Before Hurricane Katrina and breaks in the city's levee system brought a great city to its knees, Neville lived on Pauline Street in the city's Ninth Ward.

A singer, Neville is a member of one of New Orleans' great musical families. Her father, Charles Neville, performs with uncles Aaron, Art and Cyril in the Neville Brothers band. She estimates the musicians in her family number well over 100. In New Orleans, she said, every neighborhood and every family has musicians.

Many of the city's musicians were out of town when Katrina hit, Neville said. She, however, had recently returned from a tour.

What's more, she added, she could not afford to leave when residents were told to evacuate. Many others in New Orleans, home to thousands of poor residents, were in the same boat.

"It wasn't that I wanted to ride out the storm, believe me," Neville said. "Two days before the storm hit, I had spent every penny I had saved getting a new roof put on my house. I didn't have any money. I didn't have a car.

"When they said the storm was coming, I barricaded myself in the house and prayed. Many people in my neighborhood stayed because they didn't have resources. We did not stay because we wanted to be looters or martyrs. We stayed because we had to."

On Tuesday, Neville sought shelter at the school across the street from her home. For the next three days, she recalled, the singer waded back and forth in waist-deep water to bring food and drinking water to the growing number of people in the school.

Neville and others tried to get the attention of helicopters from the school's roof, but by Thursday, they'd given up hope of rescue.

"When we realized they weren't going to pick us up, we had to leave," she said. "So we just started walking, in water, with dead bodies, and fish, this big, and alligators, filth, trash. The smell was horrible."

Some desperate flood victims committed suicide, she said. "Because nobody was coming to help them, they were killing themselves. Some people that just went crazy."

At first, Neville thought her group could find refuge at the Superdome or the Convention Center.

"When we got down there, I saw that they couldn't help themselves," she said. "And when we got to Canal Street, we saw that no one was going to be able to help us."

At the French Quarter's French Market, Neville said, the group spotted a city bus that had been commandeered by a young Ninth Ward resident. They joined him and drove from the city in heavy rain, eventually reaching Donaldsonville. There they found food, shelter and fresh clothes at Shekinah Full Gospel Baptist Church.

Using the church's phone, Neville reached a friend, prompting a flurry of phone calls to other friends and relatives and, finally, the singer's friends in Baton Rouge, who soon arrived to bring her to safety.

Just back from a visit to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center on Saturday afternoon, Neville was cut, bruised and a little despondent. Among the horrible things she'd seen last week, she said, was the rape of old women, girls and boys.

"Some people hate themselves, so they hate everybody else. Those people were not true New Orleanians," she said.

But Neville saw heroes, too. "There are many, many heroes that have come out this. People talking about what I did. I didn't do nothing. Everybody did something."

Neville said that she, too, was raped during those chaotic days. "What he took from me was nothing, because he can't take my spirit, he can't take my soul. My soul is New Orleans."

The singer believes brass bands will play in Congo Square again, that her city will rise again.

"It may take us a couple of years, but it's gonna happen. We will not abandon our home. God put his foot down and that's why Louisiana's shaped like a boot. He said good people who have faith in me, who love life, who love good food, who love music, these is the kind of people who need to be here, and that's why we were born there."