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How We Survived the Flood
By CHARMAINE NEVILLE
Counterpunch
September 7, 2005
http://www.counterpunch.org/
This is a transcription of an interview Charmaine Neville, of New
Orleans's legendary Neville family, gave to local media outlets on Monday,
September 5.
I was in my house when everything first started. When the hurricane came, it
blew all the left side of my house off, and the water was coming in my house
in torrents.
I had my neighbor, an elderly man, and myself, in the house with our dogs
and cats, and we were trying to stay out of the water. But the water was
coming in too fast. So we ended up having to leave the house.
We left the house and we went up on the roof of a school. I took a crowbar
and I burst the door on the roof of the school to help people on the roof.
Later on we found a flatboat, and we went around the neighborhood in a
flatboat getting people out of their houses and bringing them to the school.
We found all the food that we could and we cooked and we fed people. But
then, things started getting really bad.
By the second day, the people that were there, that we were feeding and
everything, we had no more food and no water. We had nothing, and other
people were coming in our neighborhood. We were watching the helicopters
going across the bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover
over us and tell us "Hi!" and that would be all. They wouldn't drop us any
food or any water, or nothing.
Alligators were eating people. They had all kinds of stuff in the water.
They had babies floating in the water.
We had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people. People that we tried
to save from the hospices, from the hospitals and from the old-folks homes.
I tried to get the police to help us, but I realized they were in the same
straits we were. We rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat from
the 5th district police station. The guy who was in the boat, he rescued a
lot of them and brought them to different places so they could be saved.
We understood that the police couldn't help us, but we couldn't understand
why the National Guard and them couldn't help us, because we kept seeing
them but they never would stop and help us.
Finally it got to be too much, I just took all of the people that I could. I
had two old women in wheelchairs with no legs, that I rowed them from down
there in that nightmare to the French Quarters, and I went back and got more
people.
There were groups of us, there were about 24 of us, and we kept going back
and forth and rescuing whoever we could get and bringing them to the French
Quarter because we heard that there were phones in the French Quarter, and
that there wasn't any water. And they were right, there were phones, but we
couldn't get through to anyone.
I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been
raped down there by guys, not from the neighborhood where we were, they were
helping us to save people. But other men, and they came and they started
raping women and they started killing, and I don't know who these people
were. I'm not gonna tell you I know, because I don't.
But what I want people to understand is that, if we hadn't been left down
there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things
wouldn't have happened. People are trying to say that we stayed in that city
because we wanted to be rioting and we wanted to do this and, we didn't have
resources to get out, we had no way to leave.
When they gave the evacuation order, if we could've left, we would have
left.
There are still thousands and thousands of people trapped in their homes in
the downtown area. When we finally did get into the 9th ward, and not just
in my neighborhood, but in other neighborhoods in the 9th ward, there were a
lot of people still trapped down there... old people, young people, babies,
pregnant women. I mean, nobody's helping them.
And I want people to realize that we did not stay in the city so we could
steal and loot and commit crimes. A lot of those young men lost their minds
because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn't stop. We would
make SOS on the flashlights, we'd do everything, and it really did come to a
point, where these young men were so frustrated that they did start
shooting. They weren't trying to hit the helicopters, they figured maybe
they weren't seeing. Maybe if they hear this gunfire they will stop then.
But that didn't help us. Nothing like that helped us.
Finally, I got to Canal St. with all of my people I had saved from back
there.
I don't want them arresting nobody else. I broke the window in an RTA bus. I
never learned how to drive a bus in my life. I got in that bus. I loaded all
of those people in wheelchairs and in everything else into that bus, and we
drove and we drove and we drove and millions of people was trying to get me
to help them to get on the bus, too.
Charmaine Neville is a member of the third generation of New Orleans's
legendary Neville musical family. She fronts the Charmaine Neville Band.
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