Tag Archives: New Orleans

by

Dear Indywood: Listen, change, repeat

IMG_0739

mailed April 15

Dear Indywood,

Enclosed find my rewards returned for backing your project on Kickstarter. I also ask that you remove my name from your list of supporters. The idea of a downtown movie house was very appealing to me when I read your request for support as the clock was ticking down on your campaign and so I backed it. I was pleased by your enthusiasm for the idea and for your location. However, I’d like to register my displeasure with your recent actions by returning my rewards and withdrawing my visible support.

When I read about the robbery at your shop, I was sorry and sad for your troubles but assumed that your impulse would be to reach out to the neighborhood to help construct a community that could look out for each other and one that might also begin to consider the effect that so much concentrated development is having on a previously diverse and vibrant street. That maybe the best response you could have to random violence being visited on your place of business would be to assume it was happening to others and to knock on doors and to offer some help to the neighborhoods on both sides of St. Claude.

Instead, I was directed to posts and vlogs authored by the Indywood team and found your newfound shock about street lights near your place being out and your statements about installing buzzers and “lots and lots of lights, ignoring the neighbor/HDLC” (sic) agreements and lofty talk of being on the edge of gentrification (I hear that it had originally been written as on the “forefront of gentrification” please tell me you thought you were joking with that).

I am very sorry that you had this happen to you, but to act as if it only happens to you is the first sign of privilege. The second is the immediate talk about securing property with things that will separate you physically and socially from your neighbors. The third is to advertise that St. Claude is not safe as if this crime has made it so, rather than the already existing and growing divide of richer and poorer that your (our) investment has contributed to it being ever more hardened into long-term reality. The fourth is the shock and hurt over you seem to have in being called out on it via social media.

Let me be frank: like you, I gain from white privilege. Everywhere I go in America, I am welcome and can reasonably assume I will not be randomly stopped for driving or walking anywhere simply because I am white. I can walk into any employment situation and at least get a fair(ish, I am a woman after all) screening based on my actual credentials. I can dream of owning a house in any parish if I so desire. I was afforded a pretty good free education that suggests I can operate behind a desk or even manage others. It has taken me many years to truly understand how those and many other benefits are not evenly offered to everyone.

I live here in New Orleans partly because my culture is not the dominant culture, or at least it wasn’t when I moved here over 30 years ago from an entirely white suburb of a shrinking Midwestern city. That point is very important; what I mean is that I was able to see my unequal position as a white person in terms of the continuing colonial imperialism that I profit from but also to have the chance to live here at a time (well at the waning end it seems) when the African-American community still had real prominence in government and in the culture. I had the luck to work and live in a majority African-American U.S. city during a time when it hosted a true renaissance in music, dance, photography, organizing among many other areas that brought the adoration of the world to us. And in lieu of blue, pink and white-collared white people being around to teach me, I learned from those people of color who were still here. I went to St. Claude Avenue to talk with repairmen who knew everything about the machines brought to them. I had all African-American teachers and principals at my high school. At every workplace, I knew to ask to be trained by those matronly ladies who work hard in every city; the thing is by my time here, they were almost all women of color.

I must share that I was surprised by the grace and the lack of recrimination my neighbors had when talking with me, so very often willing to meet me more than halfway and to patiently show me how my unfair edge had made the world seem a certain way when in fact it was actually not that way at all.

So, we muddled through for a few decades, sometimes getting closer to each other and sometimes further from each other. And then, as we say, Katrina happened.

The destruction of the physical space was hard but the ongoing destruction of that enduring culture was and is worse.

The number of longtime residents who cannot return is enough to populate a medium city, with almost all of them African-Americans.

The neighborhoods that they had held together through the generations of segregation and separated levels of economic opportunity were then either ignored or sold off.

Suddenly, it seemed we were moving back to the time when people of color had to offer white people an explanation for being pissed off at inequities, at hearing daily language that is woefully ignorant. The difference is that now it is not said overtly in terms of color but rather, in code words of class and opportunity as if everyone was being offered the same.

And so if it needs to be said to you, I’ll say it: it is not the same. The opportunities are not equal. They have never been but over the last few years, the astonishing blitheness of the easy takeover of every cultural treasure long created through community and artistic expression is overwhelming. The neighborhoods being transformed into versions of how whites (newly arrived mostly, but to be fair, not always) want to see New Orleans, all done with ironic detachment is painful.

So your hard work to create your thing on St. Claude is real and you should be respected for that, but it is not fair. The opportunity to get that liberal arts education and to be “white kids from Colorado” who can pick up and move to a city and have the skills and connections to open businesses is not because you have run the same course as your 7th ward neighbor and then beat him to it fair and square.

The crime that happened to you did not just happen to you. The crime in our city is overwhelmingly directed at people of color and includes some from authority figures too, the type of crime which white people largely get to avoid.

The idea you had is great but it now feels a little like you see it as a playhouse for you and your friends ambitions and less like a community place (think about it: once you get that buzzer, what would happen when a couple of African-American kids used it at 8 o’clock at night?) This is why I cannot support Indywood at all until some real change happens.

Why I wrote this tiresome long letter is because I want you to have that same opportunity I had when I came here so many years ago: to truly learn from this place and to change. I’ll still hope for you to be successful, but I’ll more fervently hope that you understand how that is made possible and that you’ll do your best when it happens to lift every boat and not just lock yours nice and tight.

I wish you both good luck. More recent news make it seem as if you are taking the lessons to be learned more seriously than before realizing that you, like all of us, have some prejudices to unlearn. If that is the case, I applaud it.

Here is the same idea but said clearly here by local activist Kenny Francis: If you’re thinking about an issue and your identity is not the one that is being threatened or harmed, your role should be to listen, to understand the privilege you have in not being affected by that issue, and to listen to those who are and what they are saying they need. That’s how you be an effective ally, that’s how you bridge divides.

Or, we can just listen to bell hooks:

15936618_10154069681476174_4981054074990207887_o.jpg

by

The Woman Named Leah (Spoiler: you want to buy some lucky beads?)

This is a story about her passing in 2011, but i wanted to record on this blog the story of The Bead Lady’s whereabouts. She was always drawn to my mother and would stop and tell her long stories as my mother answered mildly,” oh really?” without knowing what she was talking about. I have always appreciated my mother’s tact with street people.

In 2007 Yitzchak Shpock arrived at Louis Armstrong Airport looking for his sister, Leah, who had disappeared over 40 years earlier….
One kind women, Martha Owens, took a real interest in helping Yitzchak track down his sister. It turns out that Leah was a New Orleans street personality well known as “the bead lady” for over three decades. Though she had not been seen on the streets for ten years, many people remembered her. Where was she now? It was like searching for a needle in a haystack.

With the dedicated help of Julie Powers of the Coroner’s office, who was helping to locate people that were missing since Katrina, the search began in earnest. Finally, using a lead from the Social Security Admin, Leah was located at the East Louisiana State Hospital – a state psychiatric ward in Jackson, LA.

Source: The Woman Named Leah

by

French Market St. Joseph’s Day Altar activities

On Saturday (March 19), visitors to the French Market on North Peters Street in the French Quarter can stop by a St. Joseph’s Altar and learn more about the feast day and tradition. Along with viewing the altar, visitors can learn about New Orleans Sicilian heritage, listen to music and watch performances.

Here is a lineup of the day’s events:

    • 10:30 a.m. – Rosanna Giacona, a Beauregard-Keyes Historic House tour guide, will talk about her Sicilian heritage, and the Sicilian heritage of New Orleans.
    • 11-12:15 p.m. – Oompah D’Italia will feature Julie Council playing traditional Italian music.
    • 12:30 p.m. – During, “St. Joseph’s Day Altars – Then and Now,” attendees can listen to Liz Williams director of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum talk about the history of the altars.

N.O. St. Joseph Day altars pop up in the oddest places

N.O. St. Joseph Day altars pop up in the oddest places

On March 19, the faithful and the curious go on pilgrimages, visiting altars at homes, churches and Catholic schools. Some of those pilgrimages, however, will bring folks to decidedly nontraditional sites.

  • 1 p.m. – “Sicilian Roots at the French Market,” will feature a conversation with the Portera Sisters, who built the markets altar.
  • 2-3:30 p.m. – Palermo Import/Export Band will perform.
  • 3-3:30 p.m. – The Muff-a-Lottas will perform.
Image by

Molly’s At the Market 2016 Parade

12804738_10153756694010865_7833584989432312321_n.jpg

by

Oldest building, newest activity for this Quarterite

On a bright and lively Friday, I headed down to Nine Roses for lunch in Exchange Alley  to catch up with my MidCity pal and meet her visiting NY friends. After a delicious Vietnamese lunch (I recommend the Cheagan = Cheating Vegan Pho and the coffee Bubble Tea),  we then took a mosey around the Quarter.  We ended up doing an activity that I have never done over my 35 + years here: going into the Old Ursuline Convent Museum which, as anyone knows who spends more than a day here, is the oldest existing building in the city and actually predates any in the entire Mississippi Valley. According to the National Parks Service, “This is the finest surviving example of French Colonial public architecture in the country, Louis XV in style, formal and symmetrical, with restrained ornament. It was constructed between 1748 and 1752 for nuns whose mission was to nurse the poor and teach young girls.” The Ursuline Nuns staffed the first hospital in the vast Louisiana Territory that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, and from the Appalachians to the Rocky Mountains.  In this same facility were established the first convent in what is now the territory of the United States, the first day nursery, the first orphanage, and the first institution of Catholic charities.

LOts of details on the relationship of Our Lady of Prompt Succor to New Orleans here.
The lovely St. Mary’s attached to the convent
The St. Lazarus room.
Henriette Delille
Father Seelos
ironwork on the bell structure in the garden
ironwork detail in the convent

 

The docents are dedicated, full of fascinating details and should be commended for their  pleasant natures, considering how many times a day they say the same thing.

You enter into the tiny gift shop where you buy tickets and hear about Our Lady of Prompt Succor, patroness of New Orleans, who every good New Orleanian knows, protects us from bad winds of hurricanes and more.

After purchasing tickets (thanks to our generous visitors) you are free to head into the courtyard, then into the main building. The docent there directs you to the tour of the church to your left, which was built in the 1840s on the site of the original Ursuline chapel as the Archbishops Chapel.  That turn of events was possible because of the 1820s move of  the Ursulines up to what is now known as Jefferson Avenue where they remain today (whenever I hear someone talking about that, I hear The Jefferson’s television show theme “Movin On Up”). A lovely church, only open for special events and musical concerts such as during the French Quarter Fest. Of course, we all notice the statue of the saint with a skull in her hand and ask the docent about it who is used to the question: it is Saint Rosalia of Palermo, made for St. Mary’s during the time when it served as the Italian community’s church. The story below taken from Wikipedia was  told to us in almost exactly the same words by the docent, EXCEPT for the last sentence:

Rosalia was born of a Norman noble family that claimed descent from Charlemagne. Devoutly religious, she retired to live as a hermit in a cave on Mount Pellegrino, where she died alone in 1166. Tradition says that she was led to the cave by two angels. On the cave wall she wrote “I, Rosalia, daughter of Sinibald, Lord of Roses, and Quisquina, have taken the resolution to live in this cave for the love of my Lord, Jesus Christ.” The feast of Saint Rosalia is on September 4th. [1]In 1624, a plague beset Palermo. During this hardship Saint Rosalia appeared first to a sick woman, then to a hunter, to whom she indicated where her remains were to be found. She ordered him to bring her bones to Palermo and have them carried in procession through the city.

The hunter climbed the mountain and found her bones in the cave as described. He did what she had asked in the apparition. After her remains were carried around the city three times, the plague ceased. After this Saint Rosalia was venerated as the patron saint of Palermo, and a sanctuary was built in the cave where her remains were discovered.[2] 

Upon examination by a renowned geologist and palaeontologist, William Buckland, the bones of St Rosalia were thought to be those of a goat.[3]

We see the National St. Lazarus order shrine in the hallway and the docent tells us a great “only in New Orleans” story: the building had termites and needed money to treat. The society of St. Lazarus was given this hallway in 1980 to build a permanent shrine in return for their financial assistance and in regard for their respected order which is over a thousand years old; you may know it as the Knights Templar, or as the Knights of the Crusades. The docent tells us that the order gathers at  the shrine every October.

The next area of the museum takes you through the history of the order in New Orleans, which is worth spending some time reading, including Thomas Jefferson’s agreement as to the order’s rights to be held separate from civil authority. His letter was written as a response to their request for autonomy at the time of the American takeover of New Orleans during the Louisiana Purchase:

To the Soeur Therese de St. Xavier farjon Superior, and the Nuns of the order of St. Ursula at New Orleans

I have recieved, holy sisters, the letter you have written me wherein you express anxiety for the property vested in your institution by the former governments of Louisiana. the principles of the constitution and government of the United states are a sure guarantee to you that it will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your institution will be permitted to govern itself according to it’s own voluntary rules, without interference from the civil authority. whatever diversity of shade may appear in the religious opinions of our fellow citizens, the charitable objects of your institution cannot be indifferent to any; and it’s furtherance of the wholesome purposes of society, by training up it’s younger members in the way they should go, cannot fail to ensure it the patronage of the government it is under. be assured it will meet all the protection which my office can give it.

I salute you, holy sisters, with friendship & respect.

Th: Jefferson

After that room, take a minute to view the graceful clock in the hall, still with its the original clock face  that was brought with the nuns when they first arrived in New Orleans in the 1720s. That clock later survived the Galveston hurricane which killed those nuns who had left the New Orleans area to set up an order there. The clock was returned to New Orleans and still strikes every 15 minutes (or so).

Then, check out some history of Catholic New Orleans in the other rooms, and finally take some time in the orderly back garden. The temporary exhibit there now is of six people who spent time here who are either saints or on their way to sainthood (“Ordinary People, Extraordinary Gifts: The Road To Sainthood”). The statues are very pleasing  and are set at human height to allow for close inspection. (After reading a bit online  about Cornelia Peacock Connelly, I can see why she deserved to be venerated by the church!)

The last welcome sight was of the rubber tree that I had grown to enjoy for many years as a passerby, and used to hang heavily over the convent wall. After a hard freeze a few years back (an unlikely occurrence in the city but it does happen) the rubber tree had disappeared from view. I had hoped that it had not been taken out entirely and had kept my eye out for its return on top of that wall for some years- how cheery to note  from an inside vantage point that it is just about ready to be seen by the outside world again.

 

 

by

Solnit on lead and lies

Rebecca Solnit's photo.
Rebecca Solnit

Flint makes us think about lead poisoning. Beyonce about New Orleans history.

A few years ago I made a map about both of them called Lead and Lies (in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas; the shading here indicates lead concentrations; the texts overlaid are a lineage of lies in NOLA):

We pretend truth is a solid continent, but untruth is marshy territory. There are myths and legends—about the birth of jazz, for example, which the great jazz scholar Bruce Raeburn points out did not emerge neatly out of Storyville, New Orleans’s brothel district, as people say it did. There are harmless lies, about whether my roux is as good as your grandmother’s; and there are noble lies—“we saw no fugitives pass this way”—and truths told by other means. New Orleans’s most famous jazzman, Louis Armstrong, changed his birthday to the Fourth of July 1900, to make his identity and that of his country somehow consonant—and they are, even though he was born August 4, 1901. More than a hundred years later, poor New Orleanians who said the levees had been dynamited during Hurricane Katrina were wrong in fact but right in that the callous disregard and institutional failure that lay behind some of the 2005 catastrophe had real kinship with the 1927 flood, when levees were indeed dynamited by the powerful.

There are harmful lies, too: both the ambient lies, about racial inferiority or the causes of the Civil War, and particular lies in particular mouths. New Orleans always had scoundrels and flamboyant figures who invented themselves—one of the privileges newcomers always claimed in the New World—and early on, it was populated by smugglers, pirates, renegade slaves, native people lying low, and many people marrying, making love, and creating a Creole population across color lines. Law didn’t always get much respect from these people, and there are times when lying to power is admirable.

When power tells lies to the people, though, it’s another thing altogether. New Orleans and Louisiana have been much afflicted with greedy and dishonest politicians who created a culture of corruption and cronyism (and those who take bribes are lying to the public they swore to serve). Sometimes the level of corruption is staggering: in 1991 the main choices for Louisiana governor were a Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard spreading racial lies and a longtime politician whose supporters used the slogan “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.” The crook won and later did ten years in prison for racketeering, mail fraud, and money laundering.

That slavery was generally conducted in a humane or civilized manner was another lie, one that women abolitionists sometimes addressed directly by speaking of the sexual abuse of enslaved women by plantation men, to which wives were required to turn a blind eye. (Conservatives sometimes still produce textbooks in which slavery is benign paternalism.) In antebellum New Orleans, the double life of a wealthy man with a white wife and a placage arrangement with a free woman of color had no equivalent for women. The thriving brothel district of Storyville was another zone through which men moved freely without surrendering their status (and contemporary conservative sex scandals echo that double standard). Women’s lives generally had no such latitude for doubling, though middle class white women did go out masked during carnival to ballrooms they might otherwise not enter. But this is only to say that there are liars and there are the lied-to, and the latter didn’t always believe what they heard, but often they were obliged to pretend that a lie was a truth.

Sometimes they didn’t and testified with consequences—more than once they died for telling the truth, as did Kim Marie Groves, who bore witness to police brutality and died for it. She left three orphans; the hired hitman also left behind three children when he went to prison without chance of parole. New Orleans has had for decades the most corrupt and incompetent police department in the country, one with absurdly low rates of capturing murderers or preventing violence and a terrifyingly high rate of police homicide, framed individuals, and false testimony. Several policemen went to jail for those crimes post-Katrina, and the New Orleans police department was taken over by the federal government in 2012 for its ongoing failure to protect and serve its city.

New Orleans also registers unusually high levels of lead, both from pre-1978 paint and pre-1986 leaded gasoline, though the amounts of lead are not evenly distributed. Lead is a heavy, malleable metal, easily made into objects and mixed with other substances. For much of the twentieth century, it was added to gasoline, to make the gasoline burn better and to reduce wear and tear on engines, and to paint of many types, to increase its durability and moisture-resistance and enhance its color. The far-away scientists who were asked to study lead were themselves induced to lie about the dangers lead posed, and so for half a century vast quantities were added to gasoline and circulated in air, food, and environment. That lies have a lasting legacy is as real as the contaminated soils of the central city, more than a quarter century after the phase-out of the heavy metal.

Lead is a versatile but vicious substance. It accumulates slowly and subtly, rarely detected until the dose is damaging—though children in New Orleans are routinely tested now, when their parents are motivated and financially equipped to do so. When ingested or absorbed, lead is extremely damaging to children’s nervous systems and can have profound emotional and intellectual consequences. Some, including Tulane University professor Howard Mielke, whose lead map is reproduced here, see a correlation between high lead levels and high crime levels in New Orleans.

The substance is a calcium analog—that is, lead impersonates calcium, lying to the body about what it is and insinuating itself into places where benign calcium belongs. Like a lie in words, it gets its victim to accept harm by disguising it. This is what lead and lies have in common: they are destroyers that remain unseen and are more destructive because of their invisibility.