Previously: The guard I be talkin’ to asked me to escort some other guards to check out Butch, the dope fiend on the other side of the projects who’d got shot. It was like a whole SWAT team with their guns and shields following me. Butch just lyin’ there stinking with death, covered with blood and flies. When we got back on our side of the projects, everyone know we leaving soon. An old lady say to the guard, “I’m not tryin’ to get on no helicopter, because I’m scared of heights.” I worried too…
The next morning they come with the helicopters and trucks and boats. I say to myself, Oh God, the National Guard didn’t lie.
The guard I been talking to—who’d stayed all night watching over us—said, “Some of y’all gonna move today.”
They lined us up five by five. They were takin’ us by tens. It brought a little flag back to me, because y’know this remind me of how they lined us up in prison when things like a fire or a fight broke out.
Sometimes in prison, one of the guys in lockdown might try to commit suicide, popping a socket with the lead from a broken pencil or creating a smoke bomb by wrapping toilet paper around his hand and then makin’ it like a ball and lighting it. The prison keep this kind of thing hush up, because they don’t want the outside to know they can’t control the inmates.
But now I was helping line up the others in the projects. The guard said to make sure we keep count of people we were moving.
So I snapped out of those prison memories and helped round up the elderly first.It was hard to get the old folks to listen to us. But some were like the man who said, “I’ll do whatever it takes so I can get my medical situation helped.” Many of ‘em was on heart pills or need machine.
One old lady passed out on the balcony because she was so scared about being put on a helicopter. She weighed over 400 pounds and was too heavy for the boat. It took eight of us to help this one woman get onto the helicopter.
Before a helicopter goes up, they blow a whistle to indicate which helicopter goes next—it means “Coast clear, I have a full load, and I’m about to roll out.”
So one by one the helicopters—each with maybe forty or fifty folks from the projects—lift off and head to the Convention Center. With all the other helicopters flying around, it looked like rush hour in the sky.
I was glad I could help, but then you get close and feel that motor vibrating brrrrrm, brrrrrm under your feet. I was shakin’ once I seen how they was pullin’ out. I was feeling shaky because my mind went back to the 80s when a plane crashed in Kenner—a suburb of New Orleans—right onto people’s houses. I was more and more nervous. I know it comin’ to me next.
After they leave, me KK, and the guards sit back and the guards explain how they put the rope on you to secure you in the helicopter and I’m saying to myself, Hell, what am I gonna do when it come my turn?
(to be continued)
