My Katrina, Part 8

Brett Mohar

Previously: Finally the hurricane hit. I’d never seen rain spin like that before! I made sure everyone in the projects was lying face down. “You gotta use the bathroom? Well, you can’t move,” I told them. “Just stay down . . . and pray!” Finally I saw some movement outside below the balcony and I pushed my homeboys to go out.

The four of us decided to look for families who needed help. So we headed out in the boat and, like before, had to paddle around fallen trees and wires. Of course, you heard water whooshing all around, whooosh, whooosh. But it felt like you were in a jungle; you don’t hear nothin’ usual; no music, no nuthin’. Remember, Katrina happened in August. That’s seafood time. Ordinarily, you be hearing jazz, rap, block parties, dj’s. We have seafood night, and somebody might pay for a Jazz Band to come play in the projects.

People be partying, kids playing in the playground. Folks throwing horseshoes, kling kling. Playing basketball, boom, boom. Throwing frisbees. Some people trainin’ their pit bulls to fight. You would smell gumbo, jambalaya, fried fish, fried chicken, and yaka mein, which is like a soup with noodles, meat, chopped-up onion. People selling dinners like fish plate, stuffed crab, bean and rice, cabbage.
Residents from the projects go to the seafood market or go fishing in Lake Pontchartrain and catch catfish, perch, crabs and then they clean and sell what they catch.

But now you could hear a rat pee on cotton. That’s how quiet it was, missin’ all them sounds. It was a day like you sometimes want . . . quiet and peace, but not the way that was goin’ down now.
Me and my homeboys tried to row past the Superdome, but tanks and trucks and National Guardsmen were blocking us. A Guardsman stopped us and said, “If you come this way, you gotta go into the Superdome and stay.”

So we turned the boat around and headed down Poydras Street, toward the river. We saw some families sitting out and gave them food boxes that military helicopters had dropped. We were on a mission to help. But we also wanted to be nosy, to see what was going on.

We heard sharp crackling and splashing sounds, and paddled toward them. Around a bend, police officers were throwing bricks at store windows with glass shattering all over the place. The cops were carrying TV’s, computers, and clothes out of a store.

Seeing the cops looting was like giving us a license to join in. So we made a line to pass things out to each other. I went into the store and filled my arms with whatever folks back at the projects might need, like jackets, jeans, socks, blankets, candles, batteries, flashlights, charcoal, tuna, and sardines. I passed armfuls to Calio, who was standing by the broken window. He then passed the stuff on down until another friend put it all into the boat.

While paddling back to the projects, I saw us comin’ up on a Chicken in the Box with a broken window. I jumped out of the boat and climbed through the window to get a matchbook. My homeboy Calio said, “Man, you gonna smoke a cigarette? You smell like a thousand pounds of gas! You gonna blow yourself up!”
From being in the floodwater, a slim layer of gasoline had coated my body, so I thought twice before lighting one of the cigarettes that I kept zipped in a plastic baggie. But I was dyin’ for a smoke.
I told him, “We blow, we blow. Y’all can step over there.” But then they all wanted a cigarette, too.
After surviving a smoke and paddling farther down, we saw more people breaking into stores. But the cops got out of their cars and shot the looters with rubber bullet guns that went bang! You shoulda seen those guys jump; they dropped everything and ran!

After that, the cops went into the stores and came out pulling big old duffle bags, stuffed with every kind of everything. Finally we made it back to the projects, where the stench of trash and sewage and decaying bodies made me almost throw up. We asked, “Do anyone need batteries, water, dominoes, playing cards? We got it all. We the store now. The free store. Paper plates, napkins, tissue paper. We can go out and get more.” We tried to make people feel comfortable, take the chill out their bodies.

Just as everyone was enjoying the new stuff, my homeboy KK, who’s like a little 27-year-old brother to me, come up the steps bawling his eyes out, and I said, “Man, what’s wrong?” He run up gagging and gasping and crying, “Did y’all hear about my grandma and my little cousins?”
(to be continued . . .)


Issues |Living Unsheltered


Region |Washington DC

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