Second Line Rescue: Improvised Responses to Katrina and Rita

VINCENT TROTTER

205 Vincent Trotter was born in New Orleans’s Charity Hospital in September 1973. Though he has nine half-siblings, he was the only child between his father, who held a variety of jobs, and his mother, a truck driver. He spent his childhood in the Mid-City and Uptown neighborhoods of New Orleans, before moving across the Mississippi River to Algiers. Like Sidney Harris (the narrator of the previous interview), Vincent became a deputy sheriff for the Orleans Parish Prison, and he was on duty on Sunday, August 28, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina closed in on the city. Vincent’s prison narrative differs remarkably from Sidney’s. The two run parallel in presenting scenes of remarkable deprivation and hardship, but Vincent emphasizes the extreme cruelty of the elements rather than the dangers posed by the inmates that appear prominently in Sidney’s story. And where Sidney finds strength and redemption in caring for his nephew, Vincent finds a saving grace in small acts of kindness exchanged between guards and prisoners. The guards and the inmates reach a status of equality that underlines their common humanity. VINCENT TROTTER “All I knew was, I had to get home” 206 Vincent Trotter When recorded, Vincent was a trainee in the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston project. On March 20, 2006, the first day of his training, each of the survivors shared his or her storm story with a fellow trainee. His co-worker Dione Morgan expressed the sentiment of the group at large in saying, “I’m in awe of Vincent’s story. ” Thus Vincent was chosen to narrate the first recorded story before the entire group. Looking back, I believe that the power of Vincent’s narrative lies in its unlikely combination of horrific conditions with tiny acts of goodness, mortal danger with comic relief, all conveyed eloquently and calmly by an unassuming, self-described “man of few words. ” David Taylor, folklife specialist of the American Folklife Center, was the interviewer. When I was in elementary school, believe it or not, I wanted to be a chemist. My mom bought me my first microscope. Well, actually she bought me a microscope because she refused to buy me a chemistry set. She didn’t want me blowing up things around the house. But, you know, being a kid—she bought me that microscope. I thought of everything under the sun that I could put up under that microscope to look at. So I had a really interesting childhood, you know; I would go out to the Vincent Trotter, 2008, at the Broad Street overpass, New Orleans. Three years earlier, Vincent was one of a handful of Orleans Parish Prison deputies guarding hundreds of inmates trapped on the overpass in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Dallas McNamara. Vincent Trotter 207 country sometimes and we’d think of things to blow up. We’d put gasoline and kerosene and oil in a jar and pitch rocks at it to see if it was going to explode. But, we were kids, you know. As I got older, I was in my senior year of high school, had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do because, actually, I had planned to join the military. My dad was in the army. So I wanted to join the army, be a soldier like my dad, but I loved being in the band. I knew the military had a band, so that’s what I wanted to do. I went down to the recruiter’s office and they asked about my medical history and once I told them, you know, my medical condition, they told me I couldn’t join the military because if something happened to me, they would have to take care of me for the rest of my life. And I was like, “Okay,” but I still wasn’t accepting that answer because after I left the army recruiter’s office, I go over to the marine recruiter’s office. Six months after that, after the marine recruiters told me no, I go over to the air force base. I’m really trying to get into the military because it is all I knew I wanted to do. Because I hadn’t considered going to college, you know, because I didn’t know what I wanted to be. All I knew is I liked playing...