Previously: So we all huddlin’ together on this little bitty porch, and a man passed near us in his motorboat. We all scared and hollering. KK took off his wet t-shirt and flagged the man down. There was floods over the roofs of the houses. After we seen that I told Calio, “We wouldn’t’ve made it there with our boat, we’d be dead.” The water hittin’ the motorboat’s windshield real hard now.
The motorboat man give us lifesavers with ropes attached to the boat so we can swim out to help folks and then he can crank us in. Problem is we can’t get to the houses, because them houses, they cavin’ in. Trees fallin’ over there. It ain’t nothin’ for that weather to pick them things out the ground. You got telephone poles split too.
When we saw houses that we thought we could reach, the man circle his motorboat, like how you go fishing. We then got off the boat wearing our lifesavers and swam to rescue folks.
We always asked for the kids first. We hold babies up in the air toward the sky, like they was a laundry bag, and glide back to the boat with them. Bigger kids we put on our shoulders.
For grownups, two of us would carry them. The water up to my chin. I could just about manage.
There was this old man, he ain’t got no legs, just his torso. So me and KK carry him. He so scared. He keep sayin’, “Please don’t drop me. Please don’t drop me.” Finally we get close enough to pass him over to Calio and the man driving the boat.
That guy with no legs, now he so happy, he say, “Man, thank y’all! Thank y’all!” Another twenty or thirty minutes, he woulnd’t’ve made it. After he safe in the boat I swam back to get his wheelchair.
We rescued three more families after that, which was a blessing. We drop all them at the ramp to the Superdome and then I push the man up in his wheelchair.
The security at the Superdome ask are we going in too. We say no.
He say, “By right, once you go up the ramp you gotta go in.”
I say, “No, no. We been bringin’ people here for days.” Then Calio and I run to the motorboat, and the security man didn’t run after us.
Motorboat Man drop us back at our boat. He told us, “If there is any kind of way to get to my house, I’d give you some paddles, better than them sticks y’all been using.” He say he’d try to come back, but we never seen him again.
When we get back up toward the project, we ask if anything going on. They say some people got hit by bullets on the old side of the projects where the shootin’ was.
I say we’ll check early, when it’s daylight. Being out at night, it pitch dark. You can’t see what might come at you. You don’t know if building might fall or if live telephone wires down. If somebody try to kill you. There ain’t no way to call the cops.
In the project, it like the old side against the new side. They beef, they don’t get along too good. It’s not a gang, exactly; to me it’s like struggling for power in the project.
The next day we went building to building. On the old side they had an old addict we know, named Butch. He got hit by bullets in his leg and on his side. That bullet burnin’ him, and he so soakin’ wet. All him bleedin’ make him drippin’ pink all over. He hollerin’ “Help me!”
He tell us he heard some shot. “I try to run,” he said. He had been in the middle of shootin’ up his drug and he drop his syringe.
I said, “Man, people dyin’ out here and you doing that? That’s crazy!”
He gotta survive, and we gotta get him outta there.
To be continued . . .
