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.
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.
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.
This year’s theme is presented both in English (“Royal Gardens”) and in Latin (“Horti Regis”), emphasizing the timeless significance of gardens. The desire to be surrounded by beauty is as old as mankind itself. In every time and culture artists have arranged natural elements into gardens to please all of the senses. Emperors and Kings assured that their gardens were planned with as much care as their castles, and some of these gardens were counted among the wonders of the world. The 2016 Rex Procession takes us to splendid gardens known only from ancient illustrations and descriptions, and to others still providing beautiful sights to those who visit them. In the best tradition of Rex artistic design, watch for a parade filled with colorful flowers, historic figures, and colorful costumes.
Oh my favorite parade is coming up and although I want some of you to come to it, I don’t want all of you to try to make it. don’t take it personally.
Cuz one of the best things about the walking parades is their scale. That scale allows for interaction with its members and allows their sly humor and satirical displays to be front and center. The “super”krewes -super only in size to me-are flashy, loud and often just too much. Since almost all of them have been moved to the Uptown route (except that one that is seriously loud and often delayed for hours and full of frat attitude along the viewer lines; it does have good neighborhood parties though) the work to get a good spot is difficult. In contrast, I remember riding my bike to work years ago on the non-parade side of Canal and veering over to grab some moonpies tossed from the Krewe of Carrollton (or was it another parade? who gave out moonpies?) and how the folks on the float cheered my great catch.
Okay, back to present day… Many of my pals are in ‘titR and so that is how I found it in its first year, way up there in the 9th ward… I remember laughing at the tiny floats and having time to walk along in the dark and really check out the work done. I have made it to this parade every year, except for the year I was out of town for work- almost did that again this year, but decided to postpone that trip partly to be in person.
The nod to the history of New Orleans schoolchildren making shoebox floats is a lesser known part of the embedded history of this krewe and also makes it special. Additionally, the krewe is maxed at a certain number of floats and so it has reduced the possibility of one serious issue in parades: thematic drift. This happens when anyone is allowed to join a parade, adding a never ending succession of borrowed floats and masks or costumes or throw design not being done well.
I’ll see if I can find a pic of my previous years loot; I keep the best in a tiny little display which includes tiny coconuts, tiny beads, tiny books (Hail Caesar Meadows!), tiny spears, tiny stickers, tiny shoes, well you get the point.
So, don’t crowd me and don’t expect massive throws. I’ll see you by the tiny ladders and tiny viewer parties (yes they do exist) and I’ll expect a tiny wave.
2016 floats:
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1
French Quarter block by block 
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