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Hurricane, Remembered

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Memoirs by teenagers who survived Hurricane Katrina.

Posted Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006, at 5:58 PM ET

Melvin Carter, 16. Before Hurricane Katrina, he lived in the Iberville Project near downtown New Orleans.

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The day before the hurricane, my mother woke me up at 7 a.m. and told me to pack my clothes. We got in the car to go pick up my grandmother and my aunt and her daughter. We tried to leave but we got stuck.

So everyone came to my house because the hurricane was going to hit that night. Everybody had brought food and drinks for the hurricane. We had 30 people in a small house in the project. Everybody was just talking, watching TV, and playing the game. Then it started to rain and the power went out. My mother and my aunts started to light candles and put them all over the house so people could see.

Then it was late and the rain started to come harder and harder. It hit so hard I thought the window broke.

The next day we woke up and ate. Then people were telling us they broke in the store in the front of the project. So me and my cousins Lester and Dennis left to go to the store. They didn't have anything left in the first store. So we went in the next store. We had to break in through the wall.

We got the wall down and we went inside. They had no lights working. The only lights were from outside, shining in from the wall we broke. Everyone was taking everything in the store. Me and my cousin had boxes of stuff.

We was about to eat when the people on the radio said that if you are in your house you need to get to the Superdome because they were going to open the flood gates and the water was going to be 20 feet high.

My mother told us to pack some clothes so we could go to the Superdome. So me and my cousin went upstairs, got a book sack, and put some clothes and all the candy we had in the book sack. We had to leave all the food there and get two baskets. One was for my cousin, the special one. The other was for my little brother and little cousin. The water was already over their heads. I had to help my aunt because her knee was still hurting. Everyone was in front of us because we had to move slow.

That water was cold.

When we got to the Superdome, we had to wait in a long line to get in. Finally me, my grandmother, my aunt, the cousins, and my cousins' mother were in. But we had to wait on my mother, my other cousins, and my other aunts because we had got split up in the line. Finally we saw them, so we started to look for a spot to sit in the Superdome. We were down by the field. We were sitting and talking. Then they had come telling everyone that a little girl had been raped. They were saying, "If you have to go somewhere, take someone with you. Because they have a raper man in there."

People started saying, "This is sad" and, "They let anyone in the Superdome." My mother and the rest of the grown-ups told us that we had to stay where they could see us. So me and my two cousins Lester and Jeremy were talking about the car book that we had, and we were eating the candy we had, while we were seeing people from my old project, the Ninth Ward, who were coming in to talk with us.

Then it was dark outside, and a lot of people were going to sleep. But most were staying up to watch their families. I know my mother was.

So we were just sitting, and time was passing. It got late and I was asleep. Then I heard a loud sound. It was a gunshot. Someone took a gun from the [Superdome security] guard. People were going to see what was going on. But they kept running them away.

When it stopped raining we went outside. We saw these two men about to fight. One of them had broken a piece of metal off of the army cots. He started to hit a white man with it, and to stab him. Someone had to carry the white man to first aid to get some help. He was bloody all over.

So then we started to go around to the other side of the dome because they had a line to leave over there. But we didn't get in the line right away. We had to count because there were about 45 of us there, and we had to make sure all of us got out.

When we got into the line, it was still daylight, about 5 p.m., but then it started to get dark. A man came running from around the other side and told us that a man had killed someone's grandmother and raped a lady. So my big cousin, we call him Booboo, was telling us, "Don't move! Stay with us!" We had a lot of people with us, so it would be hard to tell who was missing.

We moved up the line a little bit. We kept waking up to move all night. …

The next morning it was hot, it felt like 100 degrees. We were all up on top of one another. My special cousin in the wheelchair got sick. They tried to get him out through the front of the line to get help. They got up to the front of the line and told me to hold my little cousin.

A man came to talk to the guard because his baby fainted. They were just looking at his baby, and the man started to cry.

Then we had to get on the hot school buses. This was because all the cool buses had gone and because we were waiting on my cousins. It was so many of us that we took up a whole bus. We had two other people on the bus with us. One was a white man; he didn't say nothing for the whole ride. Then there was this crazy lady who thought we were a part of her family.

Finally we got to Shreveport, La. When we got to the shelter, they gave us clothes so we could take a bath. We had to throw away everything we had on anyway.

culturebox
entries
1234

Memoirs by teenagers who survived Hurricane Katrina.

Posted Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006, at 5:58 PM ET
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