Chris Bickford

The photo above was taken at a funeral procession for Lawrence Robert, a longtime member of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, outside the Zulu club house on Broad Street in Mid-City.   Robert died a few days before Mardi Gras.  He was 76 years old.   He reigned as King Zulu in the year of 1997, riding at the head of the famous Zulu Mardi Gras parade, placing him in a lineage that includes the great Louis Armstrong, who reigned in 1949 and was featured in Time Magazine in full Zulu regalia.

“He lived a good full life,” said a friend of Robert’s after the hearse and limos headed for the cemetery.  “But that ain’t what I’m gonna be sayin’ when I get to that age.  I’ll be like, can I get 35 years or so more?”

The Zulus are one of the oldest and most respected Social Aid and Pleasure clubs in the city.  Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs are the modern descendants of what were known as “Benevolent Societies” in the nineteenth century.  Benevolent Societies were organizations of neighborhood groups that would pool their resources to help out other members in the community who were in financial or medical need, since blacks were unable to purchase insurance in those times.  The most famous legacy of the Societies is the “Jazz Funeral”, which gave birth to the tradition of the second-line parade, the upbeat, celebratory parade that was staged once the body was entombed.   The whole community would fall in line behind the musicians to honor the deceased’s life with joyful music and dance.

There was no second-line after Lawrence Robert’s funeral.  It was a quiet service, mainly just family.  Nowadays second-lines are held independent of funerals, usually on Sunday afternoons.   Of course, “second-line” has also become a verb in contemporary parlance, and a second-line can break out at any time there is reason to dance in the streets.  And upon the death of a famous black musician or community leader, there is a good chance the old second-line will follow the funeral.

Mister Robert, I never knew you, but may they be sec0nd-lining for you upon your arrival into the pearly gates.   And may Satchmo himself be leading the brass band.

Louisiana, 2010

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It was a horrible place to build a city.  Malaria-ridden swamps, unbearably humid summers, ground so soft you could barely sink a post into it without it keeling over; prone to flooding from the Mississippi and storm surges from Gulf Coast hurricanes.  A network of bayous, delta sludge, and barrier islands so complex and shallow that only the smallest boats could float in them, and only the canniest of pilots could navigate them.   And yet it was the best place to build the city that had to be built there.   In the short bend of the Mississippi that brings it within a couple of miles of Lake Pontchartrain, a broad saltwater estuary that opens into the Gulf of Mexico, on ground supported by natural levees built up from thousands of years of silting, the Crescent City of New Orleans was built as the final continental destination for the abundance of goods that flowed downriver from the incomparably rich land to the north, a watershed that stretches from the Appalachian Mountains in the East to the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains to the West, with fingers reaching as far north as Minnesota, as far East as Virginia and North Carolina,  and as far west as Montana….Further downriver from New Orleans, the Mississippi becomes an unnavigable mess of delta and bayou, so the early rafts and barges that floated down the Mississippi with furs, produce, timber, sugar, and cotton would stop at the crook in the river, and unload their cargo in the port area around what is now the French Market.  The rafts would be dismantled for timber to build houses, and the goods would be portaged up Esplanade Avenue and out to the ships moored in Lake Pontchartrain; from there they would make their stops in Havana and Hispaniola before heading through the straits of Florida, and up the Gulf Stream to Charleston, Norfolk, New York, Lisbon, Seville, London, and Le Havre.

For the first two hundred plus years of her existence, New Orleans’ boundaries were defined by the bayou.   The Vieux Carré, now known as the French Quarter, was the highest ground, and was thus settled first.  The Protestant Anglo-Saxons from the north who moved down after the Louisiana Purchase settled the land west of Canal Street, which was a little soggy but high enough in places to support their grand antebellum mansions.  Eventually land was filled in to form plantations, which were later divided up into “Faubourgs” by the plantation owners to create the first suburbs, Faubourg Marigny and Faubourg Tremé.   But these low-lying areas were still subject to flooding, and thus became the domain of Irish, Croatian, and Italian immigrants, as well as the large population of free blacks that continued to grow and flourish in tolerant New Orleans.

The outlying areas of the city, by necessity, remained unbuildable, uninhabitable wetlands.  Little by little the swampland was drained by primitive pumping systems and filled in, and small communities of African-Americans, Irish and German Immigrants, Creoles, and other families too poor to live in the safer, drier areas of the city began to populate the area east of the city.   The area, known as the Ninth Ward, became a stronghold of black culture in the early part of the twentieth century.

In the early 1920’s an industrial canal was cut through the heart of the Ninth Ward to connect the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain.  Along with the canal came an extensive levee system and a more reliable drainage and pumping system, but it bisected the Ninth Ward into two parts, “Upper”, meaning upriver, and “Lower”, meaning downriver.

The Lower Ninth Ward flourished in the middle part of the century, an almost rural outpost of tightly-knit families that grew corn and raised chickens and looked after each other.  Jobs on the waterfront were plentiful, and social clubs and schools provided for strong community activism.   But as the shipping industry became more and more mechanized, jobs in the area became harder and harder to find, and the neighborhood began the all-too familiar sink into urban decay that has plagued so many African-American communities in the contemporary era.  Still, it remained home to a strong and vital community.  Home-ownership in the Lower Ninth Ward at the time of Katrina was higher than in any other neighborhood in the city, and the neighborhood continued to produce some of the finest jazz and R&B musicians in the country.

Now all that is gone.   Walk through the section of the Lower Ninth Ward north of Claiborne avenue which was hit hardest by the storm, and you will see blocks and blocks of abandoned lots, tall grass and oak trees swaying in the delta breeze.   Here and there a gutted house, a lone cement stoop, a stack of old tires surreptitiously dumped in the middle of the night.   Only two houses in the roughly three-square-mile area survived the flood intact, and rebuilding has been slow and hampered by insurance wrangles, government ineptitude, legal battles, and contractor fraud.   Currently the occupancy rate is less than one house per city block.   The once tightly-knit community has been scattered to the winds, to Baton Rouge and Houston and Chicago and Boston; and though many are determined to return home, some have already spent five years putting down roots elsewhere, and in all likelihood could not afford or stand to uproot their families again, even to return to their old home, which right now looks more like an abandoned city park than a community.

And yet, change is coming, growth is happening, and people are returning.  Some folks have rebuilt their houses thanks to good insurance and plain old hard work.   Others are being aided by forward-thinking non-profit groups such as Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Initiative and the Common Ground Collective, which are taking the opportunity to build safer and more sustainable houses, and are developing earthworks systems to address some of the geographic and ecological issues of the Lower Ninth with permaculture-style engineering.   Some have sold their land to independent contractors who are building houses with stricter covenants.  And some have been aided by religious and charitable groups and school volunteers from all around the country, who have contributed untold amounts of time and money to help the Lower Ninth become home again.

There were many mistakes made before, during, and after Katrina, all of which have been well-documented and beyond the scope of this post.  And it may seem outrageous to some that so little progress seems to have been made over the last five years.  But as a very wise man once said, “only bad change happens quickly”.    Good change takes time.   And what is happening now in the Lower Ninth, is good change.  And it’s taking time.

Mimi’s, Friday Night

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In 1812, Amos Stoddard wrote that Louisianans “are particularly attached to the exercise of dancing, and they carry it to an incredible excess”.  Reid Mitchell, quoting Stoddard in his book All on a Mardi Gras Day, writes, “According to Stoddard, balls lasted from early evening to early morning, and the irrepressible, apparently inexhaustible Louisianans would attend balls two or three nights in a row.”

Little seems to have changed in New Orleans in that regard.  Though the town is known throughout the world for its music, it often goes un-noted that the musical forms indigenous to New Orleans and greater Louisiana were created for dancing, and that, when anybody in decent health is exposed to the “real thing”, it is almost impossible to refrain from getting down in time to the heavy syncopated beats and heady contrapuntal melodies being generated by the band…and that means dancing, dancing, dancing.  Dancing in the streets, dancing in the bars, dancing in the house to old records…dancing just about anywhere there is space.   New Orleans is a town that is mad for the dance.

I’m not talking about your ordinary night-club shake-your-booty dancing (though there is plenty of that too).   What I’m talking about is something more sophisticated, more spontaneous, more beautiful.   Walk into the tiny Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street and chances are you’ll catch a pair of twenty-somethings cutting a rug to an unamplified brass band, doing the Lindy Hop like they were born in the ’30’s and dancing at a postwar victory ball.  Wander down the street and you’ll find young Cuban and Puerto Rican expats salsa-dancing with such ease and sensuality you’ll want to hop on a plane for Old San Juan and never leave until you’ve mastered the dance and found yourself a permanent dancing partner.   Around the corner at BMC on a Sunday night, you’ll find couples in jeans and cowboy boots country-dancing to a rockabilly band.   If one of the city’s famous rag-tag hippie jug-bands is playing on a street corner or closed storefront alcove, you can bet there will be a few swing dancers stepping out on to the street.   Out towards the Bywater, upstairs at Mimi’s, a DJ is playing an inspired mix of Clifton Chenier, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and Carl Perkins, and folks are jitterbugging like no tomorrow.

And then of course, there are the Second-Lines, part parade and part street dance, which roll through the back neighborhoods on Sunday afternoons, put on by various social clubs; or which erupt spontaneously just about anywhere if there is cause for celebration.   Everyone is welcome to join in, and everything in the dancers’ path–mailboxes, street lamps, cars, garbage cans–become stages and props for the endless improvisatory steps of the avid second-liner.

There is no end to the dance in New Orleans.   It is, I suppose, what keeps the place going in spite of all the tragedy, injustice, corruption, violence, and decay that keep threatening to destroy the city.   Somehow, after three regime changes and countless waves of immigration; after malaria and spotted fever and fires that burned half the city to the ground; after Reconstruction, the decline of the Gens de Couleur Libres, and the insidious enactment of the Jim Crow laws; after de-segregation, white flight, and urban decay; and after Betsy and Katrina and Gustav; after over thirty feet of water submerged the city and laid waste to the strongholds of some of the greatest jazz, funk, and blues musicians in the country; somehow, the city continues to rise up out of the water, dancing, waiting for the sound of the brass band to round the corner to join in with the second-line.

In ancient Greece, the town of Eleusis lay 15 miles northwest of Athens, in the heartland of wheat and barley fields that fed the city-state of Athens for over a thousand years. Within the walls of the town lay a temple that was ground zero for one of the most important and longest-lasting religious festivals of the pagan world: the Eleusinian Mysteries. The rites involved initiation of members into a secret society, drinking of a potion that may or may not have had hallucinogenic properties to it, the sacrifice of a pig, and various rituals intended to honor Demeter, the goddess of fertility and grain.

Those of you who studied Greek myths in school may remember that Demeter was the grand-daughter of Uranus the sky and Gaia the Earth, daughter of Chronus the god of Time, and the sister to Zeus, with whom she bore a daughter, the beautiful Persephone. Persephone was stolen by Hades, the god of the Underworld, who brought her to the land of the dead across the river Styx to be his wife. Demeter, as any bereaved mother would, set off on a desperate search to find her daughter, during which time the earth bore no fruit or grain. She finally found her daughter with the help of fleet-footed Hermes, but before she could leave the Underworld, Persephone was fed a pomegranate by Hades, by which power she was bound to spend one-third of the year with him in the Underworld from thenceforth. During this time of winter, when the apple of her eye is away from her side, Demeter weeps until her return, and the earth lays fallow and barren.

To make a long story short, the King of Eleusis, named Celeus, had shown the disguised Demeter hospitality during her search for Persephone, so to repay his kindness she taught Celius’s son Triptolemus the art of agriculture (after a botched attempt to make Celeus’s other son Demophon immortal by burning his mortality away on the hearth), thus passing one of the great secrets of life into human hands, in much the same way that Prometheus imparted the gift of fire. Eleusis, then, became the birthplace of agriculture and the center for the worship of Demeter, who not only brought forth the fertility of the land, but gave humans the knowledge to control it.

Though the mystery-cult and rituals surrounding Eleusis are (at least linguistically) much older than the feast of Carnival, and were held at a different time of year (The Eleusinian mysteries were held in the Greek month of Boedromion, which falls roughly around the modern month of September), they are both, at heart, fertility cults, intended to sanctify the earth during the winter months so that the coming spring would bring forth a good crop.

Whether or not the recently formed Krewe of Eleusis had all this in mind when deciding on a name for their Krewe, I can’t be sure. Although I attended their ball on Saturday, February 13 (or “Samedi Gras”) at One-Eyed Jack’s in the French Quarter, I was too busy enjoying myself and snapping photos to ask too many questions. What I do know about the Krewe of Eleusis is that many of the members of the Krewe are “Burners”, or members of the extended family, or “tribe” that has grown out of the Burning Man Festival and has given the world such memorable celebrations as SantaCon and International Pillow Fight Day. The impetus for their formation of a Mardi Gras Krewe and ball was, so I am told, their growing dissatisfaction with the over-hype and stagnation of the Daddy of all alternative Mardi Gras celebrations, the MOMs ball.

The MOMs ball has been the hippie generation’s answer to Mardi Gras for over 30 years…tickets are sold by word of mouth and hard to come by, the celebration takes place in a warehouse across the river, and there is, so I am told, a lot of nakedness. Word is that if you don’t have a ticket to MOMs, you might be able to get in if you go naked.

When we first arrived in New Orleans, people spoke to us about the MOMs ball in hushed tones, and we were generally told that so late in the season it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find tickets (or “invitations” in Mardi Gras lexicon) to the hallowed event. After much asking around, a chance meeting with the owner of a local head shop at yet another ball led us to score an invitation for two at last, just three days before the event. In the intervening days, however, we were told that “professional” photography is very much frowned upon at the MOMs ball, and that we might not make it through the gate with our “professional” cameras. Around the same time my friend Krista at National Geographic Traveler informed me of the Mystery of Eleusis Ball, which she herself was planning to attend (though unfortunately a freak snowstorm in DC delayed her arrival). Having some familiarity with my Carnival work and my frustration with the fact that the venues for New Orleans Balls tend to be very uninspiring spaces to shoot in, she suggested that One-Eyed Jacks might be just what I was looking for in terms of a “backdrop”. And she was right.

A longtime French Quarter establishment, One-Eyed Jack’s resides in a space that, so I was told, once was a creole dance hall and bordello–and the proprietors have kept the decor true to that spirit, with lots of red velvet, patterned wallpaper, and dim lighting from old sconces. Unfortunately my photos of the night don’t do the space justice, as I was distracted by the insane funk being pumped out by Ivan Neville’s band, the performance of an acrobatic burlesque girl, and the general shenanigans of the crowd. And then there was one beautiful lady who caught my eye late in the evening, wearing a crazysexycool outfit of denim, fur, and feathers, but who terminated my lackluster attempts at conversation with the old I’ve-got-t0-go-to-the-bathroom line.  I was jarred out of the hyper-focused photo-zone I’d been in earlier in the night and sent reeling back into teenage-frustration-land…My assistant Federica had much better luck, arriving back at the apartment around 2 PM the next day, having met a nice young man from Oklahoma…

Sometime after 3 AM I had the silly idea of heading over to see what I’d been missing at the MOMs ball. I sped across the Mississippi River and through the town of Algiers, which looked like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with mountains of detritus everywhere from the day’s parades. The MOMs ball was pretty much over by the time I got there; what I glimpsed was a mostly middle-aged crowd in clown suits and other uninspiring getups filing out en masse with empty coolers. The flourescent lights of the Mardi Gras World warehouse had already been turned on, and announcements were being made over the PA concerning lost and found items. The naked people must have already left. I went back to the Quarter, back to One-Eyed Jacks, sat down at the bar, and bought a round of drinks for a tatooed girl sitting next to me who, after initial flirtations, sank into a sulk over unfinished business she seemed to be having with the bouncer.

Sometime before 6 AM, I cut my losses, toasted the Krewe of Eleusis, and wandered home in the dawn’s early light pondering my own complex relationship with the Goddess of Fertility.  Have I angered her over the years with my behavior and my decisions, or was she just looking out for my best interests?  At the same time, I found myself wishing that the Krewe of Eleusis would throw their Mystery Ball all over again, and not wait until next year to do it. This time around, I’d take better pictures, wear a cooler costume, groove a little harder to the band, and take another stab at chatting up the girl in denim and fur.

“Wake Up, Wake Up, it’s Mardi Gras Morning!”…

So went the chant of the Northside Skull and Bones Gang as they floated quietly through the Tremé and the northeast corner of the French Quarter, rapping on doors and windows, waking up those who’d slept in cars they’d parked on the roadside late the previous night, waking up those who’d been asleep in houses they’d lived in for generations…It was a quiet, muffled chant; the bone gang all wore papier-maché masks of huge skulls over their heads.  A lone tambourine beat out a steady, slow, singular rhythm.  The first one walked on stilts, urging one and all to change their ways…”Stop your cheatin’, stop your lyin’, stop your drinkin’…” he sang, low and slow, almost under his breath…

Through the streets they wandered, five men and five boys, unidentified, anonymous…”Young and old, you’re all gonna go”…They chanted their gang name, “North Side Skull and Bones, wake up, wake up, it’s Mardi Gras Morning…”

Sometimes the doors they rapped on were answered, and old friends would emerge, bleary-eyed, to give the skeleton crew a beer, or a hug, or a friendly wave.   Mostly the streets were empty.

The North Side Skull and Bone Gang have been waking up New Orleans since 1819, or thereabouts.   The details of their early years are enshrouded in myth, though it is generally said that they began their Mardi Gras tradition in the Tremé around 1830…How or why it developed is also a matter of folklore, but there hardly needs to be a reason.  It’s the kind of tradition that has been around in some form or another since the dawn of ritual.   From a strictly religious viewpoint, Mardi Gras is the last day, the very last day, of a celebration whose Latin translation could mean either “farewell to the flesh” or “to lift up the flesh”…In either sense, it is a celebration of life that, at its heart, embraces the inevitability of dying.   Death is ever-present in this life, and at no time is that more true than on the morning of one of the largest and longest-running annual bacchanals the world has ever known–one that, historically, though largely a celebration of life, nearly always involved violence and murder.   So while the Bone Gang slides through the shadows of Mardi Gras morning; as the day grows ever-brighter with the promise of brilliant colors, outrageous behavior, and joyful mayhem; the long shadows of the big chief’s stilts grow shorter and shorter; and death slinks into a dark blue tavern for a cold beer and a soda pop, waiting to re-emerge into the light of day to dance with the living on this the final day of Carnival.

From a New Orleanian standpoint, the march of the Bone Gang plays a major role in the tradition of Carnival Noir, the African-American Mardi Gras.   Along with the Baby Dolls, the Mardi Gras Indians, the Zulu parade, and the boom-boom-boom of thousands of black New Orleanians partying under the overpass on Claiborne street (which, before Highway 10 split the neighborhood in two in the late ’40’s, was a major gathering spot in the Tremé, a neighborhood which boasts a 200-year old tradition of Free People of Color), the Bone Gang represents the resilience and evolution of African-American traditions in New Orleans despite all the obstacles that have been strewn in their path.  Ironically, in the first two years after Katrina, the black diaspora from New Orleans kept the Bone gang from marching.  In a town that had seen so much death and ruin, perhaps nobody needed to see any more skeletons walking through the neighborhood.  But thanks to the efforts of the Backstreet Cultural museum, help from the community, and that old Mardi Gras Indian “won’t back down” attitude, the Bones are back.

It is one more note to take on why New Orleans matters, and what makes it the most culturally rich city in America.   The rituals and traditions of New Orleans are of the people, by the people, and for the people.  They are not mere tourist attractions, but living, breathing expressions of a community that, no stranger to crime, death, poverty, disaster, and hardship, still finds a reason to celebrate, in some of the most unique ways I have ever seen, almost every day.