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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-0243, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
In this animated interview, Pamela Mahogany describes her family's and friends' harrowing escape from the rising floodwaters in post-Katrina New Orleans. Instead of evacuating, Mahogany remained in the Saint Bernard Housing Development in the Lower Ninth Ward, a public housing complex notorious for criminal activity. A native of the Saint Bernard projects, Mahogany defends and expresses pride in her community, describing the sense of kinship that it cultivated and noting that crime exists even in the wealthier parts of New Orleans.. She was at work when the hurricane hit. As a nurse for the local hospital, she was offered a chance to stay there, but she declined because of her son's fidelity to his friends and family, who remained in the Saint Bernard community. Mahogany recalls feeling that the hurricane was no different from others that she had experienced. After three days, however, when the waters failed to subside, she and her family and friends realized that their stay in a third-floor apartment was not sufficient. Mahogany describes how friends rescued them with a stolen boat. They remained on the Interstate 610 bridge for a day before heading to the New Orleans Superdome. Mahogany graphically describes the horrible physical and emotional conditions of the Superdome and the pandemonium that arose during the wait for evacuation to areas less damaged by the storm. Mahogany and her group of family and friends remained together and pooled their money to travel to family members' homes in Baton Rouge and Leland, Louisiana. A year after Katrina hit, Mahogany had still not returned to New Orleans. She discusses her disagreement with public housing authorities, who provided vouchers for New Orleans public housing residents to live in Texas but who she says effectively evicted them with the mandatory storm evacuation. Tenants who seek to return to New Orleans should also be provided vouchers, she argues. Mahogany describes her current efforts to restore the Saint Bernard complex and to help low-income people return to public housing.
Pamela Mahogany describes her family's and friends' harrowing escape from the floodwaters in post-Katrina New Orleans. She also discusses her attempts to get low-income public housing residents to return to New Orleans.
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 1]
Why don't you just start by saying your name, where we are. I'll just hold it up, so.
Okay. Hi, my name is Pamela Mahogany, and we're right here in front of the Saint Bernard Housing Development, where I'm formerly from.
Okay. Tell me where you grew up.
In Saint Bernard Housing Development, in New Orleans all my life. I'm forty-three years old.
Uh-huh. Tell me about your family.
Okay. I grew up back here in the Saint Bernard Housing Development with
me and my mom. I have two sisters and one brother. My
brother's incarcerated. My two sisters, I have one that works
at Amtrak and the other one is a licensed cosmetologist, she does hair.
And I have one son, he's sixteen years old, he's
in eleventh grade at Old Perry Walker. I'm not gonna say his
name.
Okay.
What else?
What was the neighborhood like when you were growing up?
It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun growing up in public housing. I
mean, public housing has always had its share of crime—it
just would be unrealistic to not admit that, you know, they has always
had crime in public housing, but I don't know if you should
say that when you grow up around it. You kind of learn to live with it,
you know. I don't know if that's fair to say. Some
people might feel like it's a normal situation. New Orleans
is a fast-life city, and where some people in certain areas might prefer
to hide and not publicize the crime, it is actually there, you know? I
have friends all over the city, and
And everybody in public housing, we know everybody. You know, I go to
work—I don't want to name my job's name
for personal reasons—but I've worked in a
hospital, I've worked in nursing homes, and now I do home
help where I make the visits to the people's homes. And I
basically, prior to Katrina, I lived, I worked in the hospital. But when
I came back, because of the situation of being permanent staff in the
hospital, that it put us in, not being able to evacuate, being a
practical nurse, I chose when I came back to do a home help setting type
of thing. So if, in effect, we have to evacuate again, I
won't be tied into, you know, worrying about losing my job if
I evacuate with the rest of them. So if I choose to evacuate with my
child, you know. That's basically why I swapped up. But I
prefer it to working in the hospital. I like working with children, I
love children. I had a girls' group back here in the Saint
Bernard, was called after my last name,
What kind of things would you do with the girls?
I educated 'em on drugs. None of 'em are too young
to know about sex, so I educate 'em on sex education,
basically building up their self-esteems, and taking 'em out
of here, out of the Saint Bernard development, so that
they'll know that there's other places to see and
do and then if they choose to stay, it's not because
they've never been anywhere. You know? So we travel. We go to
Disneyworld, we go to Washington, D.C. Last summer, right before the
hurricane, we had just come back from Texas, and we went to
Sleddabine[??] just so they could have a different setting. Just to have
fun and enjoy themselves. And then you know we talk about things like,
look at this environment, is this what you want, do you want better,
what kind of jobs you want, and you let 'em meet and talk and
deal with people that's doing positive things. You go to the
school, and you communicate with the teachers, to help 'em
out with their grades and stuff. You know, just encouraging and
interacting kind of things. They're good kids,
it's just a matter of being introduced to other things. I
mean their parents are like me. They don't have
Tell me where you were when the storm hit.
I started out in my apartment, at 3964 Gibson Street. Well, actually, as it was announced that it was coming in, I was at work. I got off about 7:30, I made it home about quarter to eight. My son was down the street with his godmother, on higher grounds, because her sister lived on the third floor. So I left him with her, because my job had offered that our family could come to the job. And basically, that probably would have been the best situation for us because they didn't get any water over on St. Charles Avenue. But he didn't want to go, he wanted to stay with his godmother, so I left him, I went to work, I came home about 8 o'clock, and we went to sleep. We slept through the hurricane. We woke up that morning, the sun was shining, but we—.
Sunday?
Monday morning. Sunday night I went to sleep. It was drizzling, and the lights went out, the phones went out, you know, no contact. We didn't really have a clue about what was going on. We went to sleep that night, finally being able to doze off. The wind was high, it was a lot of rain, you know, a regular storm to us, cause I couldn't really tell that the storm was worse than any of the other storms that we had ever had. Basically when we got up that morning, from the rain and stuff, the water wasn't, you know, going down. We had no idea that the levees and stuff were broken. We just thinking, regular storm, and being in public housing we like, "The water just taking a long time to drain." So then they finally hit us. The water was actually in my living room and I realized something was wrong. So I told my son, we gonna eat, cause the stove is electric and gas, so when the lights are out, you can still use the stove, so I was like, "We gonna eat, and then after that, we gonna go to higher grounds."
So we left, and we went down on the other end to the third floor where I
had picked him up from previous with his godmother. And we stayed there,
and the water was just getting higher and higher and we were getting
kind of afraid, you know, like this water not gonna stop. And we heard
the stories that, you know, if we should ever go underwater, we might be
looking at twenty feet of water and stuff like that, like, oh my God. So
we praying, and we stayed there three nights. My friend who is my
son's godmother, her son-in-law came with a boat that he had
stolen from private property back in Lakeview or somewhere in the
lakefront, and they came and it was just a regular boat, not with a
propeller or anything, just a regular boat, and they came and they got
us. And it was my son, Maurice, and a couple of his
friends—it was like about five of them—and my son
is about six feet. And the rest of the guys were also. And we got in the
boat, and
Did you have food, did you have any water?
We didn't have anything. We didn't have anything. And you know what's so strange about it? We actually didn't worry about it. You know it's like every day you at home, and you wake up and say, "I need some water, I need something to eat," and at that point you just like, "We just need to survive," you know? So it wasn't, you know—. We had a five year old with us. And you know, she never said, "Ma, I'm hungry, Ma, I wanna eat." You know, she just like, "I gotta do what they do," you know? It was kind of sad but it was what we had to do, so when the helicopter never came back [at] ten that morning, what we did was we started walking, because prior to when the lights went out, we had heard people saying that they was having shelter at the Superdome, so in our mind it's like, "Well it's food and it's water there, so let's go there and eat." Actually that was the worst mistake of our life. We wish that we had just stayed on that bridge and tried to survive, because that Superdome was horrible.
When we got there, there was this National Guard, and a guy said, his exact words to us, and it was not coming out as saying, "Please don't go in there." He was a Caucasian male, but you could feel the vibes. He said, "If you go in, you go in at your own risk." He used the word "risk." "You go in at your own risk, and when you go in, you can't come out." To me, that was my clue not to go in, but for some reason I just bypassed it, you know. And I was like, "Alright, we shouldn't go in," but we went ahead and we went in, and Lord. It had so many—. By the time we made it, it had millions of people in there. It was nasty. You could just smell the urine and the feces, and we were in and they were searching us down to make sure we didn't have guns and stuff. So they finally started coming with—. They had lines outside. And you could go outside and you had to stand in the line to get food. And you had to get it yourself, you couldn't get it for anybody else. It was a big old controversy, because they wanted all the males to go in on one side, and the females to go on the other side, and we had about five males with us, and three of them were underage, and one of 'em was my son. And I was important with him, you know, I wasn't about to leave him. So that was a big old thing. They was like, "Well, they have to be searched in this line and you have to be searched in that line," so I'm like, "Well okay, this is how this is gonna go. I'm-a get in this line, and I'm-a get searched. But you gonna allow me to come back and get in the line with my son, or either you gonna allow my son to be searched with me. But we will not separate, at all." So then one of the guys, he said, "Okay." He let him get in the line with us. So he got in the line with us, we got searched, we went in.
And Jesus, I think I cried the whole three days I was in there, it was
just horrible. People was getting killed. I actually witnessed somebody
shooting somebody, and it was
And finally, my girlfriend had a little radio. And we could hear Nagin [Clarence Ray Nagin, Jr: mayor of New Orleans, La., from 2002-] on the radio saying, "They lying to you," because we had stood in a line like thirteen hours, waiting for buses. Actually millions of people, just lined up in rows and waiting for buses that never came. It never came. And then you hear the mayor saying, "Somebody get off your ass and do something, these people are dying, and they're lying to you, there are no buses outside the Superdome or wherever." And then finally, within hours and stuff, buses started coming. There were people in the line, the guys were fighting. And the army was just standing with their rifles pointed in the crowd like, "Just long as y'all don't come up here, y'all stay back there, you okay." And you have to keep getting out of the line to protect your family, so it's like you're in the front, finally, you're starting back off at the back, and it's just bad.
So when the buses finally came and they were letting us through the gates, it was chaos. Everyone wanted to get on the bus, so people trampling over each other and they running, and then you trying to maintain the group of people that you with, so that everybody could stay together. And we did accomplish that. One of the people, somebody did broke through the line with him, one of the local guys that was with us. His family wasn't with us, so we couldn't leave him. So we was like, "We can't go." So one of the guys promised us that when the next opening came that they would get him out to us. So he asked, he said, "Could y'all just go in the exit port" that they was bringing us to—I don't know if it was the Convention Center that they brought us through to get to the buses, I really don't know, I was so distraught at the time. But we waited. We wouldn't get on the buses. To see if he was going to come through. And maybe about forty-five minutes after waiting, he did come. So we all got on the bus together. And when we got on the bus, they told us we was going to Florida. We didn't go to Florida. They took us to Dallas.
One of my friends' sister talked to one of her friends, who
was Caucasian, and she used to work for her, and she had family in
Plano, Texas. So they came and picked us up. So we was only in the Dome
like maybe three days, but I really have to say that the setup that they
had in Dallas was ironic. It was 100% better than what we got in the
Superdome, from our own hometown. I mean, the people had
food—and I'm talking about real food, I
ain't talking about that Army Corps stuff. And I wanna go
back and tell you. When we was in the Superdome, those people actually
treated us horrible. I mean. At one point they got tired of letting us
get in the line for the food. They just threw the water out on the
ground off the truck and threw the food off the ground, and we just
refused to go
But anyway, when we got to Plano, Texas, the people came to pick us up. They were really friendly. We didn't know 'em, Angela did know 'em, and we stayed there. But, you know, it was a comfort zone like we were in safety but it wasn't where we wanted to be. It was like we still wanted to get back home. And we stayed there three days. And the day after Labor Day, a Monday, we went to picnic by one of the family friends' house, and they fixed hamburgers and stuff for us. We left, and we took our own money that we had, and we combined it. We got tickets for everybody, cause Red Cross hadn't started yet paying for people to commute back and forth. So we went to the bus station. They brought us, their family brought us to the bus station. And we got bus tickets, and we went to Baton Rouge.
And we got to Baton Rouge—that was where we all separated. We
started getting in touch with our family members. I had one sister in
Mississippi, one sister was living in a hotel with my little niece and
them—the Holiday Inn Select, was on Constitutional Drive. So
we stayed there. For free. You know, the people had set up an area in
the ballroom for a lot of families to stay in, so we stayed there, and
for like thirteen days we was trying to find an apartment, so that we
could just live there until we were able to get back home. And we
couldn't find anywhere to stay. So the people started saying
it was nearing the time that we was gonna have to leave. So we left
them, and we went to Greenville, Mississippi. And my sister, in the same
situation there—this is my baby sister—she was in
a hotel somewhere in Greenville, and the people were putting them out,
and they were on the news and whatever, and this lady had a house that
she had started
So we stayed there, and then I just was getting sick, every day. I needed
to come home. I was stressed out. I was having chest pains, and I was
like, "You know what? I gotta go home. You know. As close to
home as possible." And when I was in Baton Rouge, I really felt
comfortable, because I felt like I was home, close to home, but I just
couldn't find nowhere to stay. So after that, we stayed in
Mississippi till December, and in December I came. I got a voucher from
Housing Authority because I was living in public housing and they had
these
Now tell me about this effort to try to get back into public housing.
What it is, is I have a lot of my friends that's family
members, old and young. Children. And I talk to them on a daily basis.
And they everywhere. One of the little girls that's in my
youth group, her mommy's in California. She'll be
here, I think, on the ninth. She'll be here.
That's one of my other friends, Sharon, her and her daughter,
they're in Florida. And her husband is a close friend of
mine. We grew up, back here, in the
I mean, these people to me, they are illegally evicted. The mayor said
that it was a mandatory evacuation. That mean you have to go. Because a
lot of people wouldn't have left, if they didn't
have to go. Actually, they came in this development and made a lot of
people leave. You know, people didn't want to go. So the same
way it was mandatory for them to leave, it should be mandatory for them
to return. For those that wanna, that don't wanna return,
that should be their choice. They should not be kept. And HUD is not
telling us what their plans are for public housing, but it's
a section of our mind that know. We know that they do not intend on
opening Saint Bernard, Lafitte, a lot of the developments, rebuilding
Desire. I'm-a speak for Saint Bernard cause I'm
from Saint
No, I haven't.
We gotta ride over there. It's nice. It's really what they think, I guess, everybody should live in. To me it's junk, if you ask my opinion. If a hard wind come through there, it gonna wipe their ass out. I'm saying, that's just my opinion. If I had a choice between River Gardens and this, I choose this, because it's—. I mean, it's beautiful if you just look at it, but it's cheap and it's not-worth-nothing material. Whereas if you look at this, right here, it's sound. It's sound. So we out here every day protesting because we want HUD to allow—the same way you asked us to leave, we want you to allow us to come back. And when you do things to me, like—. A lot of the people I'm working with, they're just like, "Let's just go claim our apartments. Let's just go take it back." But I'm the kind of person, I like to say, "Let's follow the chain of command." Just say it like that. And then after you follow the chain of command, and the chain of command don't work, then you do it the way you know is gonna work. And that way nobody say, "Well, they didn't ask," or, "They didn't go through the proper channels, they just broke the fences down," and, you know, you follow all the steps.
And Alfonse Jackson put in the paper the other day, "Nothing is
gonna happen unless it comes from Washington." So to me
you're saying, "Y'all can do all the
protesting you want. You can get on all the news media you want. The
final decision gonna be mine." So we've dealt with
Donald Babbers [??], and Bill Thorton, you know, the
And I think HUD had that responsibility. They need to come in, and you need to educate people. And you need all these trainers that you always talking about, you need to provide these trainers. You need to mandate that our people participate in them. You know what I'm saying? And you need to make sure they get educated. You need to make sure that they become self-sufficient. And then when you talking about taking 1400 units away from people, then you have something to stand behind. But you don't take a Hurricane Katrina, where people have lost everything, lost families, you know what I'm saying? And lost everything that they built all their life. Children, the only thing they know is to be around their family, and they got family in Texas, Washington, and everywhere! Kick 'em when they're down and say, "Y'all can't come back to your home," but everybody else, Lakeview, everybody else, they coming back.
And it's a conspiracy. Because it's only the poor
black people. You know? And they say, "Hurricane Katrina
affected everybody." Hurricane Katrina did affect everybody.
Hurricane Katrina affected people that wasn't in this city.
You know what I'm saying? Cause if you have a heart, how
could it not affect you? It affected everybody, but you can't
say that everybody lived what we lived. And people that have money and
that's knowledgeable about what's going on with
this situation, they allowed to come to their homes. But we not, cause
you feel like one of the guys—. And I'm so upset
with him, Howard Huska [??] I think his name was. He did an opinion in
the Times-Picayune a few days ago, and he said, "Why
don't we just buy 'em out?" And I was
disturbed mostly by he was like, "Why don't we just
give 'em a car, give 'em some money so they can
rent some property?" It was a few things that he suggested that
they do, like we was for sale. We not for sale. You know. And I was
very, very offended—well, he wrote it for us to be offended,
and I was offended. But I responded to him, because this is not about
drug bait. Crime that they always talk about. We had our share of crime
like the whole city, but they focus in on this because this is poor
black people. But the crime that's all over everywhere,
Right.
So, that's it. You know.
END OF INTERVIEW