Harold Toussaint

Abstract

Although Harold Toussaint feels most at home in France, he is quick to say that he has never forgotten his time in the Upper Ninth Ward, where his family moved when he was six. A self-taught, free-spirited sommelier who has won contests in Paris, San Francisco, and Boston, Harold took a sabbatical from his craft when he returned to New Orleans in 2000 and became involved in his church. Deacon Harold, as he is known, takes pride in his pre-Katrina role as a caregiver to the oldest generation and a mentor to the young people of his church and community. He witnessed the first five days of Katrina and its aftermath from Bayou St. John near City Park. Friday and Saturday he spent at the Louis Armstrong International Airport for twenty hours, and until February 2006, he stayed at a Howard Johnson hotel in Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta, where at least eighty-seven other Katrina evacuees were housed.

A short, slender, and impeccably groomed man, Harold was wearing perfectly creased dress pants and a short, beige, leather jacket with a hand-knit, striped, wool scarf stylishly draped around his neck on the day of his first interview in the lobby of the Howard Johnson on January 6, 2006.¹ He carried himself with aristocratic grace.

Harold is representative of the New Orleans’ “gumbo”: the unique mixture of racial and ethnic groups, languages, and history. Harold’s narrative sheds light on the complicated reasons intelligent people of all classes decided to weather Katrina in the city and the complexities of race relations during and after the storm. Evidence of the spiritual wounds inflicted by a military presence more preoccupied with crowd control, it seemed from Harold’s vantage point, than rescue, haunt this otherwise upbeat account. Acts of humanitarianism, generosity, compassion, and resourcefulness, however, ground this testimony from start to finish.