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Life's Necessities Grow Scarcer at the Superdome
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A soldier announced that a Black Hawk was coming to blow air down on them -- "to cool you off a bit," he said. A sea of black faces turned upward, as if the piece of machinery would appear right away, which it did not.
"I don't believe they would have put blacks and whites together up on this roof," Seaton said. "Might have started a revolution." He leaned across the rope as he offered that sociological insight.
"Make a hole! Make a hole!" Now it was a little girl, wearing purple jeans rolled up to her knees, eyes closed, possible dehydration, a woman crying after her.
"It's so many people," said Brian Mandel, a 22-year-old senior airman at Lackland Air Force Base. He allowed as to how he's only gotten "three, four hours of sleep" in the past two days.
Down at street level, throngs poured up and down the nearby highway. Many waved empty water jugs like jack-o-lanterns. Those without water seemed grateful to be clutching onto a bottle of orange or grape or lemon-lime soda.
"Been in New Orleans 41 years, and now I'm ready to go," said Darlene Franklin, 41. She said she had been walking two straight days. "And I got my two grandbabies with me. This don't make no sense. No sense at all." She talked with anger, flashing gold teeth and something that seemed months away from growing into a smile. She flicked the ash on her cigarette, drawing her arm away from her grandbaby to do so. "We need help out here!"
A man walked up, wearing a T-shirt, work pants and moccasins. Raymond Williams had been a nomad for four days. "My wife's got cancer," he said. "Throat cancer. And I got prostate cancer." He was accompanied by his wife, Leona, and 15 grandchildren. They were carrying their belongings in plastic bags. The Superdome was in the distance, like a painful mirage. "Both me and my wife are on medication. Leona, show him your neck."
She pulled down a handkerchief that had been tied around her neck. The bandages that covered the incisions made from her throat cancer surgery were the color of river water. "We holding on through the grace of the Lord," Leona Williams said, in a pink blouse that somehow still looked very nice and pretty.
Every minute or so, Raymond Williams would twirl his neck, gathering his grandchildren close as possible, only to have them ease back out into the road, like figures on a bobbing raft.
