THE BIG EASY AT 300
Journey through its storied past
On St. John the Baptist’s Day, seven spirit-seekers and three mediums gathered around a table inside a 200-year-old haunted house in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
Candles flickered on a wine-coloured tablecloth. A cat mewed. Marie Laveau, the 19th-century voodoo queen reimagined as a doll, stood quietly in the corner, bearing witness to the séance-in-progress.
One by one, the guests reached out to their deceased loved ones. The mediums received visions of green olives (a message from a mother fond of them), embroidered cloth (from a greatgrandmother of Latin-American descent) and a limping animal (a family’s golden retriever that had been hit by a car). When my turn arrived, I did not shake the family tree or poke empty dog beds. Instead, I attempted to rouse a figure who has been garnering a heap of attention this year in New Orleans.
“I would like to speak to Bienville,” I told the trio of women, uttering the surname of the FrenchCanadian who established the port city in 1718. “I want to know what he thinks of New Orleans now.”
The medium Juliet spoke from her position behind a black lacy curtain that partially obscured her face and body. “I saw him shaking his head,” she said. “He is in shock and disbelief that, after 300 years, we are still here.”
Voodoo Queen Bloody Mary, who ran the séance, said that she had once tried to find JeanBaptiste Le Moyne de Bienville in Paris’s Montmartre Cemetery, but failed to locate his remains. (She was looking in the wrong resting place.) On this occasion, Bienville materialized with little prodding. Lucy the dog took longer to show up.
So, why was Bienville so quick to return? Perhaps he was curious about all the fuss the city is making for the tricentennial, with special art exhibits, celebratory cocktails and festive signage on buses, lamp posts and lawns. Maybe he wants to don ropes of Mardi Gras beads and dance on 300 years of history, some of which he made.
If he does decide to join the party, he will find himself on a crowded stage. New Orleans has accumulated a lot of characters over three centuries, and not all require a medium to contact.
Soft, soggy, swampy. The area’s boggy terrain was better suited for spotting gators than establishing an urban centre. But that didn’t stop the French. The colonizers first started sniffing around the Louisiana coast in 1682, back when its primary inhabitants were Indigenous peoples. Decades later, the French established La Nouvelle- Orléans on the eastern banks of the lower Mississippi River, a move that many consider a folly.
“It’s a very strategic site for a city,” said Richard Campanella, a geographer and professor at the Tulane School of Architecture. “It made sense at the time.”
I met Campanella in his office, where he rattled off a whiplash version of the city’s history. The French ran New Orleans until the 1760s, followed by the Spanish (1762-1800), then back to the French.
In the early 1800s, U.S. president Thomas Jefferson expressed interest in purchasing New Orleans. Napoleon, distracted by a slave uprising in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and tensions with England, sold Louisiana for US$15 million. In 1803, the countries signed the Louisiana Purchase, and the rest is U.S. history.
“This was the dawn of the American Era and the Antebellum Age,” Campanella said.
We hopped in his car for a tour. On the drive, he pointed out significant sights, with commentary: Magazine Street (“At five miles long, it’s one of the great American streets”), Bywater (“it is the Williamsburg of New Orleans”), City Park (“the fifth-largest in the country”), Old Ursuline Convent (“You could drop it into the outskirts of Paris and you wouldn’t even bat an eye”).
In Treme, we passed a church and his professorial tone turned giddy. “Oh look at that,” he exclaimed. “It’s a funeral. I wonder if there is going to be a jazz funeral afterward.”
Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to idle by the steps.
Back at Tulane, I switched cars (minivan), guides (John McCusker) and focus (music). McCusker, a New Orleans native, runs several excursions, including the Cradle of Jazz and the Katrina Eye Witness Tour. (The former Times-Picayune photographer is the eyewitness in the title.) En route to Louis Armstrong Park, McCusker explained the history of jazz, a musical mutt of blues, ragtime, dirges and marches.
“It was a new tradition that grew out of other cultural traditions that intersected,” he said. In Congo Square, inside the park, McCusker tapped into jazz’s forebears, the slaves who gathered on Sundays to sing, dance and play their ancestral music from West Africa. A sculpture depicts the jubilant scene: The women, swathed in head scarves called tignons, moving their mouths and legs to the beat; the men pounding on drums and plucking on stringed gourds.
“The grandfathers of jazz hadn’t even been born yet,” he said.
Many of those grandfathers — Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong — lived in New Orleans, and McCusker decelerated by several sites where they once performed or resided.
We later braved the heat to check out Storyville, the city’s red-light district from 1897 to 1917, and the black vice district, which was active from the 1880s to the 1950s. The latter is home to a quartet of buildings whose shabby states belie their earlier vitality.
We stood outside the boarded-up Iroquois Theater, a movie palace and jazz concert hall that catered to African Americans. “This was the first stage Louis performed on,” he said. Back in the car, McCusker slowly passed by the former residence of trombonist “Kid” Ory. “This was a crack house,” he said of the home’s 1990s period, which preceded its 2002 renovation.
In Central City, the stars collided. “This is the neighbourhood where jazz was born. Not Treme. Not the French Quarter,” he said. “This has the highest concentration of jazz pioneers who would go on to take the music to the rest of the world.”
Several plantations along the river invite visitors inside the opulent Fabergé eggs the wealthy planters called home. And in New Orleans, Le Musée de F.P.C. shares the accomplishments, and hardships, of free people of colour, many of whom prospered in the port city known for its thriving slave market. The Whitney museum covers similar themes but turns the lens on the slaves and relegates the owners, the Haydels, to the sidelines.
“We’re one of the few plantations telling the story of slavery, of how it was,” said Matthew Ward, a guide and PhD student in history at Louisiana State University.
From 1752 to 1865, the plantation possessed more than 350 slaves, who toiled in its indigo, rice and sugarcane fields or in the Big House as domestics. Mary was not one of the Whitney’s slaves — her oral history was collected through Federal Writers’ Project interviews of individuals who had spent their childhoods enslaved — but I could safely assume the plantation had several of its own Marys.
After handing out umbrellas as sun protection, Matthew led us inside the Antioch Baptist Church, where we were not alone. Dozens of statues depicting children born into slavery sat on pews and stood in loose clusters around the altar and in the aisles.
Their sculpted faces were full of expression; some looked defiant, others withdrawn.
Outside, the Wall of Honor, one of three memorials on the property, was a silent roll call of the Whitney’s slaves. The first granite slab was empty, a tribute to the men and women who did not appear on the ship manifests but deserve recognition. The other panels were covered with first names, countries of origin, dates of birth and skills. I started reading from the top:
“Achille, Mandingo Nation, Carter, Ploughman, Domestic, Born ca. 1797;”
“Alexandre, Bambara Nation, Carpenter, Barrel Maker, Domestic, Born ca. 1789;”
“Francois, Grif (Black and Native American), Born ca. 1769.” Andonitwent. Matthew later explained how, after the U.S. abolished the international slave trade, slave owners relied on breeding to fill their ranks. As an example, he mentioned Julia Woodrich’s mother, who gave birth to 15 children. Physical condition determined price, he said. A 16-year-old Creole named Suzette was sold for US$1,125; a man with a hernia was worth US$200.
“The bodies were only as valuable as the labour they could produce,” he said.
At a large iron bell, Matthew encouraged us to yank the thick rope “in honour of all of the enslaved people who lived and died on the plantation.” He added: “The story about slavery does not end. It goes on in other ways and in other names. It’s part of the American story.”