NEED TO KNOW
- Charmaine Neville, a member of one of New Orleans’ most celebrated musical families, was trapped in New Orleans like numerous others in Katrina’s wake in 2005
- She says she could not afford to evacuate the city when warnings were issued ahead of the storm but did her best, in the aftermath, to help her neighbors
- In the 20 years since the deadly storm, Neville has restore her home in the 9th Ward and continues to perform
Charmaine Neville feels ill every time she learns a storm is in the Gulf of Mexico.
“I just panic, the anxiety comes,” Neville says. “It’s never going to go away, because the horrible things that I saw and lived through are something that won’t go away.”
Hurricane Katrina killed 1,392 people. Neville encountered the bodies of some of those victims as she tried to escape her flooded neighborhood after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005.
Neville says she was also raped as she tried to get to higher ground when the levees broke. Her attacker was never caught, she tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview for this week’s issue.
When the warnings were issued, Neville says, she and some of her neighbors, who, like her, did not have the means to evacuate, barricaded themselves in her home in the city’s 9th Ward and prayed.
“I remember a reporter asked me, ‘Well, why didn’t you leave?’ A lot of people could not leave,” she says. “And I don’t know how people don’t understand that if you don’t have money, you can’t go anywhere.”
Neville says she also could not leave because she had neighbors with nowhere to go — people she felt a close connection to and an obligation to help.
“So I did what I had to do, which was to try to help everybody in my neighborhood that couldn’t get out of here,” she says.
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Along with Neville’s dogs and cat, the group tried to wait out the storm. She recalls hearing three explosions, including one from the breach of the Industrial Canal, while she was still on her roof. After that blew off, and as water began to enter her home, Neville says she used her pirogue — a small boat designed to navigate shallow waters and popular in Louisiana — to rescue as many people as she could.
“That’s when we started seeing all of the horrors of bodies,” says the performer, adding that she also saw animals and reptiles that had escaped from a zoo and an aquarium in the floodwater.
The 9th Ward in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
miley N. Pool/Houston Chronicle via Getty
At one point, Neville even commandeered a bus to rescue herself and others from those horrors.
“The police told me I had to say commandeer [is what I did],” she says, laughing. “Just anybody and everybody, whoever it was, if you blew the horn and someone could come out of where they were and get on the bus, whether it was with their dog, their cat, their grandmother, their tuba.”
She still bears the emotional scars of the federal government’s slow response to the hurricane.
“The worst thing after Katrina was everybody came down here in busses, like we were animals in a zoo, to look at us through these bus windows,” Neville says through tears. “And that was very hard.”
Neville, who is a member of one of the city’s most celebrated musical families — her father is Charles Neville and her uncles are Aaron, Art and Cyril Neville — says it was also hard to witness the storm silence New Orleans, although temporarily.
“Katrina just slapped everybody upside their head and said, ‘Stop the music,’ ” she says. “This is a city that always had music.”
In the two decades since the storm devastated her neighborhood, Neville says, she has restored her home. (John Goodman paid for her roof to be replaced, she says.)
But the restoration process was not without challenges and took years to accomplish.
Charmaine Neville performing in 2011.
David Redfern/Redferns/Getty
“Everything was like patchwork,” she says. “You couldn’t do it all at one time because you ran out of money, or the contractor ran off and left you holding the bag and didn’t do the job the way they were supposed to.”
She was scammed by contractors multiple times, she says, which cost her about $40,000 in addition to the tens of thousands of dollars she spent to fix her home. Some of her friends and neighbors sold their own properties at a low cost to investors who then fixed them up and resold them at a higher markup, Neville says.
“There’s still some of us who have lived here since we were kids that have come back and made sure that we’re not going to let our culture die,” she says. “So we’re here. We’re still fighting and, yes, it’s a constant fight every single day — but we’re here to fight until the end.”
Neville has continued doing what she loves: performing, which is what she will be doing at various events to mark the 20th anniversary of Katrina.
“This is my only job,” she says, “playing music, writing music, singing and entertaining people.”
