We didn't have anything. We didn't have anything.
And you know what's so strange about it? We actually
didn't worry about it. You know it's like every
day you at home, and you wake up and say, "I need some water, I
need something to eat," and at that point you just like,
"We just need to survive," you know? So it
wasn't, you know—. We had a five year old with us.
And you know, she never said, "Ma, I'm hungry, Ma, I
wanna eat." You know, she just like, "I gotta do what
they do," you know? It was kind of sad but it was what we had
to do, so when the helicopter never came back [at] ten that morning,
what we did was we started walking, because prior to when the lights
went out, we had heard people saying that they was having shelter at the
Superdome, so in our mind it's like, "Well
it's food and it's water there, so
let's go there and eat." Actually that was the worst
mistake of our life. We wish that we had just stayed on that bridge and
tried to survive, because that Superdome was horrible.
When we got there, there was this National Guard, and a guy said, his
exact words to us, and it was not coming out as saying, "Please
don't go in there." He was a Caucasian male, but you
could feel the vibes. He said, "If you go in, you go in at your
own risk." He used the word "risk."
"You go in at your own risk, and when you go in, you
can't come out." To me, that was my clue not to go
in, but for some reason I just bypassed it, you know. And I was like,
"Alright, we shouldn't go in," but we went
ahead and we went in, and Lord. It had so many—. By the time
we made it, it had millions of people in there. It was nasty. You could
just smell the urine and the feces, and we were in and they were
searching us down to make sure we didn't have guns and stuff.
So they finally started coming with—. They had lines outside.
And you could go outside and you had to stand in the line to get food.
And you had to get it yourself, you couldn't get it for
anybody else. It was a big old controversy, because they wanted all the
males to go in on one side, and the females to go on the other side, and
we had about five males with us, and three of them were underage, and
one of 'em was my son. And I was important with him, you
know, I wasn't about to leave him. So that was a big old
thing. They was like, "Well, they have to be searched in this
line and you have to be searched in that line," so
I'm like, "Well okay, this is how this is gonna go.
I'm-a get in this line, and I'm-a get searched.
But you gonna allow me to come back and get in the line with my son, or
either you gonna allow my son to be searched with me. But we will not
separate, at all." So then one of the guys, he said,
"Okay." He let him get in the line with us. So he got
in the line with us, we got searched, we went in.
And Jesus, I think I cried the whole three days I was in there, it was
just horrible. People was getting killed. I actually witnessed somebody
shooting somebody, and it was like only thing the
National Guards did was, the Army Corps or whoever they was, only thing
they did was stood at attention with rifles pointed at us. It was just
like, at any means necessary, keep them contained. That's all
it was about. You were not to go a certain distance to them, you had to
stay away from them and not invade their privacy. And they were just to
keep you in a certain area. So, you know, people crying, they
frustrated, they hungry, you're walking in about this much of
urine and feces on the floor, and that was just a horrible experience
for me. I'll never in my life visit the Superdome. I
don't care how many millions of dollars they put into it, fix
it up, what they have in there. Mentally, my mind will never allow me to
go back that way. It was bad. It was bad for all of us that was there.
And finally, my girlfriend had a little radio. And we could hear Nagin
[Clarence Ray Nagin, Jr: mayor of New Orleans, La., from 2002-] on the
radio saying, "They lying to you," because we had
stood in a line like thirteen hours, waiting for buses. Actually
millions of people, just lined up in rows and waiting for buses that
never came. It never came. And then you hear the mayor saying,
"Somebody get off your ass and do something, these people are
dying, and they're lying to you, there are no buses outside
the Superdome or wherever." And then finally, within hours and
stuff, buses started coming. There were people in the line, the guys
were fighting. And the army was just standing with their rifles pointed
in the crowd like, "Just long as y'all
don't come up here, y'all stay back there, you
okay." And you have to keep getting out of the line to protect
your family, so it's like you're in the front,
finally, you're starting back off at the back, and
it's just bad.
So when the buses finally came and they were letting us through the
gates, it was chaos. Everyone wanted to get on the bus, so people
trampling over each other and they running, and then you trying to
maintain the group of people that you with, so that everybody could stay
together. And we did accomplish that. One of the people, somebody did
broke through the line with him, one of the local guys that was with us.
His family wasn't with us, so we couldn't leave
him. So we was like, "We can't go." So one
of the guys promised us that when the next opening came that they would
get him out to us. So he asked, he said, "Could
y'all just go in the exit port" that they was
bringing us to—I don't know if it was the
Convention Center that they brought us through to get to the buses, I
really don't know, I was so distraught at the time. But we
waited. We wouldn't get on the buses. To see if he was going
to come through. And maybe about forty-five minutes after waiting, he
did come. So we all got on the bus together. And when we got on the bus,
they told us we was going to Florida. We didn't go to
Florida. They took us to Dallas.
One of my friends' sister talked to one of her friends, who
was Caucasian, and she used to work for her, and she had family in
Plano, Texas. So they came and picked us up. So we was only in the Dome
like maybe three days, but I really have to say that the setup that they
had in Dallas was ironic. It was 100% better than what we got in the
Superdome, from our own hometown. I mean, the people had
food—and I'm talking about real food, I
ain't talking about that Army Corps stuff. And I wanna go
back and tell you. When we was in the Superdome, those people actually
treated us horrible. I mean. At one point they got tired of letting us
get in the line for the food. They just threw the water out on the
ground off the truck and threw the food off the ground, and we just
refused to go get it. You know. I told my son,
"Do not go out there." Mentally, I was like,
"That's horrible." It was like we was dogs
or something.
But anyway, when we got to Plano, Texas, the people came to pick us up.
They were really friendly. We didn't know 'em,
Angela did know 'em, and we stayed there. But, you know, it
was a comfort zone like we were in safety but it wasn't where
we wanted to be. It was like we still wanted to get back home. And we
stayed there three days. And the day after Labor Day, a Monday, we went
to picnic by one of the family friends' house, and they fixed
hamburgers and stuff for us. We left, and we took our own money that we
had, and we combined it. We got tickets for everybody, cause Red Cross
hadn't started yet paying for people to commute back and
forth. So we went to the bus station. They brought us, their family
brought us to the bus station. And we got bus tickets, and we went to
Baton Rouge.
And we got to Baton Rouge—that was where we all separated. We
started getting in touch with our family members. I had one sister in
Mississippi, one sister was living in a hotel with my little niece and
them—the Holiday Inn Select, was on Constitutional Drive. So
we stayed there. For free. You know, the people had set up an area in
the ballroom for a lot of families to stay in, so we stayed there, and
for like thirteen days we was trying to find an apartment, so that we
could just live there until we were able to get back home. And we
couldn't find anywhere to stay. So the people started saying
it was nearing the time that we was gonna have to leave. So we left
them, and we went to Greenville, Mississippi. And my sister, in the same
situation there—this is my baby sister—she was in
a hotel somewhere in Greenville, and the people were putting them out,
and they were on the news and whatever, and this lady had a house that
she had started getting together to do
a—what is that when you take in a lot of residents and stuff?
It's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't think of
it. But anyways, it was like eight rooms in the house. So we all went
with my sister to stay there. And then as we stayed there a while, we
all found our own apartments. And me and my middle sister, we found
somewhere to stay in Leland, my momma was in Arkansas, and she finally
came from Arkansas by us in Greenville. So her and my baby sister lived
in an apartment in Greenville, and me and my other sister lived in an
apartment in Leland which is about fourteen minutes away. And
it's like a straight shot.
So we stayed there, and then I just was getting sick, every day. I needed
to come home. I was stressed out. I was having chest pains, and I was
like, "You know what? I gotta go home. You know. As close to
home as possible." And when I was in Baton Rouge, I really felt
comfortable, because I felt like I was home, close to home, but I just
couldn't find nowhere to stay. So after that, we stayed in
Mississippi till December, and in December I came. I got a voucher from
Housing Authority because I was living in public housing and they had
these [unclear] vouchers at the time. I
got a voucher, and I looked every day to find me somewhere to stay.
That's when I moved on Green Street, and I been here ever
since.