whole
different thing getting from that day to this day. Every day
it's okay, are you going to—? I mean, we just got
a phone two weeks ago. When we first came back and we got electricity,
that was like a big deal. But I felt so bad, I was going around turning
our lights off. I was telling my husband, "Turn them off,
everybody's going to see." He's like,
"I went through all of this to get electricity, you want to
turn them off." I said, "But we right on the highway.
Anybody that passes, they're going to see we got
lights." But you feel bad because nobody else has lights.
I'm thinking they're going to come burn our
building down if they see our lights on.
[Laughter]
You don't know how to feel. Like one minute you're
on one side of the fence. Of course, I was glad we had lights. We had
air conditioning, but to feel guilty about it because nobody else has
it, that's just weird. It's totally not what
you—kind of the way you're supposed to think,
but—. You started thinking about everybody. Anybody that
passes this building, they know we been here like thirty-three
Page 16years. They're like, "They
back," you know. "They got lights." But I was
kind of scared. I kept lighting the candles. You just feel bad for
everybody else. We felt fortunate because we were lucky we were on this
highway. Now had the hurricane came up the
[unclear] , it would have been a totally flip side of the
coin, because then we closest to the
[unclear]
. Actually, that's the scenario they always said
about. If the hurricane ever goes up the
[unclear]
—. Nobody ever talked about it's coming
from the lake, so in that respect, everybody was caught off guard.
Then for years, I mean, they keep making these levees. You get like a
false sense of security. You kind of feel like OK, we got a pretty good
levee, but when you got that much water, I don't think
nothing's made to withstand that. Like I said down there, a
thirty-five foot storm surge—can you even imagine how big
that is? I mean, you can't even imagine if something like
that's coming at you, and most of the people that stayed,
that didn't evacuate, and I talked to some of my friends that
stayed, the water went up chest high in like three minutes. I mean, you
don't even have time to react. If you didn't have
your ax in the attic and your ladder right there, whatever—.
Like when I was telling you, my ninety-year-old aunt was going out of
the roof, we was on the phone and we were telling them, "Put
the ax in the attic." Well, my cousin's outside, and
we hear him. We're on the cell phone and we hear him.
"Hurry up!" he's screaming. "Hurry
up! Get in there! The water's coming!" And they
could actually see the wall of water coming, so he jumps in the attic,
he's pulling my aunt, my cousin's downstairs,
she's pushing my aunt, and we on the phone with them. And you
could just hear chaos and just everything, and all of a sudden, you just
hear [unclear] .
Oh, well, we were like freaking out. We are crying, we throwing ourself
on the
[unclear] , we're like,
"Oh, Lord, they died, they drowned." We kept listing
them as missing persons. Well, probably two and a half weeks later, we
thought we saw her on CNN. Now to even imagine CNN in Saint Bernard is
like the wildest thing you can ever imagine. But since then, I got a
video thing, like a DVD, that shows—. Like the water was so
high, when you riding out on the highway, the people are in boats, and
they actually ducking under the red lights, like the street lights that
are hanging. The water was that
Page 17high, and they in
boats. All of a sudden, we see my ninety-year-old aunt. She looks like
Mrs. Claus. She's about four and a half foot tall, white
hair, rosy, rosy cheeks, and here she is, in the back on an army truck
with this big old thirty-five pound purse probably. We just recognized
her with the hair and her hair's all flat down, but that was
when we realized they didn't die. They actually got rescued
and they finally got her through the roof, but they had to wait on the
roof for I don't even know—.
To tell you the truth, I don't know how long they stayed, but
when they finally did rescue them, she got hurt going through the roof
because she's ninety years old. They had to Med Vac her in a
helicopter to San Antonio, Texas, and that's how we found
her, in a hospital in San Antonio. Since then, we went to San Antonio to
go visit her, because we figured she made it through all this, this is
probably going to kill her. So we had to go—. But like that.
She'd come here and get her hair done every Thursday morning,
you know how little old ladies do. She's steady going
downhill, because all she knew was here, too, and then she
don't see us no more. It's like she
don't see anybody anymore, so every time if we pick up the
phone and call her, you want to talk to her because she's so
happy to hear from you, but you dread it at the same time because you
know she's crying on the phone the whole time. "Oh,
darling. Oh, please come to Antonio and see me." I
don't even think she gets how everybody's so
scattered and everything's such a disaster that
it's not like before she'd call us, "Oh,
come over," and five minutes we'd be there. Or if
she was in the hospital, we'd go and help take care of her,
whatever. Now she feels like she's totally lost.
There's nobody that we know that's in San Antonio,
Texas, but when all these people were getting evacuated, I mean rescued,
they didn't even know where they were going. You
don't know where you're going till you get there.
All you know is they're getting you out the water
[Laughter] , and most everybody wound up in
places that probably never in their life thought they would be in this
place. But where do you put that many people? In a case like that, in a
disaster, what do you do with that many people? So
everybody's just so scattered out. If you ever see them
again, who knows? All you know is we know who's here today
[Laughter] , you know? And that was a
big chore just trying to
Page 18get a couple of us
together, like I finally got my mom back, I got my son back, I got one
sister back. The rest of the family we didn't get back
[Laughter] . Think about that in your own
family, if you only got like, say, four people in your whole family
back. And then you feel lucky at that, because it kind of feels normal,
you know? Kind of like, okay, this is good. Like for this week, this is
good.
But I never ever would have thought I would think like that. [unclear] I had my little routine, and
that's what I knew. To just have everything upside down
is—. I don't know. Sometimes you just feel like
it's the same day in the parking lot at the hotel [Laughter] . It's like you
don't know if you're ever going to see nobody.
It's a terrible feeling that you don't know if
you're ever going to see nobody again. But considering most
of the people, we were fortunate. This is what you call fortunate [unclear] , in case you didn't
know, by today's standards. I don't know. It was a
nice place before [Laughter] . Everything
was nice. Not like big city living, but nice for us. This is what we
know. Everybody's got their own idea of home. This was our
idea of it, and [unclear] take a long time
to get back to it, I guess. But what do you do? You got to go from here
like that, try to get my little shop together and try to work a little
bit, and cook every day and just try to make another routine. Just try
to make a new way of living, not that anything's ever going
to be—. It's never going to be like it was, just
like it's going to probably be a smaller version of what it
is. That's probably the best that we're going to
get, you know? If half of it comes back, it'll be a smaller
version of what we had.