Chris Wiltz

Chris Wiltz

with Charles Henry Rowell

ROWELL: Did you evacuate from New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina? What did you see after the hurricane? What were your first reactions?

WILTZ: I'll start with the fact that our house did not flood. But we lost the hundred-year-old slate roof that was on it. We knew we were going to lose that. Joe, my husband, had gone up into the attic and tarped the entire inside of it. This is what we did during the storm, because we didn't leave. He had a staple gun and his tarps. It was really ingenious the way he had the water feeding back out through the eves and also into an old cistern that had been up there since the house was built. So we had no water damage in the house even though the roof was ruined.

After what had happened here in the city, we felt so lucky when we got back that we were able to live in our house, that our neighborhood was intact, that most of the people who lived here were back or coming back. We didn't suffer the kind of devastation that you saw yesterday. But by the time we returned, we knew a lot of people had died. During the first six weeks, we didn't see any news at all, because we were staying out in New Iberia.

The writer James Lee Burke—Jim's a good friend of ours—called us the weekend of the hurricane and said, "What are ya'll doing?" We said, "We're staying." He said, "Are you insane?" Joe said, "No. No, we're going to be fine." Joe works in the offshore communications field. He's very much in tune to the weather. He did not think this hurricane would hurt us, and he was absolutely right. We just breezed through the hurricane—no problem. Then, as we were driving around checking on the houses of friends who had evacuated, we saw the water coming. Then we listened to the radio, and that's when we knew we had to get out. Jim had given us the directions to his house in New Iberia. He had no cable hooked up—he was in Montana—and we just let it go. We were so busy. Don't ask me what we did. I was on the phone eight to ten hours a day, trying to get things straightened out. Joe was working something like twenty hours a day. Anyway, we didn't see any of the horrible devastation until we got the cable hooked up and we started watching CNN. All I can say is I am really glad to be alive. I am really glad. [Tearfully] I am so glad.

I know some people who had the worst. One woman has the absolute worst hurricane story I ever heard. I don't know how she survived it. She's from St. Bernard Parish. She was one of the people I wrote about in a biography of a woman named Norma Wallace called The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld. This woman had been a prostitute in Norma Wallace's house. Norma had called her the worst hooker in the world because she just wasn't any good at it and she finally just had to let her answer the phones.

She's one of the best people I've ever met in my life. She has a son who has cerebral palsy, and he is going to be forty years old in October. Most people as crippled as he is with cerebral palsy die by the time they're fourteen. She has taken incredibly good care of him. At the time of the storm, her husband was ill. They got up in the wee hours of the morning, after the levees broke. She said when she...