Like other New Orleans natives, Allen Toussaint was determine to ride out Katrina, as he had so many other storms in his life.
"I thought I'd be able to stick it out," he told the Sun. "So the Sunday before, I went and checked into the Astor Crowne Plaza on Canal St., on the fourth floor. And even a day or two after the hurricane, even though there was a lot of wind damage, the water hadn't begun to rise. But when that happened, I knew then that I wouldn't be going back home, and it wouldn't be business as usual. So I had to find a way out of town and managed to do so, in a roundabout way."
Toussaint ended up wading through about a foot of water out the back of his hotel in the French Quarter, which was largely spared, and buying a ticket for a bus bound for Texas that never came after a five-hour wait.
"I saw many acts of kindness," he remarked, without a trace of anger about the situation. "I saw people helping each other who looked like they would have never spoken to each other before. I saw a real rugged, thuggish looking guy helping a little old lady get in and out of her wheelchair. I saw a lady braiding a little girl's hair and this was across racial lines and all. And I found that a most interesting evening."
Eventually, Toussaint was offered a lift by a man driving a school bus to Baton Rouge, where he spent the night at the airport before flying to New York City at the invitation of his business partner.
So when will Toussaint finally return to The Big Easy?
"I like the word 'soon,' " he said. "My neighbourhood is still sort of sleeping, you might say. There are trailers on all the lawns, meaning people have come back in and moved into those trailers. They go into their houses daily and try to do what they can to fix them up and hire carpenters whenever they can get them. There's not enough to go around to rapidly rebuild something that took a couple of hundred years. So people have to get the workers when they can. So it's slowly, but surely coming."
