My homeboy KK, gasping and crying, say, “Y’all hear ‘bout my grandma and my little cousins?
KK’s grandma was Miss Mary. I used to clean her yard. She was like a grandma to all of us. She’d cook us mustard greens and pig tails and cornbread. On Fridays, she’d make fish plate and fried chicken. Her cookin’ make you say “mm.”
Miss Mary always have a family day at the park with so much food you could bring a doggie bag home. It was a good family, a party family.
But now KK say, “We went to check on our grandma and our little cousins. My grandma and my family dead. Somebody come in the house and kill them.”
KK say he get there and see Miss Mary and the kids shot up and stabbed up, house all bloodied up, the beds, the kids’ rooms, everything. And KK saw the safe. It was open and empty. I thought, It had to be someone who knew she had a safe.
As soon as we heard that we started bringing all the kids in the projects more close to us. The kids was scared and we was scared. We knew we had to watch them even more now. Somebody had to stay on post.
Up on that big, long balcony, we was just like if we was protecting the President’s house; someone always on lookout. You come up? We pat you down. We had no metal detector or nothing, but we gotta make sure everything all right.
I put my head down and say, Lord I’m glad my family’s away. For those whose families ain’t away, they ought to get away.
We feel the pain of Miss Mary’s family. As I said, the lady was like a mother to us all. We had to go and see what was happening in that house.
We didn’t go empty-hand. My homeboys put all kind of thing in that boat: bush knives, screwdrivers, hammers, little hand-saw blades. We didn’t know if someone still be in the house. We wasn’t lookin’ for no trouble. We just tryin’ to survive.
A lot of us went over there, like 20 of us, including KK and some of his older cousins. We all piled into the big ole boat, which was long like a canal boat. Mind you, Katrina was still going on with pouring down rain and rattling thundering. Water flooding all over and wind that feel like an elephant against your chest. People looking bewildered, desperate.
On the way to Miss Mary and them kids, we passed a house with a sign on the door that said “DEAD BODY INSIDE,” but we know only thing that kill that body was Katrina.
We paddled a few more minutes and then Miss Mary’s little white, wooden house come into view. So far, it look normal.
As we floated nearer, we could see the windows and back door wide open. We pulled up close; that way we could wedge the boat to keep it from drifting and climb right onto the porch, but still we make sure one of the homeboys stay and watch it.
We entered Miss Mary’s house and knew not to touch nothin’; we use rags off the boat to touch the front door. The rug was squishy but there wasn’t too much flood, because the house sat some steps up off the ground, even though those steps were now washed away.
Inside the house, ain’t no power, no electricity, no phone, no police, no nothin’. The fist body I seen was Miss Mary stretched on her back on the sofa, wearing one of them grandma dresses. If you know how Miss Mary be when she call you into the house to have some gumbo or go to the store for her, you think she just laying on the couch watching her daily stories, like “The Young and the Restless,” the way she always do. Except now you see blood all down the front of her grandma dress.
It put chills in my body. As good as that lady was, it took everything out me to see her that way. It was like you wanted to say “Goddamn!” We was all in big shock, looking at each other, putting our heads down. Who gonna do this to her?
You feel so weak, it feel like you dead. I ain’t gonna say every day—but just about every week most of my life—I might be seeing three or four dead bodies that been shot in the project or that somebody found in an abandon building. You see families fighting, stabbing each other. Boyfriend and girlfriend fighting.
So I was used to seeing dead people, but I ain’t never seen anyone murdered that open her heart to you like Miss Mary. She meant so much.
I knew the grandkids was in their bedrooms, and now I had the hardest thing: to follow KK and see them kids all bloodied up.
