Renee Martin never really liked New Orleans. Life there was hard, and she struggled with depression worsened by the death of her only son. When Katrina struck, she was trapped in the city with thousands of others struggling to survive the aftermath. After days of turmoil, she finally made it to the Houston Astrodome. She remained in Houston, and was able to make a life for herself in her new city—she had a new apartment in a nice neighborhood, and a good job with people she liked. She felt like Katrina had given her a chance to get things on track. However, two years later, when I called Renee in Houston, tragedy seemed to have followed her to Texas. She struggles with health problems and the recent death of her grandson. Expressive and thoughtful, she is trying to once more readjust to her new circumstances and make the best of them.
—Selena Simmons-Duffin
I can hold up my head and talk about
it now, but I will still probably go
home and cry later.
Right now I’m sittin’ down, eating soup. I just got out the hospital again. First time: two weeks; second time: a week; third time: nine days; and this last time: about five days. I have respiratory failure—my heart, liver, and kidneys are shut down. Since I had a heart attack I had respiratory failure. My respiratory is weakened, and because of that, so are my kidneys, and my liver, and my lungs. My body is not strong enough to be active, to do work.
I’ve been suffering with severe depression caused by Bipolar disorder. A lot of my depression is due to me being displaced from New Orleans, and trying to get comfortable with that. It’s depressing sometimes, because I hurt on some of the things that come to my mind as I speak about it. It brings me bad feelings and it make me want to cry. I can hold up my head and talk about it now, but I will still probably go home and cry later.
It started with me generally suffering with depression already, before the storm. It’s been going on in my life for years. I had also been seeing a psychiatrist once a month and being treated at the mental health clinic of New Orleans.
When my son died, that really throwed me for a loop. I got real, real sick. I just had feelings like, you know, life. What’s the purpose of life, you know, when you have death? I felt like he was alone now. He left us and he was alone. A lot of people were telling me, “He’s in better hands, you know. He’s gonna be alright.” But he still is my baby. And he was taken away from me.
It was hard for me to deal with it and it is still hard for me to deal with because he was my baby. I think about him every day. I mean, every day. Dealing with that is like a tear in my heart. I’m crying inside emotionally, and nobody see me cryin’ because they can’t see within me. But I know what I’m feeling. So when the Katrina storm came, and I looked at the whole 360 picture of the whole thing, that really took me for another loop. When it happened, I thought that the world must be coming to an end.
My daughter had left before the storm came, and she asked me if I want to go. But I told her, “No, you go ahead and go. I’m gonna stay,” because every year we is told we gonna have a bad hurricane, but it always hit land and pass on by. It might do a little damage, but it’ll pass on by, so I don’t think no one really took it as serious. Then when the governor, when she start realizing that it was that serious, it was too late for us. Because a lot of us can’t have a car, no transportation, no money. If we had a car, we didn’t have no money to finance the gas. So what’s the reason of gettin’ on the highway? I knew myself I had five dollars—five dollars can’t get me too far. That’s only a gallon or so. So a lot of us just, we ride out the storm.
Then every day, you know, I’m struggling, trying to survive, among other people they’re trying to survive. We seeing dead around us, people just falling out dead, people being killed. We among that for three days and four nights in the Superdome. We didn’t have food. We didn’t have water. We didn’t have no changing clothes, no money, no nothing.
We didn’t know how we were gonna get from in New Orleans, until the third day when we started hearing a lot of helicopters flying around. We started seeing they was rescuing people. Everybody’s fightin’ trying to get ahead, because nobody wants to get left behind. They had 500 charter buses headin’ out to pick us up. We can’t see anything, but they delivered us from the Superdome and brought us to the I-10, to dry land. They set us there, real good. We were tired. We was just laying down on the concrete, on the road because the grass is wet. But they still had people laying down, because people are tired.
I was on the sixth bus going to the Astrodome. When we got there it was another disaster because everybody’s all piled up in the Astrodome. They fighting for food, they fightin’ over gang rivals from New Orleans, and they rape. They rapin’. But I only knew about one, and it was a seven-year-old little girl. Crime going amongst ourselves in another state. And that was—that was hard.
When we first got here in Houston. It was still hard. In Houston, they had apartments that was given up free, but if they have three hundred people in a line, and they only servin’ one hundred people, they gonna cut the line off and say you have to go to another apartment complex the next day. It’s hard.
So that third day, I didn’t join the gang and walk to the area, I caught the bus. I figured me bein’ by myself, I stand a better chance. My clothes had dried up on me, but, you know, I still was a mess. I clean myself up and fixed my hair as neat as I can get it, but I think it was excusable at the time because they knew a lot of us just flooded out Houston because of the storm.
I saw a Walmart and I said, “That’s a job right there,” but I wanted to see what was behind Walmart. Further down the street, they had some apartments and stuff. And then I was gonna come back up and see about a job and see about a house.
I saw they had a nursing home, so I said, “Well let me go over there.” I went inside there and I asked someone if they’re hiring. They asked me what position, and I say CNA [Certified Nursing Assistant]—I had my license. The girl say, “Well, I’m sorry we don’t have no openings at this time for CNA.”
So I stood there, almost ’bout to cry. I said, “Ma’am, do you have a position in anything right now?” I say, “Right now, I’m living in the Astrodome.”
She say, “Are you with the New Orleans people, from the storm?”
I say. “Yes, ma’am.”
She say, “Wow. Let me see if I can find you something.” She said, “We have something in laundry. Would you take that for right now?”
I say, “Yeah, until CNA come up.”
She say, “Yeah, that’s a good start.”
So the owner of the nursing home facility, they called around for the apartments they had behind the Walmart. The owner of the nursing facility gave me a check. When I got to the apartments, they had all the paperwork set up for me to sign. I had my ID on me, I had my social security card, I had my CNA license. I had just the right things I needed.
So they gave me some sheets, and some blankets, and some pillows. When I got in that apartment, all I could do was take a real good bath, and eat, and lay down. I laid down and I said my prayers, and I went to sleep.
Then that morning, when I went to work, they’d bought me two uniforms. When the supervisors come in to work at eight o’clock, the lady say, “Are you Renee Martin? I been looking for you.” She say, “We was gonna take you to Walmart and get you some things. You wanna go right quick and get some tennis shoes?” I had on some flippers. So we went to Walmart, and I got some brand new white tennis shoes to wear so I can work in.
Every day, the co-workers was bringing stuff from their houses—cots, and towels, and just a little of everything that I needed for the house. They gave me a $300 gift certificate to buy me some pajamas, and underwears, and socks, and stuff like that. I felt like, God, I really don’t want to go back to New Orleans! So I’m still on that same job. Still there. It’s been two years.
New Orleans was a very small place; it’s not that big. Being there so many years, you get to know a lot of people. All my children was very well-known. Going places in Houston, we’ll run into somebody either know my daughter or know me. We exchange phone numbers, and we get to talking about different stuff. A little bit about the storm, but a lot of times you talk first about how FEMA doing this and that, how they not getting help from the Red Cross, just all kind of issues.
Before my daughter decided to come up here, I talked to her every day. She would call me and tell me about how things were going out in New Orleans. Wasn’t making any progress. It’s a mess. Debris still, a lot of debris. Houses are caved in, cars collapsed, and different trees everywhere, and stuff like that. They cleaned the streets and made headway for the vehicles to pass through, but the living arrangements out there are terrible. The crime had went up a lot. She said they don’t have enough police force down there, they killing each other down there. She told me they have started hiring for different job positions and offering so much money in places like McDonald’s, KFC, places like that. A lot of people from the had came in and took over the jobs. She used to work at a beauty salon.
For the holidays, I would go down there. Every time I go down there I’d get sick. I stay sick like three days. When I come back to Houston, you know, I’m sick. When I decided to stop going, I wouldn’t get sick. It’s because my immune system is low, so it’s easy for me to pick up germs and bacteria, and stuff like that. That’s due to me having complications with my heart and respiratory failure.
I still work at the same nursing facility, and I still live at the same apartment complex, but I’ve been having some changes with my health. I’ve been getting real sick. I think it was in October they had to put me in the hospital because my pressure was too high. I had to stay like four days. They had to monitor me. I was suffering headaches real bad, and I was taking aspirins when I didn’t have Tylenol. I’m not supposed to take aspirin at all because it’s bad on my liver and kidneys, and my heart.
The doctor started me seeing a doctor for my high blood pressure and my heart. I asked her too, “Why I have to see a doctor for my heart?” She explained to me that I can have a stroke or a heart attack due to untreated high blood pressure. I wound up having a heart attack.
It started when the gate had fell on my grandson. My daughter was here at my apartment—she flew in from New Orleans to stay with me a week. She wanted to see my grandson, which is her nephew. We went out there to see him, but his house don’t have no telephone, so we couldn’t call ’em. We had to take a risk, seeing if they gonna be home, and they wasn’t home. Twice they wasn’t home. When it was time for my daughter to go back, she said well when she comes back up here she’ll get a chance to see him.
We was riding to the airport and I’m steady saying to myself something is wrong. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel something is wrong. We riding, and the airport is like an hour and a half away from my house, passin’ up where my grandson lives.
Like thirty minutes later, we in the truck, and I get a phone call. It’s one of my nieces, and she lives in New Orleans. She say “Auntie,” she say, “where you at? I have something to tell y’all.”
When she said that, I knew something was wrong. I had no idea she was gonna say my grandson. I say, “What happened?”
She say, “A gate fell on him, and the people at the apartment say that a fire truck ran into the gate that night, and must have knocked the hinges loose on the gate. The next day he was out there playing, the gate collapse on top of him and smashed him.”
The accident happen around 4:30, and I got there at 7:00. The police, and news, and all that was out there, but they didn’t come and pick him up off the ground until like 10:30 that night. But I stay out there that time until they came and pick him up. He had just made four. It happened this year in January. The gate fell on him when he was out running around playing with his sister. The gate fell on him and smashed him. The gate was like six hundred pounds, and he was only sixty-four pounds, so it smashed him.
The owner of the apartment complex that my grandson and his mom were living at, it was negligence on his maintenance crew. My grandson’s mom is trying to sue the apartment owner, and still waiting to go to court.
I had to go to New Orleans because we decided to bury my grandson beside his father, which is my son. A couple days later, I was home, and I told my daughter ‘Get me some Mylanta,’ because I thought I was having a gas pain in my chest. All day I been drinking on the same one bottle till didn’t have no more left. I realized I had took too much and I still had this pain and the pain was worse. So at night, when I was laying in my bed trying to sleep, that pain woke me up, it was so bad. I had to get up go to the hospital, and when I got there, they put the EKG on me and told me I was having a heart attack. I didn’t know. I just thought it was just bad pains I was having.
That’s when my daughter decided she’d rather stay up here so she can watch me than stay down there. Since I been sick, my daughter moved back up here. She just moved out of my house a week ago, and she in her own apartment.
I think about losing my son before the storm. Coming here, and dealing with that. Then, his son was killed up here in Houston. And then two months later, my father, he was placed in a nursing home in New Orleans and he wanted me to take him out and take care of him. I decided I would do that because I was on sick leave. I wasn’t able to go back to work, so I brought my father to live here, and took care of him for two months. Then he died. He died from heart failure. After that it’s just been a lot of stress on me.
I recently saw the picture of myself when I lost my own son. I was so hurt. I felt angry. I didn’t know who to take it out on, so I kept it to myself. But I was angry—why? Why this have to happen to my grandson? He’s only four. What if I would’ve went and got him earlier? Or, you know, what could I did differently to keep this from happening? It was just all kind of feelings I was goin’ through. Then, you know, I get to work, my co-workers ask me, “Are you alright? I saw what happened on the news,” and this and that. It was hard. It was hard to deal with.
I have this pattern. I start off thinking about my grandson, and I look at his clothes, or his toys. Then I start going want get the pictures out, look at his pictures. Then watching his pictures, his dad’s pictures are there, and my dad’s pictures are there. Then I’m spreading out the depression looking at their two pictures also. It had got too much for me to bear.
I just recently start seeing a psychiatrist here. I wasn’t seeing one the whole time I was here. They had put me back on the medicine that I was taking from New Orleans. I see I still need it. I thought when I moved on with my life, that I can also move on with my condition, and do it on my own. But I see that tryin’ to do it on my own only worsen the problems because I have to realize that I have a sickness. It has to be treated, and I have to be monitored.
I get afraid a lot because Houston’s a new place. I’ve been here two years now, but there’s still a lot to see I haven’t seen. I don’t go out much. When I do go out, I’m mainly going to a doctor, or a store to pick up my medications, or work. I come home, but I get scared a lot because I wonder, what’s going to happen next? If I can’t go back to work, I won’t be able to maintain my life the way I would like to. What am I able to do now if I don’t be able to work? I have to think about all those things and I don’t know what to do. Maybe I should take this time off and just write—like I like to write. Maybe one day someone could help me publish my story. If it did happen I could get some money and be a little bit successful, and be able to take care of myself. Next week is my birthday. The older I get, the more afraid I get because I’m getting more sick. Even after all these years trying to better myself. It’s a struggle.
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