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I met Mrs. Mary while touring friends from England through the now internationally famous ruins of the lower Ninth Ward. We made small talk. “How’s your house?” “How’s your family?” “You gonna rebuild?”
The last question was more obligatory, as I naturally assumed this 68 year old great-grandmother, bent over and slowly ambling about with a cane, was too far up in years to consider rebuilding a home, a life, from nothing. She surprised me when she responded, “Oh yeah…I’m rebuilding!”
She clearly meant it, her eyes penetrating me with conviction. But it was her next statement that almost felled me to the ground. “I rode out the hurricane in my attic. My house floated away with me in it!” she said matter-of-factly.
My jaw dropped. The floodwaters had reached the rooftops when the levee in the Ninth Ward broke. “So how’d you escape?”
Holding up her staff, she smiled, “I tore a hole out the roof with my cane and climbed out.”
Of all the hurricane survival tales I’ve heard – and I’ve heard enough to write my own bible - hers is the most astounding story I’ve heard yet!
My friends and I walked with Mrs. Mary to the place on Cherbonette Street where her house once sat. There exist only three steps leading to nothing now but a vacant lot overgrown with weeds. Her turquoise blue home is down the street, crammed like an accordion between a tree and her neighbor’s house. She struggled to get down to a seated position on what’s left of her porch. Her sitting there, dragging on a cigarette, looking down the road into the distance, I suddenly knew that’s exactly what she used to do when she lived here…a lifetime ago.
Mrs. Mary’s an old lady. But standing before her, she seems stronger than everyone else you know her age – probably stronger than you in a couple of important ways. I asked, “Weren’t you scared when that hurricane hit and the levees broke?”
She looked at me with that sarcastic, raised eyebrow, Black momma expression.
“Scared for what?”
The following week, I visited Mrs. Mary at the Uptown shotgun double she now calls home. Sitting with her bad leg propped up in a recliner, she recalled the family’s original plan for riding out the hurricane - should things go bad. “It was me, my brother, my two nephews…we were supposed to go by my daughter’s,” she said in that N’awlins singsong drawl. “She lived the opposite street corner from me in a two-story. I could stand on my porch, talk to her on her porch. That’s how close we were.”
“(Sunday night), we woke up and one of my nephews went outside and saw the water. He said, “We gotta get outta here!” I said, “Well come on. I’m ready.”
He looked out again, then said, “We can’t leave here.” I said ‘Aint’ no such thing as ‘can’t’! I can walk that water!’ Then I looked out, saw how high the water was,” drawing an imaginary water line with her hand across her chest. “The water was coming fast. We was going towards the attic when the water rushed in and flipped the fridge right over.”
In the attic, they watched as the ceiling’s plaster beneath them began to break into pieces and float away. “We was standing on the rafters. Then the water was below my knees. The furniture floated up. I had a couch with a lot of stuffed animals on it. All my stuffed animals start coming thru the rafters, clothes, everything… But I never got scared. Just kept on praying…”
Her nephew was hanging out of the attic window under the roof when a baseball bat floated by in the water. “He grabbed it and was sitting in the window, tapping the water with it. Then we saw a big rat swimming toward the house,” using her hands to show the size of a small dog. “He was hitting that rat away with the bat. Then an alligator came!,” demonstrating double the previous size she’d shown me. ”And he beat it away. Then a great big fish came after that! We don’t know if the alligator was after the rat and the fish was after the alligator… I was expecting a snake next!!” she chuckled as I stared at her, horrified.
“It was morning, around 9 am I guess, when we felt a ‘Boom!’ My brother said, “That’s a house that hit us!” After about 10-15 minutes, you could feel our house rocking, floating. Then we hit a tree, then another house. My nephew climbed out the window onto the roof. My daughter was down the street on the second floor of her house yelling for us.”
Like so many folks from the Ninth Ward, Mrs. Mary never learned to swim. “I couldn’t go thru the window. I know that water woulda took me. So, I started tearing the roof out.”
“I found a pine hollow spot and starting banging on it,” she said, showing me her red and brown painted cane with masking tape covering the nub. “As I kept hitting it, it was loosening the nails on the roof. Then I squeezed thru the hole,” she says, struggling to pull herself up on the armrest of her recliner chair to demonstrate. “I don’t know where I got strength from,” she says, collapsing back into her seat.
Because the house had floated down the street, it was now only partially visible to her very worried daughter. The nephew yelled out to her that Mrs. Mary was okay but, said Mrs. Mary, “I stood where my daughter couldn’t see me. If anything happened, I didn’t want her to remember me there. It’s a hurting thing to see your momma drown, can’t do nothing about it. I didn’t want her to see me, if anything woulda happened…”
Finally, a neighbor came with a boat Monday afternoon and carried Mrs. Mary and her family through the water to her daughter’s house. There, the entire family spent another night without food, water, or bathroom facilities while waiting to be rescued.
“That night was something to hear!,” recalled Mrs. Mary. “You could hear people hollering, children hollering, ‘Lord!! Please help me!!’ Hollering so much, you want ‘em to stop! Then when they do stop, you wonder, ‘Lord, what happened to them!? Is they drowned? This-a-way hollering, that-a-way hollering,” motioning with her hand. “That’s when it got to me.” Shaking her head, she said, “I just sat there and prayed for em.”
The Coast Guard picked up Mrs. Mary’s family Tuesday afternoon and they eventually arrived at a shelter on the campus of Southern University. “It was nice. Had the air on, food, you could take a bath, clothes. I hadn’t used bathroom since Monday.” This being her first time ever evacuating, she laughed, “…I wait to be an ‘ole ass lady to go to a shelter! But I was sho glad to get to this one!
After such a traumatizing account, I couldn’t help but ask, “Why aren’t you afraid to go back to an area that has such bad memories?”
“I figure it could happen anywhere,” she reasoned. “It can get you anywhere. I was in Betsy (a Category Four hurricane in ’65), water was up around four feet high then. And I went back home. If it’s your time, it’s gonna come and git you. You can’t run.”
Mrs. Mary says she’s doing okay today. She’s going to rebuild her Ninth Ward home, which was already paid off. Although she admits she didn’t have insurance and doesn’t know where she’s going to get the money to rebuild. To date, she’s living off social security, splitting the cost of her rental with the other family members staying with her. But she shows no signs of concern – or of giving up on her goal.
“No use in worrying about it,” she waves off the idea. Blood pressure gon go up… Then when it (the opportunity) do come to you, you too crazy to know what it is!”
All and all, life is showing favor to Mrs. Mary as she continues to enjoy one of her favorite routines. “I’m still close by my daughter,” she smiles. “She lives on the other side of house. I still can go out on my porch and she can come out on hers and we talk. Thank God…”
Deborah Cotton is a freelance journalist and public speaker based in New Orleans, covering on-the-ground stories of the city’s recovery and chronicling the rebuilding efforts of residents in the historic Black neighborhood of the Ninth Ward. She can be reached at Deborah.cotton@gmail.com.