Second Line Rescue: Improvised Responses to Katrina and Rita

ANGELA TRAHAN

177 On January 23, 2006, less than five months after Katrina’s landfall, Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston held its first training session. On the first morning of that five-day session, the sixteen trainees paired off and began sharing storm stories. Each person told her or his story to a fellow survivor, then the two changed places as the listener to the first story became the teller of the second. Afterward, the whole group reconvened and each survivor summarized his or her partner’s story for all the others; the group then chose one person to be the project’s first interviewee. Angela Trahan was the person chosen for that role. Fourteen of the first sixteen trainees were New Orleanians. Angela, by contrast, faced Katrina from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, in a presumably indestructible building that stood less than fifty feet from the beach where, on the morning of August 29, 2005, Katrina hit with the full force of its 135-mile-per-hour winds, pushing a twenty-two-foot storm surge. The storm found Angela, her mother, her three children, and her fiancé, Sam, in “lockdown” in the seaside dormitory of a Catholic boys’ school. As Angela explains, the building had withstood the power of Hurricane Camille, the ANGELA TRAHAN “We really did not think that we would make it” 178 Angela Trahan benchmark for destructiveness on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. (Camille was stronger even than Katrina when it hit nearby Gulfport, Mississippi, on August 18, 1969, bearing 180-mile-per-hour winds and twenty-four feet of storm surge.) The drama of Angela’s narrow escape from Katrina’s head-on fury and Sam’s role in saving the lives of his fellow survivors were the obvious reasons that the trainees chose her story as the first to record. Yet, over time, listeners have been equally moved by accounts of Angela’s family’s resourcefulness and resilience in the days following the storm, and by the concluding episodes, in which Angela recounts the kindness of the strangers who aided her family on the course of their long escape to Houston. Angela was interviewed by David Taylor, folklife specialist for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, as her fellow trainees looked on. I was born on May 20, 1977, in St. Louis, Missouri. We lived there until I was about a year and a half, and we moved from St. Louis here to Houston, with my mom, my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles. My grandfather was in the air force, and he got re-stationed here in Houston because he’s from Houston, so he came back home. Well, my grandfather passed away and my grandmother wanted to be back home in Mississippi. She was born there in Bay St. Louis. And her father was not doing very well healthwise, so she moved back home to take care of her father. I don’t think she wanted to be here in this big city, without my grandfather, anymore. She felt more comfortable being back home, and in her hometown, with her family. [She] and my oldest uncle went first. And then my aunt and her family went, and my mom Angela Trahan, her husband, Sam, and their three children, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, 2007. Photo by Dallas McNamara. Angela Trahan 179 and myself and another uncle were the only ones here. So after everybody else was gone—our immediate family—we started to miss them. My mom decided to move back, my mom and my uncle. I think she was missing her mommy. So she moved back to Mississippi to be closer to Mom. I actually used to go [to Bay St. Louis during] spring break and summer to spend time with my grandmother and her parents before they both passed. So, I was familiar with Mississippi also. [Bay St. Louis] was a really nice town. Very big on sports, an athletic town really. They supported the kids in football, basketball, baseball. They had a lot of city leagues as well as the school leagues. And just a friendly town. You know, everybody knew everybody. If you didn’t know them, you were related to them, or you went to school with them, or your kids played together, you went to the same church and store. I mean you cannot get, literally, five minutes down the road without waving at somebody...