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CDs by Charmaine Neville
It's About Time /
Manichalfwitz /
Up Up Up /
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Transcript
of Charmaine Neville's Story
from Video
by WAFB, Baton Rouge
Sunday,
Sep. 11, 2005
I was in my house when everything first
started. I was in my house, yes, I live in the Bywater
Area of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. When the hurricane
came, it blew all the left side of my house, the North side of
my house. And the water was coming in my house in
torrents. I had my neighbor, an elderly man who is my
neighbor, and myself, in the house. And 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
open on the roof of the school to help people, to get them up
onto the roof of the school. Later on we found a flat
boat. And we went around in the neighborhood in a flatboat
getting people out of their houses and bringing them to the
school. (Crying.) We found all the food that we
could and then 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, no water. We had
nothing. And other people were coming into our
neighborhood.
We were watching the helicopters go across
the bridge and airlift other people out, and they would hover
over us and tell us “hi!”; but that would be all. They
wouldn't drop us any food, 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 we rescued a lot of police officers in the flat
boat from the Fifth District police station. The boat. The
guy that was driving the boat, he rescued a lot of them and
brought them to different places where they could be saved.
We understood that the police couldn't help us. But we
could not 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 helped two old
women in wheelchairs with no legs, that I rolled them from
down in that Ninth Ward to the French Quarters, and I went back
and I got more people. There were groups of us, you know,
there was about 24 of us. And we kept going back and forth
and rescuing whoever we could get and bringing them to the
French Quarters because we heard that there were phones at the
French Quarters. And there wasn't any water. And
they were right there was phones, but we couldn't get through.
I found some police officers. I told
them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys
who had come (audio deleted) [not] from the neighborhood where
we were that were helping us to save people, but other men.
And they came and they started raping women
and (audio deleted) they started killing. And I don't know
who these people...I'm not going to tell you that I know
who they were, because I don't.
But what I want people to understand is
that if we had not 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 an extra day because we wanted to be rioting and we
wanted to do this, but we had no resources to get out, and 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 the homes in the
downtown area--when we finally did get--in the Ninth Ward, and
not just in my neighborhood, but in other neighborhoods of the
ninth ward there are a lot of people who are 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 that 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'd do SOS on the flashlights, we'd do everything.
And it came to a point. It really did come to a point
where these young men were really so frustrated that they did
start shooting. They weren't trying to hit the
helicopters. Maybe they weren't seeing. Maybe if
they heard this gunfire they will stop then. But that
didn't help us. Nothing like that helped us.
Finally, I got to Canal Street with all of
my people that I had saved from back there. There was a
whole group of us. I--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 those people in wheelchairs and then everything else
into that bus and (sobbing) and we drove (crying) and we
drove.
And millions of people was trying to get me
to help, for them to get on the bus (crying, crying, crying).
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Neville:
My Soul is New Orleans
Singer Charmaine says city, music will come back
posted 14 September 2005 |
