Aldon E. Cotton

Abstract

Born in 1968, Aldon E. Cotton is the youngest of six boys raised in Back of Town by church-going parents who worked around the clock to provide for their family. As a child Aldon showed talent for music, determination, spirituality, reasoning ability, and sociability. These were already clearly visible in Aldon before the first of many “nobody-but-Jesus” moments at the age of fourteen, when a train accident changed his way of doing some things. At the age of twenty-two, he began pastoring at the only church he has ever known, Jerusalem Baptist Church (Jerusalem) in Central City. Although in ways he is an example of upward mobility, rising from his grandparents’plantation shack in Vacherie to a middle-class home on Lake Carmel with his wife and three children, he refuses to prioritize material values.

After doing everything possible to prepare his congregation of 160 members for the evacuation from the city, including Mapquest instructions and emergency phone numbers, he caravanned along with thirty church and family members to Greenville, Mississippi, on August 28, 2005.

This interview was conducted on February 14, 2008 in Luling, Louisiana, the site of Aldon’s temporary home and gateway to New Orleans, the city of his calling The small home was comfortable, pleasant, and unostentatious. Aldon was wearing a beige, silk turtleneck sweater. A spellbinding storyteller, Aldons contagious smile, mellifluous voice, and hearty laugh animated his stories.

His narrative describes the experience of growing up in Back of Town, marked by the central landmarks of the Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) and the Orleans Parish courthouse at Tulane and Broad. Unswervingly upbeat, Aldon refuses to give depression a toehold in his psyche. Determined from day one ofKatrina to return home, Aldon began working with coalitions of pastors and churches to facilitate the rebuilding process. Clearly articulated in his testimony is his vision of the role black churches can play in shaping the future of endangered neighborhoods.