as told to Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza,
July 2008
The following story is that of a friend who was in New Orleans during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina. He showed tremendous bravery and resolve, moving his family to Texas until they had the opportunity to move back to New Orleans. For anyone who has somehow missed the scope of the tragedy in Louisiana and throughout the Gulf Coast, I strongly encourage that you read his profoundly illuminating story. In fact, if it were in my power to do so, I’d say it should be required reading for all Americans.
I. Katrina
I didn’t come out that well propertywise, but everything else turned out pretty well. A couple days before Katrina, as a family we were trying to decide whether to leave, whether to stay, or whether to go to the Dome. I’m a driver, and two days before the storm I actually went to work. The airport was closing, so I took several people who needed to get away out of New Orleans. The next day, the day before Katrina, my family decided to leave. We packed twenty family members into three vehicles.
In New Orleans there were no gas stations to get gas, so all of us thought maybe if we just get on the road and got going we could get gas after we got outside of the city. But then we ended up sitting on the interstate and started to have car problems with one of the cars. We had to pull over to put water in the car, that sort of thing. We did manage to get from 10 to 310 to 90. Once we crossed over 90, we sat in a traffic jam. Once we got to Boutte, which was nine hours later, the sheriffs were out, saying that if you really need to get gas there’s no gas between here and Lafayette. They said, if you can make it to Lafayette continue, but if you can’t, you’ll have to come up with another plan because there’s no gas. Between the three vehicles we were down to about a quarter tank of gas. So we knew that we weren’t going to be able to make it to Lafayette.
The plan then was to go to my grandmother’s complex. My grandmother lives in a complex for the elderly off Johnson and Esplanade. It’s about five feet off the ground, so we knew we were going to be safe. We had canned goods, we had a portable television, and we had a portable radio, so we went to the house. There were twenty of us inside a one-bedroom apartment just waiting out the storm.
That morning it was 5:30 a.m. when Katrina actually arrived. My two boys and I went out on the porch and watched as Katrina hit. We saw the hurricane as the trees were toppling over, as there was debris in the street, and power lines falling. We stood on the porch and watched it until about 6:45 a.m., when we determined we had enough. We went inside. The house was really hot, so we had to bust open a window to get air to come into the rooms. It was still raining outside, and there was water pouring in and everything, but at least we started to breathe better.
When we looked out, there was about a foot and a half of water in the street. I thought that was basically normal for a hurricane. Anytime there was rain there would be a lot of water. Then we heard on the radio that the 17th Street Canal had breeched and none of the pumps were working. Where my grandmother lived on Johnson Street between Esplanade and St. Bernard was about a mile away from the London Avenue Canal. My sister Sheila lives about four blocks from the London Avenue Canal. Even though she was with us, she’d already gotten word from someone else that that area was flooded. We all decided just to stay put where we were.
II. Getting Help
As the days went by, as the second day, then the third day, then the fourth day passed, we were watching the water rise, going from the second step to the third step to the fourth step. By day five, the water had reached the top step of the apartment building.
We were walking in water, and we could see five feet of water outside. We could see helicopters. Myself and my two sons went up to the roof of the apartment, the third floor, as high as we could go, and we waved a white sheet while helicopters were passing by. We were waving the sheet at them, and they’d wave back at us. That’s how close they were. But no one was actually trying to rescue anyone. They were just filming.
The building we were in was an elderly complex. I decided, I told my mother, I’m going to go outside and see if we can get some help. I went through the back door where my grandmother lived and there was basically no one back there. There was a slanted stairway and I knew where it led to, but I couldn’t see it, so I took a chance and just walked, and I fell into the water. When I stood up, it was up to my chest. So I knew it was five feet of water.
As I walked out of the back gate, I got out to Miro Street to St. Bernard. I looked around, walked back to Esplanade, looked around, didn’t see anybody. The only people there were residents in the city scrambling to try to get someone to help them. So I walked back down St. Bernard around to where St. Leo the Great School is, around the race track, then I cut across to Grand Route St. John. Just as I was approaching the city park, I see two guys or four guys in two different boats. When they see me they say, “Oh, how’re you doing, where are you going?” And I said, I’m looking to be rescued.
They asked me to show where we were on a map they had. So they gave me this map, and I looked at this map, and I looked at the street patterns. I won’t forget this conversation.
They questioned me, asking me, “How many animals do you have? How many people do you have? What’s the situation with you?”
I said, “Well, we have no animals, just people. We’re inside a house, and we’re just looking to be rescued. But this map that you have, I don’t live anywhere on this map. The map only goes to Broad Street, but I live below Broad Street, so you have to keep going down Esplanade or Saint Bernard.”
They said, “Well, I’m sorry, this is the area we’re designated to rescue in. I’m sorry, we can’t help you.”
I asked, “You can’t help me?”
They said, “We’re sorry, sir, you have a problem.”
So I said, “Well then, I’m sorry, too, because you’ve got a problem.”
“Okay, well, what’s our problem?”
“The problem is, that I’m going to drown someone and take this boat from you.”
“Wait a minute. Look, we’re not supposed to do this but look we’ll take you back to the vicinity you came from.”
III. Getting to Safety
As I rode back to my family in the boat with these men who didn’t want to rescue anyone outside of their area, I talked with them and explained to them that my family was in an elderly complex with my grandmother. There was no electricity. The folks in there all had respirators and breathing machines. I asked them if they could at least help the elderly. All they would say was, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll take you back there.”
So on the way back to the apartment complex, they wanted to know where we were. We were in the Seventh Ward. They wanted to know what the streets around us were. So I said, to the right is Esplanade, to the left is St. Bernard. When we got to the top, they were looking at the complex and they could see the people sitting out on the porches and fanning themselves. One of the two of them had a radio and he was in communication with this helicopter above us. He was talking on the radio to the guy in the helicopter, telling him it was an elderly complex, explaining the situation and the area.
After he got off the radio, the guy said, “The good news is, this area will be rescued.” Then he said, “They’ll be back in about ten days.”
The men in the helicopter started throwing water and food into the courtyard, into the water, from the helicopter. People started scrambling to get down and get the food. They actually made it more chaotic by just throwing things down out of the helicopter. So I said, “Well, let me get my family. You have to help my family.”
They said, “No, we only wanted to take you home. If folks know these two boats are back here, they’re going to rush them.”
I said, “Okay, let me go in through the back door.”
So I go in through the back door, and I bring out my grandmother, my mom, my sisters, and my kids, and we all piled into this boat. They took us to I-10 and they said that was as far as they could take us. We walked from the on-ramp of the bridge over to the Convention Center. As we were walking down I-10, we heard stories of what was happening at the Dome and that sort of thing.
We decided not to go to the Dome. It seemed like our best chance was to go to the Convention Center, so we did. When we got there, though, the state police were in the streets, trying to impose order. They were saying that the Dome, not the Convention Center, was where victims should go. Still, they told us that there were buses coming the next day to pick people up and take them to Houston. We got a tag to guarantee our family would be on a bus to Houston.
IV. Leaving New Orleans
We had no food, no water, nothing with us. I decided to go to the office my company had five blocks away to see if I could get us some drinks or something. Once I get there, one of the managers was there, hollering and screaming at me for not leaving. The whole place was surrounded by police. We had a cinder-block wall, and someone had busted down the cinder-block wall and was stealing all the vehicles.
When I went in, the owner of the place told me to make sure to take a car, whatever car I could find—“go get it and get out of here.” I took a vehicle and went to the Convention Center, and then I began driving my family to Texas. I drove one group to Houston and then drove back, then I drove the other group to Houston. Then I drove both groups to Dallas. That’s how we got to Dallas.
V. Dallas
We stayed in Dallas for thirteen months. What I remember from first moving to Dallas was a particular interview on the radio in which someone said that people should be very careful of the New Orleans refugees who were there. They said that the New Orleans people were in a survival mode, and everyone should be very careful about how they handled and dealt with them. They added that in the coming months they’d find out who the sex offenders were and let the citizens of Dallas know.
I can’t forget WPAB. On one of the biggest talk shows in Dallas, this guy talked about the New Orleans citizens like you would not believe. I think from that particular point on, we didn’t really have a chance in Dallas. That isn’t to say that there weren’t a lot of good people there—there were. One of the good people I met, who was really helpful to us, was a young lady who belonged to Central Baptist Church in Crandall, Texas. The church decided to adopt a family, and they pulled out our name—and we thank them.
When we first moved to Dallas, Dallas Housing Authority put us in an apartment complex in South Dallas and gave us free rent for three months. But the area that they put us in was mainly a housing project. There was shooting, people were selling drugs, and there was prostitution in front of the housing complex. So I went to the Dallas Housing Authority, and told them that I understood I couldn’t be picky about where I lived, but I did not live this way in New Orleans. I asked them if there was anything they could do for me to get us out of this situation. I explained that I had my mother, my grandmother, and my little kids living in this complex.
They said I could do one of two things: accept where I was and live there for a year, or go off on my own. I slept on it that night, and I thought about it, and I just had to get away. So I caught a train, the blue line that came into town to get mail. Since we had already filled out forms at the reunion arena, and they said the mail would be coming soon, I said that I would go down and check on it and fill out the P.O. Box form at the Post Office. I was doing errands to keep myself occupied while I worried about this housing problem.
Coming back I caught the wrong train, and I wound up on the other side of Dallas. When I realized I was on the wrong train, I got off and started to walk around to see what was in the vicinity. I walked right into an apartment complex. Figuring it couldn’t hurt, I asked if they took New Orleans residents. They said that they did and asked for my FEMA number. They asked how many apartments I would need. I needed three and I needed them now.
They said that we could have three, but it wouldn’t be until December. This was mid-October. So I said, fine. That was fine for me. And it fit perfectly because the kids went on a Christmas break in December, and I had then already filled out the paperwork. And at the beginning of the Christmas break, we packed up and we moved to North Dallas into these apartments. It truly was a blessing for us. Life changed for us then. Moving from one area that was drug-infested, with prostitution, to a very good environment where the quality of life and the schools were much better was what we needed as a family. And we got involved in everything to take our minds off missing New Orleans.
We went to Rangers and Mavericks games. We went to Six Flags and the water-park. We did it all as a family every weekend. Every time we had a chance to do something as a family, we took it.
My daughter went to one of the top high schools in Dallas, and my other kids went to a local elementary school, which is also a very good school. They actually worked with the kids, which was so different from before.
At my son’s high school, the boys on the football team decided to beat up the girls from New Orleans. They put up the names of the girls they were going to beat up on a wall, and after they beat them up, they crossed the name out. And my daughter’s name appeared on this list. So I went into the school and talked to the principal, the assistant principal.
“That’s my daughter’s name. I understand the boys here are beating up the young girls. Is there anything you’re doing about it?”
The principal said he didn’t like my attitude.
“Let me stop you there,” I interrupted. But he had his own ideas.
“No, let me stop you,” he demanded. “Until you understand that you New Orleans people can’t win, things are going to be this way. And your kids can’t come in here and threaten our kids.”
So, basically, the Dallas kids felt threatened by the New Orleans kids being there. The New Orleans kids went into the school system and rallied around each other as a support system, but the Dallas kids didn’t want to believe that. They thought they were there to take over their schools and so they were fighting our kids. My daughter was fifteen years old at that time.
I said, “Okay, here’s my situation. Since you already have a mind-set of how I’m supposed to be, here’s my plan—my daughter, when she walks on your grounds, you have to protect her. If something happens to my daughter on your school grounds, I’ll protect her myself.”
They called the police and told them I was a terrorist threat. So I had to go in front of a judge. I didn’t mean any harm, but I didn’t like the response I was getting. The judge said it was a normal reaction, “but here in Dallas, we train our kids from a young age to be a little bit different.” I said I was sorry, and he let me go.
VI. Spring Break
The counselor from my daughter’s high school was from New Orleans, and everybody loved her. By the end of the school year, my daughter was known as Miss New Orleans. They thought the way she talked and the New Orleans music we played was very strange, but Dallas was very interesting. The kids adjusted better. But I was still getting the questions about home.
When can we go home? Where are my friends?
So, when spring break came along in April, I rented a van, packed everyone in, took them to New Orleans, and showed them the house. It had five feet of water inside. And then I showed them my grandmother’s complex. Someone had already broken in and taken all the valuables. I showed them their old schools.
I think bringing them back to New Orleans was helpful for their experience in Dallas. Showing them that the wind blew the back part of the house and the roof off. Taking them into the Ninth Ward, explaining that everyone from New Orleans is now living in different places. Showing them that we can’t go home right now. It was all helpful.
Once we got back to Dallas, their grades were different. They all passed the TAX test at the end of the school year, which promoted them to the next grade. The counselors said, “This is going to sound crazy, but we didn’t think they were going to make it when they first came here, but they did, they passed.” What a relief. By this time, we had spent thirteen months in Dallas.
VII. Moving Back
My sister was a sheriff in New Orleans and had contacts who were working on apartments around New Orleans. The city was trying to get the sheriffs and police to come back first, but my sister said, “I’m okay, but you know my family is in Dallas, and they really need to come back.” They gave us a number to call but said that three apartments wouldn’t be ready until mid-September. And then we got a call, “You can move home anytime now.”
We immediately packed up. We weren’t going to wait for that next week. Two days later, the whole family was packed up. That Sunday when we went to church, I spoke and said, “I have some good news, we found a place back home.” The pastor asked how we were going to get home. At the time, we didn’t really know. I figured we’d rent trucks and vans. But then a member of the church who owned a trucking company said, “You’re not going to do that, we’re going to send an eighteen-wheeler to your house, and he’s going to drive you.”
“We can’t afford that,” I told him. He insisted on taking care of it.
The day we were moving, about fifteen members of the church brought all kinds of furniture from storage. They had refrigerators and even found new mattresses, still wrapped in plastic. The crew of them unloaded all three of the apartments and loaded our furniture and all the furniture they gave us into the truck and sent us back home. My sister, grandmother, and I drove home, since my grandmother doesn’t fly. But Barbie Bonds, who works for Southwest Airlines, got Southwest to fly the rest of my family members back home.
VII. Missing the Food
It was good to be home. I had enjoyed Dallas but I missed New Orleans like I never thought I could. I never thought that I actually loved my city like I do. I cried often in Texas with my grandmother.
She said, “Please don’t let me die in Texas. If I die in Texas, I’ll blame you. Take me home. If I die in Texas, it’s on you.” We went through this often.
One of our saving graces in Texas is that we’d occasionally go out as a family to restaurants. For the first six or seven months we were there, they didn’t have any New Orleans products—Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning, hot sauces, that sort of thing. And so for the first six months, I came back three times.
My momma would say, “Here’s a few hundred dollars, here’s an ice chest. Go back, and I don’t care where you find it, bring some pickled meat, and bring me some beans back. Bring me some shrimp, something I can put in my gumbo, and bring me some andouille sausage.” We all missed the food.
So I came back to buy hoghead cheese, hot sausage, and pickled meat for the beans. White beans, red beans—we ate all of it. My family slow-cooked beans and put andouille sausage and pickled meat in it. We mostly used Blue Runner beans but sometimes another type of beans, always on Monday. We’d have seafood on Fridays. It was a tradition at my family on Sunday we would fry chicken, with eggplant, mirlitons, and shrimp, so I would go home and get that. Food was important.
In Texas, they’d take the crawfish, boil it in the water, then they’d sprinkle pepper on top. So I said, “No, you’re not seasoning the crawfish, you’re seasoning the shell.” At a place called Aw Shucks on Greenville Avenue, I explained to them how to do it, step by step, and they did it.
And there was one place in South Dallas that advertised “New Orleans Style Po’ Boys,” and I went and I asked for a roast beef po’ boy. I ordered it “sloppy.” The woman behind the counter looked at me a little bit, went in the back, came back out, and said, “The guy who makes the sandwich wants to know what you mean by ‘sloppy.’”
I was in awe. Anyone that’s ever had a New Orleans po’ boy knew what “sloppy” meant. They were capitalizing off the New Orleans residents but they didn’t know anything about New Orleans. We just couldn’t find regular-type New Orleans food, so I had to come back and get hoghead cheese, pickled meat, and red beans. I drove back and forth to Houston five times, and it takes nine hours each trip.
VIII. FEMA Sent Me
At some point after the storm, I went to the medical station and I told the lady I was a diabetic. She asked how long it was since I’d had medicine. It had been a while. She stuck my finger and my sugar was 700 and something; she told me I needed to go and take my paper and my FEMA number to Lancaster Hospital in Lancaster, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. She said, “Take this, they’re going to see you.”
When I got to the hospital, they took the paper, looked at me, and put an IV in my arm. They then asked me where I was living in New Orleans, and I gave them a New Orleans address. I was at the hospital with an IV in my arm for a few hours. They got my blood sugar levels a good bit lower, then wrote a prescription for me for insulin supplies, testing strips, and a testing machine. I was grateful, and I thought that was the last of it.
Then, many months later, once we returned to New Orleans, I started getting letters looking for $3,700 for the hospital visit. So I’m calling the hospital and saying, “FEMA sent me there.” It didn’t help. I would never have gone if I knew, because I didn’t have $3,700.
Letters and bills kept coming until I talked to a friend from the Baptist Church in Crandall, Texas. He called the hospital and got them to forgive the bill. The same friends from that church also called during holidays and sent presents to our kids.
When that friend from the church went to bat for me with the hospital that was only one example of the kindnesses that community showed us. Coming from New Orleans and going into this strange community, I couldn’t believe these folks embraced us the way they did. It was a white church, and they just took us as one of their own. Coming from New Orleans where most of us only come together for Jazz Fest or Saints games, it was very different. These people provided us with anything we needed. Some people said that the people in Dallas weren’t very friendly, but most of them were.
IX. Organizing
Somewhere along the way, a group of six or seven guys from New Orleans got together and formed a group in Dallas. We were listening to the Mark Davis Show on WPAB and hearing him say things like “all the New Orleans people should go home.” Davis always had people on his show saying that they gave money for Katrina relief and wished they could take it back because they didn’t know where it went. Those sort of things hurt. The group of New Orleans guys got together to try to see what we could do for the other New Orleans residents in Dallas. A woman named Katie Neason from ACORN said we should form a group and come up with a mission and by-laws to see what we could do. Our main purpose was to show New Orleans residents that there was someone to help them in Dallas. But we didn’t have any money.
The ACORN organization in Dallas saw us and heard us. They said if we came under their wing, they’d help us get money to do whatever we needed to do. So we became the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association. Branches of our organization opened in Houston, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, and all across the South. They used the model from Dallas to help people with housing and health care resources.
A friend named Greg Williams who worked with ACORN in Dallas said he wanted to take me to this church, a Presbyterian church, where every month they have a resource meeting to pull resources together to help the citizens of New Orleans. I went to the meeting and was listening to them talk about what they could do. I got up and introduced myself to the crowd, told them who I was, told them about our mission, and told them we didn’t have any money. I told them the things we wanted to do, and they helped.
The way that we draw New Orleanians together is with music and food. So our idea was to throw a block party with New Orleans music with the help of the radio station. We’d then get health care providers and schools and other organizations to distribute information to our residents. We got Orleans Parish sheriff Marlin Gusman and other high-profile political figures in the city of New Orleans to become involved. We signed up 1,500 people to vote in the mayor’s election and got a bus company out of Dallas to bring us to Shreveport to vote.
X. New Orleans in Washington
At one of our Katrina Survivors Association events, a man out of the ACORN national office in Washington, D.C., exchanged numbers with me. He was basically asking what I thought about how things were progressing. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was actually interviewing me. ACORN invited our group to come to Washington for a rally. They even asked Ms. Neason and me to speak. It was four hundred or five hundred people. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Representative Barney Frank, and Representative Sheila Jackson Lee were all in attendance.
And then they said, “We need to take you to Mr. [Henry] Paulson’s office. He is the head of FEMA.” I had only a minute, so they gave me a script. But I just went completely off the script. I asked why more wasn’t done to allow displaced New Orleans residents to vote. Why was it that, even though other countries have elections with polling booths for their citizens, we, scattered across the country because of Katrina, couldn’t vote in the mayor’s election in New Orleans? They wanted us to go back to the city to vote.
He said to me, “But we don’t know where everyone from New Orleans is.”
I said, “Mr. Paulson, please. Everyone signed up for FEMA. You know where we are. We’d like mail, and we’d like to know what’s going on.”
Mr. Paulson continued on that it was because of the Privacy Act that they couldn’t put polling places outside of the state. And that was our meeting.
In the end, the only thing I can say is that there weren’t enough hard decisions made for the city. The blame was on all levels—federal government, local, and state levels. Basically, I think the U.S. government wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of this storm, and they didn’t know how to come and help. Once they took FEMA out of the cabinet, they’d lessened it, and it didn’t have the strength to help cities like New Orleans.