Survivor to Survivor: Katrina Stories from Houston: Recording Katrina: The Survivor Duet

Katrina stories were being told by those in its path before the storm hit and retold amongst survivors long before rescuers arrived. In New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward on the eve of the hurricane, neighbors congregated in bars to verbalize a plot of betrayal: the rich and powerful would once more dynamite the levees and flood their homes as during past emergencies. And after the storm, as water filled the city's streets and topped its houses, those who fled to the high ground of the overpasses introduced themselves with stories: "We just got together, walking up and down the bridge, you meet this person, you hear a story, you meet that person, you hear a story," Henry Armstrong told Nicole Eugene in the interview that follows.

The directors of the Surviving Katrina and Rita Project are convinced that no storm stories are more important, more compelling, or more true than those shared among survivors, and for this reason we have focused our training on strategies aimed at cutting through the red tape of release forms in order to convey the survivor interviewer back to a place where she has already been: listening to the story of someone who is important to her, in a situation of trust and intimacy, as if across her own kitchen table. Many complex difficulties stand in the way of this simple goal; a full description of the training sessions is laid out in the article "Storms of Memory" at the end of this section. For now, suffice it to say that the survivor interviewers are urged to ask briefly and listen deeply. The thrust of all our efforts has been to give the storyteller sovereignty over the story and to put that story before the public in a way that reflects the teller faithfully. If the interview succeeds, in the great majority of cases it is because the interviewer is a largely silent partner.

But the silence of the interviewer is anything but passive. The listener forms an active bond with the teller. To give an idea of the strength of that bond, to demonstrate that every interview is in fact two stories, and to let the untold story of the interviewer surface, the pages that follow feature one of some 300 "duets" created to date in the course of our project. Nicole Eugene, the survivor-interviewer, introduces herself, tells part of her ow nstorm story, talks about her experiences with the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston Project, and then introduces one of the interviews that she has conducted. In her introduction she speaks about the special qualities of the narrator and the aspects of the story that made this particular interview compelling to her. We hope that by prefacing the interview with the otherwise hidden reflections of the interviewer we will be able to convey to readers a sense of the special relationships that form between those who share storm stories.¹

Nicole Eugene, though born in New Orleans, has lived most of her life outside of Louisiana; she had just moved back to New Orleans to explore her roots when Katrina forced her to evacuate to Houston. Nicole was enrolled at Bowling Green (Ohio) State University when she began working with the survivor program, and she has since completed her M.A. thesis for Bowling Green's American Cultural Studies Program.

Nicole's "duet" is, properly speaking, a trio, because the main narrator, Henry Armstrong, insisted on having his mother present for the session. Although Dorothy Griffin speaks few words in the course of the interview, she exerts a telling presence throughout, for she was the focus of Henry's concern and the source of much of his strength during their days trapped together on a New Orleans bridge and their time in the Superdome. The obvious power of Henry's words (even when reduced to writing) has been a major factor in influencing Nicole to undertake to write a play based on the accounts of Henry and other Katrina survivors who weathered the deluge on the bridges of New Orleans.