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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview U-0240, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Rhonda Lind was raised in the Ninth Ward and moved to St. Bernard Parish in 1973. Hurricane Katrina changed everything about her life. At the time of the interview, she and her husband had moved five times since the storm. She had to separate from her extended family because there was not enough space for them to evacuate together. While she misses having her own things, the biggest losses have been the irreplaceable items such as photographs. She describes the mud that entered her house during the flood. The strength of the water moved a house three blocks and then deposited it in the middle of her brother's street. She feels that the rest of the nation abandoned them, but the people in the neighborhood help rescue each other. Though she and her husband left, she has heard about the horrors other people faced. When she returned, she was struck by the silence. Because they had lost so much, she and her neighbors scoured the area for anything that reminded them of their old lives. Lind says that many did not have flood insurance because mortgage companies told them they did not need it. Though her neighborhood still does not feel normal, she is grateful that she is home. She does not expect to return to life as it was, but she is hopeful that she will have a smaller version of what used to be. She lists how she will handle future storms differently. Lind believes that the government needs to spend more money fixing the problems plaguing New Orleans, especially the levee system and the erosion of the coastline, but she does not believe this will happen. Nonetheless, she is hopeful that the residents themselves will slowly be able to revive the neighborhood.
Rhonda Lind was raised in the Ninth Ward and moved to St. Bernard Parish in 1973. Hurricane Katrina changed everything about her life, but the biggest losses have been the irreplaceable items such as photographs. She resented the fact that the news media never reported what was happening in St. Bernard Parish, and she says even the rescuers ignored her parish.
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 1]
My name is Rhonda Lind. It's June 4, 2006.
So I wanted to start kind of back at the beginning, I guess, sort of talking about how you came to be in this area. Did you grow up here or marry someone here?
Okay. Well, I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the Ninth Ward. I
guess you heard about the Ninth Ward
How was your life different?
How's it different?
I remember when we originally evacuated to
The first time we came, we come down the main road that comes from the
interstate,
Well, it came to the point where we had to split up because there was too
many of us to go to one house. I remember sitting in that parking lot
Now it's just so different. Now the ones that wanted to sell
sell, and they got like these strangers moving in. You don't
even feel like you want to go back because it's just so
different, but we just tried to do whatever we could do. So we moved in
with some relatives of ours that were actually my in-laws from my first
marriage, and my sister and my mother, they rented a little place on a
lake up in
It wasn't no problem really. It was just an emotional thing, but we didn't really have—. We all left home with three sets of clothes, everybody that I know, because we figured, I mean, we leave a couple of days, we're going to come back, and everything's going to be fine. We wound up having to find a Wal-Mart, and we had to just go buy underwear and t-shirts. It was like ninety-five degrees, and your brain feels like it's just spinning out your head. I mean, things that most people take for granted—just like, you know, every morning when you wake up, you go in your drawer and you get new clothes. Well, we were washing clothes in a hotel room in the sink and hanging them on the side of the truck and stuff.
We went to the—trying to find a bank, trying to get whatever money we could have. We had to apply for food stamps, which we've never done in our life, but it was like a disaster assistance program that they were telling everybody, "Well, do this." But living in a hotel, you can't get groceries to cook, so that's when we had to wound up trying to find alternative things. But all of these months, it's just, you know, every week it's learning a new way of living. Still you can see, being here, there's no grocery stores. I mean, there's like a little corner food store if you run out of bread or something like that. If you got to go to the grocery, you got to go miles, go either across the lake or whatever, and most people lost their vehicles. I mean, we did. We had one vehicle that we had with us. Well, we had to wound up going to get—. Most everybody we know lost at least one vehicle. There's not a person I know that didn't lose their house, everybody's photographs.
It's like I have one child, and I've taken pictures since the day he was born. I had photo albums full of him. When we went to go look, I found the photo albums, but when you turn the pages, the pictures are blank. I wish I would have saved some I could show you. There's just a rim of the picture had a little color on it, and my son's father—. Our wedding pictures—. His father died when he was six years old. I got the album, but it's blank. It's empty. My mother was lucky enough—she had a little mother's album, you know, when you get married and the mother gets a photo album. So she had one for each one of us kids. It's not big ones like you would have, but that's probably the most precious commodity of the whole thing.
It's like I was telling you. You could build another house. It's not that it's going to be your home, but it'll be a house. It'll be a shelter, but I don't know. It's almost indescribable. You just don't have anything left. It's just like as blank as those photographs that we went back and looked is what your life feels like. To me, it felt like a death in my family, just coming back and seeing your whole community, everything that you know, everything that you do daily—. Go to the cleaners, there's no cleaners. No groceries. We just started getting a couple of little banks. It's a daily struggle every day when you have to do anything.
Just like I was cutting
Like anything that fell on the floor, you couldn't even hardly
salvage. It depended. If it was like, say, dishes, something
that's cleanable—. Other than that, because they
had so much mud that came in with the water—. And a lot of
people got oil. We didn't get oil from the oil spill from the
oil
When you're just picking up this stuff and all
this—. We got boots and gloves and suits and masks, and
we're going through this stuff and it smells so bad and
everything's just dripping with this muck. And every thing
that you pick up has a memory attached to it, no matter what it is.
It's a memory, and every thing that you pick up and you think
you're going to salvage, it's like mentally you go
through it all again. Every little thing you touch, it just breaks your
heart, because you know—. It's almost like people
say—. We heard when we evacuated people were saying,
"Well, those people just need to get over it and get on with
it." Well, it's easier said than done.
You're not going to just—. You actually got to
make a new life. It's just day by day, you're just
trying to go through it all over again. Things as simple as, okay,
we've been staying here, we've been collecting
trash, we've got to put the garbage out. Well, we
don't have a garbage can
It's things that people just don't think of. I think that they don't really know until they come. They need to come here and see it. When you see it and you drive through some of these neighborhoods and you see like where my brother lived, you go down his street, you can't even drive down his street now. There's a house in the middle of the street, with the slab still attached to it. There's an American flag sticking in the front yard, and the weird thing about that—. I mean, it's weird, okay. There's a house in the middle of the street, but on both sides of the street, there's no houses missing. So this house actually came from probably three or four blocks from where the house landed.
The whole house, it just picked up, floated, because that's
how deep the water was. It passed over houses; it passed over cars,
trucks. They even have little figurines in the windows. Curtains are
still there, everything. I could take you and show you the house.
You'd freak out. I mean, some houses kind of moved a little
bit. This house in particular came from three or four blocks away and
literally
And that's just my brother's street. There's subdivisions on top of subdivisions all the way through New Orleans. I went through Mississippi, and everything was the same way. Most of those people got a lot of wind damage. We had somewhat wind damage, but when our levees broke, that was it. The newspaper said it; a couple of weeks ago they had, "Within six hours, our fate was sealed." I'm forty-eight years old. Everything I knew my whole life, in a matter of six hours it's totally gone. You feel angry; you feel like you're just so mad you want to do something. I mean, you can't do anything. You can't be mad at anybody. Who are you going to be mad at? Mother Nature? It's hard to talk about, because you can't hardly find the words to even express, you know. And still, sometimes I'll talk about it, and it feels like it was yesterday. You just start crying. Some days you feel like you don't even want to wake up. I mean, you'll see the trash. It's stacked up a story high almost ten months later, and nothing's changed.
We was able to get sheet rock and floors back, but there's
people I know that are living in tents, just tents in their yards or
FEMA trailers. I saw this one lady one morning. We were driving in
They had a man that was rescuing people. As soon as he got his mother in a boat, because the people stole boats—. I mean, they had to. They were trying to save their lives. He got a boat; he got his mother in the boat. It was him and his neighbor, and right after they got his mother in the boat, his mother had a massive heart attack, and she died. But the guy, he continued rescuing people, and every house he went up to in the boat, they had people hanging in trees, on light fixtures in their houses. I mean, you name it. I personally know the guy, and he was telling the people who he was rescuing, "I feel like you need to know this before you get in the boat that I got my dead mother with me, and I cannot leave her behind. So if you want to be rescued, you have to get in the boat."
This is a true story. They went to the high school, and he tried to leave his mother there. But you've got to understand at the time, they had probably twelve feet of water where the high school's at, and they wouldn't let him leave his dead mother there. So he kept leaving the people out that he was rescuing and left his dead mother in the boat with him for days. It was like three or four days he did this. And they broke in a grocery store; they was stealing food just to go bring to the high school so people would have food. This was people who actually stayed, didn't have the means or whatever to evacuate.
Like I told you, we don't never evacuate. We usually stay.
Well, we just so happened at the very last minute when we woke up that
Sunday morning before the storm and this thing is like a
monster—. It's like Category Five, and my
husband's like, "Oh, we got to go." And
that's what we did. We ran around the house, and I got my son
But a lot of people stayed. They probably had twelve hundred people in
Saint Bernard Parish that drowned, died, from some hurricane-related
thing. I had a ninety-year-old aunt that got rescued out of her attic of
her house, and by the time they decided to leave, it was too late. They
were trapped;
A friend of mine had their little grandbabies, like two-month-old babies. Finally when the helicopters started coming, they're on the roof and they're holding the babies up to the helicopter and they're making motions to their mouth, like bring food and drink, and the helicopters just left. They never brought them anything. It can get you so mad, because to me, they send all this money—. Like Iraq and Afghanistan, they go bomb these places, they have full-out war, they send all this money, they're rebuilding, and here we are. This is American people that work every day for a living, and they're leaving them to die in a situation that's totally beyond any of our control. It ain't because we did anything wrong. It's just a hurricane came; that's what happened. You would think that they'd have people right outside maybe the state lines ready to come in, but it was weeks before anybody came to help any of these people.
When we finally got to come back, nothing was green. Everything looked
red, black. You could see from the pictures I showed you. The weirdest
thing was by our house, we had all kind of birds and squirrels and you
name it. When we came back, you didn't even hear any type of
anything. You didn't hear no birds; you didn't see
no squirrels. This is my husband Jeff, by the way
It felt like you was in a movie. It kind of felt like it wasn't even real. It's like when we drove back from Baton Rouge, it's a long ride because the interstates were jammed. People were just trying to get back to see their properties or whatever, and we had a bunch of us in our truck and we were talking. You know, a truck full of people, everybody's talking. When we went back, not one person spoke a word to each other the whole way back. I believe it's true that your brain can't even absorb everything. It's like what you saw, you can't even believe that you just saw it. It's like everything in your life, and that was just the first time. Every time we would come back to gut the houses, then you'd start finding stuff, what you thought was to be good stuff. Like I said, you'd be amazed how your brain just kind of shifts modes to where now the littlest thing means so much. We were bringing back stuff full of mud and probably mold and everything. We sitting outside with buckets of bleach and soap and water with toothbrushes, just trying to scrub little angel figurines and anything that we could find. Probably all we could find, out of a whole lifetime of stuff, probably would fit in one little grocery sack, like the little plastic sacks that you get at the grocery. Probably everything that you could find out of your whole entire house, you could put in one of them little sacks, and you've got to feel fortunate that you was able even to find anything.
Some people I knew went back to find just a slab of their house and
actually scoured the neighborhood looking for whatever, anything that
looked familiar to them that was out of their house, and never was able
to find anything. Yeah? Those houses were like, even kind of like in the
back of where I told you my brother [lived], which they were closer to
the lake, but actually not even probably five, ten minutes from where we
sitting right now. But it's so widespread that you got to
really see it. I wish you had more time. I could take you around and
show you things that would blow your mind. You'd think
you'd never see nothing like that in your whole life. Like I
didn't never think I'd live to see
It's hard to recognize stuff when it happens like that. We never ever would have thought that we would [have] had the kind of water that we had. I mean, people had mortgages on their houses and like with the banks, and banks and stuff, mortgage companies even told these people they didn't need flood insurance, because it had never ever in the history ever flooded before. Probably more than half the people that lived down here literally didn't have no flood insurance because they never ever needed it. But if you go buy a house and the mortgage company and the bank is telling you you don't need it, chances are you're not going to get it. Some people will, but this is not a rich community. It's all working class people, and I know it probably sounds weird to a lot of people, but they didn't even have flood insurance? But if you never ever needed it before—I mean there's places probably still that have never flooded before—people might not have known that you could get flood insurance.
I bet now down in
It's such a grand scale. Everything that you could think of in your own life, or anybody for that matter, anything—just every day when you come home from work, you put your keys in the same place or you know where your shoes are at. Think about first of all you don't have a home to go to. Second of all, there's no table to put your keys on. You're lucky if you've got a floor or a wall, and everything that you own could fit in one little bitty bag. Your priorities just change. All of a sudden, material things don't seem important, but then at the same time, you're digging through mud and sludge and everything else to try to find anything that you can keep. That's what I think it is, just because they got a memory attached to every single thing. But the pictures, that's the worst thing because most things you can replace. Pictures is one thing that you absolutely can't replace. I got some of my baby's pictures back. I say "my baby"—he's twenty-six, but from giving my sister-in-law and them pictures when all these years while he was growing up, when we left, moved out of their house to come back, they were digging through pictures and they gave us a Ziploc bag with all the pictures back. So that's the only way I have any of my baby's pictures anymore.
It's almost like as if you've got to live through
it to know. It's so hard to try to describe. It looks like a
third world country; sometimes it feels like a third world country just
being here. But at the same time, it's probably the most at
home I've felt since the day the hurricane hit, because
it's just familiar. It's your home.
That's where you live; that's where
you've lived most of your life, but it's
different. I mean, hardly any of the people here—. We
probably had eighty, ninety thousand people living in Saint Bernard
Parish pre-Katrina, they call it now. Pre-Katrina, post-Katrina,
that's the way people measure
We got this highway and
I remember the first time we was in Gonzales and we went to a Wal-Mart, and the first girl I saw was at this meat market that I used to go to almost every day. She used to just make the chicken salad. I knew her by name; she knew me. Well, I turned my basket in Wal-Mart, and she's turning on the same row, and both of us make this face like "it's you, oh, it's you!" And both of us busted out crying and we're hugging each other. It wasn't even that we was real great friends or close friends. It was just—. She says, "You the first person I saw," and I said, "You're the first person I saw!" Everybody's like hugging and crying and "Where you at? Where you staying?" Exchange phone numbers, but who would ever think that you would get that emotional about just somebody that you seen in a store. It's just because it was the first familiar thing that I saw after, and that was probably five weeks after the storm. I freaked out when I saw that girl, and I'll never forget it because she was the first one I saw.
But like on the news, everything's New Orleans, New Orleans.
Well, New Orleans is like five minutes from here. Ten minutes tops,
you're in New Orleans, but they probably get the most help
because it's a famous city. Nobody ever hears of
We sure did find out that it was like a bowl. Like down in
If you think it's bad here, ten minutes further down, and
that's kind of like open to the Gulf, there's no
sign of life at all. At least here they got a little traffic. Down
there, there's absolutely
That's why a lot of times when they talking to Congress or
whatever, they tell the people, "Come down here and
see." It's the only [way] you really can get it is
if you see it. I don't [know] any other way to tell you. I
could show you pictures, what it looked like before, what it looked like
after, but—. And then again, it's a whole
different thing getting from that day to this day. Every day
it's okay, are you going to—? I mean, we just got
a phone two weeks ago. When we first came back and we got electricity,
that was like a big deal. But I felt so bad, I was going around turning
our lights off. I was telling my husband, "Turn them off,
everybody's going to see." He's like,
"I went through all of this to get electricity, you want to
turn them off." I said, "But we right on the highway.
Anybody that passes, they're going to see we got
lights." But you feel bad because nobody else has lights.
I'm thinking they're going to come burn our
building down if they see our lights on.
You don't know how to feel. Like one minute you're
on one side of the fence. Of course, I was glad we had lights. We had
air conditioning, but to feel guilty about it because nobody else has
it, that's just weird. It's totally not what
you—kind of the way you're supposed to think,
but—. You started thinking about everybody. Anybody that
passes this building, they know we been here like thirty-three
Then for years, I mean, they keep making these levees. You get like a
false sense of security. You kind of feel like OK, we got a pretty good
levee, but when you got that much water, I don't think
nothing's made to withstand that. Like I said down there, a
thirty-five foot storm surge—can you even imagine how big
that is? I mean, you can't even imagine if something like
that's coming at you, and most of the people that stayed,
that didn't evacuate, and I talked to some of my friends that
stayed, the water went up chest high in like three minutes. I mean, you
don't even have time to react. If you didn't have
your ax in the attic and your ladder right there, whatever—.
Like when I was telling you, my ninety-year-old aunt was going out of
the roof, we was on the phone and we were telling them, "Put
the ax in the attic." Well, my cousin's outside, and
we hear him. We're on the cell phone and we hear him.
"Hurry up!" he's screaming. "Hurry
up! Get in there! The water's coming!" And they
could actually see the wall of water coming, so he jumps in the attic,
he's pulling my aunt, my cousin's downstairs,
she's pushing my aunt, and we on the phone with them. And you
could just hear chaos and just everything, and all of a sudden, you just
hear
Oh, well, we were like freaking out. We are crying, we throwing ourself
on the
To tell you the truth, I don't know how long they stayed, but when they finally did rescue them, she got hurt going through the roof because she's ninety years old. They had to Med Vac her in a helicopter to San Antonio, Texas, and that's how we found her, in a hospital in San Antonio. Since then, we went to San Antonio to go visit her, because we figured she made it through all this, this is probably going to kill her. So we had to go—. But like that. She'd come here and get her hair done every Thursday morning, you know how little old ladies do. She's steady going downhill, because all she knew was here, too, and then she don't see us no more. It's like she don't see anybody anymore, so every time if we pick up the phone and call her, you want to talk to her because she's so happy to hear from you, but you dread it at the same time because you know she's crying on the phone the whole time. "Oh, darling. Oh, please come to Antonio and see me." I don't even think she gets how everybody's so scattered and everything's such a disaster that it's not like before she'd call us, "Oh, come over," and five minutes we'd be there. Or if she was in the hospital, we'd go and help take care of her, whatever. Now she feels like she's totally lost.
There's nobody that we know that's in San Antonio,
Texas, but when all these people were getting evacuated, I mean rescued,
they didn't even know where they were going. You
don't know where you're going till you get there.
All you know is they're getting you out the water
But I never ever would have thought I would think like that.
What's it going to look like
Probably like this street that we're on is going to be
probably the only main highway. The other highway on
No matter where you live, they got something. I met some people the other
day. That's one good thing; we been meeting a lot of people
from out of town
Now, well, whatever you was able to kind of get back, whether buying or
like churches gave us a bunch of clothes and stuff right after the
hurricane, so whatever we was kind of able to collect back,
it's like this is your stuff. You become possessive; this is
all you have. So that's what I think. Whoever leaves, they
taking everything, I mean down to whatever, anything. You name it, they
taking it because who would have ever thought, you know, that that
happened last time. When you lose everything, there's only
one way to go but up
Why did you decide to come back?
I never ever had a doubt to come back, because it's home. Like I told you, not that I wasn't grateful for everywhere that we stayed, all the different places we stayed, but I never felt like I belonged anywhere. I just feel like I belong here, and when we were other places and you walk in anywhere, a store or a restaurant, you just feel out of place. Everybody in there, they know you're not from there, especially when you start talking. They're like where you from? But I just knew, like at first they told us we couldn't come back, and that was just—I couldn't even imagine that. So it's like, well, why we can't come back? If we're willing to work, and like I said, we come gutted everything and tried to fix stuff back, why shouldn't you be allowed to come back? I mean, it is America. You should be able to do, you know—. Nobody's paying for us. We paying our own way, so as far as that, there was never a doubt because it's home. Like amongst all of the debris and rubble—. I told my husband, it was one of the first things I said. I said, "Now finally this feels like home," and we looked at each other and we start laughing. I was like I know it sounds twisted because it was just so bad, but it is home. Who don't like home? Everybody wants to go home, so this is our home now. This is just a new home.
What made it home? What makes it feel that way for you?
It's just everything's familiar.
There's not a person that would probably pass here that we
don't know, probably went to school with or went to parties
with or something. Football games, baseball games. We actually used to
have all that
It's not going to be overnight, and we can see now
it's not going to be a year or two years or probably even
five years. It's going to be more like probably ten. But I
mean, we live on the river. Everybody needs the river. I think that for
this parish, it's going to mostly be cut in half this way.
The lake side's not going to be no more, just kind of the
river side, and that's just
It's weird. I know like in Tennessee, it's probably
a lot prettier. Everything's flat and stuff around here, but
I've been to Tennessee and I know what it looks like, and I
liked it when I went. But I was still glad to come back home when I
finished my trip, you know?
What would you do if you were?
Oh, I'd make sure I'd fix all of it, I swear. Well, first of all, they been arguing about that, the coastline's been eroding like crazy. We had maps from, say, maybe like thirty, forty years ago, maps. They actually had to change the maps because Louisiana is just losing so much coastline. It just looks like one day the end of the boot is not even going to be there. It looks like it's going to fall into the Gulf or something. I don't know, but they keep doing studies about it. It's like you get tired of hearing about it already. I mean, how much it costs for the studies when they ought to just put it to the coastal erosion problem. They waste more money than they know what to do with, and it's not just here. I mean, they need all of it. They need Florida, they need Mississippi, they need Alabama. It's all part of it. It's all part of the big picture. You can't just say, oh, well, you know, we're going to forget about that part of the puzzle. It don't work like that. It shouldn't work like that, I should say. But they sure liked our seafood. They ship it all over the place, but that's where it comes from. It all comes from the Gulf, but it's just that the Gulf's moving closer to the land. It just so happens that's the place that we all picked to live, so that's part of it now.
I'm sure like our grandparents and whatever probably
didn't think that the maps were going to change and it
wouldn't look like that anymore, but over the years
that's what happened. The hurricanes are not going to stop.
Every hurricane season it gets more and more severe, it seems like. Like
last year, they went through the whole alphabet and started in the Greek
alphabet. I don't know whether that ever happened before.
That was weird, but when it snowed on Christmas Day, we should have knew
something was up
What else would you do if you were in charge
Oh, God. They'd have to make the levees—they'd have to at least be like the river levees. To me, the river levees are twice the size. You could go look at them; they're twice the size. On the river side, it's concrete on one side, which that's a whole lot more stable that just compacted sand. See, like these new levees, they put a bunch of sand and that's fine, but the river levees, they've been compacted and compacted. They're like solid. See, to me, if a hurricane comes, the levees are not compacted enough. I wouldn't feel safe enough, probably wouldn't stay. Now they're saying what? If we had a tropical storm, nobody should stay. It's going to be like a mandatory evacuation. So what does that tell you? There's so many things, it's hard to just pick one thing, but the levees are actually foremost on our mind. That's actually what failed, which brought us the water. I mean, the hurricane was just so intense. I don't know that any kind of levee would have been [able] to withstand [it]. You know, this thing was a category five. I don't know what kind of levee you'd have to make for that.
Is now the time to just change it? Do you think those changes will happen?
I think, well, they better. I think it's either now or never.
If this don't make them do it, change anything,
it's never going to change. I mean, what's more
important than that? There's so many people that this
hurricane affected, and we just one little parish on this whole Gulf
Coast. The
This is America. I mean, I don't understand how that works.
How can they say we not worth it to fix this, and instead send millions
and millions to Afghanistan, Iraq, and whatever else cause they got. To
me, it's all the way around the other side of the world. They
bombed them for reasons. To me, I wouldn't even go back and
rebuild them after I bombed them. We need stuff in our own country. It
seems like a no-brainer. To me, I'm not no politician, but
you should do for American people first, wouldn't you think?
Is it right that America has homeless people, and not by their
own—not by anything that they did. Like we were working and
all before. It's not because we lazy. It's just
because we had a hurricane. That's kind of out of your
control, but
Everybody goes about their little life because it's not
affecting them, like that day, but anything could happen one day. They
could get a hurricane where they never had a hurricane before. Then
they're going to know. It's a shame that
you've got to find out that way because I wouldn't
wish that on nobody, but that's the way it happens.
That's the way it happened here. Nobody would have ever
thought. You could have bet anybody they'd never see that in
our life. Well, here it is
It's just something that we never ever would have thought
would happen, so you just got to try to start somewhere. Like already
started. This is what we call our start. Hopefully, it'll
just get better. I might be old by the time it gets better
Like I said, it's just a struggle every day. It's
so stressful and aggravating and everything, and at the end of the day,
you so just tired out. You just want to go to sleep. I don't
even want to wake up today, but then every day you get up and you do it
again and just keep doing it. That's all we can do. I mean,
what else do you do? In order to build something, you just got to take
it one step at a time. Hopefully, we figure we doing it, and the guys on
the next street's doing it, and the guys down the street,
they all doing it. That's what it's going to take.
I don't know any other way to do it. There's no
really one answer. It's just a lot of work for a lot of years
before it gets—. I'm thinking maybe my
grandchildren—I don't even have grandchildren, but
maybe one day my grandchildren will benefit
You try to go places and have fun a little bit, like we go off just to
try a little change of scenery, kind of like freshen your brain up or
something, you know?
What do you want your life down the road to be like, to look like?
What do I want it to look like? Hmm. Stress-free
I just wish all my family didn't have to be just everywhere
like that. I just hate that. I liked things the way I liked them, and
it's hard to adjust to a whole new way, a different way. But
when it's staring you in the face every day, it just kind of
happens on its own. You don't have a choice. It just kind of
forces you into that's the way it's got to be now.
But you think your whole life's taken away overnight,
virtually overnight, and it's just everything that you knew
or whatever, you got to find new ways
What happens if there's another hurricane
That's a hard one. I don't know. I really
don't know. Most people I know say we'll try it
once. If it happens again, we out of here. I hate to even think about
that, I swear. I really don't know. We probably
wouldn't have a choice. It ain't that I would want
it, but it's just like how you going to sink all your money
back into something when you're so unsure about
what's going to happen? To me, I guess we probably
wouldn't have a choice, but I'd have to probably
see that to even believe it, because I couldn't
imagine—. It still goes back to you're permanently
altered. That's the whole thing I don't get, that
I hate, is that it's life-altering things that came about
because of this hurricane. If it would just change a couple of things,
but it's just bam, just life-changing everything. So I
don't really know. That's a hard one to answer.
Almost everybody I know says they'd try it once and
that's it. I guess if nobody came back and I was the only
fool to come back
Down the road.
Down the road. To be continued.
Yeah. I just have one last question for you. How is Bernard and New Orleans different?
I mean really just—. Mostly, well, they got the French
Quarter, and it's kind of like famous. They got Bourbon
Street. It's got more historic—plenty of the
buildings are like historic, all the different areas, but really and
truly, like I told you, all of the people from Saint Bernard are from
New Orleans. I could guarantee you ninety-nine percent of them are. So
as far as that goes, there really is no difference. This is just, like I
was saying, to get out of the city, and this was kind of like the
country but actually only ten minutes away. So this was
everybody's answer to kind of slowing it down a little bit,
because up in New Orleans it's just twenty-four/seven.
It's just party, party, party. Well, we can go there and
party, and we get to come back home, you know what I mean? But
that's the only thing I could think of would be the historic
value to that and they just made it famous, just the name of
It's just nobody knows that we here. That's the
thing. That's really the only probably difference is that
nobody knows—probably nobody even heard of this place, you
know? And it's just like ten minutes. Outside of that, they
got diverse cultures of people down here, too. They tend to kind
of—. A lot of tourists and stuff go there. It's
kind of a that kind of a place, but if I had to, I'd move
back there. Actually, they got less water than we got
The people down here made that what it is, pretty much. We just call it
like the city. You know, we
Probably got places like that everywhere. It's just people
don't realize it till like something happens, but we got the
hurricane way worse than they did. It's just the way
it's made, like just the way the lakes run and the way that
storm came that direction, and it's just the way it happened.
I mean, who
At first, I did hear stuff like that, but then you never see it
Do you think New Orleans and this area—? Or what is the soul or the spirit of this area?
I don't know. I don't know how you would describe
it. Everybody just goes for anything. That's just the kind of
people. They just got a different way about them. They go along with
anything and whatever, whatever. It's the same exact thing as
with the heart and soul of New Orleans. It's mostly about the
people. It's the diversity of all of the different people.
Everybody that's down here likes the same things that
everybody—. I mean, it's all the same. I
don't know. They got like a love of
Why do you think people forgot about Saint Bernard?
I have no idea. The only thing that I could think of was just because
New Orleans happened to be a famous name that people knew. Like I said,
I don't think a lot of people know—. Probably nine
out of ten people you talk to probably have never heard of Saint Bernard
Parish,
I mean, I remember us being in Baton Rouge. We were calling the state
police, and some kind of way—. My husband's
brother, he was down here like nine days or something before he got
rescued, and some kind of way one of them got a phone call to my
mother-in-law, and they was freaking out because they were still living.
And we started calling the state police trying to tell them, and after
the
It just didn't seem like nobody was doing anything, and they
definitely didn't have it on TV. Maybe they figured that
there was a major screw-up and they knew it. Maybe they was just
trying—hoping nobody would find out. It just seemed weird. I
mean, we couldn't even find—hear anything about
nothing down here. To me, if we couldn't find out, what if
nobody knew? That's what we was thinking. You figured they
got a National Guard, one of the biggest right in
They're not helping Saint Bernard out very much right now?
Does it look like it? No. No. I mean, they still got people that we know
that's waiting for FEMA trailers. We lucky. We'd
probably still be waiting for one. We told them we didn't
need one because we had a place to stay. I remember me and my husband
saying it. Well, we'll just tell them we don't
need one because somebody else probably else could use it, but then so
many people were still waiting to get them. They still not helping. I
mean, they don't even come around and pick up the trash.
What's easier than that? If you come and you got your own
building and you put the stuff out—. I mean, we
ain't asking them to come do it. This is a main highway, and
look at the piles of trash
You know like the big garbage cans you see? One day I think we had six of them because we had all these apartments, and rented trucks came one day and they came, turned over the garbage on the driveways, and loaded all the garbage cans up on the truck and left with them. I don't know why. We took the two garbage cans that's out on the side, we took them down from our house and brought them up here so that we could use them. Every time the garbage man's coming, one of us is looking out there to make sure they ain't taking the garbage can again. What kind of sense does that make? Because Waste Management wanted their garbage cans back? What is that about? It's crazy. If they would go around and say if they just had to choose one thing to do, pick up the trash. How much better would it be if you don't have to see all of that trash? To me, that don't seem like a lot to ask. I'm sorry, but it just don't seem like much. Maybe they need the president to come in and tell them they need to do it. I don't know. But I swear, they never do it.
Actually, it was probably just about a month ago when they picked up some
trash we had out with those apartments gutted out onto the side, onto
the side of it, and I went out there and they started picking that up. I
asked them, "Could you please come—I mean
y'all right here. Could you come by the front because we
trying to open our business back up and stuff?" And they told
me, "No, we can't do that." They said,
"That's the state." So evidently
there's some kind of confusion as far as—what? I
don't know. State people's got to pick up trash on
the state
And for a while, they had stopped picking up all the garbage altogether.
I'm not talking about just like household garbage like the
debris, because like FEMA or whoever was supposed to be paying these
guys stopped paying them. They owe them like how many millions of
dollars or whatever, and so
And you figure like they telling people, you know, you want to get your
businesses back and running. Well, if people could see over the debris
that you got a business, maybe that would be one thing. So you know, you
don't understand. You don't get it, like, but to
me, they could at least do that. For the most part, the
people's doing the work themselves. Plenty of people signed
up to get their houses gutted out and whatever, like volunteers come
around and do it, I guess, but they still got a whole load of them
that's not done. But like we said, they ain't
nobody going to do it. We didn't ever think they were going
to have volunteers come and do it. We just figured we had to come do it,
so that's what we did
Most of the ones that I know did their own. Like old people or whatever,
we had some old people in the back here, they cleaned their yard. They
never could do their house. I mean, they in their eighties. They were
going to try to do it, but I even told them, I said,
"That's a way bigger job than you think." I
think plenty of like the older people probably sign up for like spring
break
Yeah, the trash is a big problem down here, and when you go through New
Orleans, you don't see that much trash. Some places you do,
but not like down here, so what's the difference? I
don't know. It seems like there shouldn't be a
difference. It seems like it's maybe a political deal.
It's got to be something. All I know is I don't
have trucks big enough to move it
END OF INTERVIEW